Auburn to Outback; Birmingham Bowl taps Florida, East Carolina
Alabama celebrates its SEC Championship win over Missouri.
It’s been a crazier-than-usual week for football in Alabama …
• For the 6th consecutive year, a team from the state will be battling for the national championship. No. 1 Alabama (12-1) faces No. 4. Ohio State (12-1) in the Allstate Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day in New Orleans.
The winner faces either No. 2 Oregon (12-1) or No. 3 Florida State (13-0) on Jan. 12 in Dallas.
Alabama beat No. 16 Missouri 42-13 Saturday in Atlanta for its 24th SEC Championship. Hueytown native and persistent troublemaker Jameis Winston led Florida State over No. 12 Georgia Tech 37-35 in the ACC title game.
• No. 19 Auburn (8-4) will head to Tampa, also playing on New Year’s Day, for the Outback Bowl, facing No. 18 Wisconsin (10-3).
• South Alabama (6-6) will play in Montgomery’s inaugural Raycom Media Camellia Bowl on Dec. 20, taking on Bowling Green (7-6).
• In the Naming Sponsorship Still Available Birmingham Bowl on Jan. 3, Florida (6-5) will battle East Carolina (8-4). The Gators are making their first trip to this bowl, while the Pirates lost to South Florida in the first then-called PapaJohns.com Bowl in 2006.
• Mobile’s GoDaddy Bowl will have Arkansas State (7-5) in its fourth consecutive appearance Jan. 4. The Red Wolves won two out of three times and will face Toledo (8-4), last in the bowl in 2005 beating Texas-El Paso.
• UAB will not go bowling. The Blazers finished 6-6, with slim hopes of a bowl bid turned even slimmer by Tuesday’s announcement that the program was kaput.
• The 66th annual Reese’s Senior Bowl takes place Jan. 24 in Mobile. The South leads the series over the North 29-26-3.
The following chapter is an excerpt from Birmingham author Carla Jean Whitley’s “Muscle Shoals Sound Studio: How the Swampers Changed American Music” [aff. link]. She is managing editor of Birmingham magazine, a freelance writer and a journalism instructor at the University of Alabama and Samford University, plus a good friend.
In this excerpt, Whitley shares how the Rolling Stones snuck in a recording session in Muscle Shoals in between stops on its 1969 U.S. concert tour.
• • •
The Rolling Stones
“I know I’ve dreamed you a sin and a lie I have my freedom, but I don’t have much time Faith has been broken, tears must be cried Let’s do some living after we die Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”
— “Wild Horses,” Rolling Stones
They really weren’t supposed to be there.
The Rolling Stones pulled in to Sheffield, Ala., on Dec. 2, 1969. Two nights earlier, they had wrapped a thrilling performance in West Palm Beach, Fla.
The band had a few days of downtime before their next big show, the soon-to-be-legendary Altamont performance in Los Angeles. The free show drew 300,000 fans to Altamont Speedway, and it was the site of four births and four deaths, including a stabbing death committed by a member of Hells Angels just in front of the stage. But before they went on to make rock ’n’ roll history on Altamont Speedway, the band hoped to sneak in a little recording time.
There was a problem, though: Union complications and back taxes meant the Rolling Stones weren’t actually supposed to be on a working vacation. Not that it stopped anyone. Part of the appeal of recording in the Shoals, after all, was its out-of-the-way location, and the Stones had been assured their visit could be kept secret. A band could show up with British accents and flamboyant style and still go unrecognized.
After all, Muscle Shoals Studio was a nearly unknown entity. The owners had a little backing and plenty of talent, but there was only one hit to the fledgling business’ credit: R.B. Greaves “Take a Letter, Maria.” Cher’s “3614 Jackson Highway,” the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section’s first attempt at working with a well-known artist under the auspices of its own studio, was a commercial nonstarter.
But the Rolling Stones, newly signed to Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic, were something else. The British invasion had been dominating American airwaves, and the Stones’ most recent album, “Let It Bleed,” was an emotional release that elevated the band from its previous work (and briefly knocked the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” out of the top spot on British charts).
With the Beatles on the cusp of releasing their final album, the Rolling Stones were arguably the best band in the world. And the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section was prepared. Jimmy Johnson was at the ready with the studio’s Scully eight-track machine primed to roll tape whenever the band was set. That’s exactly what occurred during the Stones’ 3-day residency at Muscle Shoals Sound. The band spent the majority of its time in the studio, playing out its kinks before launching into new material.
“The Stones came in, and they were a little rusty at first because they hadn’t been practicing on account of the tour,” Johnson recounted to BMI in 2009.
So the band would spend the first several hours of work on any particular song ironing things out, and Johnson would be poised. On Night One, they recorded “You Gotta Move,” a cover of a Mississippi Fred McDowell song. A review in Rolling Stone magazine would later cite this track as an album highlight, especially because of Mick Taylor’s electric slide guitar and [Keith] Richards’ acoustic guitar and harmonies.
The band and session musicians spent most of Day Two ironing out wrinkles in their sound before settling in for the second evening’s task. This time, as tape began rolling, the now famous strains of “Brown Sugar” filled the former casket factory. The Chuck Berry-inspired song clocked in at 490 on Rolling Stone’s list of the Top 500 Songs Ever Recorded.
In that list, the magazine wrote, “Here the Stones lay waste to a battery of taboo topics — slavery, sadomasochism, interracial sex — and still manage to be catchy as hell. The song got its start at a session at Muscle Shoals studios: [Mick] Jagger scrawled three verses on a stenographer’s pad, and Richards followed with an impossibly raunchy riff. Add some exultant punctuations (“Yeah! Yeah! Woo-o-o!”) and you have a Stones concert staple.”
Day Three was equally — if not more — successful. At one point, Keith Richards began ruminating over what would become the song “Wild Horses.” His son had been born 4 months earlier, which made being on the road difficult. After Richards jotted down the chorus in the studio’s small bathroom, Jagger polished the lyrics. He left only one line of Richards’ original work, but it sticks with listeners: “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”
Between Richards’ inspiration and Jagger’s finesse, the Rolling Stones walked away with what would go on to become one of the band’s signature songs. Richards added a guitar riff, and “Wild Horses” was born.
Richards heard Jim Dickinson, a Memphis studio musician whose sons Cody and Luther are now two-thirds of the North Mississippi AllStars, noodling around on an old piano in the building as the band worked up the song. After Richards commented, Jagger declared Dickinson should play on the song — and so he did.
“I got on ‘Wild Horses’ because Ian Stewart, their regular piano player, wouldn’t play minor chords,” Dickinson later recalled. “In the meantime, they wouldn’t be saying anything to me, but I knew I had to get the very best performance when it happened,” Johnson said in the BMI interview.
“After a few takes of ‘Wild Horses,’ Jagger just looks up at me and says, ‘Is that it?’ — like I’m the producer or something! But I knew when they had it — and I just told ’em to come out and hear it back.”
Sure enough, the song went to No. 28 on charts, and “Brown Sugar” hit No. 1. Andrew O’Hehir wrote on Salon.com that the songs represented a new sound for the Stones — and one they never again created. Rolling Stone ranked the song No. 334 in its list of the 500 Best Songs of All Time.
“Richards wrote this acoustic ballad about leaving his wife Anita and young son Marlon as the Stones prepared for their first American tour in 3 years. Stones sidekick Ian Stewart refused to play the minor chords required, so Memphis musical maverick Jim Dickinson filled in on upright piano at the Muscle Shoals, Ala., recording session for ‘Sticky Fingers,’ ” the magazine wrote.
Despite the Stones’ sometimes colorful reputation, they were professionals in the studio. In his autobiography, Jerry Wexler noted, “As producers, they knew exactly what they wanted and how to get it. Their musicianship really came into play in the studio process. They controlled their craft and ran the whole show with dead-on direction. I was confabulated.”
Nights later, when the Rolling Stones performed at Altamont, Jagger introduced the newly recorded “Brown Sugar.” While the three songs the band taped during those 3 days all became part of “Sticky Fingers,” the Rolling Stones’ first No. 1 album in the United States, “Brown Sugar” remains one of the band’s most enduring songs.
And though the recording session would produce the band’s first stateside smash, it wasn’t as though the Stones were unheard of in Alabama. Even so, as the band lounged in the median of a Tuscumbia highway, watching and waving at passersby, locals seemed to accept them as nothing more than a passing curiosity. Bands weren’t unusual in the Shoals, after all.
But had they been recognized, having the Rolling Stones in town would have been newsworthy indeed. Imagine if the residents had realized who the odd-looking out-of-towners actually were!
• • •
Carla Jean Whitley has two book signings for “Muscle Shoals Sound Studio”: Books-A-Million’s Brook Highland location [map] from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday and its Brookwood Village location [map] from 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 14.
“Muscle Shoals Sound Studio” (July 2014, History Press)
The Alabama Theatre’s 2014 Holiday Film Series starts next week: 11 days, nine movies and a few cartoons. Plus, the Mighty Wurlitzer will lead the audience in Christmas carols before each screening.
Movies start at 7 p.m. unless otherwise noted.
All shows are $8, except “The Polar Express” which is $12 (fund-raiser for Kid One Transport; includes conductor’s hat, candy and photo with Santa). Tickets available online through Ticketmaster and at the door.
The Alabama Theatre is located at 1817 Third Ave. N., downtown [map]. For more information, visit the website or call (205) 252-2262.
White Christmas
Dec. 12 and Dec. 21 (2 p.m. matinee): Fred Astaire said no. Donald O’Connor dropped out because of Q fever (thanks, Francis the Mule!). So we got Danny Kaye. Oh, and Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas” in a movie for the third time, because … Bing.
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The Polar Express
Dec. 13 (10 a.m. and 2 p.m. matinees): Creepy Tom Hanks is creepy.
Also, from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., children can try out the hands-on modes of transportation exhibit outside.
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It’s a Wonderful Life
Dec. 13 and Dec. 20:Shout out to the commenter who likened UAB’s dismantling to a “Pottersville-type vision.”
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Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
Dec. 14 (2 p.m. matinee): Kris Kringle fails to produce his long-form birth certificate, but is saved when the President issues an executive order on illegal immigration.
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Christmas Vacation
Dec. 15 and Dec. 22, plus Dec. 20 at midnight … and bonus screening on Dec. 23: Kids, National Lampoon totally used to be a thing. First a humor mag, then books, albums, radio shows, plays and movies. Marvel should totally do plays, by the way. “Iron Man 4: The Importance of Being Awesome.”
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Home Alone
Dec. 16: Two entrepreneurs scrape by in a depressed economy, thwarted at every turn by a bratty, privileged suburban kid who expresses himself through lashing out.
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Scrooged
Dec. 17: Every Christmas TV episode is either “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” (I guess “The Gift of the Magi” has been retired). This is the best version of the former with Bill Murray.
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Elf
Dec. 18 … and bonus screening on Dec. 21: The four main food groups — candy, candy canes, candy corns and syrup — were based on the actual FDA recommendations at the time in 2003.
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A Christmas Story
Dec. 19: If you’re gonna watch the 24-hour cable marathon of this movie, you’re gonna need to warm up first.
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Cartoons
Dec. 20 (2 p.m. matinee): A triple-feature …
“A Charlie Brown Christmas”: Can’t wait to see the big screen CGI remake of this (rolls eyes) …
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”: Bullies are the worst, y’all.
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas”: He dropped football, bowling and rifle.
Blazer tight end Kennard Backman leaps as UAB faces
No. 18 Marshall in its final home game.
Author’s note: In the past, I have worked in my capacity as a communications consultant for the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
•
Summary: After the loss of its football program, UAB must fire its president and leave the UA system to avoid future calamity.
Dec. 2 would have been a news-filled day without the end of UAB football, and bowling, and rifle.
• Pat Sullivan, a beloved Auburn quarterback and 1972 Heisman winner, stepped down as Samford’s football coach after seven seasons. He turned around a program even as he battled health issues.
• Charles Krulak announced his retirement as president of Birmingham-Southern College, ending in May. His 4-year service brought about a remarkable turnaround for a school drowning in a surprise $67 million debt. Before coming to Birmingham, Krulak served as U.S. Marine Commandant general and MBNA vice president.
UAB would see its own share of departing coaches and a different kind of turnaround from its leader.
Dr. Ray Watts, barely 22 months into his tenure as president, has forged an ugly legacy. He has done so through his unwavering service to the University of Alabama system trustees, rather than UAB’s students and employees, not to mention Birmingham proper (that bothersome B in UAB).
Watts managed to murder UAB football, after a history of 23 years, a 117–150–2 record, plus one bowl game. Caught in the crossfire were UAB’s bowling and rifle teams. He pulled the trigger, and the board of trustees gave him the gun.
UAB is the only FBS school in 19 years to drop football; University of the Pacific ended its program in 1995. Twenty schools have added football or moved up to FBS in that period, including Troy (which welcomed a new coach Monday) and South Alabama (headed to the first Camellia Bowl, Dec. 20 in Montgomery).
His leadership has been laughably disastrous, and UAB should find a way to oust him as soon as possible.
Some saw the warning signs earlier. Justin Craft, a former UAB player and member of the UAB Football Foundation, sounded the alarm in a Nov. 5 letter. New coach Bill Clark, who would lead the team to a 6-6 record and a possible bowl game, wasn’t being considered for an extension on his paltry 3-year contract; no non-conference games beyond 2016 were being discussed.
Watts met with Craft on Halloween, but Craft said he received no definitive answers from Watts about the program’s future.
Watts’ public statement offered no hope, referring only to a consulting firm’s report (below) that would determine football’s fate.
Over at Samford, Sullivan leaves a hero as the all-time leader in victories and a string of winning seasons. Attendance hovered just under 5,000. The Bulldogs made the FCS playoffs in 2013, the first time in more than 20 years.
Clark pulled off his mini-turnaround in a single season without an on-campus stadium, without an indoor practice facility (Mayor Bell and the UAB Football Foundation offered to foot the $10 million bill), without the support of UAB’s top official.
In seeing a couple of UAB games over the years as a guest of the university, I remember talking with then-president Carol Garrison at the tailgate party. She has chatted up guests at the pre-game receptions, talked to the squad in the locker room and graced the luxury box at Legion Field.
Watts, to anyone’s knowledge, hasn’t been to any of this year’s six home games at rickety old Legion Field, where attendance more than doubled.
Video: UAB president Ray Watts meets the football team
(perhaps for the first time) to kill the program.
Samford, of course, is a private institution with autonomy and lower expectations in the FCS division. UAB is part of the UA system, represented on a board with only four UAB alumni out of 15 members (the rest UA alums), though UAB brings in three times the revenue.
On Saturday, UAB beat Southern Miss on the road for its sixth win, becoming bowl eligible for only the second the fourth time in program history. The Football Writers Association of America gave the Blazers its Big Game National Team of the Week award.
On Monday, hundreds of student protestors marched to the administration building and demanded answers. Watts’ campus parking space was vacant. Watts, in hiding from his own students, offered a statement nearly identical to the one from a few weeks before.
On Tuesday, protestors again marched to the administration building. Watts could drag this out no longer, his office announcing a meeting with the football team at 2 p.m. and a media conference at 3:30. During the afternoon, the official word came by email: UAB would eliminate the football, bowling and rifle programs.
Watts emailed students. He didn’t announce it in person first to students. He emailed it. And not to alumni, even as student volunteers continued to place fund-raising calls for the $1 billion Campaign for UAB.
The school begs for money, but when alumni and the City of Birmingham offered millions of dollars, Watts said no.
Football was the real target. And it was an easy one: It loses money, as most FBS programs do. Even Auburn, which played for a national championship this year. He said as much during a closed meeting to a disbelieving group of players, who confronted him about his singular focus on the numbers.
When Watts tried to slip out the back door after that meeting, an angry mob of students shouted and lunged at him, pounding on the SUV taking him to the media conference. He needed an armed escort to make it to the vehicle.
Watts explained his position to the media, citing the consulting firm’s report that estimates UAB athletics’ spending at $100 million total over the next 5 years while mentioning the university’s cancer research.
He played the cancer card, even though research funding through grants isn’t the same as athletics revenue through conferences, television, licensing and donations.
CarrSports Consulting report for UAB on how to
cut football, 16 pages
•
CarrSports Consulting report for James Madison University
on how to move up to the FBS division, 65 pages
The report from CarrSports Consulting has been in the offing for months, even when Clark was hired as football coach in January. It’s less a consideration of the question of football and more a how-to guide on dropping football.
Title IX requires a balance of men’s and women’s sports in number and participation, so out go rifle and bowling’s all-female teams after football. In come men’s cross country and track to keep the university in NCAA Division I sports.
UAB will get the boot from Conference USA, which requires members to sponsor a football team. Ironically, the conference men’s and women’s basketball tournaments will take place March 11-14 at the BJCC Arena and on campus at Bartow Arena.
The financial intangibles muddy the picture, such as in enrollment, Blazer merchandise and donations.
Chuck Krulak has received accolades not only for his fund-raising at Birmingham-Southern, but his hands-on attitude, living in the dorms, eating daily in the cafeteria. Many alumni were justly concerned about the school’s financial malpractice, but he won them over in his first year by putting the college in the black for the first time in 7 years.
Krulak never took a salary during his 4 years on the job. Watts’ annual salary is $853,464, the 11th highest among American public universities. But Birmingham-Southern is a small, private college, one that resumed its Division III football program in 2007 after a 68-year hiatus. UAB has more faculty members than BSC has students.
In August, Krulak co-wrote an op-ed piece for the Chicago Tribune asking President Obama to force the military and CIA to come clean on the use of torture in Iraq. He shows courage and leadership in financial, practical and moral issues.
Watts demonstrates no such courage, no such knack for leadership. He displays no grasp of candor, no backbone, no vision for making the university and her students stronger and smarter.
He will drag UAB, Birmingham’s largest employer, into an abyss.
The first step is clear: My pal Steven E. Chappell named his new site FireRayWatts.com.
Don’t look for help from the UA board of trustees, which denies any involvement. The same board that approves all UAB athletic personnel contracts (bye bye, Jimbo Fisher) and nixed plans for an on-campus stadium in 2011. The same board that bows to the dictates of the overly influential trustee Paul Bryant Jr.
Purge Watts, this sorry, gutless wonder, from campus as soon as possible.
The second step will be more difficult. Because none of this was really about football. It’s about self-determination.
UAB cannot function with absentee landlords, as reporter Kyle Whitmire notes in his al.com essay. He likens UAB to UA’s plantation, great for the masters and terrible for Birmingham. (As I would liken al.com/Birmingham News to Advance Digital’s plantation …)
Since Birmingham cannot hope to win over the trustees, it must wrest UAB from the UA system. Let the trustees bat around the Huntsville campus instead.
UAB must have autonomy or face the whims of an untrustworthy board, one that can and will make decisions that continue to damage the city’s crown jewel. What next … academics, research, the arts, new construction, housing? Imagine a worse successor as university president. Imagine fewer amenities to attract top professors, undergraduate applicants and research dollars.
Only a month ago, the suggestion of decimating UAB football would’ve seemed crazy.
It will take the authority of the Legislature to grant such a divorce from the UA system. Last week, Rep. Jack Williams proposed a bill to remake the board, but a far more drastic reshuffling is required.
The Blazers won’t play again in Birmingham, but if they’re very lucky, they might still go to a bowl game at 6-6. ESPN’s Brett McMurphy is alone in picking UAB for any bowl: the first Popeye’s Bahamas Bowl vs. Western Michigan on Christmas Eve.
It’s one last chance for those orphaned players and coach to shine before a national TV audience and perhaps find new schools that won’t lie to them and use them up for sport.
•
P.S. Columnist John Archibald writes an epitaph for UAB football: “In the end we lost again, because Birmingham did not support its own. … Support local sport. High schools and colleges …”
The Weihnachtsmarkt will have vendors offering ornaments,
gifts and more for shoppers.
Das Haus will hold its fourth annual Weihnachtsmarkt. Based on a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, this Christmas market will have arts and crafts, ornaments, trees and gifts.
Also available for sale are German beer, mulled wine or Glühwein, plus brats on buns, pretzels, potato pancakes or Kartoffelpuffer and pastries.
The day includes musical performances, children’s entertainers and a visit from Santa Claus.
The free event runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at Das Haus, 2318 Second Ave. N., downtown [map]. For more information, visit the Facebook event page or email fdskgermanclub@gmail.com.
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