Muscle Shoals  (2013)

 

"Muscle Shoals" was featured in the Asbury Park Music In Film Festival 2016 (check out pics from the Festival here).

 

If I may wax poetic or wax philosophical - I believe music is everything. Even the worst music is still beautiful in a sense, as much as I may hate it, I can appreciate that someone is creating is, someone is expressing themselves, someone has the talent to do it. On the flip side, when music is GOOD, it brings me such an indescribable joy that my heart and soul and brain explode. "Muscle Shoals" was an incredible documentary of a story so good, I could barely stop smiling.

Muscle Shoals is a county in Alabama, bordering the Tennessee River. It has a population that just reaches five digits, but somehow became an epicenter of a musical revolution. In the late 1950s, Rick Hall started FAME Studios, recruited local session musicians, recorded names that would become legends, and created a signature sound.

This reminded me a lot of one of my favorite movies, Standing in the Shadows of Motown. They both highlighted the guys behind the scenes, the session musicians whose names you never knew but played on countless records you love. Motown had The Funk Brothers, and Muscle Shoals had The Swampers (famously name-dropped in "Sweet Home Alabama"). I'm always intrigued by the story of session musicians. Classic songs like "I'll Take You There", "Respect", "When A Man Loves A Woman" and countless more all featured musicians who just showed up to work, cranked out a track, and came back the next day to do something totally different. One day it's Aretha Franklin, the next day Bob Dylan, the next day Jimmy Cliff. Wilson Pickett gets his name on the album cover, but The Swampers are the ones laying down the grooves.

Half the movie focused on Rick Hall and the Swampers, and the other half was full of interviews from the artists ranging from Bono to Mick Jagger & Keith Richards to Aretha Franklin to Etta James to Gregg Allman and tons more. As a huge U2 fan, I can admit that Bono was his typical grandiose self; Aretha and Etta still had the soul; Gregg Allman told some great stories about Duane's time as a session guitarist. I must also say that if someone just put a camera in front of Keith Richards for any reason, I would watch it.

It's an incredible story of a boy who grew up with a dirt floor and no running water, determined to make it big and actually succeeding. It's a love letter to the old school ways of the recording industry, before computers and AutoTune and bands that spent two weeks in the studio just trying to get the snare drum to sound perfect. It was guys who were excellent musicians doing what they loved, and turning it into something the rest of the world embraced.

 

 

On the [Celluloid Hero] scale, "Muscle Shoals" gets a 9 out of 10.

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