Steve Played It
The great Steve Cropper departs the stage and studio
“Steve Cropper, Blues Brothers band member and Booker T. & the MG’s guitarist, has died,” at age 84, Fox News reports. Cropper was indeed in The Blues Brothers and played guitar with Booker T. Jones, but here’s a bit more people should know.
Cropper’s first significant recording was on “Last Night,” a hit for the Mar-Keys in 1961. The Mar-Keys were the studio band for Stax Records, with Isaac Hayes on organ, Donald Dunn on Bass, Booker T. Jones on keyboards, and Al Jackson on drums. The next year, as the story goes, while waiting for a singer, Cropper, Jones, Jackson and bassist Lewis Steinberg recorded “Green Onions.” The “accidental hit” lived on in American Graffiti, Get Shorty and other movies and countless jam sessions across the land.
At Stax in 1966, Isaac Hayes yelled “hurry up” to songwriter Dave Porter, who replied “hold on, I’m coming.” That line became a huge hit for Sam Moore and Dave Prater, with Cropper on the session. The guitarist was co-writer of “Soul Man,” so Moore had good reason to say “play it, Steve!” on the recording. Cropper’s short solo fits the tune and lingers in the mind more than many longer efforts that don’t go anywhere. As the great Eddie Harris said, if you can’t remember anything a guy played, maybe he didn’t play anything.
As Cropper explained in 2020, he listened to the band and the singer and played around them. One singer he listened to was Otis Redding, heard here on “Try a Little Tenderness,” first recorded by Ray Noble in 1932. Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” released in 1968, became his only number-one single. That’s Steve Cropper, co-writer of the tune, on guitar. As the Stax strummer showed, you don’t have to be the front-man to shape a soulful sound that stands the test of time.
Cropper’s passing leaves Booker T. Jones as the last surviving member of the “Green Onions” quartet. Check out Steve back in 1978 on “Saturday Night Live,” backing Jake (John Belushi) and Ellwood (Dan Aykroyd) Blues on “Soul Man.” Jake tells Cropper to “play it Steve,” and he does, just like old times. Maybe in the Great Beyond Studios, Jake is telling the new arrival, “we’re putting the band back together.”
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"[I]if you can’t remember anything a guy played, maybe he didn’t play anything."
Truer words never spoken.
And reminds me of Paul McCartney, who couldn't read music, and who said, "We had to write memorable tunes because we had to remember them."
In 1991, I produced the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Tribute show at Madison Square Garden with star, after star, after star. The first encore of "My Back Pages," had Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Roger Mcguinn (The Birds) and the man himself, Bob. The 2nd encore, for "Knocking on Heaven's Door," all thirty major artist joined Bob for the song. It was a great show but we had a hard time booking a backing band because, of what we called at the time, BOB. G. E. Smith the musical director put a number of famous bands, with famous players, and Bob rejected every single one. Finally, G E. Smith, after offering all this star power for a backing band said let's try Booker T and the MGs. We reluctantly took it to Bob. For the first time Bob's eyes lit up and said now you've got it and the rest is Rock n' Roll history. Steve Clapper was not only a great guitar player, who no one knows about, but he was one of the nicest people to ever live. The music world will miss him.