Posted on 01/13/2017 9:52:37 PM PST by nickcarraway
In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett
By Tony Fletcher
Oxford University Press, 320 pp. $27.95
It was October 13, 1966, and Wilson Pickett was pissed off. And as friends, bandmates, producers and girlfriends knew, you did not want to piss him off. Not for nothing was he referred to — and reveled in — his nickname as “The Wicked Pickett.”
At Rick Hall’s storied FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Pickett and his crack band had just laid down a definitive, smoking take on a little tune about a girl who loved her car more than her man. But before they could listen to the playback, someone in the studio hit a wrong button and the tape careened off the machine, breaking into dozens of tiny pieces.
“There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone looked at the fruits of their perfect take, cast across the studio like so much aural confetti, before Pickett unleashed a serious flash of the temper that he generally kept under control in the recording studio,” Fletcher writes here of the take that all in the room felt was “the magic one” that couldn’t be improved upon.
Fortunately, studio owner Hall and producer Tom Dowd sent everyone out for lunch, and painstakingly put the take back together using the razor blades and tape that were de rigueur for splicing in those pre- ProTools times. And thanks to their calm efforts, “Mustang Sally” — Pickett’s most recognizable tune, now playing somewhere at a wedding or dance party as you’re reading this — was saved.
In this, the first-ever biography of "the Wicked Pickett," music journo Fletcher traces the personal and professional life of the volatile singer through new interviews with bandmates, family members and archival comments from its subject, along with rare family photos. Fletcher had the blessing and cooperation, but not oversight, of Pickett's estate.
And while the premature deaths of his contemporaries Sam Cooke and Otis Redding have made them bigger names in accepted music history, Pickett should rightfully be mentioned in the same breath for sure.
After an early start with doo-woppers the Falcons, Pickett’s raw, gritty shouts and screams made him one of soul music’s strongest artists in the ’60s and early ’70s. Besides "Sally," his string of hits included “In the Midnight Hour” and “634-5789,” both recorded at Stax studios in Memphis, plus “Funky Broadway,” “Land of 1,000 Dances” and “I’m a Midnight Mover.”
Later he would also inexplicably find crossover success with cover versions of pop and rock tunes, from the Archies' lightweight “Sugar, Sugar” to Vanilla Fudge’s heavy take on the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On.” But none was more artistically successful than his powerhouse turn on the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” which was still on the charts. The proto rock-soul tour de force was cut at the unlikely suggestion of Pickett’s studio guitarist at the time – Duane Allman. “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” and the chugging "Engine Number 9" could stand with his earlier classics.
So what happened to Wilson Pickett? Why didn’t he get the late-career respect and accolades contemporaries like James Brown, Sam Moore and Lou Rawls did? There are plenty of reasons, and not for nothing is a recurring theme of this book “he was his own worst enemy.”
While he was still capable of putting on killer live shows, his spotty recording career from the mid-’70s onward was pitiful. Utterly ill-suited to join the disco bandwagon or for smooth and synthy ’80s R&B, he released half-hearted records with a revolving-door cast of band members and producers who increasingly did not want to work with him.
Personally, he alienated and insulted all sorts of people with his violent, bitter temperament and sizable ego, exacerbated by his increasing use of drugs and alcohol and fondness for waving guns. Physically, he would beat a litany of girlfriends (though he was married), children and even fellow performers with impunity.
He once forced his 14-year-old son to do cocaine with him while ostensibly giving a talk on the birds and the bees. He missed his own 1991 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and possible comeback-making performance after refusing to come out of his house when the limo came to collect him. Then there were two stints in jail for drunk driving, drugs and weapons charges in his middle age.
Wilson Pickett would clean up (somewhat) in the late ’90s, continue to perform live (often on oldies package shows and cruises), deliver one last decent record and appear among other ’60s soul survivors in the concert documentary Only the Strong Survive. He died of a heart attack brought on by debilitating health in 2006 at the age of 64.
The unique performer, the complicated man and the brute bully all come together in one here. And — in the words of the women he occasionally shared the stage with — Wilson Pickett gets his R-E-S-P-E-C-T in book form, finally.
I agree completely. So many of these R&B acts are treated as icons, but in reality make music that is virtually un-listeable or mediocre. Look at James Brown, for example. Or Sly Stone. Or even BB King.
I was looking to see if someone posted exactly what you posted. The story makes no sense. Even if one of the reels was seated incorrectly on the deck, and even if the wrong button was FF or RW, which is the only likely possibility, and even if for some reason one of the reels jammed somehow and the other went flying somehow, there would be a pretty easy fix on any product - one repair if that.
Remember how we used to do loops, after all, with your buddy down the hall, a pencil and the “mobius” reel?
LOL I still have my Otaris.
Strange... Why would big stars use such poor quality tape? Ampex 456 in 1/4” was the thinner tape we used but it was tough stuff and I know they made that tape in reels as big and expensive as 2”. (Right?) I never worked with it but I saw the reels... I never touched the cheap stretchy crap that came from the ad agencies, etc. Why would a “rock star’s” engineer?
I still have reels of 400 with bloopers and programming. Now if I could just find a working Ampex quad machine....
Wilson Pickett - I Found A True Love, Mono 1968 Atlantic 45 record
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP3tSZxIeA8
Wilson Pickett - Silver Bells
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u3iCoolJEE
Yes, I remember that old magnetic tape could go brittle, but I’ve never seen it break like glass, which is what the author seems to be claiming.
Perhaps the tape snapped when the make-up feel fell off the spindle. That would have required a single splice to fix.
I think someone’s exaggerating.
Should say, take-up reel.
Darn autocorrect!
Exactly. I figure one break at most in that scenario. An easy fix for any competent engineer.
Somebody's exaggerating the hell out of that story.
Interesting that you’ve got working tape decks at all. Most consumer grade machines that I’ve run across in recent years are kaput.
Most cassette tapes you find are also too degraded to play, unless they’ve been kept in a secure box of some type. I’ve got 25 year old session copies that still play alright, but I no longer have a decent playback machine.
I had most of them transferred to CD a few years ago to preserve my work.
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Its not the cassettes themselves that are degraded, its the capstan wheel whose rubber has oxidized to the point that the tape sticks to them, thus destroying the tape if you attempt to play it.
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Just amazing. They've got themselves convinced that Trump is going to deport every immigrant (legal or not), reinstitute Jim Crow, revoke all environmental laws and regulations, shut down the mainstream press, roll back the whole gay agenda, secretly enrich himself and his companies, and open up every square inch of federal lands to the evil oil companies. And for good measure, he may even lock up all his critics on the left.
They're suffering from self induced mass hysteria.
I do a lot of books on tape when I travel. Get them at Half Price Books for $2.99, only get unabridged ones.
Is that actual cassette tape?
The closest I’ve come is seeing 1/4” on a machine with a run away reel motor that got stuck in FF or RW whipping itself into a few small pieces. But it involved a highly unusual combination of factors. Repairing it only involved a razor blade for the purpose of trimming the edges of the splice, though, the pieces were just stuck together in whatever irregular shape the break left them in.
But, yeah, no shattering. The author’s padding the story.
Quadtapexfer.com
In quad videotape, Ampex once made a machine that used a vacuum column to handle tensioning. It used a series of light bulbs opposite photo cells to keep track of how far the tape had been sucked into the column. When one of the light bulbs burned out, the machine’s logic would freak out and put the feed reel into rewind and the takeup reel into fast forward. You’d be sitting there minding your own business, then suddenly hear the motors torque up, followed by a loud snap as the tape got pulled tight against the spinning quad heads and cut in half.
It only took us a couple of those experiences before we replaced the light bulbs with LEDs.
Thanks, I didn’t think any of these machines were still around. I have some awesome outtakes from the old Dallas TV show. Larry Hagman was the master when it comes to breaking up the crew. It’s on the same reel with Sam Donaldson getting thrown out of the White House. Priceless stuff.
I second this. Outstanding documentary!
My oldest, now a senior in college, has many stories like these from the days following the election. Hysterically funny, but sad as well. He just laughs at the people.
He was once called the “token conservative” by one of his profs and just laughed at her.
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