Amazing recording - reading about it is just as amazing. If I recall, they had Duane playing in the bathroom at one point.
I saw Boz in Syracuse in the early 80’s, and he didn’t sing that live anymore. He explained that when he did so, people would throw dimes on the stage, and short out the amps. LOL. Great concert, tho. Saw him in Atlantic City a few years ago excellent, but he didn’t sing Lend Me A Dime.
ZZ: You had to put him in the toilet during ‘Loan Me A Dime’ didn’t you?
Boz: That track was one of the only tracks where we had all the musicians in the studio at the same time, where they were all blowing away. We had five horn players, and the whole rhythm section and Duane’s style - the way he gets his sound - is to wind up that energy level, and he sounds really loud. Now the other cats use tiny little Fender amps, that’s just the way they play. And they freaked when old Duane cranked his guitar up, so we had to move him into the other room otherwise he would have filled up the whole room and his stuff would have leaked onto all the other tracks. So we put Duane’s amplifier in the bathroom, no actually we put Duane himself into the toilet which was only about as big as this table - 3 by 3. And he was crammed in there with his headset and amp, and just wailed away. And man he played... wheeeeew.
Also, there’s a 40 minute version somewhere:
ZZ: I remember when you were over here a couple of years ago you told me that the track was a jam, and that it was a very rare thing to hear those Muscle Shoals cats to that.
Boz: We came to the end of the number and they knew that they were going to do it. The drummer, Roger Hawkins, said “Lets break into a slow boogaloo, and play out the chords and just have a jam,” and we were going to let it just fade out, like just a sniff of what we were doing. And they broke into a little boogaloo, and the little boogaloo broke into a slow shuffle and the slow shuffle turned into a swinging shuffle and they just went right on. And Duane started soloing, and Barry Beckett started soloing and they just took it from there. Rarely do they come back in to listen to the playbacks, I mean those guys have been in the studio for years and they don’t have to go back into the room to listen, they know what they’ve played. But they came in to hear what they’d played. And while they were listening to it they were looking at each other and going, “God, man” and grinning at each other. The first time we did it it lasted 25 minutes, and everyone thought it was such a gas that they trouped back in and did it again and it ended up with about 40 minutes of “Loan Me A Dime” and we wanted to use at least 20 minutes of it, but we had to use the shorter version, but that music is in the can somewhere in Muscle Shoals, and Duane was really rockin’ out.