For two decades or more, he has sported one of the most atrocious mullets in modern America, and yet Steve Cropper must go down as one of its all-time musical heroes. As the (white) guitarist in the multi-racial Booker T & The MG's, he supplied the immortally hot licks on "Green Onions," and also played on (and co-wrote) innumerable solid-gold classics of 1960s-70s Memphis soul. In audio-visual exhibits at the wonderful Stax Museum, his unselfish admiration for those vintage sessions in which he was such a key player, mark him out as a 100% diamond geezer, to the point where you could only expect a Cropper solo album to be the absolute business. And so it is.

Recorded in '69, just before Martin Luther King's assassination changed the vibes at Stax (he quit the following year), With A Little Help… serves up eleven whipsmart instrumentals, which certainly showcase his six-string dexterity, but never to the detriment of their mostly high-tempo, horn-assisted groove. Pick of the bunch? A smoking "Land Of 1,000 Dances" — after five-and-a-half minutes of that, you'll have busted at least 700 of 'em.