Rhythm and blue might better have been called rhythm and gospel in a sense because there is in contemporary rhythm and blues and the rock and roll which stemmed from it, they're probably much more, ah, there's much more recourse to gospel musical form than to blues forms. Blues is blues, 12 bar blues but rhythm and blues while it does occasionally use the 12 bar form has used gospel music meaning gospel chord changes and gospel meters. I don't want to get too technical but to put it in a nutshell because of what Ray Charles brought to the table the music of rhythm and blues now is the devil's words to the church's music. My first intimation of this was when Ray Charles summoned us to Atlanta, Armand Ertigan and myself and we went to the Peacock Hotel and there was new seven piece band that Ray had assembled. Until then Ray had worked as any other R and B musician, singer did in a studio with hand picked studio men with songs that we presented to him. Now Ray was an integer, it was complete with his own band, his own arrangements and his own songs. And one of the first intimation of this recourse the gospel was a song "I Got A Woman" then the song, "This Little Girl Of Mine" which was "This Little Light Of Mine" and so on. To my knowledge very little of this had been done before. I'm sure it may have occurred but this very conscience, conscious and deliberate effort to bring music from the church and put secular words to it was Ray Charles and it never changed. And of course the next great purveyor of that was Aretha Franklin who continued and may, maybe even solidified this idea of rhythm of gospel even more than Ray. Is that it?

Sam Cooke, what do you think about Sam that makes him such an important figure?

Ah, my great, you know, abiding love for Sam Cooke has to do incidentally more with the records he did with the Soul Stirrers than the records he did later on for RCA with the arranged records but that's a whole other story 'cause he was the same Sam Cooke whether he was singing with an apa… a cappella quartet and a guitar or a full band arrangement. But Sam was the incarnation of sexual appeal to women. When Sam would, let's go to the gospel days, if he was doing a gospel show and he'd be standing, ah, stage one or at a pulpit or whatever and he'd sort of rock from side to side and then slap his side like this, [slap] that was almost the same as a charismatic hitting a supplicant with the - Do Jesus - in the forehead 'cause the ladies would fall over like ten pins. As soon as Sam did this [slap] that, of course it was, ah, ah, artificial, it didn't look planned 'cause Sam knew what he was doing. It always came at an appropriate moment in the music. Now let me say another thing about Sam, I don't believe anybody ever had, controlled his voice the way Sam Cooke controlled his, his voice for registration, pitch was perfect, ah, variation in timbre and so on. And he blew his voice the way a great saxophone player could blow a saxophone and do whatever he wanted with it. And of course his famous - wooo, wooo, wooo, you know. That, ah, ah, Herb Alpert once said that, ah, he tried to ask Sam to put in some of those where they didn't belong and Sam always knew where they went. So, would you call the Magic of Melisma and, by the way, Sam for those who never saw him physically was very pre-possessive, just a beautiful man, I mean he was as handsome as could be.

Was he a model for what followed him in the sixties, Motown, Marvin Gaye?

Oh, absolutely. Ah, Sam Cooke was a, he became an archetype and many, many singers utilized what they could of his style. Of course he was inimitable again because of this seamless magic he had for purveying melody and beautiful turns. But people like Marvin Gaye, Solomon Burke, this is the smoother voiced singers, Smokey Robinson, some of the higher pitched, Clyde McPhatter had many elements of Sam Cooke in them.

... getting his own artistic control.

You want to talk about that, getting away from Art Rupe?

Briefly.

Ah, of course I have a little personalized spin on what happened to Sam Cooke but it's a loser's story, perhaps I shouldn't tell it. Ah, I used to know Sam and he used to come up to our office in the days when he was singing only gospel with the Soul Stirrers and he was, he was on Specialty Records. He had a manager out of New York named Bill Cooke who was a disc jockey in New Jersey, R and B disc jockey and they would visit with us when they came to New York and I used to beg Sam, said, to say, gospel great but how about let's make some money like let's start singing the blues and R and B. He said, well maybe some day. It never happened. Of course we never even had a look in because he was in California and we were in New York. What happened was that he and his then road manager and musical director Bumps Blackwell went into the studio and cut a couple of non gospel songs. They then went to Art Rupe the owner and CEO of Sam's record company, Specialty Records and present them to Art. Art did not want to risk Sam Cooke's gospel career with these pop songs over on the other side. So they struck a deal I think there was something like 15 thousand dollars of obligation that Sam owned and he was excused from that and the masters which were probably cut es., especially his expensive were handed back to Sam. He was now free. That would be maybe the equivalent of Bobbie Barnes being turned loose on the market with no restrictions whatsoever and being now available for the nearest comer. So he then went to a man who was in the airplane business, a man named Keane and put out the first few records. And of course they were again, pop spins on gospel tunes. "She's Wonderful" which was "God Is Wonderful". Is it "She's Wonderful" or "You're Wonderful"? [sings]. She's wonderful, whatever and it was God is wonderful. And of course this now, Sam turns his back on the church, on the gospel business and became a pop artist. And then he went to RCA and had this wonderful career with all those big hits. Although again, I'm not a big fan of the RCA arrangements.

Tell us about encountering Stax for the first time, what you heard down there?

One of the, ah, the best associations that we had in Atlantic was the association with Stax Records which was a module in Memphis making the most wonderful kind of rhythm and blues records with a new technique. We had a, we were pressing our records at that time for the particular area of the Southeast or the mid South in a pressing plant in Memphis called Plastic Products which was owned by a wonderful gentleman named Buster Williams. He called me one day and said, there's a record down here that we're selling a lot of you might want to come down here and take a look at it. It turned out to be a record not on Stax but on Satellite Records which was the earlier name for Stax with Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla Thomas called "'Cause I Love You". I went to Memphis. I liked the record. I met up with Jim Stewart the owner of Stax Record and we arranged for a contract whereby we would press and distribute the record on a royalty basis. Ah, the record really didn't do much. It had its little run regionally… .

So there was this one record Rufus and Carla that really didn't happen to any extent but it was the door opener because a year later I was in my office and I got a call from an old pal of mine, Hymie Weiss who is one of the lovable roughnecks in the record business. And he said, he was in Memphis and he said, - hey schmuck you got a hit record down here. It's Carla Thomas, "Gee Wiz", he said, if it wasn't you I'd pick it up for myself. You better come down and get it. Of course that was his own way of, you know, giving me a little bit of information. We had them under contract. So that was a big hit, "Gee Wiz" by Tarla Komas, by Carla Thomas and we began a very close association with Stax Records whereby they furnished us with an incredible roster of the illustrious artists of course Otis Redding, later on Sam and Dave, although I did bring them into Stax, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, different groups and it really turned me on to watch the way they recorded because it was entirely different from what we had been doing in New York and from what everybody else was doing around the country which was recording with written arrangements, arrangers and studio players who read the charts. This is not to say that they didn't make some good records in that way that sounded spontaneous and authentic and real and funky but I think entropy was setting in for us around this time somewhere, where in the early sixties and it just seemed as though we couldn't get out of our own way, at least I couldn't, in the studio as an on the line, line record producer. It seemed to me that the musicians were out of licks, the arrangements were, the arrangers were out of ideas, the song writers were coming up empty and I just was so turned off and so bored with making bad records actually that I stayed out of the studio. I let somebody else make the records. But when I went to Stax and I saw how they did it, they had a house band, a rhythm section called Booker T. and the MGs which incidentally is one of the more famous examples of an integrated band with, with Booker T. and Al Jackson being black and Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn, Steve the guitarist and Duck the bass man being white and they produced some wonderful music. Well what they did is they would come in in the morning, hang up their coats, take out their axes and start playing music. If they didn't have a song they'd play some chord changes, if they didn't have any chords somebody would sing a top line. The records, the arrangements were developed inductively by building rhythm patterns on simple chord changes rather than playing the chords the finished chords and the finished patterns from written paper. This was very heartening and, and also inspirational to me because this seemed to me a way out of my impasse. I had Wilson Pickett signed up and for a year we just couldn't seem to make any headway. The songs that I brought him he didn't like, the songs that he wanted to record didn't strike me as being suitable. And one day his manager called up and said, let's do it or turn him loose. I didn't want to turn him loose 'cause I thought he was a fabulous singer. So I got the idea of calling Jim Stewart in Memphis and say, hey, can I bring Wilson Pickett down here and make some records with you guys, which we did and it was fabulous. Went down to Memphis, I put Wilson Pickett in a hotel room with Steve Cropper and a, and a bottle of Jack Daniels and the next day they came out with "Midnight Hour", "Don't Fight It", "634-5789", "It's A Man's Way". There was a weeks worth of incredible hits were cut that week in this new method. And the other person I brought down was Don Corvey who also cut some fantastic records there but the main thing is that I had now tasted this southern style of recording. The must… the, ah, Memphis, the doormat, the welcoming mat for me at Memphis was pulled because of whatever reasons, Mr. Pickett's intransigence, problems with the other people. And maybe it was management's idea that they wanted to concentrate their efforts on their own artists and their own label 'cause … label, rather than making their studio available as a custom operation. Whatever it was, I now felt very frustrated because I'd found this way to go and the door had been closed. Well 125 miles from Memphis, it's, I guess that would be southeast and 125 miles due south of Nashville in a triangle is a town in Northwest Alabama called Muscle Shoals. And I heard some music coming from there that sounded exactly like what was coming from Memphis. Again it was a man named Rick Hall who had a studio there and who had a rhythm section of exceptional players, recording people like Arthur Alexander and Jimmie Hughes, Clarence Carter and it came about that we distributed, Preston distributed Rick Hall's records on a label called Fame which was the name of his studio in Muscle Shoals. Well this seemed to be the next place to go. So I took Wilson Pickett to Muscle Shoals and we built his records that night the same way, they were just a listing of chords, chord progressions, no rhythm pattern, nothing, just chords and we put the record together by the musicians playing the music and playing into a pattern and the first thing we cut was "Land Of A Thousand Dances" which was enormous. And the energy and the sonority of that record, to me is wonderful, to this day the projection is just something that comes, that leaps out of a record. I call it the sonority of the record that it's different from the rhythm, it's not exactly the sound, it's not the song, it's the gestalt, it's the way the sound of the record impacts on the ear instantly. And to me that's the magic ingredient in a phonograph record, if you can convey that, it can't be defined or explained but it's something that just grabs you. The Rolling Stones had it, the Beatles had it, Otis Rush has it to this day. And they had it. And so from then on Muscle Shoals became the place that I prefer to go and love to go. Incidentally there's another curious anomaly. Incidentally that's where I took Aretha Franklin when we cut her first records "I Never Loved A Man" which people to this day still regard as being maybe her most soulful and really funkiest records. But here's the anomaly, these players in Muscle Shoals were all Caucasians. Now this again, this seems to confound, perceived wisdom and all the, the logic of the music professors and the commentators. How could authentic soul music and blues come out of a situation like this? Well, I don't know how it did but it did because what it was in my opinion is that these white boys who grew up in Alabama and who were the products of country living and also of country music which they had heard all their life, also had a proclivity for blues. All Southerners like blues whether they're white or black. Now many of the people like the Muscle Shoals rhythm section ended up in Nashville playing three and four chord country songs. But there was a notion among this particular group of people not to do that because here's the little dirty secret, they professed not to like country music but they liked country music to listen to. They don't like to play it. So these boys took a left turn toward the blues instead of going up to Nashville and making a lot of quick money in the studio. And that was the matrix and the genesis of two decades of wonderful rhythm and blues recording in Muscle Shoals.