jon tiven Archive
06 Jul 2021
Steve Cropper: The Go-Getter Gets Going (Part Two)

Continued from Part One … With Cropper’s buy-in to the idea, Tiven enlisted the skills of drummers, including ace session man Anton Fig. Cropper has long been friends with the South African-born precussionist. “You’d know him from Saturday Night Live and David Letterman’s show,” he says. But Fig also played drums in a later version
05 Jul 2021
Steve Cropper: The Go-Getter Gets Going (Part One)

Ask serious music fans to name a tasteful guitarist, and inevitably Steve Cropper’s name is going to come up. As a studio musician, Cropper’s work is part of the center of gravity of innumerable recordings that came out of Memphis’ Stax Records in the 1960s. With Booker T & the M.G.’s, Cropper was responsible for
16 Sep 2016
PRIX: The Band that Never Was

In March 1974, Jon Tiven had just turned 19 and was living in New York City. In the next two and half years, he’d find himself deeply enmeshed in a Memphis musical scene and saga that – while the stuff of legend today – went almost wholly unnoticed at the time. He variously played, wrote,
03 May 2016
Preview: Prix

In September 2015 I was in Nashville for the annual Americana Music Awards and Conference. I was there primarily to take part in a discussion panel entitled “Breaking Barriers Through Social Networking,” but I took full advantage of the many opportunities to see and hear some excellent live music. (And in keeping with the stereotype