Muscle Shoals – The Movie #1

Great to see the results of getting this story together.
[Post Note : later full review here.]

At one point “it was war”,
but all the time “you’re in
rock and roll heaven, man”.

Previous posts, expressing concern that the whole story wasn’t really out there, [here] and [here] are consigned to history. Great result. The moral of the story is “in Muscle Shoals they have The Swampers” where “these black guys are mighty pale“, but don’t forget “FAME is where it all started“.

[Man, I do miss Alabama.]

[BTW Keith Richards – the luckiest guy who know’s he’s so lucky that his luck still hasn’t run out. Had to watch Ladies and Gentleman and Shine a Light last night. Love the man.]

[Anyway – can’t wait to see Muscle Shoals the Movie. Interesting that producer / director Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier talks in the cliche of the place – the town of Muscle Shoals itself – having a “vibe”. I just don’t see that. For me it was the studios themselves and the people in them at one period in time. FAME itself was not originally located in Muscle Shoals, but in Florence (home of W C Handy) – still the F in FAME – geographically over the border on the Memphis & Nashville side of the business, before crossing the mighty Tennessee River to Muscle Shoals. Good to see the Movie Web Page has links to both FAME and MSSS, though the latter is broken. I hope the MSM-Foundation gets the full history straight having bought the physical MSSS studio, since the FAME2 (active business) web-page still has only a one-liner about The Swampers leaving to set-up MSSS, despite it then running successfully for a decade and recording a large proportion of the acts trailed in the movie. As Rick said is was war at the time – I think the history needs to be clearer on who recorded what where with whom, when the world came to Muscle Shoals. The Muscle Shoals story started with FAME and Rick Hall, and FAME is the current ongoing music business that inherits the heritage, but it’s history is more than FAME. I’ll comment further after I’ve seen the film. PS – the MSSS .org address link is dead, but both the MSSS .com and .org addresses are owned through a discrete privacy service.]