The Colonel AKA Steve Cropper has won two Grammy Awards, he was ranked the number two greatest guitarist of all-time—behind Jimi Hendrix—by Mojo Magazine, and number 36 in Rolling Stone magazine’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” While in high school, Cropper’s band, The Mar-Keys, hit number #3 with “Last Night.”
Cropper’s name has been synonymous with the world-famous soul label Stax Records. While at Stax, Cropper co-wrote hits, played guitar behind, and produced such legends as Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett, Bill Withers, Sam & Dave, Albert King and Carla Thomas along with working with Booker T and the MG's.
He's also produced and/or played on sessions for Jeff Beck, Yvonne Elliman, Paul Simon, Ringo Starr, Buddy Guy, Johnny Lang, Elton John among, many, many others. Oh and he's also one of The Blues Brothers.
At 82 he's still making music having just released the album Friendlytown featuring Billy Gibbons and Brian May
We chat to the legendary Steve Cropper and find out more about his amazing life in music.
PG: Friendlytown has been getting a lot of good press. Did you get the feeling you’d made a really good album when you heard it?
SC: So far so good. There’s a lot of response, a lot of response compared to the last one. The last one was nominated (for a Grammy Award), but it doesn’t matter. Everybody says it’s a pretty good album. I got friends calling me saying ‘man this new album you’ve got is great!’. I’m having more fun now than I’ve had in my life on the records. Why? Because this one’s selling. I don’t care if it gets nominated. But I still don’t have my CD’s!
PG: You co-produced the album. What is it you like about collaborating with other musicians?
SC: John Tiven, he’s my friend and the co-producer of the album. Everybody needs a producer, I don’t care who you are, you could be a producer, but you still need a producer. Maybe Stevie Wonder didn’t need one, or maybe John Foggerty didn’t, but I think everyone needs a producer, apart from those two. They didn’t need anybody’s input. I could have done it, but I didn’t. I love input. I love to co-write. I love to spin off somebody else, when they say “that wasgood, do that again”, it tells me I’m in the right direction.
PG: How did you form the new group?
SC: Well that was John Tiven’s idea and I went for it. The new one is Billy Gibbons, Brian May and Tim Montana he’s only playing on one song, but he’s been a real good friend. He’s a showman and an artist, he’s gonna make it. It’s awesome. Felix Cavaliere's on this album, he sings better now than he did when he was a teenager.
The difference between this album and the last album - the last album was nominated for a Grammy - but we weren’t in the studio because it was the Covid era. So we are all in the studio together, so there’s a different energy on this one.
Billy runs into Tiven at a store and said “what are you working on John”, he said “nothing right now, but I’m getting ready to do another album with Steve Cropper” and Billy said “can I be on it?” - "you’re damn right you can, let me call Steve now and tell him.” So I said “I love Billy, I love him to death. He’s welcome anytime." Billy played on everything and he wrote three of the songs.
PG: You’re known for writing good grooves. How did you write these songs with the other members of the band?
SC: The titles are usually John Tiven’s ideas. The last album and this album started with me and tracks. I just write the grooves. I’ve always written grooves, but hadn’t written the songs. The last album was just things I had in my head for a long time. This album was more intentional: our intention was to write good songs at the time it was written.
PG: What gives you the drive to make music after such as long career?
PC: No idea! The artist, the song, that drives me. They ask me what’s my favourite song - I don’t know. It’s the one I’m playing. And I just play my heart out when I can. What made me famous in the old days was that I used the guitar as a tool, not as an instrument, there’s the difference. If they had called for a hammer, I’d have had a hammer ready. If it called for a saw, I’d have used a saw. If they called for a 2X4, I’d have used a 2X4, but they called for a guitar, so I used a guitar. So I became a pretty good guitar player, because I played on a lot of hits: I played the right thing I guess.
PG: You started playing sessions at a young age.
SC: Oh when I was real small. Chips Mowman got me my first session at Stax I said “what am I supposed to play” and he said, “it doesn’t matter, just play what you feel. If they don’t like it, they’ll tell you what to play. So I just kept using that same theory all the time. So he told me how to play, what to play and when to play. That was my first session. ‘I’m going Home’ by Prince Conley.
PG: Do you have a favourite riff?
SC: No, I probably have a favourite one I use all the time, but I don’t have a favourite one. I never think about favourites, never will and never have. I always get asked who’s you’re favourite band or musician - I always say it’s the one I’m playing with. ‘Coz they are. I treat everyone the same, equal. They’re God as far as I’m concerned.
PG: You’re playing style is very minimal, how did you develop that?
SC: Well my theory on sessions is that I act like a singer instead of a guitar player and I just finish their melody or play on top of them. I pretend I’m a singer and I play melodically. It might be melodic to some of these guys but to me, it just sounds like a bunch of notes together. Dexterity tells me how good they are as a guitar player, it doesn’t tell me how good they are as a musician. I get asked by people “my son wants to learn guitar, any tips for him?” Yes - learn the business. If you don’t have the business in you, you can learn all the music, but if you don’t know the business find somebody who does! Either get a manager or a lawyer.
PG: Is there a song you’d wished you’d written?
SC: No, I don’t think of it that way. If you ask me if there’s somebody I wished I worked with, yes her name was Tina Turner. She’s not here anymore and I wish I could have worked with her. I’ve worked with a lot of people, but she’d have been something else.
PG: You’ve preempted my next question. How did you and Tina never work together?
SC: I don’t know, we’ve never been on the same stage together. When she was with Ike years ago they were a week ahead of the Mar-Keys. We had that hit record ‘Last Night’. They wanted to know how come that was such a big hit, I don’t know. Then it hit me about three years ago - it must have been the first twist instrumental. I remember playing that record for my Mom and the first thing she did was the twist dance.
PG: Where did your interest in the blues come from?
SC: I think the blues came out of the fact that I listened to Gospel music growing up. I loved what they played. The first thing I did in Memphis was go to the Gospel Reunion and those guys The Five Royals blew me away. The Five Royals went back to singing Gospel music when they split up. We did an album called ‘Dedicated’ based on The Five Royals songs written by Lowman Pauling.
PG: You had a chance to work with The Beatles in 1965, why didn’t that come off?
SC: There’s a good reason that didn’t come about. Brian Epstein did come to Memphis for a couple of weeks. He wanted to make sure that if they worked at Stax there was plenty of protection for them, so I got them a good place. But he said it wasn’t good enough, he was more comfortable in New York.
PG: What would a Steve Cropper-produced Beatles album have sounded like?
SC: I have no idea. I wrote one song and every time I played it back it sounded like a Beatles song. It wasn’t something I’d put my name on as Steve Cropper, it was too pop for me. I wrote a lot of pop songs but they had some R and B roots. If a pop song has roots of R and B there’s a difference, that a pop song is just a pop song, there’s a big difference.
PG: Did you enjoy working with Otis Redding?
SC: He was like an older brother. He was very streetwise and we hung out together. We hung out a lot. I didn’t realise until I read his obituary and we were born almost a month apart.
PG: How did you come to meet Jimi Hendrix?
SC: Deanie Parker (at Stax) said there’s a guy who wants to see you, and she thought he was really important. I said Deanie I’m mixing so I didn’t want to meet anybody. So about 5.30 I’m thinking everybody’s gone home except me,because I’d probably be mixing till midnight. Deanie says to me, you know that guy I brought in earlier, but you didn’t want to meet him. That’s him across the street with a cheeseburger. So I went over to him and introduced myself and asked have you played on anything I’d have heard? He said, yeah I did some sessions up in New York. I played on Don Covay’s ‘Have Mercy’ session. I said when you finish that cheeseburger can you come across the street and show me that lick? So did. He took my guitar and he turned it upside down and I said I can’t learn it that way! But he played the played it upside down and left-handed. I couldn’t play it that way but I learnt it later and just listened to the record. It was a great lick.
PG: Do you have a favourite guitar that you like to play?
PG: I never did play a Cropper Classic on stage, I should have done but I didn’t. The one I have now is made by the same guys (Peavy) and it’s more Tele-like than anything else, except it’s real light and I love that. So I’ve been playing that for nine, almost ten years. I used to play the Telecaster on everything because they’re so versatile. If they ask for a solo, it’ll play a solo if they ask for rhythm it’ll play rhythm. So it will do both. If you got some kinds of Les Paul’s or a Gretch, it doesn’t do everything. It does some things better, much better than a Tele, but not rhythm and all.
PG: You played an Esquire back in the day didn’t you?
SC: Well the Esquire like I played on Green Onions has one pickup on a Tele has two. So I put the switch in the middle position and used both pickups. On the new one I use just the neck pickup only and I’ve been doing that a long time.
The guys at Peavy in Mississippi built this guitar for my 65th birthday. So I took it out one day and thought this guitar sounded pretty good. The guys at The Blues Brothers, said keep that guitar, so I played it all the time and took it on the road with the amp, it’s a good marriage. I use a Victoria amp, and they sound good together. I know how to set the amp up. The Victoria amp is handmade in Chicago. I’ve had everybody playing on that amp. I’ve had Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Louis Walker and then they switched and went to the new stuff. It is what it is, but they’ll always go back.
PG: How did The Blues Brothers stuff come about?
SC: Well Duck was the first one called. Belucci called me. I was with Robben Ford at the time. I hung up on him twice, I thought it was a friend wanting to go to lunch. The third time Belucci called he said “don’t hang up, it really is John Belucci”. He asked me to go to New York and do Saturday Night Live. We were playing Carnegie Hall one night and I didn’t know John Belucci was there. He said “if I ever put a band together I want that band” He came really close to getting that band. He got Duck and myself and Steve Jordan.
PG: Duck Dunn used to joke that the MG’s stood for musical geniuses was he right?
SC: I don’t know about that! It’s been so long, we’ll tell you that it does stand for the Triumph car. Chips Moman had a Triumph at the time. We got a letter from the lawyers from British Motors and it said we don’t want to be involved in any musical groups, so we changed it. So we called it the Memphis Group. Duck said to Columbia years ago said what does it stand for ‘Musical Geniuses! I could never say that, we’re not even close to being that. Maybe Duck was, I wasn’t. Booker’s great, he’s the best musician I’ve worked with.
PG: Green Onions is one of the classic tracks from the MG’s how did that come together?
PG: We were working on Sunday, but Jim Stewart said can you bring the band in to do a demo, but the artist never showed. So we started playing around with something you might play on stage - a filler. F minor blues was all it was. When it was over Jim said, you’d better come here and listen to this. He said if we put something like this out, have you got anything for the B side? In those days records had an A side and B side. We looked dumbfounded, we didn’t have anything. I said Booker, play me a few riffs that might be good for a song, so three cuts later we had Green Onions. It was ad-libbed, it was that simple.
'Last Night', was our first song out of high school with The Mar-Keys. Packy Axton, the tenor player and I came up with the horn line the day before that session and Lewie Steinberg played bass on it. Most people don’t know I was on it because there’s no guitar. I play the organ and hold it down on one note. Smoochy (Smith) couldn’t do both at the same time. So that’s how that happened.
PG: Stax and Motown were big labels at the time, and there is this perceived rivalry between them, was that the case?
SC: If people listened there might have been in their mind. But we had no rivalry. We didn’t care about Motown they were in the pop business. We played R and B all the time. The difference was we were selling grooves they were selling music and grooves and that's the deal.
PG: Are you working on another album?
SC: I go from project to project. If the record company finally comes up with the budget, I'll say "ok when do you want me to start?" It all depends on the budget. If there's a budget for a third album then there will be.
PG: Do you have any songs that you are working on?
SC: I don’t have any ideas yet but I will when I sit down. If you give me an artist and a budget I’ll give you three hits by noon tomorrow!
PG: What inspires you to write?
SC: Artist and budget, the artist is nothing without a budget, I don’t care who they are. It doesn’t have to be a lot or extravagant budget. Gimme $5 that’s a budget. I don’t care as long as it’s fun. Duck used to sit down at a session and say “We’re not going to make work out of this are we boys? If we are I’m leaving!” Every time we sat down and played it was always fun. Nothing was ever serious. The engineer and the singer might be serious, but the musicians weren’t. We get everybody in that frame of mind of having a good time and having fun and it always works.
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