STORIES

MUSCLE SHOALS, FAME, AND DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS 2004

In the late 50's, North Alabama resident Rick Hall started FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Studios in a vacant space above a drug store in Florence, Alabama.
He had two partners, one of whom, Billy Sherrill soon left for Nashville (2 hours to the north) and went on to become one of the most successful record producers of all time (Stand By Your Man, Delta Dawn, Behind Closed Doors, He Stopped Loving Her Today, Elvis Costello's Almost Blue......).
By the early 60's, Hall, who was a man of uncompromising spirit and drive, was sole owner and the studio moved to it's present location on the corner of Avalon Av. and Woodward Av. across the Tennessee River in the very small town of Muscle Shoals.

This isn't the time for me to go into a huge definitive history of Muscle Shoals, The Shoals Area, Rick Hall, or Fame Studios, but a brief passover:
The Muscle Shoals Area is comprised of 4 small towns (and their surrounding areas) located on both sides of the Tennessee River in the northwest corner of Alabama.
It's only 20 or so miles from the Mississippi State Line and only 10 or so from Tennessee.

The area was the site of TVA's 1st and biggest hydro-electric power plant (Wilson Dam, built around 1920 and at the time the biggest in the world).
The Tennessee River was considered unnavigable and would veer from flood plains to sometimes a meandering stream, cutting through one of the poorest regions of the country.
Now it's a big beautiful river, controlled by a series of dams (built by TVA, The Tennessee Valley Authority) with huge lakes, ideal for boating and recreation (and unfortunately ideal for the cooling of Nuclear Power Plants like Browns Ferry, which is the site of the worlds 3rd worst nuclear power plant accident). Upstream from the Shoals is an abundance of industry, causing the beautiful lakes and waterways to be somewhat polluted.

The area gets it's name from an abundance of mussel shells that used to make up it's bank on the north side of the river. They're still there, although now you have to dive to see them, as they are under 50 feet of river since the building of the dams. Supposedly someone misspelled it, hence the name.

I noted earlier the names of Woodward and Avalon, these are also two of the main drags in Detroit MI. Back when Muscle Shoals was mostly farm land, Henry Ford came down (with Thomas Edison and FDR) to tour the area and it's huge system of dams with the intent of buying Wilson Dam and building the worlds biggest auto plant there (powered by it's cheap hydro-electrictricity). There was a lot of excitement in the air, and developers began planning a city to support and house all the people who would be moving there to work in the mighty plants. Of course, it didn't work out and Ford, instead built his mighty plant up in Detroit. He built a plant that built transmissions in the Shoals area. It shut down in 1982, the year I graduated from High School.

(Cooley wrote about all of this in his song "Uncle Frank". Jason also wrote about this, from an opposite point of view, in his song TVA, which he wrote before he ever heard Cooley's song and way before he joined our band.)

Meanwhile in the early 60's, Rick Hall is still hard at work learning to record and produce. He has his first success with a song called "You Better Move On" by a bellhop from a local hotel named Arthur Alexander.
(It and another song called "Anna" were later covered by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones).

Not long after that, James and Bobby Purify hit gold with "I'm Your Puppet". My father played trombone on that track (his first recording session).

Also around that time, in another smaller studio that had sprung up, Percy Sledge recorded 'When A Man loves A Woman".
Rick Hall forwarded a copy of that song to Jerry Wexler, a very successful producer and vice-president of Atlantic Records.
Atlantic released the song and it became one of the all time biggest hits ever.

Wexler, fascinated by the sounds coming out of this remote area (no interstate access, a tiny airstrip, "Can't Get There from Here" as they say) came down, bringing Wilson Pickett with him.
They recorded "Mustang Sally" and "Land Of A Thousand Dances" and many others there.

Next, Wexler brought Aretha Franklin to town, recording "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)" and "Do Right Woman" the first night.

The story veers wildly there, and I'll save that for a future dispatch, but at least you get a little taste of where we came from and why it was important to us to go back there and record.

Last week, we went to FAME Studios and recorded for the first time there.
Not long after the story I just told, my Father and his partners left FAME and started their own studio (Muscle Shoals Sound Studio)
The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, Bob Seger, The Staple Singers, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Cliff, Traffic, Cher, Boz Scaggs, Rod Stewart, are just a few of the artists that they recorded with during the heyday.
Until a year or so ago, I had never set foot in FAME Studios.

Back in the 70's, as you entered town, the city limits sign announced "Welcome to Muscle Shoals AL. The Hit recording Capitol of the World".
It was no idle boast.

The signs are long gone now, as are most of the studios.
The original site of Muscle Shoals Sound is inactive and the multi-million dollar facility that replaced it is for sale. (My Father and his partners sold it nearly 2 decades ago to MALACO Records, a small blues and R&B label out of Jackson MS).

FAME, however survived, due to a mix of diversity and determination. Rick's sons Mark and Rodney operate it and the very profitable publishing company it spawned.

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