Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham begin Moments From This Theatre, their in-concert collection of chamber soul, with "I'm Your Puppet". The tempo is unhurried but insistent, with Penn's voice sweet and soulful, his gently picked acoustic guitar brushing up against Oldham's Wurlitzer electric piano. The offhand artistry of the performance derives from decades of friendship and a long history of collaborations, encouraging fans of vintage rhythm & blues to close their eyes and turn back the years.
It's 1966, and James & Bobby Purify, a couple of cousins from Florida, have come to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record at Rick Hall's Fame Studios. Penn and Oldham had been woodshedding for years, writing songs and cutting demos during the late-night hours when the studio was empty. They'd gotten a number of songs recorded as B-sides, but Penn hadn't had a real hit since "Is A Bluebird Blue?" charted for Conway Twitty in 1960.
Preparing for the Purifys' session, producer Don Schroeder listened to a number of Fame demos and picked out "I'm Your Puppet". The authors were already in the studio: Penn was engineering and Oldham was on piano, alongside Barry Beckett (organ) and his colleagues in the crack Fame band: Jimmy Johnson (guitar), David Hood (bass) and Roger Hawkins (drums).
"Frankly," says Penn, "I didn't care much for the way they were doing it, but I'd learned enough not to say anything. But when it came out and was a big hit, I loved it; still do."
The Purifys' version of "I'm Your Puppet" rose to #6 on the pop charts, and while Penn has fond memories of getting an initial check for $4,000, he mostly recalls feeling great relief that he'd finally scored his second hit. More were on the way.
Moments From This Theatre -- which came out in England in 1999 but recently received its first U.S. release on Proper Records -- collects the songwriting team's greatest hits, including Penn/Oldham songs recorded by the Box Tops ("Cry Like A Baby" and "I Met Her In Church"), Percy Sledge ("It Tears Me Up"), Janis Joplin ("A Woman Left Lonely"), and the Sweet Inspirations ("Sweet Inspiration"). Then there are the two oft-covered classics written by Penn and Chips Moman, "The Dark End Of The Street" and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" (the definitive versions recorded by James Carr and Aretha Franklin, respectively). Add Penn's "You Left The Water Running", cut by Otis Redding, and Moments From This Theatre serves as a veritable dictionary of soul.
These are songs of such enduring power that they seem to have been born in a distant galaxy, and in a way, they were. Imagine Alabama in the days before the Voting Rights Act, and consider the implication of white musicians backing black singers during the tense, violent days of the civil rights movement. Think of Arthur Alexander in 1961 cutting "You Better Move On", the first national hit recorded in Muscle Shoals, with Spooner Oldham overdubbing the organ part. The tune would soon be covered by the Rolling Stones, while the Beatles grabbed onto another Alexander tune, "Anna (Go To Him)".
"They shared common experiences with the black artists they played with," says Jerry Wexler, who famously brought Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to record in Muscle Shoals. "They all walked with the same mud between their toes."
Wallace Daniel Pennington was born on November 16, 1941, in Vernon, Alabama, but by the time he arrived in Muscle Shoals, he'd shortened his name and was fronting a band called Dan Penn & the Pallbearers (the group traveled in a hearse). The repertoire was strictly rhythm & blues. "When I wasn't Ray Charles or James Brown, I was Bobby 'Blue' Bland," Penn told Peter Guralnick in his book Sweet Soul Music. "There was no such thing as Dan Penn then. It was 'Here comes Bobby "Blue" Penn.'"
Lindon Oldham was born on June 14, 1943, in Center Star, Alabama, a perfectly-named hometown for one of the most famous sidemen in rock and soul. His dad played mandolin and sang harmonies with his two brothers. Lindon took piano lessons in junior high, though not for long. "I quit after Miss Garner hit my hands with a wooden ruler," he says. Then he started playing in bands.
The nickname "Spooner" came from a schoolmate's taunt when he learned that as a young child, Lindon had reached for a frying pan only to have a spoon flip in the air and blind him in his right eye. By the time he met Penn, Spooner thought the name was cool, not cruel, though he later worried that people assumed he was a coke freak.
"When we first sat down and started writing, we liked each other, and that's a good start," says Penn. "But after night after night of writing, this chemistry kept building. Now if we sit down to write or play, we can almost read each other's mail, we've done it so much. When we play, that's as close to the '60s as you can get, when we were at the Fame studios, because there'd be nobody there but us."
By day, Spooner would play on demos and recording sessions, including another early Muscle Shoals hit, "Steal Away", by Jimmy Hughes. Rick Hall had hired Penn as a staff songwriter, but Penn also hung around the studio to watch Hall run the board. When he was otherwise engaged, Hall would turn the recording console over to Penn.
The music business is littered with sad stories of songwriters who were duped out of their publishing, but Penn and Oldham were lucky. "I knew absolutely nothing about publishing when I started," says Penn, "but by 1961, when I started writing for Fame, I didn't need to, because I had a publisher. I wrote them, they published them, and I ain't saying I got every penny, but I don't go around thinking that I was screwed. We were just trying to keep writing, and I figured if I write well, I'll make good money. I wrote pretty good, and I made pretty good money. Even in the early days, I was getting 25 dollars a week, what else did you want? I was playing on the weekend and making 50; that's 75, and my dad wasn't making but 50 in the plant."
The days and nights of recording were also making Oldham a subtly accomplished sideman. The Fame band, like the Stax house band in Memphis, was famous for its ensemble approach to recording; this was very different from the way Atlantic created R&B records in New York, where jazz-seasoned musicians played written arrangements. By contrast, the southern players created head arrangements on the inspirational fly.
For example, when Wexler brought Aretha Franklin to Muscle Shoals, Oldham was hired to play acoustic piano, but when he heard Franklin's gospel-styled accompaniment to "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)", he instinctively moved to an electric instrument. A few minutes later, he came up with the distinctive lick -- Penn calls it "the three-fingered dumb hum" -- that kicked off one of the most memorable records of the soul era.
Oldham's early session work was also highlighted by a late 1964 session for perhaps the most popular soul ballad of all time, Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves A Woman". "Percy's at his first recording session," remembers Oldham, "and he's singing his heart out. And I was having my first experience with this shiny red Farfisa organ that had a multi-tone booster that sounded like a thousand bumble bees, and another setting that had the nice, smooth sound that I settled on."
Penn was anxious to produce records, and after the success of "I'm Your Puppet", he moved to Memphis to work with guitarist/producer Lincoln Wayne "Chips" Moman at American Studios. Penn had met Moman when he'd come to Muscle Shoals to play on a Wilson Pickett session, and the two strong-willed music men became all but inseparable. They collaborated on a total of six tunes, four of which are long forgotten (including a couple composed with Oldham and another two with Moman's frequent writing partner, Bobby Gene Emmons). By contrast, the two credited just to Penn/Moman -- "The Dark End Of The Street" and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" -- are unforgettable.
The circumstances behind the composition of these modern standards are almost absurdly off-the-cuff. "The Dark End Of The Street" was written when Penn and Moman, who got the nickname "Chips" because of his love for playing poker, took a break from a card game. "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" was composed after Moman's wife served a particularly delicious dinner of quail. The song became the B-side to Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)", with Penn writing the tune's bridge during Franklin's one-day session in Muscle Shoals.
Franklin is also among the many who covered "The Dark End Of The Street", including the Flying Burrito Brothers (who also recorded "Do Right Woman"). The most unusual version was cut by Clarence Carter, who tacked a single verse to the end of a soulful recitation titled "Making Love At The Dark End Of The Street". Not long ago, Penn nearly fell off his chair when he heard Garrison Keillor treat the song like a Lutheran hymn on "A Prairie Home Companion".
Penn finally got his chance to produce when Moman passed along a local rock group called the Box Tops featuring a 17-year-old singer named Alex Chilton. Penn chose a song called "The Letter" that he'd found on a Wayne Carson demo tape, and added the noise of a jet plane to the fade. Moman hated the sound effect and, according to Penn, was scarcely seen around the studio for the four weeks that "The Letter" was #1.
Success put pressure on Penn to prove his production debut wasn't a fluke. He begged his old friend Spooner to come to Memphis and help him write a hit. They spent long, late nights getting nowhere until, just hours before the session, they gave up, locked the studio, and went across the street to a cafe called Porky's.
"So we're sitting in this booth staring at each other," says Penn, "and Spooner puts his head down on the table and says, 'I could cry like a baby.' I said, 'What did you say?'" They stayed up all night writing, but according to Penn, were "fresh as daisies" when the musicians arrived in the morning. After all, they had their song.
There's a poignant irony about the success of the Box Tops, for the blue-eyed soul singing that Penn coaxed out of the young Chilton flew up the charts, whereas Penn's own stabs at recording went nowhere. Over the years, Penn had released a handful of singles under his own name and such handles as Lonnie Ray, Danny Lee, and Brother Lee Love. Nothing clicked, and by the time Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, the easygoing, cross-racial scene that had nurtured the era of southern soul was as dead as King's dream. (Penn finally released an album in 1972 called Nobody's Fool, but it received little notice or acclaim.)
Oldham split for Los Angeles in September 1969 and was introduced around town by his friend Chris Ethridge, who played bass in the Flying Burrito Brothers. He quickly found himself recording with such emerging Southern California talents as Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne.
"You have friends who have friends," says Oldham in a voice that's as laid-back as his keyboard style, "and word spreads if they like what you do." Word spread to, among many others, Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, Maria Muldaur, the Everly Brothers, Roger McGuinn, Willie DeVille, J.J. Cale, and John Prine, not to mention Liberace. More recently, he added keyboards to the Drive-By Truckers' 2003 disc Decoration Day at the request of Patterson Hood, the son of Fame bassist David Hood. Oldham, who played on Neil Young's acoustic-oriented albums including 1978's Comes A Time, 1992's Harvest Moon and the new Prairie Wind, will be seen in the concert film Jonathan Demme shot of Young performing his new album at Ryman Auditorium.
Oldham books his own sessions, and says he's not that picky if the pay is right and his schedule is open. There's no preparation involved. "Usually what happens," Oldham explains, "is that when I hear the song, I'll talk to the producer or another player and say, 'What do you hear? Piano? Organ?' The artists I've worked with can usually sit down with a guitar and give you a good picture of a song. So I try to key into that and embellish it with what I do. It's all about the song, and all about the performance."
Penn had a tougher time adjusting to life after the heyday of southern soul. Old Fame colleagues like Donnie Fritts moved into country music, playing keyboards for Kris Kristofferson, but Penn wasn't cut out for Music Row. "I had trouble with country when it was good," he says today, but the real issue was that R&B had changed. "We were country R&B," Penn says. "Then it got more city, and in the '90s, I don't know why they even called it R&B. I wish I could stay current, but I decided a long time ago that, 'Hey, you can't stay up with it, baby, so just hang back here and do your thing.'"
Penn and Oldham had long noticed that European and Japanese audiences were informed fans of soul, just as they are of jazz. "Back in the '60s and '70s, they wanted to know who wrote the songs and who played on this," Penn recalls. "It wasn't just a star trip, like in America; it was about the making of the record."
Peter Guralnick is an American author with a foreigner's curiosity, and the 1986 publication of Sweet Soul Music was a valuable addition to music literature. When the paperback was reissued in 1991, it encouraged the release of some more great soul music. First Guralnick and Joe McEwen, an A&R man with a passion for R&B, produced a revelatory compilation called Sweet Soul Music: Voices From The Shadows. Then Penn and Oldham were enlisted to back Arthur Alexander on 1993's Lonely Just Like Me, a fine album that was released months before the singer's death. Finally, McEwen got Penn in the studio with his old Fame buddies to cut the excellent Do Right Man, a 1994 collection that confirmed Penn just might be his own best interpreter.
It was perhaps no coincidence that this revival came after Penn had kicked some long-standing problems with drugs and alcohol. It wasn't the first time he had turned to the Lord for help; early on, he'd briefly quit music to work in Bible store.
"Something very strong was hitting me back in '81," he recently told Crossrhythms, a Christian music magazine, "and I haven't forgotten how lost I was. I came to the end of my rope and I knew that was it. I had one foot over the grave, or I felt like it...but one prayer and he was there."
Lest one worry that the born-again Penn has lost his sense of humor, he tells the same interviewer, "I sometimes pray for a song, and I say, 'Lord, if you can't give it to me, give it to my co-writer.'"
Not long after the release of Do Right Man, Penn's new record-biz friends encouraged him to go see Nick Lowe when he played Nashville. "He came up to me," says Lowe, "and said, 'I'm Dan Penn,' and gave me a card that identified him as a 'writer.'" Lowe was charmed, and soon Penn and Oldham were engaged to open a series of dates in the British Isles.
"They really helped people to get my newer, low-key style, just hearing Dan and Spooner play these songs in this very undercooked way," Lowe acknowledges. "And if you've got ears, it's mesmerizing, and not just a couple of old blokes mumbling. Or, as Dan jokes about hearing one night, 'Who are these old guys singing covers?'"
Moments From This Theatre was drawn from those 1998 dates, and Penn has been busy ever since. He produced an Irma Thomas collection in 2000 called My Heart's In Memphis: The Songs Of Dan Penn, and he started building Dandy Studio in the basement of his Nashville home. Just this year, Penn has produced Bobby Purify's Better To Have It (he also wrote all but one of the songs with Carson Whitsett and Hoy Lindsey, the same trio that wrote the title tune for Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up On Me), the Hacienda Brothers self-titled debut, and Greg Trooper's Make It Through This World. Frank Black recorded Honeycomb in Penn's basement, with Penn as engineer and Oldham playing keyboards.
"What drew me to Dan was that I wanted a more rhythm section and organ driven kind of sound," says Trooper. "It also didn't hurt that Do Right Man was still in heavy rotation in my CD player." He says Penn's best advice was to sit down while he sang. "He said, 'Once you stand up, you start performing,' and he was right, because when I sat there and read the lyrics, it took away some of my self-consciousness, and got me closer to the songs."
Penn also brought his old friends to the studio to cut a record called One Foot In The Groove by Donnie Fritts, who's lately gone through both heart surgery and a kidney transplant. The disc has yet to find a label, but one suspects the musical amigos gathered in the basement for reasons other than mere commerce.
"There ain't no friend like an old friend," says Penn, who's been married to his wife Linda for 43 years. "They can make you mad, maybe, but you get glad, because they're your old friend. Me and Spooner and Fritts have known each other for so long that they can just walk in a room and I'll warm up."
John Milward sings with the Comfy Chair, a Hudson Valley band whose repertoire includes "You Better Move On", "I'm Your Puppet" and "The Dark End of the Street".
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