Rick Hall

But first, going back to your early days, before Hit Records, before Nashville, before Taylor, can you tell us about the scene you came up in, which I'm assuming was the, the Boston scene?

Yeah, the Boston music scene was absolutely exploding right on time for, uh, for me and the guys to get together.

Um, we actually s- formed the band in '79.

That's five years out of high school, and two of us, or three of us went to high school together.

And, um, and then, uh, we put this band together, uh, but along was, you know, he, we had The Clash, and we had Elvis, and we had Nick Lowe and, and of course, Joe Jackson you mentioned.

And I was just really, really intrigued by the, by how they could still be like, play these sort of quirky, punky songs, but have really good lyrics and, and great melodies.

Uh, so yeah, yeah, those are, those are the guys for me.

You guys ended up doing really well.

So I was in a dentist office.

And I was going through, thumbing through a magazine, a Southern Living magazine, and it had an article about Muscle Shoals Music and Rick Hall.

And I read this article, and man, they mentioned people that had recorded there.

Linda Ronstad, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, I mean, all these people.

Wow.

Of course, he was 19 years old then, and we were both nobodies in the music business.

We couldn't get in to see Rick Hall because...

He wouldn't see anybody unless you had a resume of songs and stuff.

like so what what is what like can you give me like a like a very short history of of what what makes Muscle Shoals so okay

Muscle Shoals once known as the hit recording capital of the world uh you could you would see it on the sign after you cross the bridge you know and uh A lot of it happened right there at Fame Recording Studios with Rick Hall.

He was the mastermind behind it all.

He found a way to get these guys together and they formed this band called The Swampers.

So there's this tie to music and vibration that goes all the way back to the original people who settled on this land.

And then you fast forward to Rick Hall throwing up a studio in the middle of nowhere and saying, I'm going to make the greatest records of all time here.

And that's exactly what happened.

And the fact that these guys that all lived here that ended up being called History Calls on the Swampers, these musicians, local guys, predominantly white.

These were totally Ben and John's guys.

So back in the day, yeah, back in the day, there were the players that sort of became Rick Hall's little crew.

That's right.

They were sort of the band that was always playing at fame.

minute.

If you ever go to muscle shows and they let you sit at Rick Hall's desk and you look out in front of you, all you see...

It's Mac Davis in that George Costanza pose and his shirt unbuttoned.

He was wearing a sweater under his shirt.

I got to write with Mr. Spooner Oldham and Carl Holder and Mark that day.

And Rick Hall actually came into the studio that day, the guy that started the studio down there.

And he has since passed on.

But I got to meet him that day, which was magical.

The caskets were a detail, not a metaphor.

The Swampers had been the house band at Rick Hall's Fame Studios, a mile and a half up the road.

Hall was a sharecropper's son from Mississippi.

Smart, demanding, and very tight with money.

When the Swampers opened 3614, the business followed the sound.

The Rolling Stones came in 1969 and made Brown Sugar and Wild Horses in the Coffin Showroom.

Having arrived, per Rick Hall's dry summary, thinking they were cutting it faint.

And then there's the Paul Simon story.