Rick Hall and my claim to FAME (Recording Studios that is)

When I was a reporter at the TimesDaily, I got a call out of the blue that Rick Hall wanted to meet with me. After quite a bit of back and forth, we agreed to a day and time. I arrived and was led to a room inside FAME where I waited. And waited and waited. I still had no idea what he wanted to talk about.

He finally appeared wearing a loud sport coat and his trademark handlebar mustache and eager to talk about Shenandoah, a new country band he was producing. I never cared much for the music, but you can’t argue with its success.

Not many people remember Shenandoah now, but the R&B Hall produced in Muscle Shoals lives on as some of the best American music ever made. So glad Rick Hall finally got his due before his death this week.

Here’s the excellent New York Times obit by Jon Pareles. It helped a lot with this recollection of my Rick Hall interview because I was having trouble remembering exactly what it was we talked about. Then I saw the reference to Shenandoah and it came back. So thanks to Jon Pareles for being so thorough.

In the video, check out the cameo by Rick Hall at the :48 mark. (There’s another one later too.)

That’s him in the corner: Michael Stipe sighting launches R.E.M. pilgrimage

Journeys sure do start unexpectedly sometimes.

If you follow them, they can take you to sacred moments from the past and then on to new places and discoveries of things you might have missed the first time. It’s risky, though. Trips to the past can bring joy but can stir up old heartbreak too.

This one started in an oyster bar in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. These are not places I frequent often — Manhattan or oyster bars in general. But Jennifer and I were near the end of a visit to the city earlier this year and enjoying our drinks amid the echoing clatter of food being served and the crunch of ice serving as temporary bedding for oysters.

We were deciding whether to add oysters to our order when the host seated a man several tables behind Jennifer who wasn’t quite as pedestrian-looking as the rest of us in the restaurant. He sported a bushy, gray beard, black horned-rim glasses and what in Alabama we always called a toboggan — you might call it a knit cap — covering his bald head.

I barely noticed those signifiers and focused mostly on the man’s nose (or septum) ring. It very gradually started to dawn on me I might be having a New York celebrity sighting. I asked Jennifer to Google to see if Michael Stipe wore a nose ring. A quick image search showed that he did, indeed, sport one — and horned-rim glasses and a long beard.

For me this wasn’t just any celebrity sighting. I described it to the kids this way: Think of your all-time favorite band, and then imagine the lead singer walking in and sitting a few tables over. I hadn’t really listened to R.E.M. much in a while, but the answer to “who’s your favorite band of all time,” would certainly, if I thought hard about it, always be R.E.M.

I didn’t bother Mr. Stipe, who was sitting alone at a small table near a window before being joined by someone a short time later. But boy did the R.E.M.-related moments and connections and missed opportunities and meaningful songs start stirring.

The posts that follow are what I imagine I’d have told him if he’d invited us over to his table for a chat.

Next up: Murmurs of new music in Tuscaloosa

Jennifer and Michael Stipe.

That’s him in the corner: Michael Stipe.

 

 

 

A follow-up on site traffic

Nice example of having success generating more traffic to a blog. Textbook.

Talent in the Triangle

In my last post on my blog’s site traffic, I talked about just how little attention this blog was getting. In the month since, the traffic to my blog has gone up exponentially! I’m not even kidding, you guys. It’s a little ridiculous. I’m getting more than 10 hits a day, which doesn’t sound like much but is huge compared to the 10 hits total I had before.

So, clearly, I made a few changes in my posting style to make all this happen. First of all, I started posting more than I had been which should be an obvious tactic. Secondly, I started tagging my posts with key words that were relevant, like “North Carolina” “entertainment” and other terms someone would use in a Google search. Another thing I did was use more hyperlinks about the blog content to link to other pages, which I noticed specifically got those…

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New York Times spotlights problems with Alabama Music Hall of Fame; here are some possible solutions

Photo via Alabama Music Hall of Fame.

It’s sometimes said all publicity is good publicity, so a New York Times story about the struggles of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame is probably a good thing for the beleaguered museum.

Alabama Museum, in Area Where Stars Found Sound, Seeks an Audience: Tourists

The story suggests the museum, with its long history of closings due to funding problems, might need to do some things differently to be successful in the future, including moving to another city.

As a reporter and editor at The TimesDaily in Florence, I covered the hall of fame before it had a building or displays and was raising funds through an annual all-star concert in Birmingham.

I heard and met an amazing lineup of musicians and music industry types on this beat, including members of the country band Alabama, Martha Reeves of Vandellas fame, Jim Nabors, David Hood and Jimmy Johnson of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, blues legend Johnny Shines, Charlie Louvin, FAME Studios founder Rick Hall, bandleader Erskine Hawkins, the Commodores (minus Lionel Richie), Percy Sledge, Bobby Goldsboro, Jimmy Hall of Wet Willie and Marty Raybon of Shenandoah, Clarence Carter and more. One year’s show ended with a group of stars on stage for a spine-tingling rendition of “My Home’s in Alabama.”

(There were almost more people on stage as in the audience. The Birmingham News didn’t cover the event and the city didn’t support it particularly well.)

When the funds were raised, construction began in the late 1980s on a parcel of old cotton field off U.S. Highway 72 south of downtown Tuscumbia, one of the four cities that makes up the metro Shoals area of Alabama (Florence, Sheffield, Tuscumbia and Muscle Shoals). The Shoals became home to the hall primarily because it was the general area where famous musicians had come to record at several recording studios, most prominently FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound. Also, the powers behind the hall of fame were mostly Shoals-area people with connections to the music industry.

The precise location, though, was a head-scratcher. It’s on a stretch of 4-lane highway that isn’t a main artery between any major points and is used manly by locals who live outside  Tuscumbia or are driving from Northwest Alabama to Corinth, Mississippi or maybe Memphis, Tennessee. The four cities’ metro population is about 200,000 and as you’d expect have several highly trafficked although smallish downtowns and newer, car-oriented commercial areas. For some reason, though, the hall was built just outside the metro area, on the opposite side the fairly busy Huntsville-to-Florence corridor.

When I lived in the area, the hall was surrounded by what would have been pretty countryside if it weren’t for the uneven distribution of over-lit gas stations, fast-food restaurants, billboards and newish churches with huge, paved parking lots.

In the late 1980s Tuscumbia itself was a dusty little town that could have been the location of a movie set during the Great Depression just by changing out the cars on the street. Over time, though, while the U.S. 72 site of the hall of fame gained new fast-food neighbors downtown Tuscumbia came back to life through the generous investments of a local millionaire, making the hall’s isolated location look even more ill-conceived and short sighted.

The Times reports the current debate about the hall centers on whether it should move to Huntsville, Birmingham or Montgomery with the argument being those cities have the critical mass that could keep the museum busy vs. those who’d prefer to keep it close to the  music culture and history of the Shoals.

The second Muscle ShoalsSound Studios. The front, at left, overlooks a scenic stretch of the Tennessee River. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons.)

I lean toward keeping it in the Shoals, but not at its present location, which never made much sense and has failed to draw crowds. This is easier said than done since the warehouse-like building is constructed around the band Alabama’s tour bus, among other built-in exhibits.

The downtowns of one of the Shoals cities or even a well-traveled commercial strip would be an improvement over the hall’s current location. If the reason for having it in the Shoals is because this is the state’s musical heart, then it would make sense to connect it to that music culture and heritage. Where it is now, it might as well be in Huntsville or Birmingham or Montgomery. It just sits by the highway, isolated and unconnected to much of anything.

Moving it near Muscle Shoals Sound Studios would connect it to that history, give the attraction added dimension and give people more incentive to visit. I was initially thinking of the second facility, located at 1000 Alabama Ave. in Sheffield — a beautiful spot on the Tennessee River — certainly an aesthetic improvement over the current location with the river offering an added attraction. When I worked in the area, the studio was still in use but has since closed, with some of its recording equipment sold.

The more iconic Muscle Shoals Sound Studio building in Sheffield.

Another option might be the more famous and somewhat iconic original Muscle Shoals Sound Studios at 3614 Jackson Highway in Sheffield. It’s been purchased by a foundation for redevelopment. Either site could feature, in addition to museum exhibits, opportunities for visitors to watch actual recording, which would give the hall an extra dimension, coupled with the thrill of knowing these were places where actual stars like The Rolling Stones, The Black Keys, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Percy Sledge, Art Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, Cher and many others, recorded.

Stuck in a boxy building outside an already remote small town, the hall of fame is the definition of out of sight, out of mind. By connecting it to the rich Muscle Shoals-area music tradition, the place could be truly unique, be about much more than just Alabama music, and be a destination for music lovers of all kinds.

Related articles

• ‘Muscle Shoals’ review: a soulful musical feast (sfgate.com)

NYT story about clothing manufacturer in Bristol, Tennessee is a great read for lots of reasons

This New York Times story is both interesting and inspiring. It’s the story of a clothing maker in the rural South that still creates clothes the way it has for 100 years. 

A Tennessee clothing factory keeps up the old ways

It’s a familiar plot: A craft outlasts all others and finally begins to get recognition. It’s a classic combination several important news values: currency, unusualness and human interest: An archaic way of making textiles, once common across the South, finds its time has finally come.

Despite being an old trope, the story works. A great read. It’s inspiring because it shows a future for a traditional Southern clothing maker, offering hope for a company and its employees and bringing recognition to the longterm support of the town of Bristol, Tennessee.

The New York Times joins those reporting extreme conservatism isn’t ‘the North Carolina Way’

Moral Monday protestor in Raleigh on June 17 of this year. (Photo by Yashmori via Flickr Creative Commons.)

The New York Times has taken an in-depth look at the political turmoil in North Carolina.

North Carolinians Fear the End of a Middle Way

Splashed on page one today, it’s a thorough overview that attempts to show that even moderate and some conservative people are taken aback by the string of ideological legislation that’s been passed in just one legislative session.

As is often the case when a national news organization swoops in and takes a big-picture look at an issue, there’s not a lot there that hasn’t been reported in bits and pieces by local and regional newspapers.

But, fresh perspectives include voices like that of David French of rural Rockingham County who laments extremism in government, and the observation that, while signing all of these divisive bills, the governor never got around to passing his signature economic development initiative, an overhaul of job recruiting.

The idea that the legislature’s extreme agenda is contrary to the moderate political history of the state was also made notably in this News & Observer essay. (Note the similar headlines.):

The North Carolina Way takes a sharp right turn

For essayist, Huntsville is the new town that became a hometown

When a new town becomes a hometown by Beth Thames

A lovely and thoughtful essay on the slow, steady process of adapting to the place you’ve moved to. It’s what I’m in the midst of trying to do in Chapel Hill, and all the more poignant since the place the essayist now calls home is the place I’ll never quite get over leaving. 

50 years later: I wonder what the civil rights movement looked like to our expanding families in 1963 Alabama

Sonnie Hereford and his father walk into Fifth Ave. Elementary in Huntsville, making it the first integrated school in Alabama. I’d walk through those doors six years later, completely unaware of what had happened in 1963.

Southerners are marking events that happened 50 years ago when civil rights events exploded across my home state and others. I’m fascinated with the events themselves, but also curious about impacted families like mine.

Early June marked 50 years since George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” in response, President Kennedy’s speech sketching out a civil rights bill that very night, and in the early hours the next morning, Medgar Evers’ murder.

In the coming months, we’ll mark 50 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the horrific bombing of Birmingham’s 16th St. Baptist Church that killed four girls in the church basement.

My great friend Bill Kimber was born June 11 in Birmingham’s South Highlands Infirmary, just a few miles from 16th St. Baptist Church. That was the same day that Wallace created his lasting image as an ardent segregationist on the University of Alabama campus.

I was born in Huntsville on July 7, just a few months ahead of the integration of Fifth Ave. Elementary School by Dr. Sonnie Hereford and his namesake son who I now count as a friend. It was the first school in Alabama to be integrated, and I would walk through those same doors as a first grader six years later.

There’s not much I can add to civil rights history that can’t be found in lots of other places, but I would like to know what was it like for my mother and Bill’s mother, and other young parents, bringing children into the world when that world as they knew it was being turned upside down.

Was it scary and daunting? Did they have sympathy for what the marchers and rights advocates were trying to accomplish? Or were they so busy with pregnancy they were insulated from it? After all, they were working-class white families, not completely immune from civil strife and turmoil, but obviously not impacted by Jim Crow like those marching and protesting and hoping for changes in laws that would change their lives.

When I was old enough to have conversations with her about it, my mother told me it scared her at first. I understand. The world that she’d known was changing dramatically. It would be one of the biggest and most important social upheavals in American history, and it was happening down the street.

I can just imagine Bill’s mother in her hospital bed, Wallace’s defiant words blaring through the television via the black and white evening newscast. What a world to bring a son into. In the long run, it was a better world. A world where Bill and I went to school with black kids and had black friends and those kids went to better schools.

My mother also told me she, at some point, began to understand the importance of the civil rights movement, and supported it. I’m not talking last year, but sometime in the 60s. As a single mother from a working-class family, I think she was in a position to understand what it meant to be oppressed, at least to some extent. She and other members of my extended family (Hi Cousin Pat!) were all-in supporters of civil rights and equal rights for women by the time I was old enough to have those conversations.

My mother, Muriel Isom, in the early 1940s.

While I sort of understand how she got there, I have no idea what that journey was like for our moms. Mine was a woman who grew up the child of a mill worker father and homemaker mother in segregated Alabama of the ‘30s and ‘40s, only to see change come roaring at her in the ‘50s and ‘60s faster than she probably imagined possible.

I’m proud, though, to come from a family that embraces it rather than resists it.

David Price says voting rights changes won’t matter in the long run

New York Times story on voting rights and the changing South

Summed up nicely by my U.S congressman, Rep. David Price, (D) North Carolina:

“All the voter suppression measures in the world aren’t going to be enough to eventually stem this rising tide.”

NPR looks at how The Birmingham News did — and more importantly didn’t — cover civil rights

NPR: How the civil rights movement was covered in Birmingham

LIke a lot of B’ham News people, I was aware the paper didn’t properly cover the civil rights movement in Birmingham, but this NPR story by Audie Cornish offers some fresh insights.

It also reminds me how disappointed I have been, not only with the paper’s lack of civil rights coverage before my time, but even during my time there (and time in between).

The paper should designate a seasoned reporter to cover civil rights-related issues, including reporting on cold cases. The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi is a model for how it could and should be done.

I once suggested this to a reporter there I greatly admire, and he told me he’d brought it up before to editors (who are no longer there). They told him they already had a civil rights reporter — the religion writer. Certainly, the religion reporter knew many of the civil rights figures and is a good reporter, but civil rights and religion both deserve their own beats in a place like Birmingham.

The paper can’t do enough to make up for what it didn’t do back then, but is slowly getting there. Folks there now have done a mostly good job with the 50th anniversary of the events of 1963. And when I was there, we did an exhaustive piece on Birmingham’s many civil rights landmarks — bombed homes and churches, and other important places.

In Seattle, a reporter covers nothing but Boeing. In New York, many reporters cover nothing but Wall Street. In Detroit, reporters there own auto industry coverage. If a city has something completely unique to that city, the local paper ought to claim it and say “no one is going to do this better than us.” The Birmingham News/Al.com should do that with all things civil rights.