Steve Cropper lives by the groove and fires one up. Speaking with a player whose work dates back to the first days of Satellite and Stax Records, I didn’t expect to hear about rods and reels. “I have always compared making hit records to fishing. The thing is, you have to remember that fish do not bite on the same lure and the same hole every day. They just don’t do it. They move around a little bit. So fishermen have to change the lure and be with the seasons. You have to do that with music, too.” The man telling me this should know a thing or two about hit records. Steve Cropper not only played on them, he wrote and produced them. And just as classic Stax records still sound fresh today, so too does Cropper himself when the spry 79-year-old calls from his home near Nashville. On this day, he’s talking about Fire It Up, his new solo album that harkens back to that classic work at Stax, not to mention his records with the Blues Brothers Band. And, to hear him tell the tale, it’s an album that could only have been made in the age of quarantine. “Fire It Up was definitely done because of the pandemic and the lockdowns,” he tells me. “The guys that are on the album were never in the studio at the same time. All of the vocals were done through an iPhone! Jon [Tiven] and I wrote the tracks at his house. He’s five minutes from here and has a studio in his house. And he called me and said,
‘I’m going to finish up some of those things we PHOTO BY MICHAEL WILSON started writing. I know Steve Cropper you don’t want to put out an album, but what if we put out some of these tracks?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re going to need a record company and a singer.’ He said, ‘I’ve got a singer.’ I said, ‘You’d better play me something he’s done, then.’ And he did, and I said, ‘Where’s this guy been all my life?’” That singer would be Roger C. Reale, a Rhode Island native who’s made his name in New England since before the 1980s belting out classic rock-and-roll with a feverish, new wave intensity. Like the album’s co-writer, multiinstrumentalist, and producer, Jon Tiven, Reale had an early connection to the Big Sound label, who released Memphian Van Duren’s first records in the ’70s. But his singing, it turns out, was a perfect fit for the songs Cropper and Tiven had been writing, steeped in classic soul riffs. “Roger’s fantastic,” says Cropper. “I think he put everything into it. All of his life, he’s been a blues singer, basically. And he was able to put his voice to the groove for a change. And that’s really good to know. Not knocking
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Fire It Up
anything he’s done in the past, but he’s never really worked with a band or a musician that lives by only groove. “When I’m writing, I’m grooving. I’m feeling the groove. In this particular case, Jon Tiven was playing bass, so he would feel the groove, too. And we worked together real good that way. It took me years to play with other bass players besides Duck [Dunn]. I always loved playing live with Duck. Why? Because he always kept a groove going, and you could feel Duck’s bass in your back. “I miss Duck, but Jon was so on top of playing the groove, it didn’t matter. And I don’t look at Jon as being an expert at groove. But he was at that time, when we wrote all those songs. All we were doing was playing to a loop, which we took off later and put real drummers on. And he put on real music [keyboards and horn arrangements] and so forth. And Roger’s treatment to it is just mind-boggling to me. I’m still hearing it fresh.” “Fresh” is a good word for Fire It Up, and Cropper’s clearly proud of the finished product, only his fourth solo work in a career defined more by collaborations. “This new record has some sticking power,” he says. “I am convinced that people are ready to party and dance, after this lockdown. And if they are, this is the album for them.”
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
MUSIC By Alex Greene
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