John Spong: Did you do anything to prep for Willie?
David Hood: No. No. I mean, we never did with anybody. People would come in cold; we would hear the songs for the first time when Barry was writing down the chords to make our chord charts. And we would go in cold, and just cut it right then. And I mean, that amazes me to this day. And at the time, we didn’t really think anything about it. We just thought, “Well, that’s what we’re supposed to do.” But now when I look back on it, I think, “Damn, how’d we do that?”
John Spong: Well, it’s the way the Nashville guys did it too. Although they would typically be familiar with the artists coming in, and these guys had already worked with . . . I mean, Johnny Gimble was an old buddy of Willie’s, and so they knew what to do with him. And I guess . . . did they serve as translators for what he was doing, to an extent?
David Hood: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, if you were to take Johnny and the other guys off of it and just heard our tracks, they would sound like R&B tracks, almost.
John Spong: Interesting.
David Hood: If you took the country musicians off there.
John Spong: Well, and so how many days were y’all working on this?
David Hood: I think about three days.
John Spong: Wow. Would y’all have hung out with Willie after recording sessions? Or did y’all just go home?
David Hood: Yeah, we probably went home. We might have hung around a little bit, but there’s nothing to do here. That was the reason I think we got a lot of work done. It’s just a small town. And at that time, it was a dry county. You couldn’t even go get a drink. And usually, by the time we would get through working, we’d just all go home. Willie probably stayed at the Holiday Inn or the Howard Johnson’s. It’d be one or the other at that time.
John Spong: Did he have a big entourage, or did he come by himself?
David Hood: Oh, no. Came by himself. He was just like one of the guys. You know, Texas is not that far from Alabama.
John Spong: So, what was he like at that period? Because he’s not Willie Nelson yet. He’s clearly not a big star, and he’s not actually just had a whole lot of difficulty, and kind of obstacle after obstacle, trying to make it as a performer. But he’s just moved to Austin, he’s just added his sister to the band, Shotgun Willie‘s out, and that feels good. This may be too long ago to remember, but did he feel like he was in a state of flux? Or did he feel like he had some momentum? Or was he just an artist getting his thing done?
David Hood: I think he was an artist getting his thing done, but I think he felt very comfortable with us after he saw that we could play. When people first walk into the studio, and it’s just four white guys sitting there, they don’t know what we’re going to do. I mean, believe me, a lot of Black artists we worked with the first time, they’re thinking, “What? These guys are going to play on my record?” And he probably thought the same thing.
John Spong: It occurs to me, something I forgot to mention earlier, as we talk over Zoom about this stuff, where are you sitting right now?
David Hood: I’m in the control room of our original studio at 3614 Jackson Highway, in Sheffield, Alabama, which is the Muscle Shoals area. And the studio is called Muscle Shoals Sound. And when we bought the studio, we were trying to think of a name, and we thought Lone Pine, because there’s a pine tree in the parking lot. Came up with all these different names. And I said, “I know—Muscle Shoals Sound.” And everybody just laughed, because there was no such thing as the Muscle Shoals Sound at that time. But the next day we came in and said, “You know? That’s not a bad name.” And so that’s how it’s got its name.
John Spong: And so, then what? A couple years after that is when the Rolling Stones passed through and cut Sticky Fingers there?
David Hood: Actually, less than two years. It was, uh, ’73, I guess.
John Spong: But at any event, you’re looking through the window into the room where you cut Phases and Stages with Willie.
David Hood: And also, looking in the room where the Stones cut “Brown Sugar,” where Bobby Womack cut a bunch of his hits. The same room where Traffic cut Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory.
John Spong: Wow.
David Hood: Same room. It looks exactly the same way, too, because we restored it, and it looks exactly like it did in 1970, ’72.
John Spong: Oh wow. Who was in charge in the studio? Was Wexler?
David Hood: Wexler. Wexler. It’d be Wexler, and then Barry would make the chord charts. And we’d be listening while Willie was playing the songs down. And they’re all little bits and pieces, like Phases and Stages, the theme, and then he’d . . .
[Willie Nelson singing “Phases and Stages (Theme)”]
David Hood: And then, there goes another Phases and Stages. And it was all those little bits, and we had to cut them all together.
John Spong: But it sounds like he did have a pretty complete vision—that he knew what he wanted.
David Hood: Yeah, I think he did.
John Spong: Did you end up recording them in order, or do you remember?
David Hood: I don’t remember if it was in order, but it probably was, because that’s the way he played it down to us. I remember when we first heard “Bloody Mary Morning,” we thought, “Wow, now there’s a hit. That’s a hit record right there.” And also, we liked the one of “Little Sister’s Coming Home,” and “Down at the Corner Beer Joint.” Those were fun songs to us. Yeah.
John Spong: Well, yeah, that’s Texas dance music.
David Hood: Yeah.
John Spong: That’d be in line a little bit with that western swing that Wexler liked some much. Do you remember—did you get an impression of Willie’s guitar picking while he was in there? Because he played Trigger, not as pronounced or prominently as on other records, but he’s on guitar in there.
David Hood: Yeah, he is. And we thought, “Gosh, his timing is crazy.” We thought we had to be metronomes, and he was all over the place.
John Spong: I wondered, did he follow you or did you follow him, or did you just kind of try to tune him out when he was picking?
David Hood: Well, a little of both, I think.
John Spong: When I listen closely to this song, and to his vocal lines in particular, what he is singing has absolutely nothing—more than usual, even—it has nothing to do with the time signature of the song and what else is happening in the room. It’s amazing.
David Hood: Right. And for that reason, he was a little difficult to play with. And in some ways, he had to compromise and play with us. I consider Willie one of the better artists I’ve worked with, but he was definitely his own guy. He didn’t go by the book, necessarily. He wrote the book.
[Willie Nelson singing “Bloody Mary Morning”]
John Spong: Are you familiar . . . There’s a legend out there that after this was recorded—I don’t know what the legend is and what the truth . . . well, I think I know what the truth is. There’s this idea that Wexler took it back to Nashville, to Fred Carter’s studio there, and that they rerecorded some of it. Have you ever heard that, or do you know anything about that?
David Hood: Nah. I mean, the tracks on this album—it’s us. I mean, it’s us all over it. I think they might have tried to rerecord something, but the tracks that are on this album are us. I mean, that’s like hearing your best friend talk—you recognize their voice. Like I said, Roger and I tried to play as straight as we could, because we were used to playing rhythm and blues, and that was a different thing. So we were keeping it as simple as we could. Because to us, that’s the way country music sounded. It was very simple and straight ahead.
John Spong: Yeah. Well, yeah, it’s not the bass line to “I’ll Take You There,” anywhere on there.
David Hood: No. No. And it was about the same time. “I’ll Take You There” was the year before, but it was about the same time—in dog years, especially. It was just two years apart.
John Spong: Right. Actually, I found . . . If you look online, if you go digging, of course you can find anything online. There are ideas out there that maybe Willie took his own band into the studio in Nashville, and they rerecorded the whole thing. And I was like, “I don’t think so.”
David Hood: Well, what’s on this album is us, because I’ve heard the other versions of these songs. I thought, “Gosh, that’s not s—.”
John Spong: [Laughs] That’s exactly—
David Hood: I calls them as I sees them.
John Spong: No, that’s exactly where I was headed. I mean, I love this album. I love these songs, and they’re so familiar to me. And when I listened to the version that was recorded in Nashville—oh, my . . .
David Hood: Yeah. Yeah. Wexler sent me a copy of all that stuff. And I thought, “Gosh, those guys were nowhere.”
John Spong: Yeah. And this record—it’s kind of cool, because like you said, you guys were trying to play it straight, but also play it simple, and kind of stay out of the way and be more like a country thought. Well, one of the hallmarks of country music in those days was big strings, and choirs, and lots of stuff. And when they took it to Nashville, they made it sound like just another Nashville record from that period—and not a very good one, either.
John Spong: Let me see if I can find this, actually, because . . . I won’t ask you to listen to the whole thing, but—
David Hood: Good.
John Spong: That, I mean, it’s . . . My music folder. Let me see what I can do here.
[Willie Nelson singing alternate version of “Bloody Mary Morning”]
David Hood: Hooh!
John Spong: That piano—that’s terrible!
John Spong: Turn it off. How do you turn it off? It won’t turn off. Where’s it playing? I can’t get this thing to . . .
David Hood: That sounds like a real bad country music demo.
John Spong: It really does. Somebody should have gone to jail for that.
David Hood: Yeah. I’ve got all that stuff. Wexler sent me that stuff, and I’ve got it somewhere. It just sounds like really bad outtakes or bad demos to me.
John Spong: Yeah. It didn’t work. Well, and that’s the thing, because—and we talked about this on the phone before today—when Texas Monthly ranked all, at the time, 143 Willie albums, and now we’re up to 145, actually, we did—we picked Phases and Stages the very best Willie record ever released.
David Hood: Wow. That’s something. I’m flattered by that. I also see listed on here, Al Lester replaces Johnny Gimble on fiddle. Al was a barber here in town, and he played bluegrass music.
John Spong: What?
David Hood: He wasn’t even a full-time musician. Yeah. But we knew he was a good fiddle player, but he didn’t play on any of the records I played on. He played bluegrass, and he was a barber. That’s how he made his living.
John Spong: I had no idea. I wondered why I hadn’t seen him in many other credits, certainly not in any other Willie credits.
David Hood: Well, no, he wouldn’t be Willie, but we did work with him other times—but it was on stuff where we thought, “Well, let’s get Al to come in and play fiddle.” He was not one of the regular guys.
John Spong: Oh wow.
David Hood: But he’s probably the only person I knew that played fiddle at that time.
John Spong: Wow.
David Hood: You know, we may be two hours from Nashville, but we’re a million miles from Nashville. We’re much closer to Memphis in the music and the style.
John Spong: It’s interesting, because that’s what I’ve always thought, and that’s one of the other things that’s such a great accomplishment about this record. It’s its own thing. But that’s what y’all did. When people came in, you figured out what they were going to do, and you worked with them, and you worked in support of them, and you got it.
David Hood: Yeah. It was a golden era in my life, I think. And I’m a little too old to be trying to do that again, but I’m really proud of what we accomplished.
John Spong: Would you say that this record ranks up there with the best records that came out of your studio?
David Hood: Yeah. Yeah. I would. I mean, it’s different from, say, the Staple Singers, or Aretha Franklin, or Bobby Womack, obviously, but I think it’s just as good a record as any of the other things I’ve worked on, or is maybe one of the best. And I’m very proud of what we did. I’m not bragging. I’m really proud of it. It wasn’t a hit. If it’d been a hit, I’d really be bragging about it. But I wouldn’t have made any more money. A musician, a sideman, like me, we make union scale, and that’s it. It’s over.
John Spong: Right.
[Willie Nelson singing “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling In Love Again”]
David Hood: Well, I’ve enjoyed this. It made me research what we did with Willie. And like I said, 1973—there’s a lot of water under the bridge since then. But I enjoyed going back and looking this stuff up.
John Spong: Well, hopefully it made you proud, because it really is a special thing, and y’all did it.
David Hood: Well, it does make me be proud, because it’s, like I said, one of my favorite albums that I’ve worked on, out of almost a sixty-year career.
[Instrumental clip of “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling In Love Again”]
John Spong (voice-over): All right, Willie fans. That was the legendary David Hood, telling us all about “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling In Love Again.” A huge thanks to him for coming on the show. A big thanks also to our sponsor, White Claw Hard Seltzer, and a big thanks to you for tuning in. If you dig the show, please subscribe, maybe tell a couple friends, and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and give us some stars. Oh, and please also check out our One By Willie playlist at Apple Music. And be sure to tune back in next week to hear none other than Norah Jones talking about one of her favorite old Willie cuts from the early sixties, “Permanently Lonely.” . . . We will see y’all next week.
