I was pleased with the way the recording went but I hadn't thought of it as single material. "My bass player was picking out the tune at a session one day, and it sounded good, so we decided to do it. "I just did that as an album track," replied Wilson. (There were giants in those pre-Pro Tool days.) It's not an easy choice. Sometimes it's difficult to believe that there was a time when the dichotomy between Motown's "Hitsville" assembly line pop and Stax's grittier "Soulsville" sound seemed real and important when it seemed important to debate the merits of Marvin Gaye's effortless, soaring falsetto versus Pickett's blast-furnace wail. But whether or not Pickett was a bad man in the moral as well as the soulful sense hardly matters at this juncture. Then back to Alabama, to work with Duane Allman where they covered "Sugar, Sugar" and "Hey Jude." But Pickett must have been a troublemaker - they called him "Wicked Pickett," he was arrested at various times during his career for drug and gun violations and in the 1990s he went to jail after hitting and killing a pedestrian while driving drunk. Cropper says he never had any trouble getting along with the "famously difficult" Pickett, and he's sorry he didn't get a chance to play on "Mustang Sally." Pickett would come back to Memphis near the end of 1967, to work with Tom Dowd and Bobby Womack. 4 R&B hit "Don't Fight It." All told Pickett would cut nine tracks with the Stax house band before wearing out his welcome (or maybe it was a business deal) in Memphis and shifting his base of operations to Alabama - to Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. The next day, Pickett went in the studio with Wexler and the band banged it out, along with three other tracks, including the No. Cropper, in a five-paragraph essay included the Rhino Handmade set, remembers writing "In the Midnight Hour" with Pickett in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly after meeting him for the first time. on drums, and horn players Wayne Jackson, Andrew Love and Floyd Newman). Recorded at Memphis' Stax Studios where he was backed by the legendary house band (Steve Cropper on guitar, Duck Dunn on bass, Al Jackson Jr. That's a good place to start Pickett's first really big hit, a song everybody knows or ought to know, and one that's defined by the singer's lungful attack. He was a blues shouter who - in producer Jerry Wexler's memorable words - "could shout on pitch." Pickett's been dead for four years, and probably beside the point for 35, but if you've ever heard him, you remember his voice, his one-of-a-kind, freak-of-nature, gospel-gonegutbucket instrument: Gonna wait 'til the midnight hour, that's when my love comes a tumblin' down. These days, singers are often built in labs - any fashion model or celebutante can be pitchshifted into a semblance of pop perfection.īut let's not pretend that Wilson Pickett was ever a pop singer he was never that innocuous - he sounded like a blowtorch feels. As pop music has become more and more a producer's game, with human instruments increasingly whipped into bland sweet meringue, we've become used to ice-slick processed vocals. Still, relatively few voices transcend the ordinary. All of us sound different all of us are biometrically branded by the sounds we make. At the very least, one's voice is also a product of one's experience, learned habits of enunciation and, some might say, aspiration and desire. On the other hand, there is a mysterious, emotional component to the equation: Every human voice is unique, a product of the individual's physical attributes - the shape and size of one's larynx, tongue, chest and nasal cavities, lips, teeth and throat.
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So who would need - or even want - a six-CD collection of Pickett's studio work from 1962 to 1978 with a $100 (actually $99.98) price tag? Well, maybe not that many Rhino is offering only a limited number of Wilson Pickett: Funky Midnight Mover - The Atlantic Studio Recordings for sale through its Rhino Handmade imprint (rhinohandmade.
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A nice career, but if you look at the stats, no better than a lot of '60s-era soul singers. He had a bunch of R&B hits, a few that crossed over to the pop charts. Pickett's cover of the Beatles' "Hey Jude" introduced Duane Allman's guitar virtuosity to the world (and Allman's vamp on that song pretty much provided the template for what we now call Southern Rock). "In the Midnight Hour," with its simple I-IV chord structure is a favorite blues night jam-along. "Mustang Sally" seems to have become a favorite period signifier for some film directors.
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(You'd be wrong, but you could make the case.) There are only a few of Pickett's songs that seem to retain any relevance beyond golden oldie status today. You can make the case that, in the scheme of things, Wilson Pickett is a fairly minor figure in the history of American popular music.