“He’s been hiding from you”: Pete Townshend on the most incredible guitarist in history
Any great rock and roll band always returns to that signature guitar riff. Even if there is a lot of window dressing put next to it on record, any guitarist can normally hold an audience’s attention if they come up with a riff good enough to last an entire song. Although Pete Townshend could justifiably be considered one of the kings of rhythm guitar at this point, he knew that no one could pull off anything as incredible as one particular rock and roll legend could do.
When Townshend first started with The Who, the guitar was still a fairly new instrument for rock and roll. Chuck Berry had started the idea of what a guitar hero should look like, but around the time ‘My Generation’ came out, the floodgates had opened for people wanting to sound harder and faster than everyone who had come before.
And that usually meant putting much more finesse into every track you played. Despite Townshend playing the bare essentials in a one-guitar outfit, he still found time to embrace the same fretboard pyrotechnics that someone like Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton was doing in the London clubs once the psychedelic scene kicked in. But showboating was never a part of Townshend’s vocabulary.
Since he was a songwriter first, Townshend was more interested in adding something to a tune rather than grandstanding for minutes on end. If anything, his role was about being the perfect accompanist to the main body of the song, and that was something that Steve Cropper knew like the back of his hand.
While he was a bit left of field compared to the core blues players, Cropper’s guitar chops with Booker T and the MGs were half the reason why tracks like ‘Green Onions’ worked so well. What he did wasn’t flashy, but when he did decide to take a solo, people listened intently to everything that he played.
And while Townshend would eventually embrace the sound of hard rock when working on albums like Live at Leeds, he still considered Cropper to be in the upper echelons of rock gods, saying, “He’s been here all your life, folks, on your Otis Redding albums, on your Booker T specials. Here he’s been, Steve Cropper, hiding from you, the most incredible guitarist in history.”
Whereas Townshend carved out his own style for himself in The Who, there are moments where he seems to steal a bit from Cropper’s style. Despite spending a lot of time grandstanding on Quadrophenia, some of the best moments on that record come when he leans back and provides the perfect piece of ear candy in between the bashing chords. And half the time, there are even a few moments that have a bit of the same soulful bent that those old Otis Redding songs had as well.
Because that’s what Cropper was all about. Anyone could make the ultimate guitar solo come to life, but Cropper was into making records that made people’s hearts dance rather than have everything gawk in amazement at his technique.
