The Wurlitzer That Wrote the Record

Muscle Shoals, Alabama. January 24, 1967. Rick Hall's FAME Studios. Aretha Franklin, twenty-four years old and fresh off six unhappy years at Columbia, is sitting at the studio piano working out an aching thing called "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" — a song a Detroit songwriter named Ronnie Shannon had walked into her sister's house months earlier and offered to her flat. Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic producer who signed her and bet the label on the trip south, wants an intro on the record. He turns to the Wurlitzer chair.

The player in that chair is Spooner Oldham, twenty-three, a farm kid from Center Star, Alabama, who spent his childhood listening more than speaking and had lately been the electric-piano voice on Percy Sledge and Wilson Pickett sides. He is not the star. He has been paid to hold pads and stay out of the way. He sits, for a while, and does nothing. Then he starts hunting — a descending figure across the Wurlitzer's tremulous voice, a phrase that sighs into itself as if it had already been in the air and he was only naming it. Wexler leans back. Aretha begins the song where the intro leaves her.

By the end of that day the session had come apart. There was a fight in the tracking room over a racial insult; Ted White, Aretha's husband, had been drinking; Rick Hall came in swinging late and made it worse. Aretha and Ted flew out. The next morning the studio was empty. Wexler had one song in the can, no B-side, no album, and a plane ticket to reassemble the Muscle Shoals players in New York inside of two weeks to finish the record.

What he already had was enough. Enough because Spooner's intro was not decoration. It was the arrangement. Everything the record wants to be — the pleading, the confession, the resignation — is announced in the seven seconds before Aretha opens her mouth. Released in February, it climbed to number nine on the pop chart and number one on R&B. It was the record that finally told America she was Aretha. And the shape of the record — its opening, its heartbeat, its permission to be sad — was written by a session player nobody had asked to write anything.

This is the part of the studio that gets missed in the mythology. The producer chooses the room. The arranger chooses the changes. The writer chose the song weeks ago on a couch in Detroit. But the record — the actual object that goes to tape — is often written in the seconds between "let's try one" and the downbeat, by a player who was hired to fill a chair. The chart says pad. The player hears a hook and decides, quietly, to play it. Everyone else adjusts. That is how a song becomes a record.

The best sessions are built around this possibility. Hire players whose ears go past the chart. Book the studio for longer than the tracking would seem to require. Then leave enough silence in the count-offs for them to hunt. The next time an intro on a record you love feels inevitable, look up who was on keys. It was probably a first take by someone who had not yet spoken all day.