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Legendary Stax guitarist/producer Steve Cropper hated when deejays talked over song intros. He decided to do something about it for the countless hit singles cut at the label's Memphis studio in the 1960s. As a result of his efforts, Cropper—who passed away on December 3, 2025, at age 84—became known as "The Intro Guy," a sobriquet he was proud to honor. "I got to hang out at a lot of radio stations, but I never really wanted to be a disc jockey,"

Cropper told me from his Nashville home during a phone interview in May 2018. "The work they did fascinated me, but they would always talk right up until the singer would sing. Whether it was a 10-second intro or a 10-minute intro, they would talk over it until the vocals started, and then they'd stop. And I said, 'Man, we gotta fix this!' So, I started doing these powerful, gangbuster intros they couldn't talk over because they would be too damn loud! Think about the intro to 'In the Midnight Hour'—blam! It hits like a shotgun blast."

Besides coproducing and playing lead guitar on that explosive, soulful, best-selling 1965 Wilson Pickett single, Cropper steered a literal murderers' row of prime, chart-hugging Stax-era earworms: The Mar-Keys' "Last Night," Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood," Sam & Dave's "Soul Man," Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," and, of course that perpetual Booker T. & The M.G.'s instrumental masterpiece, "Green Onions."

"What we did on 'Green Onions' was real simple," Cropper explained. "I had a thing in the middle where the guitar gets eight bars. Jim Stewart, who engineered it, was the owner of Stax Records—he was the 'St' of Stax (footnote 1). And he said, 'Steve, you know that thing you're doing in the middle? Why don't you put that on the intro, and then when it comes to your thing in the middle, just play a solo.' So I did that thing on the front end, once or twice at the most. 'Green Onions' also has an interesting drum beat. It's a 2/4 song that goes 1-2, ta-3-4, ba-ba-4—and that's in the kickdrum. To all drummers, I say, 'Play that, and just play single quarter notes on the bell of the cymbal.' Al"—that's Jackson, the original M.G.'s drummer—"did the same thing on the intro to 'Soul Man.' Instead of playing the cymbal with the beat, he played it with the stick on the side of the bell."

Much has been made of "Play it, Steve!"—the infamous, improvised exclamation from Sam Moore at 1:36 in "Soul Man," right as Cropper plays the song's signature riff. "Sam probably wished he never said it!" Cropper said with a laugh. "Where it really came from was something James Brown had done when he said, 'Play it, Maceo!' (footnote 2) People ask me what the hardest session I ever played on was, and it had to be 'Soul Man.'

I was sitting down because I played that riff like a slide riff with a Zippo cigarette lighter. That song was grooving on every take—just try sitting down in a chair and not getting up and dancing with Dave!" That's Dave Prater, the Dave in Sam & Dave. "So I had to balance that Zippo so it wouldn't run off my leg."

"I'll tell you the secret of what I learned about radio," Cropper confided. "They had this thing where they would not play anything that ran 3 minutes or longer. ... We would put '2:59' on the tape box. We did this all the time. Even if the song was 3:10, 3:12, or 3:15, we put 2:59. In those days, the deejays weren't watching the clock during their three- or four-hour shifts and logging the length of every song because they had to cue up the next track. So they didn't notice it."

Stax didn't dominate just the American airwaves. Stax tracks had tremendous impact across the Pond as well. "I'd been listening to Steve's stuff with Booker T. & The M.G.'s since I was 18 years old," British guitarist/vocalist Dave Mason told me on that same May day in 2018, just as he and Cropper were prepping to embark on that summer's Rock & Soul Revue Tour together. "Their music was such an inspiration for us Brits," Mason said. "We were basically copying or absorbing what was coming out of America and then putting our own spin on it, so for me to be touring with Steve at this point is just fantastic." (footnote 3)

Cropper revealed another secret to the success of Stax singles: "Record guys would call me up and say, 'I know that song is in the key of such and such, but the record's not.' And I said, "Well, think about it. We didn't speed it up; we just nudged it up a notch. We made the master a little more danceable.' We did that with a lot of those records. It's just technology. ... It was exciting, because 'Green Onions,' the original record, is not 'lame'—but it is slow, relative to what people are used to hearing."

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Footnote 1: "The "ax" in Stax was Jim Stewart's sister Estelle Axton, who was also his business partner.

Footnote 2: "Maceo" is Maceo Parker, James Brown's saxophone player for much of his career.

Footnote 3: If you want to hear just how well the two axemen blended together on songs ranging from "Green Onions" to Mason's "Only You Know and I Know," check out their self-released 2018 live CD, 4Real Rock & Soul Revue.