Dick Cooper

DICK COOPER

Photos courtesy of Dick Cooper

"I grew up around photography. My father was a photographer... I started working with the Birmingham Post-Herald as a reporter while I was going to Jefferson State Junior College, which led to me moving to the Decatur Daily and covering science and education. Then I moved to Scottsboro where I was one of the youngest managing editors of a daily newspaper in the United States at that time. Then I moved back to Decatur for a year, and then, in 1972, I moved to the Shoals as a general assignment reporter... You had to have a Sunday feature and it had to be turned in on Thursday. So I’m sitting at my desk Wednesday afternoon going, 'What am I going to write about? I know nothing about this town.' A photographer wanders through and says, 'Well, do you wanna go to a session?' And I didn’t know what a session was. He took me to FAME and I saw Mac Davis cut 'Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me,' which was a number-one record. So I wrote a feature story about that. And three-and-a-half months later, I started a music column, because that gave me my Sunday feature and it gave me license to hang around the studio."

Jerry Wexler and Dick Cooper

"Wexler befriended me, which was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn’t have been working for Barry Beckett if Wexler hadn’t told him to hire me. Wexler had been a newspaper writer himself. He worked with Billboard originally. He’s the one that coined the phrase 'rhythm and blues.' The charts had been called 'race records' before that. So I met him at this Gary Farr session. I was doing my column then. He invited me to join him for dinner, and we talked for a while, and he really liked me, just right off the bat. So when he came back to do the Willie Nelson record, I got pretty much full access. Then he came in and did the Barry Goldberg album, the one that Dylan co-produced. Bob said, 'Please don’t take any pictures of me.' And I wasn’t. But then Jerry comes up and says, 'That’s Bob Dylan! Go out there and shoot some pictures!' So that came off well, and that kind of cemented the relationship."

Bob Dylan and Jerry Wexler

"This is funny because they’re in the back of the studio while we’re listening to tracks. Wexler is, you know, a New York Jewish atheist. Bob is asking him, 'What chapters should I read in the Bible?' And Wexler literally is giving him chapter and verse."

Johnny Wyker and Dick Cooper

"That’s Johnny Wyker and me. He was more fun than the law allowed. Wyker was from Decatur, Alabama. He was a songwriter primarily. He had a band called Sailcat and they had a hit called 'Motorcycle Mama.' He was on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and dropped his guitar intentionally. He wasn’t much of a musician, but he was certainly a showman, and he was one of the principle reasons I got into music. We got to hanging around and riding motorcycles together. He wasn’t much of a motorcycle rider, either. He liked to hang out at the campfire. He would stand too close to the flames."

Jerry Masters

"One of the things that got me really bonded in the music business was motorcycles. And everybody had dirt bikes. Wyker started it. I got a Suzuki, and he got a Suzuki, and David Hood got a bike. So we’re going to these events and they’ve got all these team riders. You know, Suzuki had a team, Honda had a team. And on the back of that shirt it says 'Out-to-Lunch Bunch.' I was 'Chainsaw,' because I liked to cut up the woods. Wyker was 'Sailcat.' And he was 'Captain Audio.'"

Candi Staton at FAME Studios

"This is a Candi Staton session that was done by both Muscle Shoals Sound and FAME in 1974. The Muscle Shoals Music Association was Buddy Draper’s concept. He wanted to get the party back together. And he did a good job of it. Buddy and I were the ones that came up with the terminology 'The Hit Recording Capital of the World.' I was sitting in his office one day and we were talking about it. How do we get these guys back together? Yeah, they got mad at each other. They went their separate ways. But it was time for them to get back together. Then he came up with the idea. We needed an industry organization here in town. And while we’re talking I’m going through Billboard. 'We’ve got three songs on the charts this week… We’ve only got eight studios here and we’ve always got something in the top ten… I guess that makes us the hit recording capital of the world.' Buddy jumped all over it and two weeks later we got the signs."

Muscle Shoals Sound Studio B
"That was Norala originally. That’s what Quin Ivy called it. 'When a Man Loves a Woman' was cut in that building, and when he got that money, he went over to Broadway Street and built Quinvy. Before Muscle Shoals Sound built the place on the river, they started getting to the point where they needed a second room. So they rented that from Quin. He still owned it. That’s the day they opened this facility. The reason I’m there was this was my piano that I was leasing to them. It was my great-aunt’s originally."
The Muscle Shoals Horns

"I did my column for three-and-a-half years, and then they wanted to make me managing editor, but they wanted me to quit my column. I quit the paper instead to hang out at the studio and go to the line and get beer and tips. On the side, I’d already started doing promo packs for artists, with photographs and stuff like that... The Muscle Shoals Horns had put their first album out and that’s when I went to work with them. That particular session was over in Tennessee, I think. I believe that was a Jimmy Buffett thing they did in Murfreesboro. This was early ’75 and they went out on tour with Elton John in late ’75, early ’76, right after I quit working with them."

Pete Carr
"Pete Carr came along and offered me a job working for him, because he was putting out Lenny LeBlanc records, and Pete Carr records, and Eddie Struzick did an album. I did that and then I became a road manager for LeBlanc-Carr and did that for a year-and-a-half. And we were the opening act for Lynyrd Skynyrd when the plane crashed. This is at his house. I’m just sitting there talking to him. He’s fixing to put a guitar on something in his home studio, and he’s tuning the thing up while he’s talking to me."

Ed King

"Ed King and Ronnie Van Zant got into a big fight. King decided to leave Lynyrd Skynyrd, at that point in time, and he came to the Shoals to be a session guitarist. He was trying to make it as a studio musician, but Ed quickly discovered the difference between a performer who takes a great part and goes out and delivers it show after show, and a studio musician who must create that unique show piece moment for a different artist every week. Ed could certainly deliver on stage, but he quickly learned that the studio required a different mindset, and after about a month he left the Shoals and returned to Florida."

Ronnie Van Zant
"That’s Ronnie and it’s five days before the plane crash in October 1977. I ended up shooting LeBlanc-Carr that night. I shot two rolls of film and there were five shots at the end of the second roll that I shot Skynyrd with. And I got everybody that got killed except the road manager. This was in Miami, and we played two more shows after that, then they flew to Greenville and played a third show, and then the plane crashed... I’m checked into a hotel that I can’t afford to check out of. Our folks don’t know where we are. The management company all left New York and went to Mississippi and forgot we were in a hotel in Baton Rouge. We didn’t have any money. We did one Christmas show. That was the only thing we had for the whole band for money for two months, three months. We were scheduled to be with them until the end of December, then we were gonna leave that tour and go out with Journey come January. So all of those dates in between were gone. So we had to struggle until we got to the January dates with Journey. You take 30 dates, or 25 dates, out of the picture suddenly, you can’t replace those. You don’t have time to replace them."
John Prine, Rachel Peer and Barry Beckett
"This is a 1950 Crown. Prine drove it from Chicago, only on back roads, and he never got it over 35 miles an hour. When he did the Storm Windows album here, his girlfriend had come down from Chicago. He had driven down, and she had flown down. This was the last day. He’s got to finish writing this song, and he’s got to cut the track for it, and then the band can do it. So Beckett’s on him about it. 'Get back in there and finish that song,' you know. So I go to the office. I’m trying to get a bunch of girls to come over for a party that night for the band, a wrap party. So I’m sitting on the floor, and I’m going through the numbers, and I’m calling girls. So the second verse of the song is: 'I was sitting on the living room rug, looking at the numbers of the women that I thought I dug.'"
Barry Beckett
"That’s Barry in a nutshell. With a phone stuck in his ear."
Eddie Hinton

"He had a band called Eddie Hinton and the Rocking Horses that he went out and played with for about three years. It was a black band with him and his wife singing. And the van got shot at with a shotgun in the Carolinas. He had all kind of bad luck with that band. They couldn’t find a place to stay, so they were sleeping in the van half the time. A black band and a white singer just didn’t work all that well on the road. That was ’72 or ’73."

Jerry Wexler and Etta James

"I got to take her to meet her father for the first time. He was living at the Peabody. And you’ll never guess who he is! Minnesota Fats, the pool player. She asked me. I said, 'Sure!' She didn’t say a word during the trip. We get over there, I drop her at the door of the Peabody, and I go park. About an hour later, I'm waiting in the lobby when all of a sudden, the doors to the elevator open, and it looks like Tweedledum and Tweedledee silhouetted. They’re both the same size. So they waddle over to where I am, and she introduces me to him, and I’m just dumbfounded because I had no idea... and Fats was her father, no question about that. Then we drive back to the Shoals and she doesn’t say another word that whole trip back, which I can understand. She was just lost in thought."

Dan Penn, David Briggs and Spooner Oldham
"David Briggs is just one of the most awesome piano players. On some of the stuff that he did when he was doing demos, he does a left-hand bass line. 'Far from the Maddening Crowd' is the name of the song, and the demo is better than the final version. He does a left-hand part that is just so powerful. Randy McCormick almost did the same kind of thing in 'Old-Time Rock and Roll,' when he starts out. David’s thing was more powerful than that."
Alabama Shakes

"That was the night they got signed. They were playing at Pegasus, and Patterson Hood and I were in there. Patterson calls his agent and holds up his phone. And they signed them over the phone."


Sources:

Dick Cooper, interview by Brian Corrigan, April 5, 2018.