Sunday, September 21, 2025

Review: Wilson Pickett - The Wicked Pickett (1967)

 Rating: 100/100 - Genre: Southern Soul, Deep Soul, Rhythm & Blues.

Wilson Pickett began life in the church and carried the pulpit into popular music with a vocal approach that married urgent testimony to the rough edges of rhythm and blues; he was born in Prattville, Alabama in 1941 and came up singing in Baptist choirs before moving to Detroit and joining vocal groups that led him from sacred song into secular performance.

The arc that led to The Wicked Pickett is best read as a series of deliberate moves: after early gospel work and a formative stint with The Falcons, Pickett developed a singing technique that foregrounded attack, breath control and a preacher’s cadence, qualities that Atlantic Records and producers hoped to harness for bigger records. Atlantic’s executive Jerry Wexler steered Pickett into recording situations that emphasized live interplay between singer and band, and that executive decision—moving sessions out of big-city craftrooms and into regional studios where rhythm sections could be the compositional force—matters for how the album sounds.

In late 1966 Pickett’s sessions clustered around FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals under the joint aegis of Jerry Wexler and Rick Hall, and the record that emerged as The Wicked Pickett collects singles, covers and originals produced with an eye to the immediate punch of single-sided AM radio play while also leaving room for the band to breathe. The album is commonly dated to 1966 (released late that year) and appears in Atlantic discographies as part of Pickett’s mid-Sixties output that includes several landmark singles tracked in Alabama and Memphis.

Those sessions were staffed by a particular constellation of musicians who would soon become synonymous with the Muscle Shoals work ethic: Spooner Oldham on keys, Tommy Cogbill on bass, Roger Hawkins on drums, Jimmy Johnson and sometimes Chips Moman on guitar, and a small tight horn group including names such as Gene "Bowlegs" Miller, Floyd Newman, Ed Logan and Charlie Chalmers, with background voices supplied on some tracks by ensembles like The Sweet Inspirations. The combination of a gospel-trained lead voice, a compact rhythm unit, and short, rhythmically pointed horn lines is the album’s engine.

The story of Mustang Sally—the single that opens many listeners’ encounter with the record—reveals how small choices in the studio turned into an identifying feature. The song itself had been written by Sir Mack Rice and Pickett heard the tune through the Detroit/Falcons orbit; when Pickett recorded it at FAME, the band converted Rice’s compact motif into a hard-stepping A-A-B pattern with a 24-bar outline and left breathing space for the singer to push and pull the phrase. Chart runs confirm Pickett’s version reached the pop Top 40 while climbing higher on R&B lists.

The session-room detail that often gets retold about Mustang Sally shows how a tiny, almost accidental studio maneuver became a signature sonic marker: the organ lick that fills the brief pauses was played by Spooner Oldham, who later described how he invented a part in the moment, imagining an offhand image to guide his touch. “I’m sittin’ there with the organ, on the stool, and I’m thinking, ‘I really want to play today, and I’ll have to create a part if I want to play… I wonder what it would sound like if I pretended I was a Harley Davidson motorcycle riding through the studio?’” — that impulse produced the three-stroke Hammond swipes. As guitarist/participant recalled, at the exact moment of those swipes Rick Hall turned the echo on Oldham’s feed nearly to full, a mixing choice that made those three hits jump out of the arrangement and become instantly identifiable. “He… turned the echo up, almost full tilt, for those three swipes and it gave an incredible sound that was real identifiable on that record.”

Those anecdotes are not only embellishment; they point to two overlapping production logics audible across the album. The first is an inductive approach to track-building that Jerry Wexler described: musicians would be given chord charts and play together until a groove coalesced; the result would be captured, pared back and then layered with the singer. “What we do… is to build the records inductively from just a series of chord changes,” he explained, and he argued that small rhythmic decisions—pulling back slightly on the second and fourth beats—gave records a forward-leaning thrust that a singer like Pickett could use as a launchpad for phrasing. 

The second logic is economy of arrangement: horns function as punctuation rather than as long harmonic statements, organ and guitar supply short call-and-response lines, and the rhythm section plays to the singer’s phrasing rather than crowding it. Engineers and producers mixed toward the midrange so that voice and horn punches read clearly on the AM radio sets of the era; contemporary engineers and musicians have noted that the mixes favor immediacy—vocals up front, a compact drum sound and guitars/organ placed in complementary pockets—choices that made Pickett’s declamatory singing cut through.

The album’s song selection illustrates Atlantic’s repertoire strategy for Pickett at that moment: a combination of sturdy covers, regional R&B originals, and newly written material that together turned familiar hooks into vehicles for Pickett’s attack. Songs such as You Left the Water Running were written in the Muscle Shoals milieu by writers like Dan Penn, Rick Hall, and Oscar Franks, and the lines between demo, guide vocal and released take were porous—an accepted practice in that small studio ecology where Otis Redding, Pickett and others would share ideas, record quick guides and iterate on them in the room. The result is that some album tracks feel like extended singles—designed to land a single punch—while others unfold more slowly.

Musically, Pickett’s approach on the album is a study in timing and timbral contrast: he frequently places syllables fractionally ahead of the beat to create urgency; he employs guttural consonants and controlled gravel to turn a pop phrase into a sermon-like exclamation; and he treats chorus refrains as moments for call-and-response rather than for harmonic elaboration. Wexler’s observation about the “hesitation” that creates a leaning tension is useful here—when the band pulls back just enough the vocal that pushes forward feels like an arrival, and on tracks across the LP that technique is repeated, exploited and rewarded by radio listeners. “That little hesitation makes it lean forward a second and then come to the downbeat… and then the downbeat means release and relief.” (~ Jerry Wexler)


The instrumental work rewards close listening: the drum feel by Roger Hawkins is looser in microtiming than a metronomic click, the bass lines of Tommy Cogbill are melodic but anchored, guitars from players such as Jimmy Johnson or Chips Moman trade single-note answers with organ voicings, and the horn voicings are compact—short stabs or brief unisons rather than extended countermelodies. These choices give Pickett the open air to shape intensity without clutter; they also make the arrangements tight enough to read on car radios and jukeboxes while retaining a degree of studio personality—those small harmonic or timbral decisions that tell a seasoned listener where the record was made.

The album’s singles and their chart runs make plain how this studio method translated into public reach: Mustang Sally crossed into the Billboard Hot 100 Top 40, peaking in the mid-20s while performing even stronger on R&B listings, and the record’s commercial path ensured that the album became encountered as both a single collection and a set of band performances. Beyond chart numbers, the Pickett renditions of familiar songs came to be the versions that many listeners recognized first, and that continued circulation—through radio, cover versions and later film soundtracks—kept songs from the record in steady rotation.

Oral histories, session recollections and interviews with participants show that the making of the record was collaborative and often spontaneous: players described working from crude charts, inventing responses on the spot, and relying on a producer’s ear to make mixing moves that altered a take’s character. The organ-echo anecdote and the moment where a producer would leap into the room and literally dance because a take felt right are decisive examples of how performance and production overlapped; those recollections are preserved in interviews with session players and producers and appear across documentaries and archived broadcasts that record the participants’ voices.

    You might also like the review I wrote for "Various Artists - Neurotic Reactions 2: 16 Obscure Mod Smashers, 1965-1970 (2011)".

Sources:

  1. Wilson Pickett | Soul Singer, Songwriter & Producer - Britannica
  2. Wilson Pickett
  3. The Wicked Pickett - Wilson Pickett | Album - AllMusic
  4. Mustang Sally (song)
  5. Rock Cellar Magazine - "Mustang Sally" at 45 (Interview) – Sir Mack Rice and Spooner Oldham Tell The Story
  6. Jerry Wexler | Interview | American Masters Digital Archive | PBS
  7. Rock and Roll; Interview with Spooner Oldham, David Hood, and Jimmy Johnson [Part 2 of 3] - American Archive of Public Broadcasting
  8. You Left the Water Running
  9. Billboard Hot 100™
  10. Single / Wilson Pickett / Mustang Sally - Billboard Database
  11. Grammy Hall of Fame Award
  12. Remembering Rick Hall and the Musical Alchemy of FAME Studios
  13. Wilson Pickett Goes to Alabama to Make Some Funky Records
  14. You Left the Water Running - Wilson Pickett - AllMusic
  15. Wilson Pickett Songs, Albums, Reviews, Bio & More - AllMusic
  16. Wilson Pickett | Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
  17. Our history - Fame Studios
  18. “Mustang Sally” and Wilson Pickett at FAME Studios
  19. Wilson Pickett / Otis Redding – You Left The Water Running (Rick Hall, Muscle Shoals, FAME Tribute)
  20. Mustang Sally - Song by Wilson Pickett - Apple Music
  21. Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett: Song Lyrics, Music Videos & Concerts
  22. Wilson Pickett (Portuguese Wikipedia)
  23. Wilson Pickett – laut.de – Band
  24. Wilson Pickett – The Wicked Pickett (1967, MO - Monarch Pressing, Vinyl) - Discogs
  25. Wilson Pickett – The Wicked Pickett - VG LP Record 1967 Atlantic USA M – Shuga Records
  26. THE WICKED PICKETT | Rhino
  27. Wilson Pickett | Bear Family Records
  28. The Wicked Pickett LP SD 8138 (1967) - Pickett, Wilson - LastDodo
  29. The Wicked Pickett - Chartsurfer
  30. The Wicked Pickett (Italian Wikipedia)

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