In 20 to 30 years when all the stories of blues, early rock and early R&B and soul have been told, rock documentarians will be forced to look away from this golden age to the music scene of today. No doubt they’ll find less of the “magic” that was apparently everywhere in the good ‘ol days, but they might start looking for a new way to depict the recording process of today as special.
“Muscle Shoals” is a rock-doc about a small Alabama river town and the legendary music that inexplicably was recorded there. Everyone from Mick Jagger to Aretha Franklin to Bono speaks of the “Muscle Shoals Sound” and the special “something” that they discovered and achieved there. But following along those ambiguous terms, “Muscle Shoals” becomes a formless history lesson and appreciation rather than a documentary worth remembering. It’s a dry and familiar doc in the worst ways and needs a new outlook for how to frame this unique cultural moment.
Here in this beautiful, pastoral, Southern slice of Americana, everything is described in spiritual, figurative terms. No one is quite sure what makes this place alluring, but they all say it has “something”. Some even believe the Native Americans’ old story that it’s the only place in the country where the river actually sings (the other is supposedly in Liverpool and spoke to The Beatles).
Frankly, the platitudes get tired quickly, and Director Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier finds little drama with which to set inside Muscle Shoals and its musical history. It seems as though the real magic behind Muscle Shoals was not the river, the food or the scenery but the small town record producer Rick Hall and his house band The Swampers. Continue reading “Muscle Shoals”