It’s a huge statement for a musical colossus who towered over the rock ‘n’ roll age. Yet to play this posthumous release is to hear an all-time great still at the top of his game, blending the burning passion of youth with the wisdom of an old master. Steve Cropper might have left us, but
Watching The Tide indicates that there is much more still to hear from him.
‘Until Now’ makes stellar use of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood’s stinging slide, as Tiven recalls the session, “Ronnie Wood got back to me about 10 minutes after I sent off my email: ‘Oh, this looks like a lot of fun. I’ll jump in. Ron plays some unbelievable slide guitar on that one, which makes it all the better. But when you listen to Until Now, it’s not really a blue song, per se. It’s more of a song with blues changes that breaks out of the genre. The only other guitar you hear on Until Now is Steve – and it’s so atypical of what you would normally hear from him. It’s just a completely different approach, and it knocked me out.”‘Until Now’ follows the first song to be released from the album, the tough Southern-smoked blues of ‘
Ticket First’, which started with a joke and ended up with Cropper and fellow rock royalty Clapton riffing nose-to-nose. “I told Eric, ‘Man, you just turned that song inside-out – I think we’re gonna have to give you a writer’s credit,” recalls Tiven of the legendary British guitarist’s transcendent solo. “And Eric said, ‘Well, anything to get my name next to Steve Cropper’s…’”
Never a showy player, the Missouri-born, Memphis-raised guitarist was prized as the greatest engine room on the Southern scene, the push-pull of his rhythm work as undeniable as a locomotive piston. Just as vital, Cropper was a walking encyclopaedia of his adopted home city’s musical forms – blues, soul, R&B, gospel – and this served him well as the trusted first lieutenant of Stax co-founder Jim Stewart and cornerstone of the label’s house band, Booker T. & The M.G.’s. “Working with Steve was easy,” nods Tiven, “because he knew how to get the best out of everybody.”
Even for a writer who left his thumbprint on the great American songbook, the twelve new tracks on Watching The Tide show that his creative spirit endures through a vast musical legacy and a collection of unreleased works that will continue to reveal the depth of his talent and be shared with the world.
