INTERVIEW: Steve Cropper, Stax Records legend, teams up with Dave Mason for summer tour
Steve Cropper has amassed unparalleled success in the music industry, playing with some of the greats and carving out his own exemplary résumé as a guitarist and songwriter. His credits are almost too numerous to list. Whether it’s being an original member of Booker T & the MGs, writing songs with Otis Redding or serving as Stax Records go-to guitarist, Cropper’s accomplishments are wide and varied, dating back half a century.
Audiences can take in this musical history on Cropper’s new double-bill tour with Dave Mason, the equally impressive musician who was an original member of the band Traffic. They stop Wednesday, July 18 at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“I think they know who Dave is, and I’m pretty sure they know who I am,” Cropper said in a recent phone interview. “So it’s a good combination. We’ve already done a show, and it went over quite well. I know for me I’m definitely looking forward to it, and I think Dave said the same thing. We’re pretty excited about it. … He’s somebody I’ve admired for years, but I never played with him because we were in different genres of music. So to put those two together and call it the Rock & Soul Revue is pretty smart.”
The set list for the concert will include a gluttony of hit songs, many of them from Cropper’s songbook: “In the Midnight Hour,” “Green Onions,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” “Knock on Wood” and “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” The two musicians plan to be on stage together, playing each other’s songs, so Cropper will add Traffic and Mason’s solo work to his long list of tunes to master.
“We’ll be on stage together,” Cropper confirmed. “I play behind his stuff, and he plays behind mine. We start out with some of my songs, and then we work into his stuff. And then we go back to some of mine and back to some of his, and then we finale out.”
Cropper’s approach to live music is to give the people what they want, and he has no problem playing the many hits from his years with Stax Records (1961-1970). He also has tunes with the Blues Brothers that he can pull from, and it appears “Soul Man” will be on the set list.
“I’m always going to do the main hits that everybody knows because that’s just my philosophy in life,” he said. “I haven’t been out there on my own, not in the States, to force feed album projects and stuff like that that some people never heard. But the ones I do are the hit and miss ones, ‘In the Midnight Hour, ‘Knock on Wood’ and those kind of things, ‘Green Onions’ and ‘Time is Tight,’ some of our hits with Booker T & the MGs. We get around to doing most of them. We don’t do everything because we’d be up there for four hours, just kind of hit and miss on the hits that people know about and #1’s and top 10’s. And, of course, Dave’s got so many, it’s amazing. It was hard to decide what to do and what not to do, what to leave out to keep it around an hour and a half show.”
For Stax Records, Cropper served as an in-house guitarist, engineer, producer and songwriting partner — backing up and collaborating with such luminaries as Redding and Eddie Floyd, among many others. At the same time, he also made his first connection with keyboardist Booker T. Jones, and Booker T. & the MGs were eventually founded and helped to shape the Stax sound in the 1960s. Such songs as “Green Onions” and “Time Is Tight” followed, and many years later, they were recognized for their efforts with induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Cropper didn’t realize in the 1960s that he was helping to produce musical greatness. “We had no idea,” he said. “Every song got treated the same. They were all, in our minds, pretty good, or we wouldn’t record them. Some of the artists turned out to be better as they went along. They all got better. We didn’t record anybody that was bad.”
Cropper received his first guitar from Sears. He thinks he was about 15 years old and in the ninth grade. By the 10th grade, he was learning how to play, and by the 11th grade, he was playing shows in the local area.
The first time her actually played a guitar dates back even further. “I was probably about 9 or 10 years old, something like that, picked up a guitar when I was visiting my uncle up in Missouri,” he remembers. “He had one that he kept in a closet. He played piano and fiddle. He didn’t really play guitar, but he kept one in case somebody come along and didn’t have one. They’d get it out and jam on Sunday afternoon after church. I used to sit and just pluck on it, not trying to play it, but just pluck on it to hear the sound and vibration, much like you play with a rubber brand. I can thank my aunt Marty who is still alive for allowing me to do that. She didn’t know if I was going to damage it. That was my real first introduction.”
Cropper brings all of this history to his live performances, from his early guitar days to his time at Stax to his gigging with the Blues Brothers. And with Mason on the bill, there’ll be double the history.
“They’re not going to get up and walk out on us, I don’t think,” he said.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Steve Cropper and Dave Mason bring their Rock & Soul Revue tour Wednesday, July 18 to the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
