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Fact #151660

When:

Short story:

Dusty Springfield begins recording tracks with producer Jerry Wexler in American Recording Studio, 827 Thomas Street, Memphis, Tennessee, USA, which will appear on her album Dusty In Memphis.

Full article:

VINYL ICON

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD - DUSTY IN MEMPHIS
by Johnny Black

In 1967, despite international success and her status as the UK's undisputed queen of blue-eyed soul, Dusty Springfield found herself stifled by the career path she had settled into.

Instinctive and idiosyncratic at heart, she found British studios clinical, and longed for what she perceived as the more creative approach of the American music establishment which had nurtured her heroes, women like Aretha Frankin, Martha Reeves and Dionne Warwick.

"America," Dusty once declared, "was the place I'd always dreamed of as a girl. It was where the music came from."
The albums she was recording with Philips in the UK were unsatisfactory and increasingly cabaret-oriented. A chance meeting at her Bayswater apartment block with Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, provided the springboard she needed. "I played him Some Of Your Lovin' and he said, 'If you ever get free of your obligations elsewhere, come to Atlantic.'"
Although hardly a major star in the USA, Dusty had enjoyed success there with I Only Want To Be With You, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me and Wishin' And Hopin', so she wasted no time in negotiating a new dual-company deal, whereby the New York-based Atlantic would oversee her recordings for the USA, while allowing Philips to retain management, recording and distribution rights elsewhere. She also made sure the contract stipulated Atlantic's Vice President, the legendary Jerry Wexler, as her producer.
When Wexler invited her to record with the ultimate r'n'b session team at Chips Moman's and Don Crews' American Recording Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, it sounded like a marriage made in heaven.
However, warning bells sounded from the outset. At a pre-planning meeting in Wexler's Long Island home, she rejected every one of the 100 songs he had chosen for her to consider. There was, however, a binding contract, so Dusty and Wexler eventually whittled the list down to twenty possibles, and set a date to start recording.
In September 1968, Dusty arrived at 827 Thomas Street in Memphis, and found a disappointingly dilapidated and battered building in an impoverished black part of town, just around the corner from the Sun Studio where Elvis Presley had made his first recordings.

The dream team assembled by Atlantic included Wexler himself, engineer Tom Dowd, arranger Arif Mardin and a superlative session crew including drummer Gene Chrisman, organist Bobby Wood, pianist Bobby Emmons, guitarist Reggie Young, bassist Tommy Cogbill and The Sweet Inspirations on backing vocals.

But when sessions began on September 26, Dusty found their modus operandi quite disturbing. She was used to huge London studios, complete with orchestra and meticulously planned musical arrangements. In Memphis, however, "It was like a house band and they would just sort of make it up, basically." She later recalled recording Windmills Of Your Mind, a track with which the band was unfamiliar and which she didn't even want to sing, saying, "It caused absolute mayhem in the studio trying to get the chords right. Originally it was very much faster and I slowed it down so it would be more organised."

Jerry Wexler, however, was adamant that she should record it, and so they soldiered on. It became one of many tracks where the instrumental parts were completed in Memphis, but Dusty's final vocal performances had to be overdubbed in New York.

Dusty's discomfort in Memphis was exacerbated by a feeling that she couldn't match up to the standards of her heroes. "I remember going into the studio and Jerry would say, 'That's where Aretha Franklin stood, right there,' and consequently I stayed frozen the entire time I was in Memphis."

In another interview, she described the situation as being, "paralysed by the ghosts of the studio! I knew I could sing the songs well enough, but it brought pangs of insecurity. . . that I didn't deserve to be there."

She also quickly realised that she didn't have the control she was used to wielding in London. "All the hit records I had in England," she told Rolling Stone magazine in 1973, "were found, produced, almost promoted by me. I never took any credit. It wasn't fashionable for women to have credit. Now it's very fashionable. But I did the whole bloody lot myself!"

In Memphis, however, Wexler was in charge, and veterans like Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin knew exactly what they were trying to achieve. Dusty's role was to deliver performances, but that proved exceptionally difficult.
Terry Manning of the NME was privileged to visit Dusty in the American Recording Studio once the sessions were underway, and found her, "in the control room munching from a box of Vick's menthol cough drops". It was only years later that Dusty revealed, "I was so crippled with laryngitis they could only record me two or three words at a time."
Unaware of Dusty's insecurities and her poor health, Manning dutifully reported that while Dusty was recording, Tom Dowd remarked on how, "Recording Dusty reminds me of recording Jack Bruce (of Cream). You never quite know when she is satisfied with her performance. With Eric (Clapton) it's just 'Yeah Eric,' or 'No, Eric,' but not Dusty. She has an intelligent opinion and you must respect it."
Dowd later revealed that the team was as disoriented by Dusty as she was by them. "She had her hairdresser, John Adams, with her, and she'd have her hair blown, dried and cut every day." Her appearance, said Dowd, was so Southern States that, "people were flabbergasted when she opened her mouth and it wasn't a Southern drawl."
Nevertheless, the Memphis team displayed determination and patience above and beyond the call of duty, making the sessions as comfortable as possible for Dusty, who responded by delivering some remarkable performances. "I think the highest and most sure I've ever sung is on the fades [of] some of the Memphis songs . . . they're stratospheric! I've never hit them again. I don't know how I did it. I just loved the songs so much that I'd probably take a . . . stand about ten yards from the mike and run up to it, come out with it."
Those songs included the Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill gem Just A Little Lovin', the Carole King ballad So Much Love and Randy Newman's I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore, but the album's high point, and most successful single, was Son Of A Preacher Man - a track that had been offered to - and turned down by - Aretha. Bobby Emmons, who played Wurlitzer piano on the track, recalled, "The fact that Dusty was a white British girl gave it the extra little spice. The sound of the song, with low chords that rang, made it dark and mysterious."
Although they worked long and hard in Memphis, Dusty later admitted that the bulk of her vocals were not completed there. "We cut the tracks in Memphis but most of it was done in New York," she confessed.
"After we did the tracks," confirmed Arif Mardin, "we added the Memphis Horns down south and, up in New York, I arranged strings and woodwinds. Somehow, the combination worked."

Despite her health being rather better and her frame of mind improved, Jerry Wexler described those final vocal overdub sessions at Atlantic's New York studios, as "excruciating" because of Dusty's perfectionism, which he rightly recognised as a symptom of her insecurity.
Dusty In Memphis was released in the USA on January 17, 1969, and in the UK on April 18, but although greeted by ecstatic reviews, the album did not immediately find favour with the buying public. The single, Son Of A Preacher Man did reasonably well, but the album itself was a financial flop.
"Everybody loved it except the damn public," recalls Wexler. "It sold 100,000 copies in America before Ahmet Ertegun deleted it. Maybe he did us a favour in terms of our reputation, giving the record a rare status."
Dusty herself maintained a low opinion of the album, telling Adam Sweeting of The Guardian in 1990 that, "It's become rather an over-rated classic. It's not as if it's some magnificent work of art. It's a good record."
There are many who beg to differ. Over the years, Dusty In Memphis has come to be regarded as the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, and it still crops up regularly in polls and charts of best albums ever.

PRODUCTION NOTES

American Sound Studio at 827 Thomas Street in Memphis, Tennessee, had been founded in 1965 by producer, guitarist and songwriter Chips Moman, a former Stax Records mainman. The studio became hugely successful in 1967 after producing The Box Tops' massive international smash The Letter and, by the time Dusty entered the studio, it was also famed for such hits as I Never Loved A Man by Aretha Franklin and Memphis Soul Stew by King Curtis.
As a result, it was now the go-to studio for major labels, keen to benefit from its distinctive sound and top-notch house band, The Memphis Boys.
In an era during which ever more complex production sounds were being pursued, American was distinctive for the minimalist aspects of its backing tracks, where simplicity and feel were favoured over gigantic washes of noise.
"I hated it at first," admitted Dusty. "I had come from thundering drums and Phil Spector, and I didn't understand sparseness. I wanted to fill every space. I didn't understand that the sparseness gave it an atmosphere."
Wexler, however, was in hot pursuit of precisely that quality. "There had been a tendency with star singers to record the tracks first, and then the singer would come in and lay their tile in the picture," he explained. "I abhorred that, as the artist would have no part of the creative process. I wanted the interplay of singer with rhythm section, with the musicians taking cues from the vocalist."

Ironically, Dusty's anxieties about working in American Sound meant that Wexler was obliged to do exactly the opposite, crafting the tracks in Memphis, then moving to Atlantic in New York to overdub her final vocals.

Wexler has revealed that, when he tried to get Dusty to sing over the tracks which were being played to her through headphones, "she insisted we crank up the track so loud it was physically painful. There was no way she could hear herself - it was like she was singing into a void, projecting an interior monologue. Like she was totally deaf and asked to sing from aural memory. The thing was - and this shows what a gifted, idiosyncratic artist she was - she sang perfectly in tune. Her pitch was miraculous."