Muscle Shoals has got The Swampers; NOT

[warrrreagl]

A sad news item for me personally, because I had a brief chance to work at Wishbone Studios in Muscle Shoals in 1980.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Musi...eut/index.html

NEW YORK (Billboard) -- Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, the Alabama facility where artists including the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger recorded classic songs, has closed.

The studio, owned since 1985 by indie blues label Malaco Records, closed last month; a film production company is in the final stages of purchasing the building.

Musicians Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, Barry Beckett and Roger Hawkins, known collectively as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, founded Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, in 1969. A Rolling Stones session at Muscle Shoals featuring sideman Jim Dickinson, who played on the Stones' "Wild Horses," is featured in the film "Gimme Shelter," which documents the band's tumultuous 1969 U.S. tour.

Cher named an album "3614 Jackson Highway," after the studio's address.

In 1978, the facility moved to a 31,000 square-foot building, also in Sheffield.

Malaco Records principal Wolf Stephenson explained that he and his partners were more interested in acquiring Muscle Shoals Sound Publishing, a catalog that includes "Old Time Rock & Roll" and "Torn Between Two Lovers," than the recording studio.

"To be quite frank with you," Stephenson told Billboard, "the only reason we bought the studio was, the banks we were dealing with wouldn't loan us the money on the publishing company; they didn't have any idea what it was. It was just a stack of paper to them."

The two-room facility was used extensively by Malaco artists, Stephenson added, but the last four years saw a sharp decline in outside projects. "When computer and hard-disk recording really got cheap and better at the same time, it just knocked the socks off a lot of studios, (Muscle Shoals) included. It was just a very difficult thing to compete with."

Muscle Shoals was put up for sale on Internet auction site eBay in 2004. The asking price of $650,000, which included the building, property and equipment, yielded no serious offers, Stephenson said. The studio's two Neve consoles have been sold to studios in Detroit and Los Angeles.

Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, Florence, and Tuscumbia are 4 towns that all nestle together on the Tennessee River in NW Alabama and the sound produced there changed rock and soul music forever.

It all started when Rick Hall lured Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge away from Memphis to Alabama to record at his own Fame Studios in Florence. The studio band he hired to back them up (mentioned in the article as Johnson, Hood, Beckett, and Hawkins) also featured Spooner Oldham on keyboards and a very young Duane Allman on guitar; and they were all white. Ironically, they became the signature "black soul" sound featured on TONS of 60's soul music (Otis Redding, James & Bobby Purify, Joe Tex, The Tams, Arthur Conley, Etta James, Fontella Bass, Clarence Carter, Lou Rawls, Dobie Gray, Solomon Burke, and many, many others).

Eventually, Jerry Wexler of A&M Records brought Aretha Franklin to Fame Studios in order to kick-start her pop career with a more "authentic" black sound. Imagine her shock when she saw that the famous black soul sound was being created by white musicians. For the rest of the 60's, Aretha would fly this magnificent house band to wherever she happened to be recording, and they came to be known as "The Swampers." This is the name that Lynyrd Skynrd paid tribute to in "Sweet Home Alabama."

Eventually, Jerry Wexler and Rick Hall went their separate ways, and Wexler helped create Muscle Shoals Sound Studios and hijacked The Swampers away from Fame Studios and hustled them over to be the new house band for Muscle Shoals Sound.

For an unbelievable discography of the artists who recorded at MSS, go to their website here: http://mssound.com/index1.html

I've seen few places like this in the world where all of these hellishly good recording studios are all within walking distance of each other (save NYC, LA, and Nashville). I had a grand time when I was there, and they will be missed...

[Booray]

Sad to hear. Lot of great music to come out of there. I bet you have a lot of great memories from your time working around there.

By the way, just a little trivia for anyone who'd be interested, David Hood's son Patterson went on to form a great band as a singer/guitarist for the Drive By Truckers (who had an album that ended up on many critics' 2004 year-end best of lists). And Jim Dickinson's sons Luther and Cody went on to form another great band, the North Mississippi Allstars (which, until recently, also featured Duwayne Burnside, son of legendary blues singer/guitarist R.L. Burnside, as a member). Their first two albums were nominated for Grammys for best contemporary blues album in 2000 & 2001 (while Grammys aren't and never will be a good assessment of quality music, it's kind of nice when they get something right once in a while)

[warrrreagl]

I can't remember now if it was Fame or Muscle Shoals Sound that had the underground reverb chamber. It was one of those oil storage tankers that they usually bury underneath gas stations, but the studio piped their sound into the chamber for the biggest, fattest reverb you can imagine.