Legendary soul guitarist Steve Cropper recalls his days at Stax records, discovering a certain 
Otis Redding and, of course, The Blues Brothers.

So, there we are, Simon and me, standing in the lobby of the Garden Beach Hotel in Juan-les-Pins, looking for a rock 'n' roll legend.
 
 

The problem, though, is finding him. Rock 'n' roll legends don't always look legendary. They can often be smaller, shorter and a good deal older than you expect. Not to put too fine a point on it, it can be hard to distinguish them from delegates at a convention of heating engineers.

Since there is one of those already going on at the Garden Beach Hotel, we keep grinning hopefully at heating engineers as they emerge from the elevator. We're starting to get a little worried. So are the heating engineers.

We needn't have worried. When Steve 'The Colonel' Cropper does emerge from the elevator, there is no doubt who he is. He is bigger, taller and looks much younger than I expected (since he cut his first record straight out of High School in Memphis in 1960, he must be at least in his mid-fifties). He has a small, neat beard, his hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail and his hands are huge. They could grab the neck of a 12-string like it was a 
violin. Then make it sing.

Cropper was under contract at Stax in Memphis throughout the sixties, both as a musician and as a producer. He'd been writing songs since he was 14, but didn't do that at Stax to start with. "I was allowed to do instrumentals but, being white and all, I wasn't allowed to do lyric songs," he says. "Then, after the success of 'No Time to Lose' (which he wrote for Carla Thomas), they started coming to me for more songs. They started putting me with different artists. They put me with Eddie Floyd, which was probably one of the great marriages of all times: we're still great buddies."

With Floyd – who, like Cropper appears in Blue Brothers 2000 (Floyd has a featured role; Cropper is back playing lead guitar in the Blues Brothers Band) – the latter wrote 'Knock on Wood' and '634-5789', which started out as the phone number of Eddie Floyd's girlfriend. He also wrote 'In the Midnight Hour' for Wilson Pickett and co-wrote and played lead guitar on 'Green Onions', with Booker T and the MGs. A man, in other words, who built the landmarks of our lives.

He was working in the studio when the call came from John Belushi. "I talked to John for about an hour, and he said 'I gotta have you in the band.' And I said, 'I can't get up there: I'm right in the middle of mixing an album in the studio.' And the guy who's album I'm producing said, 'Who are you talking to?'

"John Belushi. He wants me to play in his band.
"And the guy said 'I'll do it!'
"So I said, 'I got the call' Anyway, we worked it out."

The Blues Brothers Band had its origins on Saturday Night Live, where it used to warm up the studio audience. But producer Lorne Michaels thought Belushi and Aykroyd weren't good enough to sing on air – until he found the show running short one night and let them go on. It was, however, a completely reformed Blues Brothers Band that opened for Steve Martin at the Universal Amphitheatre. The rest is history: a hit single, a No 1 albumÉ and, of course, the original movie, released in 1981.

The Band split up after Belushi's death in 1983, then reformed for concerts and tours in the late eighties. "We didn't do it for a long time after John died," says Cropper. "But we picked it up again about 10 years ago." The occasion, apparently, was as a surprise birthday party for Dan Aykroyd.

Out on the dock of the bay, meanwhile, Cropper has another little surprise in store. It comes when I ask him how he started writing with Otis Redding. I think I'll let him tell it.

"Well, he came to us, basically," says the former Stax producer, recalling the day when this guy he'd never seen before turned up in the studio. "I thought he was the driver or the roadie, because he was unloading amplifiers and microphones and stuff. Then Al Jackson said, 'This guy wants you to hear him'. And I said, 'Oh, when we have time. I don't have time now.'

"At the end of the session, Al said, 'You know I told you about this guy? He's driving me nuts. He really wants you to hear him sing.'

"So I said, 'OK, five minutes'. We brought him in and I said, 'What do you play? What key?'
"He said, 'Oh, I don't really play anything. I play a little guitar, but not much.' So I said, 'OK, what do you want me to do, what key?'"

"He said, 'Oh, I don't care, just hit some triplets or something on the piano.' In fact, I started out – I don't remember now – in B-flat or something, and he started singing 'These Arms of Mine'."

Cropper leans back and holds his hands up in the air, recalling his amazement at hearing the finest soul voice of all time coming out a guy he thought was a roadie.

"I went 'Ooooh-oh!' We scrambled around to get a band, because everybody had gone home. Booker T had left, so we were without a keyboard player, 'cos I'm real bad: I can write a little on the piano but I'm no piano-player. We wound up with three-chord triplets. Johnny Jenkins played guitar.

"And we cut it. Next time, we came back and did 'Hey, Baby', I think. Those were the first."