When Wexler first came down here, tell me what you knew about him and how he reacted when he got off the plane.

It's a funny story and I need a longer time to tell about Wexler and myself because he was a big part of my life along with Bill Lowry, Sam Phillips …

Start off by saying his name.

Well Jerry Wexler was kind of like my mentor. He, ah, I, I was young, arrogant, Southern, had all the answers and felt like he was a typical New York Jewish guy who came down to beat us up. So we, while we had a lot of success together we had a lot of disagreements and a lot of fights in the studio. And, ah, but I met him, of course I had been intrigued all these years with this red label with the black letters, Atlantic because all the acts that I liked, the Drifters, the Coasters, I mean everybody, Ben E. King, all of them was my favorite artist. And when he came down, he was big, it was big, big news to me, I was tickled to have him 'cause he, we met through an instant 'cause "When a Man Loves a Woman" by Percy Sledge and I found the master and sent it to him. And he called me, said he didn't think it was a hit. I said, you're crazy, it's a smash Jerry. All you got to do is hide and watch. And he said, well, send it up. So I sent it up and he listened to it said, I don't think, I don't think it's a hit. Are you sure you think this is a hit? I said, it's a smash. I bet my life on it, number one, not number two, number one, just put it out. So he put it out and from then on, I was in like Flynn, you know we were, I made a lot of points on that record for obvious reasons. And then he brought, he, he started sending acts to me: Wilson Picket, and we did, ah, "Land of a 1,000 Dances" was his first record and then we had…

Wexler started bringing down some artists.

Yeah, well Wexler, ah, after the, ah, big record on Percy Sledge he started bringing down big, sending down, really not bringing but sending down. Wilson Pickett came down alone without Wex., ah, we cut "Land of a a 1,000 Dances". He showed up a couple days later, ah, first records was "Land of a 1,000 Dances". Then we did "Mustang Sally" then we did "Funky Broadway", "Hey Joe", "Hey Jude" and on and on. I mean we had a string of hits a mile long. And he was so impressed by, ah, the surroundings here and maybe my, my talents, I don't know if that had much to do with it and the musicians that he, that he decided to bring some more big acts down, bigger acts maybe.

Tell me the story when Jerry first came into Muscle Shoals.

Well when Wex first came to Muscle Shoals, I picked him up in an old beat up Chrysler car at the airport which is about two miles from here. And the airport is about, you know, it's a very small area here, five thousand people in Muscle Shoals. And I think he was expecting bigger things and a bigger entourage. So when I picked him up I was a little late for, for his flight. And when I got out there I was looking at him and he looked like a lost puppy and he, he was, you could see fright, wondered what's happened, you know, how did I get into this and the whole thing. But I picked him up and, and came back to the studio and then he was okay. But the, the airport is right in the middle of a cotton patch, big cotton patch and he thought he was, he thought he'd really been done in, you know.

I read when you first met Pickett, here was this city slicker. Tell me about that.

Well Pickett when he, I met him, of course Pickett is originally from Prattville, Alabama but he'd been living in New York for a long time and didn't want to know, anyone to know that he was from Alabama. So, I picked him up and he's got this hounds tooth coat on, black and white, he's got black pants on and back then you know they wore the, the slick down hair, plastered down. And Pickett was a beautiful black man, you know, very handsome black man but he looked like a tiger, a black panther or something. He was very intimidating. And I guess I was intimidating. Here I got my wing-tip shoes on and clodhoppers he called them. And I picked him up and all the way from the airport I'd see him looking at me out of the corner of his eye and of course I'd look at him out of the corner of his eye, my eye and thinking, boy, this is, this is bad 'cause he just came from Stax where they, he and Jim Stewart and Steve Cropper and the guys had did "6345789" and "Midnight Hour" and I guess he thought his career was over with when he saw me. And I picked him in the old Chrysler car.

Once you got in the studio with Pickett, how did that go? What was it like producing?

Pickett was a very intense individual, singer and human being, very violent tempered, ah, a real sense of loyalty to people he liked. Now he, he really liked me, we spent a lot of time together. We had a little bit of wildness, both of us did, in us. Of course I grew up tough too and on the streets, you know. And, ah, when he went into the studio he had a tendency to be really - I want this and I'll settle for nothing less. And I recall back then we didn't have a paved road in front of the studio and the carpet had been packed down by musicians going and coming until it was full of dust and when Pickett would sing his whole body was like in a knots and he's pounding and he's beating his foot, you know, and he's dancing. And, ah, when he got through with the first session his face was all white. And I said, what, what, what's on your face? And it was the dust from the carpet that had floated up on his face during the day and it looked like he had talcum powders on his face. But he was, he was a great artist, ah, non grate I don't think you know he was, he was a big guy in those days he and Solomon Burke and some of the other guys, most of them with Atlantic that I was familiar with.

As a producer of Pickett, did you let him loose or did you try to control that energy?

Well see, ah, I was always an engineer, ah, producer. You have producers, then you have executive producers, then you have engineer producers who are musicians who I think are the real producers in the music business, ah. Executive producers are record executives who's bored with the office and want to get their names on the record and their name in lights and want to get out of the office. But the real producers to me are guys who call the licks or the guys who are there on the spot, who call the musicians, have rapports with the musicians, you know, who can play what and what their limitations are and picks the material and does it all, does the hard, that's, that's to me a real producer, ah, same as a director on a movie or something. But, ah, he, ah, Pickett took direction very well from people that he respected and he did respect me a lot, ah. And we were both, he had been, grew up in the South and he understood where I was and I understood where he was coming from. But, ah, he was, ah, he was tough on songs. He was hard to find a song that he really liked, ah, but once he got the song, I'll give you a short story, you maybe not can use this but I'll tell you anyhow. There was a record called "Hey Jude" that was in the top five by the Beatles and Dwayne Allman was a guitar player on the session and was signed with me and I was doing an album on Dwayne on the side, my own project. And, ah, Phil Walden was managing him so he brought him my, we, he, he was playing on the session so he said let's, let's do "Hey Jude" and Picket called him Sky Man for obvious reasons but he said Sky Man there's no way I'm going to do "Hey Jude". I don't do songs by Jews. And, ah, so I said, - no, no, it's, it's not "Hey Jew", it's "Hey Jude", - J-U-D-E. Oh, he said, well I'm not going to do it anyhow. So, Dwayne was the kind of person who was a total upper, always, everything would work, anything worked. So he said, you're crazy. I said, you know the record is in the top five, we're going to cover the Beatles as big as they are with, with Wilson Pickett? He said, that's the whole idea. You got to have guts. You got to go for the gusto, you can't hold back. And with that Picket said, oh, let's, let's, let's fool around with it, it might be an idea. So we cut "Hey Jude" and when they were coming out of the charts we were going up in the pop charts. And it was top, five or top ten pop record and number one R and B record. So those are the kind of things we did. We, we challenged people. I, I still do that, you know, go for the gusto.

Tell me about the night you were in the studio with Pickett when you heard that Doctor King had been shot.

Well Pickett was here recording, Wilson was when we got the news that Doctor Martin Luther King had been shot and was killed. And the place came apart. Of course we called the sessions off immediately. Everybody went, split shortly afterwards and went to their hotel rooms. And, ah, I, I think we did come back the next day but it wasn't the same any more, I mean the session kind of went down hill, we, ah, I think we had cut a couple of great records before this so that's, that's, that's what happened.

Again, tell me about the night Martin Luther King died.

Picket was here when we, when Doc., when Doctor Martin Luther King was, was shot in Memphis. And when we got the news we were in the recording studio here recording, I don't recall, recall what song we were doing but the whole mood and the whole atmosphere in the studio suddenly changed and, ah, the session went down hill and we, we called off the session in fact out of respect to him and everything. But, ah, and I'm not sure that, ah, the mood of black music didn't change along with, with that night, with Martin Luther King's assassination. Ah, I think it had a, I think it had an effect, I don't know if it was good or bad but it had, it had some effect on music as we know it today.

Let's talk about Aretha. Tell me what you know about her before she came here to record. Your first reaction when you heard her.

When I first talked to Wexler after we'd had the success with Pickett, Don Covay had come down, we'd cut a couple of good sides and we'd cut, ah, of course we had the Percy Sledge record which I didn't produce but, ah, sent it to Wexler and help put the deal together for Gwen Ivey and ____ Green. So when, when we, ah, I heard, he said, well, we're doing such a great job, I'm so impressed with what I'm getting here that I want to send you an artist, bring her down that I think is going to be the biggest act in the business, ah, she's been with CBS, they've had nothing but dogs, they're cutting the wrong kind of music on her. They're doing her very vanilla, very string oriented, and, ah, we think she should be cut funky. So, ah, we're, I'm bringing her down here. Well to be honest with you, I didn't' know who Aretha was. The only thing I knew was that her father, ah, was the Reverend Franklin who I listened at WLAC in Nashville, coming home from gigs, a lot of nights, ah, and we all did because we listened to John R and all the guys, ____ ____ and all those people, ah, and we were into that and they played a lot of black music. So we, I knew it was his daughter and she'd been, ah, a secret almost in the music business. She'd never had, I don't think, even a, a mediocre hit at the time with CBS, they didn't know what to do with her. And so when he brought her down it was a big thing, ah, I, I, Wexler got me going and got me up, excited, ah, I got all the people around me, songwriters, musicians, ah, staff excited. We wanted to be impressive and we, we're, it was a big shot, you know, we thought, hey, Wexler is excited about her so I'm excited. And I knew he could push the panic button, it would be a hit if we had good product. So I didn't know what to expect when she came down but when she came, it was, ah, it was bittersweet. We had great success, ah, it was a real experience and then we had some tragedies, happened among the sessions, some unfortunate things took place that night. I stopped there because I wanted to make that a separate thing if you wanted to use it.

Tell me about the success first. What really clicked that night.

Well with Aretha the first night we rec., day we recorded, I recall we started recording I think 10, 11 o'clock which we usually did and the musicians, the studio was full of musicians, we had them three deep in the, out in the lobby meaning that if the bass player, we had three bass players, if one couldn't cop the lick, ah, we'd bring in another one and fire him. That's how, that's how important the sessions were with Pickett and her. And of course that was tough on musicians and tough on me because I had to do the firing. Wexler would say, let this guy go and replace with him with so and so. But anyhow we were ready for her and everybody was really fired up. She came in, she did two sides, spent the day on two sides; the first side was her song that she'd written and, ah, then the second tune was a tune that Dan Pan and Chips Moment had written on the session called, - "Do Right Woman Do Right Man" the first song was "I Ain't Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You". We cut both sides that day and as I recall, Wexler got back to New York and we had a real situation, ah, on the session, some drinking started taking place by some of the musicians, they started passing the bottle around, ah, Aretha's husband at the time, ah, ah, got upset with a couple musicians and asked me fire them. I fired them. And as the day wore on the drinking seemed to get heavier. And that night after the session was over I went to the hotel room to try to smooth things up with, with Aretha, not with Aretha she had, was no part of the whole thing, ah, but Ted White her husband. I went over to talk to him and we got in a free-for-all. I mean he and I just went fisticuffs in the hotel room and, and that was the end of my relationship with Aretha and with Wexler. Ah, so the success was we had Wexler call me back a few days later or left here, told me we had nothing, it was a wasted effort and the day was shot and he might be, might be that he's going to lose an artist because of it. And then when he got back to New York he called me back and said, I was wrong. We got two run away smashes, absolute smashes. And they were back to back number one records as I recall - "Do Right Woman Do Right Man" and the, ah, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You". But that was the end of my relationship with Wexler and that was the end of my relationship with Aretha. Ah, it was unfortunate but those things happen.

I read when she first sat down at the piano and started, everybody was so impressed and you all knew it was something important.

When Aretha came in and sat down at the piano and, and played and sang. Of course she played on all the stuff, ah, when she did "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" everybody began, the musicians were very excited about it. ____ ____ was playing electric piano Wurlitzer. And I always thought and I think Aretha would agree to this, his little part that he was playing was so important to the record that everybody just kind of fell into his groove and started playing off of him. And, ah, him and her combined if you listen to the record again, he's playing a rhythm pattern, [hums]. And she's doing all the high notes from the right end which nobody else can do except Aretha. Ah, when, when this started happening the hair stood up on, on the back of our necks, you know. And she, ah, we probably did the song I would think 30 times, 30 cuts over and over. And I don't think she varied one iota from, she did it exactly the same way, as I recall, every time. Nobody was concerned about whether Aretha was getting her part. The horn player had missed a part or the guitar player or bass player but she was always right there. And she never left the piano, she never got up and wandered around, she never said, look, can I have some coffee? She never complained. If you know her, she don't talk very much. She's a very quiet reserved person and when she says something most people, we all listen. And, ah, but she was a real trooper, a real trooper. I mean Aretha was, she, she, she's the greatest. But then we did the second song and, hey never, I mean "Do Right Woman Do Right Man" and all, we wound up doing it with, I think a rim shot on the drum and an acoustic guitar and then went back, went back and over-dubbed the piano, the backgrounds and all the other things later. It was a very sparse record, ah, with a little flute part and, and all the other little things that made it so great but it was, it was a trip, a real trip, the whole session was. But it was, it was hard because everybody was intent and you could feel it, you could cut it in the air, you know, it was, it was very, everybody was little uptight including myself. I was a nervous wreck because Wexler was standing over my shoulder always when I'm engineering. I believe Tom was here, Tom Dowd sitting over there someplace and between the two of them and the directions I were getting, ah, I was, you know, ah, - no turn it up, turn it down, wait a minute, wait a minute you got, you're losing the singer, wait a minute, bring up the horn, the guitar, ___ and everything else, you know and I'm. And then we didn't have sliders in those days we had turn-pots, pots, you know you turn them up and down. So it was, it was, it was, it was an exciting, very exciting time.

Atlantic is what everybody knows about.

Ah, of course everybody talks about Atlantic because that was one of the highlights and that's when the whole thing kind of peaked for me and, and people in Muscle Shoals. But of course there were a lot of success with other labels and we had a lot of other relationships that came here, ah, that were terribly important. Etta James we cut her last, big hit record - "Tell Mama" here, Otis Redding did a lot of pre-recording and he did one of my tunes, "You Left the Water Running" which is out on a, on, let's see, I think it's out on somebody now, I'm trying to think of who it was - no help… hey, son, too late, stop the camera…