Time is tight

Steve Cropper has died, the finest of all studio guitarists. The obituaries have been fulsome, so no need here to add to the biographical details. In outline, he was a guitarist, writer and producer behind many soul classics, chiefly as member of Stax Records‘ house band the Mar-Keys and its off-shoot, Booker T and the MGs, one of the greatest of all instrumental bands. Instead, I’m going to produce an appreciation of Cropper’s finest musical contribution, whether considered as an individual or as part of a quartet. For a long time now I have wanted to wrote a post on the instrumental ‘Time is Tight’. The time is now.

‘Time is Tight’ (single version)

In 1968 the American film director Jules Dassin returned to his home country after years in exile following his blacklisting by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his past Communist sympathies. Having made such classics as Rififi and Never on a Sunday while based on France and Greece, Dassin came back to America to make a film on the Black liberation movement, based on Liam O’Flaherty’s Novel The Informer (previously filmed by Arthur Robison in Britain in 1929 and by John Ford in the USA in 1935). Dassin’s stagey but gripping interpretation, entitled Uptight, relocates the action from Dublin to Cleveland, Ohio, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It is strikingly uncompromising in its presentation of revolutionary Black thought. The score was composed and performed by Booker T and the MGs, then at the height of their commercial popularity and artistic achievement.

‘Time is Tight’ had originally been composed for an earlier film Duffy, only to be held back owing to a dispute over publishing rights. In Uptight there are glimpses of the melody accompanying some of the informer’s scenes (‘Tank’ Williams, played by Julian Mayfield). On the soundtrack album this presentiment is called ‘Tanks’ Lament’. The full number is played over the film’s climactic scene, when time starts to run out for the informer, to electrifying effect. It is the final track on the soundtrack album. The number was then released as a single in 1969, becoming one of the band’s greatest, most enduring hits.

There are two versions of ‘Time is Tight’. The longer version (4 minutes 55 seconds), with a quiet, organ-led introduction leading into an up-tempo beat, with later flourishes that break away from the core riff, is that which features so dramatically in the film. The shorter version (3 minutes 14 seconds), mid-tempo and without the longer version’s musical elaborations, is that which was released as a single. It is this classic version on which I am focussing, as perhaps the single most definitive musical recording of the twentieth century.

‘Time is Tight’ (single version) is an instrumental performed by four superlative musicians: Booker T. Jones (organ), Steve Cropper (guitar), Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn (bass) and Al Jackson Jr (drums). According to Cropper, he and Dunn came up with the core riff before Jones added the organ melody (However, Jones gets solo credit for the film’s score). It begins with an uncomplicated, rocking guitar riff in the chord of C, which like all great guitar riffs is both immediately familiar yet peculiarly unique. It is a minimalist figure designed for endless repetition – dum-dee-dee-dum-dah-dah, dum-dee-dee-dah, dee-dum-dee. It is like the ticking of a clock, naturally enough (this is a tune whose theme is time). The bass and metronomic drums join in on the second bar, the bassline melodic, the snare and cymbal beat high in the mix to emphasise the ticking clock motif. The Hammond organ joins in at the same time with the simplest of complementary melodies. The tune is both upbeat and wistful. It is a groove made for dancing, yet there is also a lulling quality to it, liked a speeded-up lullaby (the opening to the long version of the number makes this quality more apparent).

The magic has been cast. All that is needed is to let it play out.

Booker T and the MGs playing some of the long version of ‘Time is Tight; in the Stax studios, from a 1969 French television programme ‘Le Blues de Memphis’

The chord switches from the tonic (C) to the subdominant (F), and back to the tonic. This is repeated, after which comes the cream that makes the coffee. The organ swells up to a climax as the band shifts into G (the dominant), the organ and guitar then shifting upliftingly into D and back again to G. This is repeated, followed by a flourish on the drums and back to C and the guitar riff once more. Another bar and this time the guitar breaks into an unflashy solo that mimics the riff. While Cropper is playing this the chopping chords on the guitar halt, Jones instead filling in with the organ – there is no overdubbing here, simply the music apparently as it was played uninterruptedly in the studio. Back to the riff and melody. The organ builds up and up, but there is no switch this time to G/D. Instead, triumphantly, Jones hold the organ on the C chord while Cropper repeats the opening notes of the guitar solo, and Jackson’s drums drive the number to an ending that might never come, except that all tunes have to have an ending. And so it fades, into silence but on to infinity, the clock forever ticking.

It is a sophisticatedly simple piece of music. You can tap your feet to it, dance to it, or listen to a hypnotic ensemble piece played with pinpoint accuracy in which every element is exactly as it should be. It is the distillation of what the popular song brought to modern times, to the point that it is modern times. This is the sound that makes us. This is the sound to be sharing with other planets.

Booker T and the MGs playing the long version of ‘Time is Tight’ in 1970 as the opening act before a Creedence Clearwater Revival concert at the Oakland Coliseum in 1970

A good part of the sublimity comes from its performance. Guitar, bass and drums with a lead musician – in this case the keyboardist – to bring colour and focus to their musical adventures: Booker T and the MGs epitomised the popular music ensemble in its most essential and most characteristic form. Other outfits would have a singer, of course, and much of the music that the quartet made was as the backing band to a wide variety of soul singers: Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, and so many others. But as a quartet they had a voice of their own, and in ‘Time is Tight’ we have their peak performance.

It’s not just the particular combination of instruments forming the backbone to the popular song, at least as it existed in the twentieth century, but that they are a quartet. There is something about four musical minds coming together in unison. The classical music world has give us the string quartet as a fusion of skill, sound and composition that suggests something particularly powerful about human co-operation. The solo musician represent the individual; the duo reflects a couple. The quartet is how we think together, plan and bring practical things to fruition. It is what has made the species succeed. Footage of Booker T and the MGs performing ‘Time is Tight’ invariably shows each member looking intently at the others, exchanging understanding. It is a form of chamber music with the model quartet for their times.

At its root, what makes ‘Time is Tight’ work so well, so definitively, is that it is backbone music. Booker T and the MGs supported countless artists, and in ‘Time is Tight’ they created the background track that is a foreground track as well. It says, look, this is how it is done. This is what the best of us can do. It is what has kept your hearts beating. It is the pulse of the times.

Links:

• The essential location for information on Steve Cropper is his website, which has the excellent URL https://playitsteve.com
• The 2019 autobiography of the single surviving original member of Booker T and the MGs, Booker T Jones himself, is entitled Time is Tight
• There is a good account of the production history of ‘Time is Tight’ by Gary Eskow on Mix, including its origins as part of the score for the 1968 film Duffy
• The full Le Blues de Memphis television programme can see seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ste1KIwjbLE
• Uptight was released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Olive Films in 2012. Copies can easily be found, and it is available (for the time being) on YouTube
• This is the Uptight soundtrack album, with ‘Tank’s Lament’ and ‘Time is Tight’:

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