BEFORE: I'm getting very close now to the end of the big Summer Concert (and Documentary) series, just two films left after today. Still it's gone on longer than planned, and I'm closer to the end of the year now than I intended to be. Hey, it's just that kind of year, maybe - the pandemic has certainly gone on longer than expected, the shutdown and the unemployment and the distancing restrictions - in March I kind of assumed the whole thing would blow over in two weeks, maybe a month, tops.
I unconsciously sort of set up the whole Summer Concert series chronologically - really when I set up the chain I was just looking for a good entry point (Sharon Stone) and a workable exit point, which could have been Keith Richards, though now it's an actress I'm not familiar with. I started way back in the 1960s' with Bob Dylan (even though the first film was about his tour in 1975/76) and then I followed Bob and The Band up to "The Last Waltz", then I moved over to the West Coast for the sounds of Laurel Canyon in the 60's and 70's, then Sound City, then I hopped over the U.K./NYC for John Lennon in the early 1970's. Then came a look at the Rolling Stones (though that concert was recorded in 2006), that allowed my transition to the history of Motown, then I came forward to the 1980's and 90's with a look at Whitney Houston.
Today I'm going to try to tie that all together, if possible - because it hasn't just been about WHEN this music was recorded, it's also been about WHERE it was recorded - Laurel Canyon/L.A., Detroit, and now Alabama. There's been a peculiar focus on recording studios - whether that was Sound City, or the Snakepit in Hitsville USA, or Lennon's personal recording studio in his Tittenhurst Park estate, or the basement of The Band's rented house in Woodstock, NY. OK, sure, we've been out on tour with Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue, and watched The Band play at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco and the Stones at the Beacon Theater, but all of these songs had to be recorded on albums first, and I've never seen such an emphasis placed on which studios these songs originated in. This is something of an odd trend in documentaries that I've uncovered, I guess rock fans want to know where things happened so they can, what, make pilgrimages there? I'll admit that three years ago I felt the urge to stop at Sun Studios before leaving Memphis - and this was the day after walking through the Jungle Room at Graceland. So yeah, I get it.
One more stop on the studio tour, down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as Aretha Franklin carries over from "Whitney".
THE PLOT: A documentary that celebrates Rick Hall, the founder of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and the signature sound he developed in songs such as "I'll Take You There", "Brown Sugar" and "When a Man Loves a Woman".
AFTER: I almost forgot about "Today in Music History", selected milestones that directly involve some of the people in today's film - on August 5, 1978, the Rolling Stones saw their only disco-themed hit, "Miss You", become their 8th #1 single in the U.S., though it only reached #3 in the U.K. On August 5, 1996, Wilson Pickett checked into a drug rehab clinic in New Jersey, at the age of 55, after a judge had given him a choice between rehab and jail. And on August 5, 2015, Keith Richards made headlines when he told Esquire magazine what he thought about the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's" album, saying, "Some people think it's a genius album, but I think it's a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like 'Satanic Majesties'". Well, he wasn't completely wrong - why can't it be both? And on August 5, 2016, Gregg Allman cancelled the majority of his upcoming tour dates due to "serious health issues" - and that wasn't code language to cover up going to rehab, he died from liver cancer in May 2017.
With that tragedy out of the way, let's talk about Rick Hall, who seemed to have a lot of tragic stories of his own that got told here, between the success stories from his FAME Studios. There's the story about his little brother getting burned by scalding laundry water, and dying three days later, which he believes led to his parents' divorce, which then led to his mother leaving to go work in a brothel. That's a lot to take in, but there's more, because after serving in the Korean War (he claimed to be a conscientious objector and played in an Army band, facts not mentioned here) he got married young, but his wife died shortly after that in a car accident. Then he worked for Reynolds Aluminum and got enough money to buy his sharecropper father the John Deere tractor he always wanted, but his father somehow ended up underneath the tractor and died. This sent Rick into a downward spiral of depression and alcoholism, which seems to have led to him becoming a traveling musician - yeah, I suppose I can believe that track.
But he really wanted to become a songwriter and record producer, and he did have some success in this arena in the late 1950's, when George Jones recorded his song "Achin' Breakin' Heart" (hmm, I think Billy Ray Cyrus might have ripped that one off...) and Brenda Lee recorded his song "She'll Never Know". So he started a recording studio and music publishing company called FAME (Florence, Alabama Music Enterprises) but he was in a partnership with two other men, who dissolved the partnership when they learned what a hard worker he was, as they were only in it for fun, and to meet girls. Hey, if the worst thing that people can say about you is that you're a hard worker, I think maybe you're doing all right. But by 1961 he had already produced his first gold record, which was Arthur Alexander's "You Better Move On", which gained more attention when it was later covered by The Rolling Stones. (The Beatles had covered Alexander's song "Anna (Go to Him)" just a few weeks before.).
By the mid-1960's the FAME studio in Muscle Shoals had become a destination for rising acts, to try to catch that "lightning in a bottle" that seemed to come whenever somebody built a room that had good acoustics - this is where Wilson Pickett came to record "Land of 1,000 Dances", Percy Sledge recorded "When a Man Loves a Woman", and it turned out to be the place where Aretha Franklin's career really took off - she'd been under contract with Columbia for five years (after she turned down RCA and Motown), but they apparently didn't know how to package her or develop her sound, so in 1967 she signed with Atlantic and was sent to Muscle Shoals. The free-form recording session there seemed to be at a lull, until the keyboard player found the groove and they recorded "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)". Even though an altercation between a horn player and Aretha's soon-to-be-ex husband ended the session early, the song still became her first #1 single. Tensions also broke down between Rick Hall and the head of Atlantic Records, meaning that Aretha never went back to Muscle Shoals, but they brought all those musicians up to New York to record more songs, like "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" and a little song called "Respect".
In many ways, this story about a sound studio seems very much like the story of every sound studio - watch this film back-to-back with "Sound City" and you'll see there's so much overlap in the ups and downs of running similar businesses, even if all of the details are different. There's this ebb and flow to any business, since everybody makes mistakes, manages to stay current on some trends, and misses the boat on others. With Sound City it was, "we were about to close, and then Nirvana came here to record, suddenly we were popular again" and with Muscle Shoals, it's nearly the same arc. Things looked bleak for a while until The Rolling Stones swooped in to record "Brown Sugar", "Wild Horses" and "You Gotta Move". Well, sort of - the Stones didn't record at FAME Studios, they recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, AL, which was founded by three musicians from FAME who split off to open their own studio, let's be clear about that. But after the Stones released those songs on "Sticky Fingers" in 1971, then acts like Bob Dylan ("Gotta Serve Somebody"), Paul Simon ("Loves Me Like a Rock", "Kodachrome") and Bob Seger ("Night Moves", "Mainstreet") wanted to come to town to get that same sound, thinking it must be something in the water, I guess.
Keith Richards is left wondering what could have been if the Stones had returned to Muscle Shoals, but doing so was prevented by legal and financial issues. (Umm, explain, please?)
Back at FAME Studios, before Rick Hall's clientele moved more toward pop, as he produced tracks for Paul Anka, Tom Jones, and the Osmonds, they'd done pretty well with that blues sound, and a young guitarist named Duane Allman had taken to sleeping in their parking lot. Up until this point, the studio had been a remarkably integrated place to work, considering it was located in Alabama. Black and white studio musicians worked together in harmony, which wasn't typical for the deep South, but working with long-haired hippie musicians like Allman presented a new challenge. But Allman persisted until they let him play guitar, and he suggested to Wilson Pickett that they cover "Hey Jude" by the Beatles - I own a copy of this track, because I've collected hundreds of Beatles covers over the years, but I had no idea Duane Allman played guitar on this! And according to Rick Hall, if you listen to this song, with the funky groove, which gets extra funky near the end, the guitar solo actually represents the beginning of the Allman Brothers sound, so it's the really the birth of Southern rock!
Throughout the 1970's, FAME Studio moved more toward country music (Mac Davis, Jerry Reed, the Gatlin Brothers), but the competing Muscle Shoals Sound Studio developed the Southern rock sound, thanks to Lynyrd Skynyrd. There's probably a whole documentary that could be made about the history, recording, and legacy of the song "Free Bird", but it was in a Muscle Shoals recording session that the song really turned into something. The band didn't think much of it at first, Ronnie Van Zant had stated there were too many chord changes, it was too long, and it was basically designed with a super-long guitar solo so that the vocalist could have a break during a concert. But at Muscle Shoals, supposedly they came back from lunch break to find their roadie playing the chord progressions on piano in a classical style, and they loved it so much they made that part of the song, and the roadie joined the band. (I don't know much about Skynyrd, but this is still one hell of a story, even if it's not completely true.). The song was recorded in Muscle Shoals in 1973, and after the plane crash in 1977, the band re-released a compilation of things recorded at Muscle Shoals, and the song, the band and the studio became the stuff of legend.
The original musicians who performed at FAME became known as "The Swampers" (or sometimes Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) and they got a big shout-out in Lynyrd Skynyrd's song "Sweet Home Alabama" - the third verse begins with "Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers / And they've been known to pick a song or two". Ah, so THAT'S what Skynyrd was singing about - another rock & roll mystery solved via the power of documentary film. When they weren't trashing Neil Young, they were tipping their hat to the session musicians of their studio in Alabama. With references like that, you might start to understand why people like Steve Winwood, Tom Jones and the Stones came from so far away to record there.
But any rundown of a studio's successes doesn't really tell the whole story, right? I mean, for every "Wild Horses" or "When a Man Loves a Woman", couldn't there be 10 songs recorded that weren't hits, or recording artists that weren't signed, or didn't achieve the same success as Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers? Motown had all those artists I mentioned the other day, like Smilin' Sammy Ward, that I've never heard of before. So I'm wondering now if everything in Muscle Shoals was non-stop success, like if they really had the Midas touch, or is that just what we're being asked to remember here? Sure, it's easy to tell stories about the hit records, but what about the songs that never went anywhere, somebody paid for those sessions, too, which is what kept the studio afloat during the down times. Everything in every industry is sort of hit or miss, even with movies - scroll down to the bottom of your Netflix or Hulu list and you may find a bunch of films that nobody cares about, but people spent their time and money to make those, too. I know, we live in a capitalist, free-market society, and it's like some music and movies have the inside track, which almost doesn't seem fair.
But I say this as a person who works in independent animation production, and that's always an uphill battle. It takes time and effort to get anything to rise in a crowded field these days, especially when you're working with limited resources, and the larger companies can spend more just on promotion than smaller companies can on their whole project. All I can say at this point is that the production of anything - a book, a movie, a record - is some weird combination of time, effort and magic, and then there's a similar alchemical equation concerning whether the result is going to be popular or profitable. So this also helps explain why a band would go across the country or even around the world to try to improve those odds.
OK, so now that I've learned about the Funk Brothers and the Swampers, in addition to the Wrecking Crew, I'm going to take a short break. I need to have some off-days in August, either now or later, to make things line up better, if I don't do this now I'll need to take two full weeks off in September, and there still may be nowhere to go on vacation, we just don't know. I still have two more music/concert docs, but I think I see a way to line them up with an anniversary this weekend - so I'll be back on Sunday, and I may as well take a couple days to see if I can write a few more book chapters. Right now it's either the book or the blog, as I don't seem to have enough time to do both.
Also starring Rick Hall, Barry Beckett, Jesse Boyce, David Briggs, Larry Byrom, Jerry Carrigan, Donnie Fritts, John Gifford III, Donna Jean Godchaux, Tommy Hardin, Roger Hawkins, Tom Hendrix, David Hood, Clayton Ivey, Jaimoe, Jimmy Johnson, Earl "Peanutt" Montgomery, Spooner Oldham, Brian Owings, Dan Penn, Norbert Putnam, Candi Staton, Harvey Thompson, Jerry Wexler, John Paul White, Gregg Allman, Bono, Clarence Carter, Jimmy Cliff, Mick Jagger (last seen in "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Etta James, Alicia Keys (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Ed King, Keith Richards (last seen in "Shine a Light"), Percy Sledge, Steve Winwood,
with archive footage of Duane Allman, Paul Anka, King Curtis, Mac Davis, Bob Dylan (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Art Garfunkel, Bobbie Gentry, Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, The Band & The Basement Tapes"), Brian Jones (last seen in "Shine a Light"), Charlie Watts (ditto), Bill Wyman (ditto), Tom Jones, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown"), Little Richard (ditto), Kris Kristofferson, Donny Osmond, Sam Phillips, Wilson Pickett, Billy Powell, Lou Rawls, Otis Redding, Leon Russell, Bob Seger (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Paul Simon, Rod Stewart (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Ronnie Van Zant, George Wallace, Bobby Womack,
RATING: 7 out of 10 Baptist church choir members
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