大象传媒

Musician and journalist, Bob Stanley, traces the wild life and career of Wilson Pickett.

You don't end up with a nickname like 'the Wicked Pickett' by accident - seemed to fall out with at least as many people as he charmed during a career that gave him 38 US Hot Hundred hits, including immortal party anthems , and . He used to start each day at the studio with a scream - startled songwriter Don Covay remembers asking Pickett what on earth he was doing. "Trying to get last night out of my mouth," replied Pickett.

His hoarse shouts and cries gave him a distinct, intense sound, even given the calibre of contemporaries like Otis Redding and James Brown. Pickett was from Alabama, born in a tiny town called Prattville. He was happy to get away from the rural south at the earliest opportunity, heading to Detroit with his father when he was 14 in 1955. There he joined the Falcons, who scored a US hit with the beautiful proto-soul You're So Fine. As a solo act, he signed to the Double-L label and had a first hit with the moody If You Need Me (US no.64) in 1963. But it was when he signed to Atlantic in 1965 and recorded at the fabled Stax studios in Memphis that things really picked up: staying at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King would be assassinated three years later, he wrote In The Midnight Hour and 634 5789 with ex-Falcon Eddie Floyd and guitarist Steve Cropper. The former gave him his biggest UK hit reaching no.12 in the autumn of 1965, nine places higher than its US peak.

Kicked out of Stax after a few short months, Pickett headed to Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama at the behest of Atlantic's Jerry Wexler. Arriving as a sharp dressed northerner in a hound's tooth coat in May 1966, he was shaken up by the antiquated sight of black cotton pickers. "I said to myself, I ain't getting off this plane, take me back north" he told writer Peter Guralnick. But Pickett stayed around, and with producer Rick Hall he cut Mustang Sally at his very first session; Land Of 1000 Dances (US no.6, 1966) and Funky Broadway (US no.8, 1967) gave him his biggest ever hits. Don Covay remembered going out drinking in Muscle Shoals with Pickett, something that would invariably lead to trouble: "We always kept the Rolls running for that quick getaway!"

When Muscle Shoals tired of Pickett's mood swings he recorded in Miami (including an unlikely cover of , a US hit in 1969) and then Philadelphia with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff for a string of early seventies hits (including Engine Number Nine and the terrific, pleading ). But, sweet as they are, of course they are beyond the remit of SOTS.