Southern comfort

As you can tell from Monday’s post, I’m kind of reveling in summer. Even here in the freakin’ every-day’s-another-day-in-paradise Valley they call Silicon, you can make a case for things being a little slower between July and September. At least around the edges of the frenetic display of unremitting innovative disruption by all those software rockstars and ninjas.

And I look for things around the edges.

So I’m glad that my local PBS station is showing the Independent Lens docu, Muscle Shoals again this week. I first saw it this spring, and I was mesmerized.

It’s all about the two recording studios that sprang up in the Alabama town that I’d previously only known as being part of the TVA. And it’s about the magic that was created in those studios for decades—jazz, rock, R&B, gospel, country, pop, blues. Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, Clarence Carter, Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, Wilson Picket, Taj Mahal, Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding, Etta James…they all recorded there.

This place has produced more gold than Peru.

The docu starts out with a shot of the Tennessee River—slow-moving and quiet, which is exactly the way the film seems to be going. If you’re accustomed (as I am) to not really giving full attention to your television, it’s even kind of somnolent. And annoying. For the first ten or fifteen minutes, I kept looking for something that was going to tell me a story, a narrator to ‘splain what was going on. It was starting to piss me off.

But in fact, there’s no central narration to the film. Director Greg “Freddy” Camalier lets the participants in the events tell their stories, which unfold gently and unhurriedly, just like a summer afternoon. You have to listen and you have to watch. I realized that just as I was fixing to zap it—even before any of the music started.

Because when Rick Hall, founder of FAME Studios, began talking about his early life, everything in my little Sunnyvale world just faded away, and I did not move until the show ended. Except to get up and dance a little now and then.

Okay, yeah—I could have done without Bono pontificating, like he personally invented jazz, rock, R&B, gospel, country, pop and blues, plus sliced bread and polio vaccine; but he does serve to remind us what a lot of bullshit goes on in the entertainment business. So suck it up a little and get back to all that wonderful music, and all those great stories.

See, this film really ends up packing a whole lot of both music and history into less than two hours of running time. Without predigesting it for you, or making you feel like you’re being instructed, like so many other documentaries. You feel like you’re drifting along, but at the end you realize how much you’ve really taken in, and how much better you feel for it.

If your PBS station isn’t rerunning Muscle Shoals, you can find it on iTunes and Amazon. It’s worth watching, especially on a summer evening.

If you can’t do that, here’s a companion playlist of many on Spotify. Pick any one you like, pick at random, whatever. Your heart will thank you.