Historic Muscle Shoals Sound Studios Closes

Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, at which artists including the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger recorded classic songs, has closed. The studio, owned since 1985 by Malaco Records, closed last month; a film production company is in the final stages of purchasing the building.

Musicians Jimmy Johnson, David Hood, Barry Beckett and Roger Hawkins, known collectively as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, founded Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., in 1969. A Rolling Stones session at Muscle Shoals featuring sideman Jim Dickinson, who played on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” is featured in the film “Gimme Shelter,” which documents the band’s 1969 U.S. tour.

In 1978, the facility moved to a 31,000 square-foot building, also in Sheffield.

Malaco Records principal Wolf Stephenson explains that he and his partners were more interested in acquiring Muscle Shoals Sound Publishing, a catalog that includes “Old Time Rock & Roll” and “Torn Between Two Lovers,” than the recording studio. “To be quite frank with you,” Stephenson tells Billboard, “the only reason we bought the studio was, the banks we were dealing with wouldn’t loan us the money on the publishing company; they didn’t have any idea what it was. It was just a stack of paper to them.”

The two-room facility was used extensively by Malaco artists, Stephenson adds, but the last four years saw a sharp decline in outside projects. “When computer and hard-disk recording really got cheap and better at the same time, it just knocked the socks off a lot of studios, [Muscle Shoals] included,” he says. “It was just a very difficult thing to compete with.”

Muscle Shoals was put up for sale on Internet auction site eBay in 2004. The asking price of 650,000,ドル which included the building, property and equipment, yielded no serious offers, Stephenson says. The studio’s two Neve consoles have been sold to studios in Detroit and Los Angeles.