Chapter 8 (Rolling Stones), Unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business

Excerpt 2: unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business, circa 1995-97

8'These crazy, weird English people had landed...'

A car full of scruffy British rockers pulls up to Muscle Shoals Sound. Directly behind them is a

billboard, with the words "Keep Alabama Fitter -- Don't Litter." The camera focuses in on it, then pans

back to the car.

It was major culture clash time -- right in the heart of the Bible Belt. The notorious Rolling Stones,

of all people, had come to Sheffield, Alabama.

Yet that classic scene from the film Gimme Shelter, a documentary of the Stones' 1969 tour,

actually captured what would end up being one of the few happily memorable moments for the band

that year -- not the beginning of another flirtation with decadence and disaster. The year had been a

horrible one for the band, beginning with the death of Stones guitarist Brian Jones and ending on the

worse note possible, with the Altamont Speedway concert in San Francisco. That, of course, was the

one at which a young black man, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death in an altercation linked to the

Hell's Angels, the motorcycle gang known for being several notches above merely notorious.

(Interestingly, an early standout from that show -- the one said by some to mark the "end of the

'60s" and to have been a hard dose of reality for the counterculture -- was the Gram Parsons and Chris

Hillman-led Flying Burrito Brothers' cover of a reality-heavy Shoals product, "Six Days on the Road.")

Perhaps more notably and certainly more pleasantly, the Stones' December 1969 sessions also

marked the first and only time that one of the major British rock groups of the '60s recorded in the

South, the birthplace of rock 'n' roll and the source of so much of their inspiration -- not to mention the

place where Arthur Alexander had recorded "You Better Move On," a cover of which had been among

the first songs the Stones ever recorded.

The sessions thus became among the most celebrated and talked about in the Stones' history,

competing only with the band's sessions in the south of France for Exile on Main Street. The sessions

were also, as one could easily guess, among the quirkiest but greatest in the history of the area's music

industry. Everyone involved thus remembers specific details, even though the sessions lasted only three

days.

Not as often told, however, is the story of how they came to record at Muscle Shoals to begin with.


Memphis piano player and later-to-be producer Jim Dickinson (Big Star, The Replacements, Ry

Cooder) today gladly accepts blame for instigating the whole shebang, thank you. It all began, he said,

with a phone call from Stanley Booth, the southern music writer who was then traveling with the

group.

Booth's account of the story, and his description of the studio as having all the glamour of an

automobile repair facility, is found in his hugely acclaimed, New Journalism-style account of the

band's '69 tour, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones.

As for the phone call, Dickinson's recollection of it is not so simple. But who expects anything but

complexity when dealing with the mid-period Stones?

"He calls up. Stanley's on the road with the Stones, and he says the Stones are gonna have almost a

week off, and by way of explanation he says that three or four of 'em hate each other intensely, and so

they never practice, they never play. But when they're on the road, they get tight, and they want to

record. Of course, they had some tunes, and they were pumped up, they had this time and wanted to

record. 'So,' he said, 'Can they record in Memphis?'"

Unfortunately, Dickinson said, "Just months before that, the Beatles had tried to record at Stax,

and they couldn't. Stax's insurance company had called up and said, 'We'll cancel your insurance.'

Memphis is a very strange place, you know. So I told Stanley what I thought to be the truth, that no,

they could not record in Memphis. Then Stanley said, 'Where can they record?' It just came out of my

mouth: 'Muscle Shoals. Nobody will have any idea who they are there.' And nobody did know who

they were."

Dickinson, laughing, added that Booth then asked him how to go about putting a Shoals session

together, and that he quickly replied, "Just call Wexler."

He did. The deal was then quickly put together, and a few days later the boys at the studio got the

word.

The Stones were in a quandary: under union rules, they could tour in the states, but could not tour

and record at the same time. Yet they knew that their chops were good and wanted to record, so they

would be forced to keep the sessions secret. This they would not have been able to do in Los Angeles

or New York, and not only because they might have been recognized. Unions would have seen to it that

the sessions would have been stopped.

So the Stones were headed south, where the lack of a work permit was no problem. "Nobody in

Memphis or Muscle Shoals knew what the hell a work permit was," Dickinson said.


And sure enough, there were no complaints from the crew at Muscle Shoals Sound.

David Hood: "I think I knew about a week or so ahead. We were booked at that time to cut R.B.

Greaves. His producer was (Atlantic president) Ahmet Ertegun. Ahmet was friends of the Stones at that

time, even though they weren't on Atlantic yet. He was friends and courting them, trying to get them to

come to Atlantic. So he would hang with Jagger and the bunch, 'cause Ahmet was a notorious jet setter

and hanger and everything. They were doing Altamont, they were wanting to record but didn't have

work permits. So he booked R.B. Greaves in and tried to secretly book the Stones at night, 'cause he

thought, 'Nobody will know they're in Muscle Shoals.' But they came here from Miami, and to get here

they tried to charter a plane. And they chartered a Super Constellation. I don't know if you know what

that is. But it's an old, four-engine propeller plane that had three tails. It was a real huge, real distinctive

plane. Probably the biggest propeller plane at the time. And it was like a surplus job that was in Miami,

and that was the only way they could get from Miami to here, they thought. And they chartered this

plane and it had problems, engine problems and everything, all kinds of shit going wrong with it. And

so some of them said, 'Fuck this! I'm not riding on this thing. I'm flying commercial."'

Dickinson's version is that the Stones were just really sick of each other, and that it was for this

reason that only half took the plane. They wanted, he said, to spend as little time together as possible.

"They didn't want to be together any more than they had to be. Wyman and Watts talked to each other,

and they all talked to Charlie, but nobody else talked to Bill Wyman."

But back to Hood's story: "So half of them flew in on this Super Constellation and landed at the

Muscle Shoals airport and anybody within several miles of the Muscle Shoals airport would know

something like that had landed, 'cause it was outrageous that anything like that would land at our

airport. So immediately the word got out that all these crazy, weird English people had landed in this

gigantic airplane and so there was already talk about it. The other half flew in commercial, through

Southern Airways back then, I think. So word got out a little bit more that they had flown in on a

commercial plane, so it really wasn't a well-kept secret. Plus they had a film crew, 'cause they shot part

of Gimme Shelter here. So these guys are riding around with this film crew in another car behind them,

hanging out the window, taking pictures and stuff. So it was hard to keep it a secret."

Eventually, they got down to recording. But it was not impressive to those non-Stones in the studio

at first. Case in point: The first night's recording of bluesman Mississippi John Hurt's "You Gotta

Move," the only song from the Stones session that did not end up as a single. It was another highlight

of the classic album Sticky Fingers, which would not be released until 1971.


"Wyman is playing bottleneck, and it just sounded awful," Dickinson said, shaking his head and

still looking disgusted. "I was in the control room, and I said, 'I'm gonna sit here and watch the Rolling

Stones blow it.'"

Dickinson ended up not sitting around to watch the agony. Instead, he went back to the Holiday

Inn in Florence with Booth, who wanted to call his girlfriend. He was in for a stunner when he came

back. Something strange had happened. The Stones were on fire. But not in the usual way -- in this

case, they were sounding more authentically bluesy than ever before, not just using elements of the

blues, or even sounding as if they were doing a great imitation. It remains one of the few good

moments of the rock world's late '60s infatuation with the blues. (Hurt was also paid well for the

cover.)

Johnson, who had been working on the R.B. Greaves session during the day and engineering the

Stones sessions at night -- "His eyes were this big," Dickinson noted -- thus saw the sessions as an eye-

opener for more reasons than just being on an adrenaline rush. He watched the band take the germ of an

idea, which was usually just a lyrical idea in Jagger's head, and slowly, ever so slowly, turn it a song.

And these ideas made for great classic songs, even though they sounded so non-listener friendly at first.

"We'd start about 6 or 7-ish is how they'd come in. Usually after about six hours, we'd have it. It

would take that long each night. We'd take one song, and they wouldn't switch songs. They'd just work

on this one idea that Jagger would have and the first hour was pretty disorganized, just finding grooves,

the right keys. That was the way they did things, it worked for them. But by hour six, the song would

really be getting together. By then, I would think, 'I better be getting ready to turn that recorder on.'

They would only have one super take in them, like most bands do. Like a peak take, and after all that

it's downhill until there's a second or third wind. But I would always, because of my experience in

working on sessions, I'd have the recording rolling about two songs before the take, maybe three

songs."

Johnson found himself paying more attention than the likely would have otherwise. Jimmy Miller,

the band's producer, had not shown up. "They were, I think, wondering where he was," the engineer


noted.

"So it was like they would depend on me to tell 'em when we had the right take. I kind of did what

their producer did, even though I didn't get producer's credit or anything. You kind of let 'em do their

thing. When the hot take starts coming, you gotta get it on tape. They would know too. They'd say,

'That was pretty good. How'd you like that one?' And I'd say, (pretends to push the talk-back button,

and laughs), 'Well, I think you need one more.' But there was definitely a method to their madness."

Hood was more confounded by it all. "At the time, I remember thinking I was impressed with all

the equipment. But I thought, 'Gosh, they're playing this shit over and over again.'"

Dickinson saw this in a different light, even though he was startled by the way they worked too, a

way he says the Stones still work. "They never have had to learn to make a record, because the first

records they made were successful. They make records completely naively to this day. Mick Jagger

holds his microphone in his hands like a harmonica, and sings into his hand. Who's gonna tell him,

'Hey Mick! Put the mike back on the stand.' Nobody. I thought, 'Who's right and who's wrong? Maybe I

should go back to the way I was doing it, instead of this slick shit that I'm learning.'"

Still, the Stones had a slapdash way of going about things that Dickinson found unbelievable.

"They had a lot of percussion equipment. And during recording, they would keep picking up things out

of the box and rattling them. That was their sophistication."

Not fazed by this was Johnson. "Jimmy didn't say a word. He just sat there with his eyes popping

out, hoping they weren't gonna stop."

The second night of recording brought "Brown Sugar." And though it started out horribly, as was

the apparent norm, it eventually turned into the most exciting number to come out of the sessions, not

to mention one of the Stones' most raucous and controversial numbers.

The song's subject matter did not faze Jimmy either, though.

"Well, it was great, 'cause I knew Claudia. Claudia sang backup in Leon Russell's band. Claudia

Lennear, that's who 'Brown Sugar' was written about. You may be getting a scoop there. She was a

strikingly beautiful black woman, just absolutely beautiful. There couldn't be any man of any color that

didn't want to spend some time with her, you know what I mean? And Jagger was lucky enough too

and the experience was so good to him, he wrote a song about it. What more can you say? It was the

height of an adventure gone well. She was a great person, had the nicest personality, and even looks

better now. Her personality matched her looks."

He added later, "She was so good-lookin' she would have been no problem for, you know, a


conservative," stressing the latter two words by lowering his voice and raising his eyebrows ever so

slightly -- so, um, suggestively.

The details of the verses were a different story, what with their allusions -- well, outright

references -- to slavery. The song was later decried as sexist and racist in some quarters; not the last

time the Stones would find themselves accused of such a charge. (For reference: the title track to Some

Girls. No more shall be said here.) By the lyrics were quite oblique, inexplicable really, with one

notable inside reference. The song kicks off with it -- the line where Jagger sings, 'Sky dog slaver..."

"Sky Dog" was the nickname of Duane Allman, the by-then former Shoals session ace. Jagger heard

Allman referred to by his alias at the studio, and threw it into "Brown Sugar."

Dickinson again takes credit for more Stones-related bit of history: seeing to it that the song's most

controversial line got in. "If I have a claim to fame in rock 'n' roll this is it. This is my footnote. The

line, 'Hear him whip the women...' is in there because of me. Jagger had forgotten the line. When he

was writing the song, the first night, he was singing it. On the third night, he was singing, 'You should

have seen him...' I was in the control room with Stanley, and told him about it. And I don't know what

was going on. Jimmy wasn't in there, and I assumed that nobody else was in the room. Then a voice

comes from the couch: 'Tell him," Dickinson recalled, affecting the low and loud, accented voice of a

hacked-off British person, a voice of the sort often heard in pirate movies. "Then I said, 'I'm not gonna

tell him,' and (drummer) Charlie Watts get up and looks at me like he's pissed off, then walks around

behind the couch and punches the talk-back and says, 'Teelll hiiim!

"I said, 'You're leaving a line out. You were singing 'whip the women' last night.' Mick said, 'Oh

yeah, same thing.' He doesn't sing it in performance now. But I thought, 'Hell, he's singing about

slavery. May as well have some whippin' in there.'"

The third and final night was even more strange. It began, chaotically enough, with the exit of their

piano player from the building. Ian Stewart, the band's longtime boogie-woogie piano man, hated

minor chords, saw them as an affront to the kind of music he played. So when he learned that "Wild

Horses" was to be marked in large part by its beginning in B minor, an offended Stewart began packing

his things.

Dickinson, who had come down to Memphis just to watch, was suddenly the focus of attention.

"Jagger says to me, 'Looks like we need a piano player.' Wexler says, 'Baby, we could call Barry

Beckett,'" Dickinson said, doing an exaggerated, Elmer Fudd-style impression of the producer's voice.

"I said to Jerry, 'I don't think that's what he means.'"


Jagger wanted a piano player right then, and Dickinson was more than ... well, of course he

obliged.

"They were real off into Gram Parsons, and they saw me as this sort of substitute Gram Parsons,"

he said, referring to the former Byrd who was then beginning to break down the musical, lyrical and

arguably social and political barriers between country and rock. "But they were terminally out of tune

for the grand piano. So I tried to play the electric piano. If you hit it real hard you can make it go sharp

or flat. I thought maybe I'd get lucky. But no, I couldn't get lucky. So they had this tack piano in the

back. They never used it, and it had all this music stacked on top of it."

There was also a little something extra in the piano this time. Yes, in the piano. "The Stones had

their dope stashed in it," Dickinson explained. "Their bag man, Tony, who you see in Gimme Shelter,

his fists are broken. By the end of Altamont, he had casts on both his bands. He was a Black Panther,

and he was carrying their dope."

The presence of a Black Panther caused no stir, though. "He never said a word. Just laid back on

the couch and went to sleep most of the time. Once I came back there, though, he woke up instantly

and moved the dope."

The Stones took it easy on the drugs while in Muscle Shoals, by the way, at least in the studio. The

rhythm section members were very nervous about the Stones' trip for that very reason, fearful mainly of

a bust. Some musicians had earlier been busted during a session at another studio, and Dickinson said

that studio had suspected that Muscle Shoals Sound people called in the tip. Retaliation, deserved or

not, was feared.

Johnson said the Stones ended up being "pretty straight" for the most part, and mainly just

performed. They smoked cigarettes and drank wine, as is visible in Gimme Shelter, but otherwise they

just played, Jimmy recalled -- although Booth's account has it that Keith snorted coke in the hallway at

one point, apparently oblivious to MSS staff. The engineer only smoked cigarettes, but his eyes

continued to grow wider by painfully natural means.

However, Dickinson did find himself being filmed once when Richards sat down beside him on a

couch in the control booth, for a semi-dubious reason. "I was the one who had the last joint. And he

knew it. That's why I'm in the film."

Now back to the "Wild Horses" session. "I literally played with one hand," Dickinson

remembered. "I'm back there plinking away. Keith had just learned how to make a Nashville chord

sheet with numbers, and had given me the thing."


What Dickinson found perhaps even more interesting was the way the charts were structured.

Novice Nashville-style chart designer Richards had apparently been thrown off by writing one for a

song that started in B minor.

Stones bass player Bill Wyman quickly learned about Dickinson's getting the charts from Keith

and had some advice: "Oh, don't pay any attention to him. He doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't

know what he's doing," the piano player said.

"Some of it was OK, but most of it wasn't. So I worked out a chord chart. Mick Taylor comes back

and Mick looks at my chart, picks it up and walks off with it."

The boys then worked out the arrangements, while Jagger stayed on the floor, listening intently

and pondering the sound. He eventually asked Keith Richards what he thought of the piano part.

"I said to Booth, 'The moment I feared. Oh, God! Here it comes.' And Keith, God bless him, says,

'That's the only thing I like,'" Dickinson said.

The pianist's reaction was more than one of relief. It brought about another creative burst. "I said,

'All right!' So I played my other Floyd Cramer lick. That's all I was doing. It's a country song."

Dickinson had played once with a Texan who was a true believer in the classic Cramer "slip-note"

style. "Luckily, I learned a couple of his licks, or I wouldn't have had anything to do on 'Wild Horses.'"

The song, he noted, had also turned into something different from what Richards had meant it to

be. Keith's son, Marlon, had recently been born and it was meant to be a lullaby. But Jagger started

toying with the lyrics -- he completed them, as usual, just before the start of the session -- and

"perverted them" into a mournful song about Marianne Faithful, who had just been married. "Jagger

was really upset, it was almost a high school thing, very interesting to see. He was this distraught

lover."

And so ended the sessions in Muscle Shoals, or wherever the Stones thought they were. It was

apparently just a place to record to them -- although a scruffier-than-ever and by-now furiously and

thankfully detoxed Richards was quoted in a 1994 Arts & Entertainment network documentary about

Atlantic Records as saying that the band wanted to go to "that little room, where all the soul music was


recorded. What's the name of it? Muscle Shoals. Yeah. Muscle Shoals, yeah," or words to that effect.

"They didn't know where they were," Dickinson said. "And they probably thought I was working

there. To this day they probably think that."

Dickinson has no doubt, however, that Richards's saying later during the session that he wanted to

maybe come back to the Shoals sometime -- and spend a month in a house or something -- was sincere.

Richards, he said, saw himself as American in a way, quite a contrast to Jagger the Jet-Setter. Years

later, the guitarist was arrested for reckless driving in Arkansas when attempting to drive from

Memphis to Dallas, a drive that the piano player had suggested. But a genuinely surprised Richards told

him later that no apology was necessary, since the time he spent with an Arkansas sheriff and his

deputies was "the greatest time I ever had in my life."

Jagger was said to have hated being in Muscle Shoals, and toward the end of Booth's account of

the sessions is quoted as bemoaning the town as "Schushel Moals."

A 1977 Cashbox magazine article shed further light on his mind-set during the stay. The magazine

quoted an unidentified Shoals musician as recalling that Jagger started getting depressed after hearing

that "people here don't notice stars." "Finally, one little girl came over to the studio to look at him, and

he just about hugged her to death," the musician reported.

All during the three days, the Stones -- who at the time were still technically shopping for a new

label since their contract with the London label was up -- spent time negotiating a deal with Ertegun

and Wexler. "So they killed two birds with one stone. No, two birds with five Stones. Ha-ha," Johnson

joked.

Everyone involved has other favorite memories.

For Dickinson, it was just looking at Keith. "He was probably at his peak of Keith-dom at that

point. The only solid tooth he had in his head was hanging from his ear, and it belonged to a cougar. He

was absolutely green. You've seen people blue, well, he was green. He was absolutely green."

The Memphis producer added that an oft-repeated story about a waitress's inquiry to Bill Wyman

at the Holiday Inn restaurant is also true. "That really happened. Wyman and his wife and others were

eating breakfast, and the waitress says, 'Are y'all in a group?' He says, 'Yes, we're Martha and the

Vandellas.' And she didn't know, for what? Maybe they were. She didn't have a clue, certainly no clue

that they were the Rolling Stones."

Johnson chuckled upon remembering what Charlie Watts asked him. "He loved the drum sound so

much that he wanted to buy the microphone. He loved it in the earphones; he loved what he heard."


The sessions were also among the first that Mick Taylor had played on, and Johnson described him

as being notably quiet and reserved.

Hood had no such recollections -- several of the band's members were "very nice," he said -- but

did remember that a friend of his ended up in Gimme Shelter due to his leaking the word. "I didn't tell

anybody but my wife and a friend of a girlfriend that I had at the time, and she told a bunch of people,

and so she got in the movie. She's in Gimme Shelter, when they're coming out of the hotel. She's got a

long coat on."

Dickinson noted that all the players were allowed to tell their wives about the sessions, and at one

point were told that they could bring the women into the studio. But he only remembers seeing the

spouse of legendary -- among his fellow music people, that is -- guitarist Eddie Hinton (a lead guitarist

who played many wild and incredible lines on Staple Singers songs cut at Muscle Shoals Sound in the

early '70s). "She was wearing sunglasses or something, I don't know. Looked like Tabetha Bara.

Tabetha Bara, the old silent movie actress. Eddie's wife had real dyed black hair, and pale skin. She

was pretty weird looking; looked like a vampire."

Wexler remembered just being awed by the Stones. He said he would stick his head in time to

time just to see what was going on.

"It was just great. It was just good musicians going to work. That's what I saw. That's the only

time I ever saw Mick and Keith in the studio, putting something together. They're brilliant. They are

the ultimate of what I always hoped to be, as far as producing a record. They knew exactly what they

wanted. I was just ... nobody knows how other people work in the studio, 'cause you don't go to other

people's sessions. You know, groupies go to sessions and hangers-on. But record producers don't go to

other record producers' sessions. It just doesn't work that way."

From the beginning, he said, "What I saw was focus. I saw a line going."

What most involved recall coming out the sessions, regardless, were some of the best Stones songs

ever. Some of their most commercial, and most successful too, even though their producer was

nowhere to be found.

After hearing the track, one of the Stones' people called Jimmy and told him that he could not

make a better cut himself. "Keith, in several interviews, has said that 'Brown Sugar' was the best single

they ever recorded, the most commercial. And I'm always happy about that, 'cause I worked on that

one."

Johnson remembered that they were songs that almost had a hard time getting the usual sort of


massive, worldwide exposure too. The reason? The Stones' album cover. Designed by pop artist Andy

Warhol, the Sticky Fingers package featured a waist-down shot of a man in jeans, and the jeans

included an actual zipper, under which one found an unquestionably realistic representation of some

being-lived-in underwear. But when people took the record home, they found themselves being unable

to hear one song all the way through, after a time. The zipper had warped the records.

Finally, Johnson said, someone came up with the idea of unzipping the zipper on all copies of the

album, thus saving Atlantic Records millions -- and of course insuring that the new Rolling Stones

album would sell by the usual truckload. Johnson noted: "I think he was made a vice president or

something.”

Interviews with: Jim Dickinson, 1995; Jimmy Johnson, 1994; Jerry Wexler, 1995; David Hood, 1994. Information about Keith's vacation idea from The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, by Stanley Booth, 1984 (alternately titled Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times).

Documents

Chapter 8 (Rolling Stones), Unpublished history of the Muscle Shoals AL recording business