Steve Cropper, Guitarist, Songwriter and Shaper of Memphis Soul Music, Dies at 84

Steve Cropper, the prodigious guitarist, songwriter and producer who played a pivotal role in shaping the lean gutbucket soul music made at Memphis’s Stax Records in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday in Nashville. He was 84.

His death, at a rehabilitation facility, was confirmed by his wife, Angel Cropper, who did not specify the cause.

As a member of Booker T. & the MG’s, the house rhythm section at Stax, Mr. Cropper played the snarling Fender Telecaster lick on “Green Onions,” the funky hit instrumental by the MG’s from 1962. He also contributed the ringing guitar figure that opened Sam & Dave’s gospel-steeped “Soul Man,” the 1966 single on which the singer Sam Moore shouted, “Play it, Steve!” to cue Mr. Cropper’s stinging single-string solo on the chorus. Both records were Top 10 pop hits and reached No. 1 on the R&B chart.

Mr. Cropper had an innate feel for a groove as well as a penchant for feeling over flash — gifts evident in his bell-toned guitar work on Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” In 2015, he was ranked 39th on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Britain’s Mojo magazine slotted him second, behind only Jimi Hendrix, on a similar list of guitarists published in 1996.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a rhythm player,” Mr. Cropper said in an interview with Guitar.com in 2021. “I get off on the fact that I can play something over and over and over, while other guitar players don’t want to even know about that. They won’t even play the same riff or the same lick twice.”

Mr. Cropper was also a prolific songwriter. His credits, typically as a co-writer, include the epoch-defining likes of “Dock of the Bay,” Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood.” All three were No. 1 R&B singles. Mr. Redding’s record topped the pop chart as well, and won Grammy Awards for best R&B song and best male R&B vocal performance in 1969.

In charge of artists and repertoire at Stax during the 1960s, Mr. Cropper produced the recordings of many of the songs he had a hand in writing. His website states that he was “involved in virtually every record issued by Stax from the fall of 1961 through year end 1970.” Judging by the testimony of the Stax co-founder Jim Stewart, it is not hard to imagine that this was the case.

“Steve was my right-hand man,” Mr. Stewart said of Mr. Cropper’s contributions to the label’s legacy in Peter Guralnick’s 1999 book, “Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.” “He would come to the studio and sit there and keep the doors open and take care of business; he was disciplined and responsible. Steve was the key.”

In the process, Mr. Cropper helped reimagine the Southern soul music of the era, imbuing it with a simultaneously urban and down-home feel — a bluesy mix of sinew and grit that was instantly recognizable over the radio airwaves. Widely sampled, the records he played on or produced influenced subsequent generations of musicians, especially in hip-hop and R&B.

Mr. Cropper achieved further acclaim in the late 1970s for his work with the Blues Brothers, the musical side project of the “Saturday Night Live” co-stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. By then, Stax had closed, having fallen into insolvency in 1975, and Mr. Cropper had begun immersing himself in freelance session and production work with artists like Art Garfunkel and Ringo Starr.

“Briefcase Full of Blues,” the Blues Brothers’ first album, included a remake of “Soul Man,” complete with a reprise of the shout “Play it, Steve!” from Mr. Belushi on the chorus. The single reached No. 14 on the pop chart in 1979, anticipating the release of the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers,” starring Mr. Belushi and Mr. Aykroyd and featuring Mr. Cropper as Steve “the Colonel” Cropper, who plays in a band called Murph and the Magic Tones. (Born of Mr. Cropper’s tendency to take charge of situations, the Colonel was a childhood nickname that stuck with him even after he established himself as a musician.) (...)

Mr. Cropper’s affiliation with the Blues Brothers spanned four decades. But back in 1978, when he and Mr. Dunn first joined the band, skeptics failed to understand why they would want to collaborate with the two comedians from “Saturday Night Live.”

“We got a lot of flak — Duck and I did — about playing with those guys,” Mr. Cropper told guitar.com. “Folks said, ‘What are you guys doing with these two clowns from S.N.L.?’”

“But those guys were great musicians,” he went on. “John Belushi had played drums in a band for years before he ever went to Second City,” the Chicago improv comedy troupe. “And Ackroyd is actually playing the harmonica on everything we did.”

by Bill Friskics-Warren, NY Times | Read more:
Image: David Reed Archive/Alamy 

[ed. Legendary. Created a whole new genre - the Stax Sound. See also: The essential twang of Steve Cropper (WaPo):]

***

“Play it, Steve,” Sam Moore chants during the chorus of 1967’s “Soul Man,” and it’s no mystery why.

Sam & Dave’s No. 2 hit is driven by Steve Cropper, who opens the song with a series of sliding double stops, delivers a funky progression for the verse, and slides up the neck with a lick played with a Zippo lighter on the chorus.

The “Play it, Steve,” probably an improvised aside during a recording session, effectively becomes a piece of the song. We hear it again when John “Joliet Jake” Belushi utters the phrase as the Blues Brothers perform their cover 11 years later on the “Saturday Night Live” stage with Cropper, in thick beard and shades, as part of the band.

And yet, Cropper was anything but famous. Which is notable as we mourn his death this week at 84.

For all the weeping we do over singers and frontmen, it is so often the unrecognizable guy who was the true genius behind the music that defines an era. And no guitarist defined the rise of groove soul more than Cropper and the crisp riffs he delivered on his Fender Telecaster. (...)

There is no shortage of guitarists whose fingers moved faster than Cropper. Instead of the filet mignon, his playing was the spicy mustard on a ballgame sausage, all body English, no performative extras. But as with the greatest musicians of the past century — Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, Clarence White — you knew exactly who was playing as soon as you heard his first notes.

My favorite Cropper? It’s definitely not his best-known work, but I love Booker T. & the MG’s “Hip Hug-Her.” Every piece of what made Cropper special is on display in that song, from the tasteful opening notes to the swampy pulls in the solo.

Michel Camilo - Anthony Jackson - Horacio (El Negro) Hernandez

 

[ed. Latin jazz from the acclaimed documentary Calle 54.]

Robert Glasper

The Decline of Deviance

Where has all the weirdness gone?

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.

I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:

a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before

b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and

c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.

When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History |  Read more:

Images: Author and Alex Murrell

[ed. Interesting thesis. For example, architecture:]

***

The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:

Every new apartment building looks like this:

Arlo Guthrie: Alice's Restaurant - Illustrated

Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”

We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version.

by Open Culture | Read more:

[ed. Never gets old (maybe a day late : ) We've got tons of Christmas songs but this is the only Thanksgiving song I can think of.]

Joni Mitchell - Joni's Jazz

[ed. What a welcome surprise. A new archival release focusing on Joni's jazz evolution, dedicated to Wayne Shorter who died in 2023. So much good stuff here - 61 tracks (full album). See also: Joni’s Jazz Reviewed: Short on rarities but steeped in a love of the genre (Mojo).]

Marian McPartland

[ed. See also: Marian McPartland in Conversation with Steely Dan.]

I Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in 6 Months

via: YouTube
[ed. It's been said that if there are intelligent aliens on earth, octopuses are probably the best candidates. Too bad they're so tasty.]

via: YouTube

Ken Parker, Who Reinvented the Guitar, Dies at 73

Ken Parker, an iconoclastic guitar maker who upended entrenched luthier traditions by producing hyper-engineered, flyweight guitars seemingly designed for an art gallery, if not the 23rd century, died on Oct. 5 at his home in Gloucester, Mass. He was 73. (...)

In 1993, Mr. Parker founded Parker Guitars in Wilmington, Mass., with Larry Fishman, who oversaw the management of the company and the electronics of the guitars. Mr. Parker leveraged his extensive experience in woodworking and guitar repair, along with his maverick streak, to build groundbreaking guitars that went on to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Which is not to say he thought of guitars as art objects. “I’m a toolmaker,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 profile in The New Yorker. “I make tools for musicians.”

In Mr. Parker’s view, guitar innovation stalled after the debut in the 1950s of hallowed models like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul — guitars that Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and countless others used to amplify a generation. His goal was to bundle together all available advances in technology and materials and build a guitar for a new age.

“I didn’t feel like I had some secret broth that I could smear on a Strat,” Mr. Parker said in 2023 interview with the music site Reverb. “That’s like trying to improve on a smile,” he added. “I mean, what do you do? It’s already developed.”

His alternative was the Parker Fly, a head-turning guitar that relied heavily on composite materials and looked like a prop from “Flash Gordon.”

Priced at around $2,000, the Fly was never a big seller, but it did find admirers among an array of notable musicians including Joni Mitchell, Adrian Belew and Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails once said he recorded about 80 percent of the guitar parts for the band’s platinum-selling 1999 album, “The Fragile,” on a Parker Fly.

In practical terms, the Fly lived up to its name, weighing about five pounds — roughly half of many Les Pauls. Mr. Parker accomplished this in part by shaving away all extraneous material and using lighter woods for the body, like poplar and spruce, instead of traditional hardwoods like ash or mahogany. He then reinforced the back and neck with an thin external skeleton of carbon, fiberglass and epoxy resin for strength.

The Fly also offered an array of tones. Its pickups (devices that translate string motion into an electronic form that gets passed on to an amplifier) could approximate the rich, muscular sound of classic Gibson humbuckers or the shimmer and quack of the single-coil Stratocaster pickups. Its piezo pickups could conjure the airy sounds of an acoustic.

The guitar featured a composite fingerboard with glued-on, wear-resistant stainless steel frets, locking tuners and a strikingly angular cutaway headstock that reduced weight and helped its overall balance. The Fly also had a distinctive flat-spring vibrato system to improve responsiveness over a standard tremolo bar.

And then there were its looks. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. In the Reverb interview, Mr. Parker recalled that Joni Mitchell once told him: “Looks like you found it on a beach. But then it also looks like it came from outer space.” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones asked, “Nice guitar, but why does it have to look like a bleeding assault rifle?”

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Robert Martin

[ed. Great guitars, and Mr. Parker was a true innovator. They'll always have a prominent place in guitar design history. See also: History of the Parker Fly (Guitar.com).]

Kai Schaefer. Dual 1219 - The Beatles - Abbey Road, 2011
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Bill Evans explaining music theory to Miles Davis.
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The Uncool: A Memoir

Who Is Cameron Crowe Kidding With the Title of His Memoir?

One of the greatest tricks cool people play on the rest of us is convincing us in their memoirs that they were and are profoundly uncool. Cameron Crowe comes right out with the pandering on his book’s cover: “The Uncool: A Memoir.”

The title refers to a scene in “Almost Famous” (2000), the tender film he wrote and directed. The headstrong rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is consoling the Crowe-like hero, a floppy-haired teenage rock journalist, over the telephone at a low moment. Bangs says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” It’s a good line. Call me anytime, Bangs adds: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

Never mind whether Lester Bangs was plausibly uncool. How about Crowe? Here’s a man who spent his adolescence in the 1970s careening around the United States for Rolling Stone magazine, a boy wonder in the intimate and extended company of David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Gram Parsons, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, the Eagles, Todd Rundgren and Yes, about whom he was writing profiles and cover stories.

Occasionally, he’d fly home to see his mother, check out high school for a day or two, then blearily type up his road memories and interview notes. Sounds uncool to me.

The second act of Crowe’s career began when, in his early 20s, he went undercover for a year, posing as a high school student in San Diego, and wrote the experience up in a book called “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Crowe and the director Amy Heckerling turned it into a wide-awake 1982 movie that provided rocket fuel for Sean Penn, who played the perpetually stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli.

Crowe, who burned out young as a journalist, pivoted to film. He wrote and directed “Say Anything” (1989), with John Cusack, Ione Skye and a famous boombox; “Singles” (1992), a romantic early look at the Seattle grunge scene; and “Jerry Maguire” (1996), with Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, before winning an Oscar for his “Almost Famous” screenplay. All this while married to Nancy Wilson, the guitarist in Heart. No sane person would trade their allotment of experience for this man’s. Omnidirectionally uncool.

When you read Crowe’s memoir, though, you begin to see things from his unhip point of view. He had no interest in drink and drugs while on the road, though Gregg Allman tried to hook him up with a speedball. He seems to have mostly abstained from sex, too, though there’s something about his adoration in the presence of his rock heroes that makes it seem he’s losing his virginity every few pages.

His editors at Rolling Stone thought he was uncool, increasingly as time went on, because the acolyte in him overrode the journalist. He Forrest Gumped along. Bands liked having Crowe around because he was adorable and a bit servile; he’d often leave out the bits they wanted left out. (...)

Crowe thought rock writers were snobs. He moved in with Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles while profiling them, for example, and he was in the room when they wrote “One of These Nights” and “Lyin’ Eyes.” It bugged him to see them put down:

A collection of rock writers at a party would challenge each other on their musical taste, each one going further and further into the world of the obscure until they’d collectively decided that “Self Portrait” was Bob Dylan’s greatest album and the Eagles barely deserved a record contract.

He especially liked Frey, because his message to the world seemed to be: “Lead with your optimism.” This was Crowe’s mother’s ethos, as well, and it chimed with his own. It’s a worldview that has worked for him in his best movies, though he’s also made gooey flops. The world needs its Paul McCartneys as much as it needs its Lou Reeds. It makes sense that Reed only sneered when he met Crowe. (...)

The crucial thing to know about this book is that it overlaps almost exactly with the story Crowe tells in “Almost Famous.” If you remember the phrases “It’s all happening” and “Don’t take drugs,” or the young woman — a “Band-Aid” in the movie’s argot — who is offered for a case of Heineken, or the rock star who briefly kills an important story, or Crowe’s flight-attendant sister, or the group sex scene that seems like a series of flickering veils, or the L.A. hotel known as the Riot House, or Lester Bangs acting out in a glassed-in first-floor radio studio, it’s all here and more.

The book reads like a novelization of the movie, so much so that it makes you consider the nature of memory. I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own.

The secret to the movie, one that most people miss, Crowe says, is the empty chair at the family’s dining-room table. It belonged to Crowe’s older sister, Cathy, who was troubled from birth and died by suicide at 19. This detail reminds you how relatively sanitized this book otherwise is. There is little that’s grainy or truly revelatory about his own life and loves. The book ends before his directing career has begun, thus leaving room for a sequel. Everything is a bit gauzy, soft-core.

God help me, I read this book quickly and enjoyed it anyway: The backstage details alone keep this kite afloat. It got to me in the same way “Almost Famous” always gets to me, despite the way that movie sets off my entire bank of incoming sentimentality detectors. If you can watch the “Tiny Dancer” scene without blinking back a tear, you’re a stronger person than me. 

by Dwight Garner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Neal Preston

Karla Davis

[ed. A real talent. See also: Mississippi Thing (and more).]

Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown

Russ Barenberg, Edgar Meyer and Jerry Douglas

Billy Strings

 

[ed. See also: California Sober (feat. Willie Nelson).]

Alison Krauss & Union Station

Norman Greenbaum

Norman Greenbaum, singer, guitarist, songwriter

Spirit in the Sky started as an old blues riff I’d been playing since my college days in Boston, but I didn’t know what to do with it. After I moved to LA, a guy I knew came up with a way of putting a fuzzbox inside my Fender Telecaster, which created the distinctive sound on Spirit in the Sky.

I’d come across a greeting card with a picture of some Native Americans praying to the “spirit in the sky”. The phrase stuck in my head. One night I was watching country music on TV and the singer Porter Wagoner sang a gospel song, which gave me the idea to write religious lyrics. Although I came from a semi-religious Jewish family, I wasn’t religious, but found myself writing Christian lyrics such as “When I die and they lay me to rest, I’m going to the place that’s the best” and “Gotta have a friend in Jesus”. It came together very quickly. I survived a car crash and now give thanks to the spirit every day

Soon after that, I was playing the Troubadour club in LA when the Lovin’ Spoonful’s producer Erik Jacobsen walked in. He said he had a production deal with Warner Brothers and was interested in signing me. When we recorded Spirit in the Sky for my debut album, the finished mix sent shivers up my spine. Initially, Warner said a four-minute single containing lyrics about Jesus would never get played on pop radio, but eventually they relented. In 1969, it sold two million copies. But I couldn’t recreate the success.

In 1986, I was working as a cook when Dr and the Medics took it back to No 1 in the UK. Then Gareth Gates’s 2003 version meant it was No 1 in three different decades. It’s been in countless movies, including Apollo 13, Oceans 11 and Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m 82. A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car crash and spent three weeks in a coma. I feel like I was granted another life. So now every day, I pray and give thanks to the spirit in the sky.

Erik Jacobsen, producer

I saw Norman at a hootenanny at the Troubadour singing one song, School for Sweet Talk, but he said: “I’ve got a million songs I’d love to play for ya.” It turned out he’d had a minor hit called The Eggplant That Ate Chicago with a group called Dr West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band and had a whole raft of crazy songs about goats, chickens or a Chinese guy who ate some acid. I said: “Let’s make some records that somebody might like.”

I put him together with Norman Mayell, the drummer from San Francisco psychedelic group Sopwith Camel, and Doug Killmer, a bassist, who’d played a lot of black music. The Spirit in the Sky riff originated in an old John Lee Hooker tune called Boogie Chillen’ and set the tone for where the song went, but the rhythm track sounded too loose. I got Norman to bring his acoustic guitar in and we recorded two performances – each slightly different – and made it stereo. Then we brought in gospel singers the Stovall Singers and their church-type clapping became a key part of the groove. A guitarist called Russell DaShiell played a hell of a solo. By now, the track was sounding immense, but when I heard Norman’s little vocal, my heart sank. It just wasn’t heavy enough, so once again I recorded two performances and combined the two together. I thought: “Thank God!” It sounded amazing. (...)

The funny thing is that when we went in to record it, my engineer was sick but we went ahead anyway with just a handful of little mics, no headphones and no sound baffling. Every sound was coming in on every mic, but it sounded great. For years people asked: “How in the world did you get that sound?” I said: “I just pointed the amps right at the drums. I had no idea what I was doing.”

by Dave Simpson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Henry Diltz/Corbis/Getty Images
[ed. I think Norman (Iron Butterfly and Jimi) did more to invent the term "heavy" back in the late-60s than anybody else - along with this new thing called a fuzz box. See also: The Uncool by Cameron Crowe - Inside Rock's Wildest Decade (Guardian).]

Annie Leibovitz - Brian Wilson, Beverly Hills, California, 2000

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