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“Muscle Shoals”

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IMG_0279    “You’re in rock ‘n’ roll heaven, man,” growls Keith Richards in an interview in Muscle Shoals, the documentary about the musical heritage of the Shoals area of northwest Alabama. The film focuses on the intertwined stories of Rick Hall’s FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. It is a compelling story that needs to be told and director Greg “Freddy” Camalier tells it with brisk pacing and verve using music recorded in the area and ample interviews with the makers of the magic that came out of the place in a specific time in American musical history.

IMG_0708I was fortunate to see Muscle Shoals on August 24, 2013, at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham and have viewed it a couple of times since. My first screening at the Alabama Theatre was as part of a packed house in advance of the film’s official release on September 27, 2013. Even for a viewer familiar with the musical heritage of the Shoals, the movie is full of new information and insights by interview subjects including Gregg Allman, Bono, Clarence Carter, Jimmy Cliff, Aretha Franklin, Donna Godchaux, Mick Jagger, Alicia Keys, Keith Richards, Percy Sledge, Candi Staton, and Steve Winwood.

The powerful conceit running through the movie is that there is music in the magical waters of the Tennessee River around the Shoals. The Tennessee curves through Alabama from its northeast corner to its northwest corner, cutting a crescent in the northernmost part of the state. The Native Americans’ word for the river meant “the river that sings” and the four towns of Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia straddle the river in northwest Alabama in the area commonly referred to as “the Shoals.”

W.C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” and Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley and other legends, were both from the Shoals. The movie spends time at the Wichahpi Commemorative Stone Wall in Florence. Tom Hendrix built the mammoth serpentine wall as a memorial to his ancestor who was exiled to Oklahoma as part of the Trail of Tears and walked back to the Shoals to be near the “singing river.” The film even pulls Tuscumbia native Helen Keller into the mix, finding a connection with the fact that the deaf, blind, and mute child’s breakthrough word was “water.”

The film focuses on Rick Hall’s FAME Studios and “the Swampers.” “The Swampers” are the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section who left FAME to open Muscle Shoals Sound Studio on Jackson Highway and who are primarily represented in the documentary by “Swampers” Roger Hawkins, David Hood, and Jimmy Johnson. Rick Hall’s biography alone includes enough tragedy to fuel any number of plaintive country ballads and his compelling and compulsive drive is the centerpiece of the film.

On occasion, Muscle Shoals may go a little overboard in its effort to tell a coherent story and the “singing river” idea might feel a bit stretched at times. Sometimes, liberal use of misleading stock footage is distracting. For example, when the documentary discusses the Shoals hospital where Percy Sledge worked before embarking on his musical career, the stock footage that is shown makes it look like a World War I-era European hospital.

Each time I watch the movie, I am confused as to which of Aretha Franklin’s hits were actually recorded in Muscle Shoals – the filmmakers are a little ambiguous there but a little research reveals that “I Never Loved a Man” was definitely recorded there (and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section was brought to New York to record other hits with her). Based on the way the documentary presents the story, one might think that Rick Hall wrote the schmaltzy Clarence Carter hit “Patches” (he didn’t; he produced Carter’s cover – and this documentary manages to make me respect “Patches” in a way I never had before).

Even so, it is the actual footage of Shoals sessions, the Rolling Stones, and other artists in the recording studio, and the director’s passion for the sounds that came out of the place that propel the movie and make it indispensable. Fans of the Maysles Brothers’ 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour and the disastrous Altamont Free Concert that ended it will recognize much of the Stones’ Muscle Shoals footage from that earlier film. The Stones recorded “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” in Muscle Shoals.

Ultimately, it’s the music that supports the story that makes Muscle Shoals such a treasure and I challenge any Baby Boomer or fan of twentieth century American popular music to sit through Muscle Shoals without finding at least a few favorite songs that were recorded in those studios. Percy Sledge recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman” there. Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, The Staples, Boz Scaggs, Etta James, Wilson Pickett, Traffic, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart, the Osmonds, Cher, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimmy Cliff, … recorded there, and on and on; it makes your head explode that so much essential music came out of such a small town. The tradition currently continues with groups such as the Birmingham-based soul band St. Paul and the Broken Bones whose recent album Half the City was recorded in the Shoals.

For me, an added treat in the movie is interview footage with Donna Godchaux, a Shoals native who, with her late husband Keith, was a member of the Grateful Dead in the ‘70s (the Dead never recorded in Muscle Shoals as far as I know). Donna got her start as a session singer in the Shoals and she lives there now. I very briefly met her when I was working backstage at the Grateful Dead concert in Tuscaloosa on May 17, 1977 (I also met Jerry Garcia that day). It was an amazing concert but my most vivid memory of it is hanging out in front of the stage for a bit during the show with the Godchaux’s toddler, Zion. We were rolling a toy Texaco truck back and forth. Zion would be in his forties now and is part of the band BoomBox.

If you haven’t seen Muscle Shoals yet, check it out. I promise it will leave you smiling.

Robert Altman’s Nashville

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IMG_1109  My directing students are currently engaged in a project in which they are analyzing five favorite films. It is a way to develop critical and analytical skills and to find their own directorial “voice.”

In discussions with the students, I realized that my all-time favorite movie, Nashville, directed by Robert Altman, turns forty this year. I fell in love with the movie the first time I saw it at the Bama Theatre in downtown Tuscaloosa and by the end of the first week of its Tuscaloosa run I had already watched it four times. I kept saying to friends “Have you seen Nashville yet?” and when they had not I made them drop whatever they were doing and it was off to the Bama to catch the next screening.

I was a little obsessed.

I was 20 when Nashville was released in 1975. That was sort of an annus mirabilis for American movies. The Academy Award nominees for Best Picture that year were Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon; Dog Day Afternoon; Jaws; Nashville; and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the winner). It was also the year of Fellini’s Amarcord; The Day of the Locust; The Man Who Would Be King; Shampoo; Three Days of the Condor; and one of my guilty pleasures, Ken Russell’s Tommy (that amazing music by the Who; those saturated over-the-top images by Ken Russell, a madman – Ann-Margret rolling around in those baked beans!).

Nashville is an examination of American culture and politics set in the country music capital. Altman weaves together the stories of 24 characters that converge in Nashville over five days. A presidential candidate, never seen but often heard as his campaign van roams the streets of the city blaring his inane populist rhetoric, provides the context that finally brings all of the characters together at a political rally. The film employs Altman’s trademark techniques of overlapping dialogue and an ensemble of colorful and vivid characters that ultimately merge in a sobering and insightful commentary on American society in the second half of the twentieth century. This is my favorite film from probably my favorite movie director.

Altman’s oeuvre includes Gosford Park, M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player, and Short Cuts among many others over a long career. They weren’t all great but Altman is one of those directors whose weaker works are more interesting to watch than many other directors’ strongest work. I was in Tuscaloosa when Alabama’s student programming film division did an “Altman Week” in 1979. The week of Altman films culminated in a visit to the campus by the director along with a screening of his latest film, A Perfect Couple. I got to interview him for a journal published at the time by the College of Arts and Sciences. It was a great week.

Prior to its release, Nashville was famously previewed by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, the best in the business and the most provocative writer to ever cover the movies. She wrote a breathless and over-the-top rave of the film that caused some people to love it and others to hate it before they had even seen it. Kael, a brilliant writer, was a divisive critic – you either loved her or loathed her – and if she was enthusiastic about a movie, she did not hold back. The same was true of movies that did not meet her standards. I read her reviews ravenously and did not always agree with her but on the subject of Nashville and its greatness we shared common ground.

I own a well-worn copy of the Nashville script by Joan Tewkesbury, developed from cast improvisations and her journals of “Music City,” but I have watched the movie so many times that the script is hardly necessary. It’s a brilliant patchwork of intersecting lives with poignancy and sadness but also with abundant humor that never ceases to amuse me.

The memorable cast includes a number of people making their film debuts. The Nashville cast almost seemed like family to me and for decades I would follow the career path of actors just because I had first noticed them in Nashville.

I have watched the movie many times and find myself anticipating my favorite lines and moments; many of them continue to make me laugh.

“She can’t even comb her hair,” Connie White (Karen Black) snarls about Julie Christie (playing herself in a cameo) when she is told that Christie is a “famous movie star.”

Ned Beatty’s delivery of the line “I think I’ll just boil me an egg” as Delbert Reese still cracks me up as does the scene in which Winifred – aka “Albuquerque” – played by the brilliant Barbara Harris, tries to explain the industrial revolution to her grumpy husband by talking about “those flyswatters with the red dot.”

There was a widespread misconception and rumor that Southerners hated the movie. I know people who didn’t care about the movie as much as I did, but I wasn’t aware of any particular backlash against it. There was resentment in the country music community around Nashville about the broad strokes with which some of the country singers were presented; Loretta Lynn reportedly was offended by the Barbara Jean character – perhaps because her story hit a little too close to Lynn’s personal narrative.

Altman suggested that the country music establishment was offended that he used original music instead of music by Nashville songwriters. Many of the actors wrote and performed their own songs and they are sometimes good-natured spins on popular country music themes. Still, I find the music to be clever and fun and cherish some of the most absurd lyrics. Actor Keith Carradine’s soulful ballad “I’m Easy” won the Academy Award for best song that year (the only Academy Award the movie received). Country personalities of the time are seen in cameos in the Grand Ole Opry scenes and there is a lovely moment when legendary country fiddler Vassar Clements is featured in striking close-up.

It is an oversimplification to say that Altman uses Nashville as a metaphor and microcosm for America in the 1970s, while Watergate is winding down and while the lessons of the ‘60s are sinking in. But that is exactly how the movie works. For Baby Boomers like me who grew up in the Cold War and with the social upheavals of the ’60s, with a regular diet of political assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War, Nashville – with its paranoia, cynicism, and, finally, its senseless violence, seems par for the course. It celebrates the American spirit and illuminates the American lie. Connie White purrs to a couple of young boys at the Opry, “I want you to study real hard because just remember anyone of you can grow up to be the president.” This, less than a year removed from Nixon’s resignation, inspires a single clueless audience member to clap, joylessly.

The climactic violent act of Nashville is senseless and meaningless and it is a fitting denouement to the decade we Baby Boomers, our parents, and grandparents had just endured. In her introduction to the published script, screenwriter Tewkesbury says, “… whatever you think about the film is right, even if you think the film is wrong.”