Who “won” the Breakup?
In the war of the two studios, in my opinion, The Swamper’s Muscle Shoals Sound Studios won out in the period of 1969-1974. After they split off from their longtime mentor and producer Rick Hall, business was quite slow for MSS. However, in 1971 the Rolling Stones recorded the single “Brown Sugar” at MSS for their Stick Fingers album, which was a hit on both the single and LP album level. Just the fact that a band that had achieved international stardom would come to an upstart recording studio shows just how talented the house musicians were, and how great of a sound the studio could put out.
This began a period of dominance by the musicians of MSS on the charts and in music history in spite of Rick Hall’s nomination for the “Producer of the Year” Grammy and coronation as Billboard’s producer of the year in 1971.
Muscle Shoals Sound Studios put out more hits and more musically important tracks from 1969 to 1974. For example, they recorded some of the earliest solo works of Duane Allman who would later be the founder and lead guitarist of the seminal southern rock band, The Allman Brothers Band. Without his work as a session guitarist at MSS and the recording of these tracks for An Anthology, ABB probably would never have reached the fame and success that they did.
On a similar note, The Swampers recorded some of the earliest songs for the legendary Lynyrd Skynyrd. When this young band of southern rockers came to MSS, they knew nothing of how to record any music, how to arrange a song, or even how to count time in a tempo. The Swampers taught the members of Skynyrd how to play with each other in the studio, and cut the original recordings for songs like “Free Bird”, “Gimme Three Steps”, and “I Ain’t the One” even if they were unable to get them published on a big label. Once again, without MSS, Skynyrd would never have been able to get their first recordings in the studio done with all of their original members, and most likely would never have been the Skynyrd that rock fans know and love.
The recordings of Paul Simon, Wilson Pickett (a longtime Rick Hall artist), Cher, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger and many other artists at MSS just shows how prolific their production efforts were in just the first five years that the studio even existed. This fast start and prolonged success in the years 1969-1974 is really what finally pushed MSS of FAME Studios in my opinion.
This is not to say that Rick Hall did not continue to produce incredible records during this time. He put out smash hits with Aretha Franklin, Clarence Carter, Wilson Pickett, Soul Survivors, and others which just goes to show that he had most definitely not lost his touch. Furthermore, he did all of this after losing arguably the best studio band in southern music of all time and dealing with the new wave of studios that were coming to Northwest Alabama in order to cash in on the sound that he pioneered.
In spite of the rather difficult split between The Swampers and Rick Hall, they remain friends today. Both sides have agreed that they spent far too many good times together in the studio and in life over the years to remain bitter about a situation that ended up benefitting both parties immensely. However, we will never know what kind of magic Rick Hall could have produced in the ’70s and ’80s if he had been able to keep his famed Swampers around.
The Hits of Muscle Shoals, Alabama 