RBM Features Archive | DJ Playlist    

Dan Penn: Anonymous Genius

Raised in Vernon, Ala., a rural town about 100 miles south of Muscle Shoals, Dan Penn grew up listening to Ray Charles, James Brown, and Bobby "Blue" Bland. Penn's reputation as a songwriter was secured when one of his early compositions, ‘Is A Bluebird Blue?’ was a hit for Conway Twitty in 1960. Dan also led a local group, the Mark V, which included David Briggs (piano), Norbert Putnam (bass) and Jerry Carrigan (drums). Also known as Dan Penn And The Pallbearers, these musicians later formed the core of the first Fame studio house band. Their subsequent departure for a more lucrative career in Nashville left room for a second session group, among whose number was pianist Spooner Oldham. Over the next few years, Penn's partnership with this newcomer produced scores of excellent southern soul compositions, including Out Of Left Field, It Tears Me Up (Percy Sledge), Slippin' Around (Clarence Carter) and Let's Do It Over (Joe Simon) and Dark End Of The Street, a classic guilt-laced ‘cheating’ ballad, successfully recorded by Aretha Franklin, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and by the Commitments for the film of the same name.

Like so many other white kids growing up in the '50s, Penn first heard black music on Nashville AM station WLAC. He had a transistor radio that he listened to at night, when he should have been fast asleep. "I've always had good ears," he recalls, "so I would have the volume turned so low that somebody could be in the room and not even know it was on. When I ran across WLAC, it was like 'WHOA! Back up!' They were playing a blues record by Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, or somebody like that whom I had never heard."

By the late '50s, Penn was a working musician in Muscle Shoals, where he worked at Rick Hall's Fame Studio, and by the mid-'60s he'd relocated to Memphis, where he worked at Chips Moman's American Recording Studio. "I was just a buzz all of the time -- looking for the next song. It paid off; I mean, I got a fair catalog from that. I just wrote songs, wrote songs, wrote songs, cut records, wrote songs. I would drag on for three nights, whatever I needed. Then I would crash for three days and get up and do it again."

Penn had been up for two or three nights when he wrote and produced "Cry Like a Baby," a hit for the Box Tops in 1968. He'd just produced the group's No. 1 record "The Letter," and the label, Bell Records, expected a quick follow-up. As the recording date drew closer and closer, he still didn't have a sure thing pocketed. With his butt on the line, he called on Spooner Oldham to help him create a hit song for the coming session.

"We tried for two or three nights to come up with something," Penn recalls. "We couldn't come up with nothin'--no lines, no melodies, nothin'. Finally, we became so frustrated that we gave up. I suggested that we get something to eat and call it a night. We went to Porky's, across from American Studios, and put our order in.

"We were feeling real bad. Could I come up with a song? Could I produce another hit record? It was eating me up.... So we're sitting there in the booth feeling dejected, and out of the blue Spooner leans his head over on the table and says, 'I could just cry like a baby.'

"When he said that to me, it was just like somebody hit me with a bolt of lightning. I said, 'What'd you say, Spooner?' He raised up his head, looked at me, and said, 'I could just cry like a baby.' I said 'That's it, Spooner. That's what we've been looking for.' Just as quick as I said that, he was hip to it too.

"We told 'em to keep the food. We gave 'em some money and told them to keep the change--it didn't matter. We started heading across the street to the studio at 3:30 or 4 in the morning. Halfway across the street, we've already got the first line: 'When I think about the good love you gave me, I cry like a baby.'

"By the time I got the electricity of the sound board up, Spooner was cranking the organ. I threw on a full reel of quarter-inch on two-track and we wrote it as we demoed it. This is just hours before the session. After we finished, we didn't leave the building. Then here comes the guys at 10 a.m., and Spooner and I are fresh as daisies. We just got us more cigarettes and coffee. We woke right on up and cut the record."

As the '60s turned into the '70s, the good feeling of soul music's heyday faded rapidly; as Penn remembers it, Memphis basically shut down after Martin Luther King's assassination. An emotional, physical, and spiritual wreck, he eventually made his way to Nashville.

"I hit the wall pretty good, so I had to back off," he says. "I was stimulating myself with amphetamines, anything, to stay up at night. It was fun, but it was deadly.... I couldn't be still. I couldn't relax. I was always looking for the next song."

These days, Penn is taking it much easier, working on cars and spending time in his garden. In his kitchen hangs a framed adage: "When life deals you a lemon, make lemonade." The refrigerator is stocked with non-alcoholic beer. With so many years of hard work and hard living behind him, he doesn't worry so much about keeping up with the music-biz hustle. "I don't particularly look for the next song," he says. "I figure it's going to find me."

That said, he does remain dedicated to his craft, and he doesn't see that changing anytime soon. "I still live, eat, drink, and sleep music the way I did in Muscle Shoals and Memphis," he observes. "But I got a life now."
 

  RBM Features Archive | DJ Playlist