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NOTE: This is a pretty straight transcript of what the late Barry Beckett told me in his Nashville office in September 1985. He had just moved up from Muscle Shoals Sound, where he'd worked with everyone from Wilson Pickett and the Staple Singers to Bobs Dylan and Seger, and he would go on to produce not only Hank Williams Jr. and Kenny Chesney but Phish and the Waterboys. In this interview he talks about how he came to Muscle Shoals and how a rift with FAME Studios boss Rick Hall led to the formation of the famous Muscle Shoals Sound studio at 3614 Jackson Highway. Barry was a great man and will be sorely missed as a presence in American music. -- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

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"I WAS BORN in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1943. I moved to Pensacola, Florida, at the age of 19 and spent about four years down there. I went on the road with a small combo and played the Gulf Coast circuit--Top 40, plus a lot of country stuff.

"Segregation didn't affect the music; it was something you didn't talk or think about. The first real black music I remember was "Money" by Barrett Strong. It was also the first thing that based a musical riff around a minor chord. Before that, I had been into country piano players: Floyd Cramer, Don Robertson, "Pig" Robbins. All of a sudden this minor riff was very appealing. Then I got into Ray Charles, of course. Piano Red I got into very heavily. Then I guess the next guy was Allen Toussaint.

"I met Eddie Hinton in college at the University of Alabama. He asked me to play on some local PBS show they were doing, and we got to be pretty good friends. He told me to come to Muscle Shoals, even though my dream was to come to Nashville. I waited and bided my time until Spooner Oldham was going to leave. I arrived in December 1967. Just by luck I became part of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The first sessions I played were by Brook Benton.

"The way the Muscle Shoals sound came about was that the musicians were tied in a kind of triangle that stretched from New Orleans to Memphis to Nashville. We sat pretty much in the middle of that. Maybe it even stretched as far as Houston, with the Bobby "Blue" Bland stuff down there.

"I don't know whether this was really regional music or not, but it was more popular down south. When the bands played the frat parties, they played rock and roll, but it had a blues connotation, it had the connotation of this regional black music. And everybody picked up Hoss Allen and John R on WLAC at night. Nobody wanted to hear strictly country music, which in a small town like Muscle Shoals was all you got, and the only alternative was WLAC out of Nashville.

"What came out of that was a hard form of rock and roll with blues riffs going on in the middle of it, picking up off of Ray Charles riffs and Bobby Bland horn licks. The Memphis Horns were very influential on the Muscle Shoals sound. In Nashville they would play a backbeat like a clock, a rimshot across the drums. At American in Memphis it wasn't that hard. At Stax it was kind of a thud but laid-back. At Muscle Shoals, Roger Hawkins was hard, but he laid back at the same time. It was a way to be subtle with power. You could build all your dynamics in and still have power.

"Instead of using the steel guitar, they would use the organ. You can't bend an organ, but you've got the same transparency that steel provides in country. And you could still incorporate country piano licks in to the overall form of the Muscle Shoals sound.

"The Muscle Shoals feel came from layin' back behind the beat a little but. Nashville would play right on the beat, but if you divide your beat up into increments, say a hundred increments to a beat, and you lay back the bass drum, say two increments, and the backbeat, say, four increments, it doesn't mean you're playing out of time, it means you're playin' on the backside of the beat. Billy Sherrill, who came from Alabama, knew the secret about layin' back, and he started incorporating it into the Charlie Rich stuff in Nashville. It was the new thing to do in Nashville.

"I worked with Rick Hall about a year and a half, and he taught me an awful lot. He taught me the basic ways to make things funky. It took me about a year to turn myself around from the style of player I was. One day it just clicked, and all of a sudden it was there, as plain as day... and it felt like a band for the first time. I had to learn an awful lot of soul licks, because basically what I was playing was country or easy listening, too pretty. Rick's country influences affected the melody lines, the mixture of major into minor, the way he thought melody. He would think white lines on top of black tracks. He would always think about hook melodic lines within the record, not just vocally but instrumentally. Wilson Pickett's "Hey Jude" was my favorite thing that we did at FAME.

"By the end of the '60s, there was a new sound coming out of California, which involved a lot of echo and a particular type of playing. We thought the best musicians in the world were in California at that time: Johnny Rivers' stuff, for instance. Everything out there was very clean, a lot of presence, warm, and it hit hard. What we were doing still hit hard, but it didn't have the sheen to it, the pop sound. We couldn't get a pop sound, and we wanted to be able to do that. We didn't want to be tied to R&B for the rest of our lives.

"There was a lot of bitterness between Rick Hall and us. It was a dirty parting that we'd hoped to avoid, and we were enemies there for a while. It's since then healed and we're the best of friends. For about four or five years there it was rough. What hurt was that Rick had just made a deal with Capitol to cut some albums, and he wanted us to work exclusively for him, on salaries that would have given us a third of what we'd been making with outside work. We figured he had us over a barrel, and that's what made Jimmy [Johnson] and Roger move. It was either than or move to Nashville.

"After we left Rick, Jerry Wexler moved nearly all of Atlantic's work over to us, starting with Cher, Arif Mardin, and Boz Scaggs. We didn't click with Cher or Arif -- it was dressed up a little bit better echo-wise, but we didn't hit the grooves -- but along comes Boz Scaggs and "Loan Me a Dime" and we get to the point where you normally fade and for some reason we kept playin' and they kept tape rollin', and a new style developed. And from that point on, we said, 'Look, there's somethin' different here.' We tried to keep the same feel but to make it more polished.

"When it got to Paul Simon, that's when it really developed. That was the first time we cut a true pop act. Of course the reason he came down was to get a black sound. He liked what we got on the Staple Singers' "I'll Take You There." We cut Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras" in thirty minutes, so he pulls out six more songs and asks which ones we wanna cut. We said, 'This is it, if we don't jump on this one, we're losing our chance.' Chris Blackwell brought in Jimmy Cliff and had lots of reggae stuff with him, and we saw the secret of it pretty fast.

"At 3614 Jackson Highway we had more freedom. Instead of me doing strictly Rick Hall licks I was able to do other things. It felt like home. True, we would have producers come in there and we felt they didn't know what they were doing, and we'd wind up playing things that didn't have any feel or structure. So we started producing. My favorite things were the Staples, Millie Jackson, Bob Seger, R.B. Greaves -- the first hit we had. I didn't have much fun with Bobby Womack because it was too loose. You could never figure where Bobby was coming from, he just went for the moment -- which was okay, but you had to go over and over things.

"When they introduced the drum machines, there was no feel, no dynamics, and that was hard for us to get into. We fought it, it was too straight-ahead, too sterile, too even, and there was no melody. R&B got very slick. We knew it would cost a hell of a lot to progress. We were lookin' at $125,000 worth of synthesizers alone if we wanted to keep up with New York or Germany. There were ways to remedy it, but we didn't like the style of the music we'd have to go through. So it slowed down.

"Mary McGregor's "Torn Between Two Lovers" went No. 1 pop and then No. 1 country. Willie Nelson was the first thing where we sat down and knew this was gonna be country. It was the first time we'd brought in a fiddle and a steel player. We'd tried to cut country before, but we hadn't had a hit. Willie has the natural blues in him, and Jerry Wexler ate him up like cake. He had a ball.

"I thought about moving up to Nashville for a good two years. How much longer can you do rock and roll when you're 42 years old? I still play it and I still feel it, but I have the future to look to. And in terms of keyboard, it's moving away from acoustic to synthetic and you gotta spend a lot of money to keep up. To me it makes much more sense to build another career, using what I've learned to help other people. Basically, I'm being paid to teach."
 

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