Back Road Into town
During his lifetime, Rick Hall worked with the very best – Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Etta James and Duane Allman. Following Hall’s death at the start of this year, we visit the producer’s legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to find a community of musicians in mourning. “He made you tough,” says David Hood. “He made you good…”
“He used to say, ‘If I can’t feel it, nobody else can feel it’” CANDI STATON
STANDING at the mixing board in Studio A, the main room at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Spencer Coats is telling a tour group about the time he produced a session for his boss, Rick Hall. It is certainly not the first time Coats – a studio engineer here – has told this story, but in the last few weeks it has assumed an additional degree of gravity. Coats explains that he was fresh out of college when Hall asked him to helm a session for the audiobook of his 2015 memoir, The Man From Muscle Shoals: My
Journey From Shame To FAME. It was a fraught experience, Coats remembers, but instructive.
“He was ripping me up about how I wasn’t punching him in fast enough and how I need to tell him how needs to tell his story,” Coats recalls. “‘Son, am I doing this right? Does it sound good?’ I told him, ‘Rick, you are literally reading your life’s story to me and you’re asking me if it’s right?’ It went on like that for hours.” Hall’s perfectionism is legendary, but it is not merely orneriness that had him berating Coats that day. “He came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You see how particular I am? You wanna be the best producer on the planet? That’s how you get there.’”
For Coats – and for the handful of other long-serving staff at FAME, not to mention the numerous local songwriters and session players who congregate there nightly – the few weeks since Hall’s death on January 2 have understandably been tough. FAME was an extension of Hall; he built the current studio in 1962, when Muscle Shoals was little more than cotton fields in every direction. Fifty-six years later, it still looks like a time capsule of its heyday, when Hall was making an impossibly long series of hit records. The floors are still covered in deep green shag carpet. There are gold records hanging on the wood-panelled walls, along with posters emblazoned with the retro FAME logo.
But since Hall’s death, some things have changed. His passing hit the music industry hard, as the roll call of artists he recorded is legendary: Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, Bobbie gentry, Duane Allman, the Osmonds, and many, many others. In Alabama, however, the loss is felt more personally. During the space of a few days, Uncut witnessed a community coming to terms with the passing of one of their most significant elder statesmen, the man who wrote and recorded some of the biggest R&B and pop hits of the ’60s and ’70s, who has mentored and inspired generations of musicians, and who put Muscle Shoals on the map.
Hall’s funeral at Highland Park Baptist Church was well attended by many artists who had worked with him over the years. The ceremony had the feel of a concert, featuring performances by Alison Krauss, Jamey Johnson, John Paul White, Dylan LeBlanc and Mac Davis. It also marked a rare reunion for three surviving members of his studio band, the Swampers: bassist David Hood, guitarist Jimmy Johnson and drummer Roger Hawkins. “It’s probably the first time we had all been together in several years,” remarks Hood. “Even in death Rick is still bringing people together.”
ALTHOugH a white wreath hangs at the entrance to FAME Studios, there is reassuring evidence that business continues as normal. In Studio B there are boxes of swag – posters and T-shirts, stickers, caps and CDs – for an upcoming trip to New York City, where FAME is opening a pop-up shop to celebrate its two grammy nominations for gregg Allman’s posthumous Southern Blood, which was recorded in A.
Meanwhile, both the studio and the city have seen increased activity in recent years: more sessions booked in A, more young musicians moving to town, more songwriters signed to the various publishing firms represented by FAME. The building remains a hive of activity. During the day there are established artists cutting records, along with a steady stream of tourists snapping photos of the Wurlitzer Spooner Oldham played on Aretha’s “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)”. At night, a crew of young songwriters and session musicians set up shop to work on tunes, lay down ideas, or just jam. There is something happening almost every hour of the day.
Although Hall was less active at FAME in recent years, producing his final session in 2012, he was a constant presence. And now his absence leaves a hole that will be impossible to fill. “I saw two versions of him,” says Coats. “There was grandpa Rick, who’s telling you these amazing stories about the music industry. And then
there’s Hit Record Producer Rick, who nailed it into people’s heads that the bar is way up here.”
Hall wasn’t shy about his accomplishments at FAME. When asked why the Shoals became a recording capital in the 1960s, he answered bluntly. “You’re talking to the reason. The reason is because Rick Hall built a recording studio here, quit his day job, and became a record producer.” Such confidence is not misplaced: Hall was the visionary who assembled a multiracial crew of artists at a time when rural Alabama was still deeply segregated, who produced hit records far from any major music market.
As it transpires, there’s a bit of Rick Hall everywhere in the Shoals – a sprawling group of four or five different towns nestled in an oxbow of the Tennessee River. He’s there in downtown Florence, Alabama, just over the O’Neal Bridge, where a historical marker commemorates the original location of Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, shortened to FAME. In 1959, he and two friends opened the publishing company above a drug store. Hall worked as both a songwriter and a song plugger, but the company soon dissolved, allegedly to his friends’ dissatisfaction with Hall’s workaholic schedule.
There’s a bit of Rick Hall over on Wilson Dam Road, just south of the dam itself. Still licking his wounds from his split, he took the FAME name and set up shop in a candy and tobacco warehouse near the dam. It was there that he recorded a song called “You Better Move On”, written and sung by a local black bellhop named Arthur Alexander. On the charts it did only modest business, but the song inspired artists halfway around the world. The Rolling Stones covered it for the A-side of their first single, followed by The Hollies and The Moody Blues. And of course, Hall still roams FAME Studios. The success of “You Better Move On” funded the construction of 603 East Avalon Avenue, where Hall recorded some of the grittiest soul music of the 1960s, making stars of local talent and tempting Atlantic Records and Chess Records to send some of their established acts down south. Hall quickly developed a reputation as an eccentric character. “When he was mixing, he’d be biting his tongue on both sides of his mouth,” remembers Donny Osmond, who recorded a series of career establishing records at FAME in the early 1970s. “He was constantly biting his tongue. That’s how he got creative. When he was in the booth, he’d go into this world of his, and he was so focused on the knobs, the reverb and the EQ.” Most of all, he was driven: precise, demanding, and often infuriating to anyone who wasn’t delivering exactly what he wanted to hear. “He would just wear you down,” recalls Hood. “He was so persistent in trying to get what he wanted. I’ve never seen anybody work so hard. He could be a very charming guy, but he would just work you to death!” Wherever he got his drive, Hall could be hell at FAME, but there was always method to his madness. “He was hard in the studio,” recalls Candi Staton, who started working with Hall in 1968 and recorded eight albums with him. “Anybody who’s been in the studio with him will tell you the same story. If you weren’t delivering, he wouldn’t let you get away with it.” One session in 1970 stands out to Staton as