Dowd sent them all out of the room and spent the next few hours patiently piecing the tape together, saving one of popular music’s greatest recordings. The metal capstan holding the tape in place ricoched off and small splinters of tape went flying across the room. Dowd started winding back the tape and, just at that moment, disaster nearly struck.
When the musicians finished recording the song, they all went up to the control room to listen to a playback. “I thought, What am I going to do that will work within that song? And I just closed my eyes for a second, daydreaming, and said, ‘I wonder what it would sound like if I pretended I was on a Harley Davidson motorcycle and was driving through the studio, what would that sound like?’ There’s a little pause in that record where there’s not much going on, and I do ‘rorp-rorp-rorp’ kind of revving engine thing.” “With Rice’s demo, the first thing I noticed was there was no keyboard on that record,” Oldham recalled in 2011. There was no plan for keyboards to be on the song, but Oldham listened to the demo and worked out a way he could contribute (and thereby get paid). “What if I pretended I was on a Harley Davidson?” Pickett was joined by Memphis guitarist Chips Moman and FAME regulars Roger Hawkins on drums, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, bassist Tommy Cogbill and keyboardist Dewey “Spooner” Oldham, who was himself a noted songwriter, with credits for songs such as I’m Your Puppet and Cry Like A Baby under his belt. He cut his version at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, with producer Rick Hall and engineer Tom Dowd at the controls, and members of the legendary The Swampers backing band in support. When Pickett recorded the song, in October 1966, it became a phenomenon – one that eventually made Rolling Stone’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Franklin had one last inspired suggestion: change the song’s title to Mustang Sally. “I wasn’t that knocked out on that myself, but I agreed and said, ‘Cool, cool,’” Rice recalled. When Rice sang the chorus of “Rise, Sally, rise/Wipe your weeping eyes”, Franklin offered a brilliant piece of advice, suggesting he changed the line to “Ride, Sally, ride”. He sang a version to Aretha Franklin, who ended up playing piano on Rice’s first demo of the song. When Rice returned to Detroit he mulled on the popularity of the car that had been introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair and wrote a song that began life as Mustang Mama. I said, ‘Man, that little shit? What are you gonna do with it – are you gonna ride in it by yourself?’” “I wasn’t that knocked out” “He looked over at this poster and said, ‘Hey, that’s the Mustang!’ I said, ‘Oh shit, man, that car there? No, no, no, it’s too little for me!’ You know, we’re used to driving big cars in Detroit – we drive Cadillacs, Lincolns and Benzs. ‘What is the Mustang? I’ve never heard of it,’” Rice told Rock Cellar Magazine in 2012. “Calvin was always talking about the Mustang car. The subject came up when Rice took a drive with Shields. Shields had wanted a Ford Mustang sports car instead.
Mustang Sally’s origins dated to the time Rice visited the singer Della Reese in New York and she told him she was thinking of buying a new Lincoln Continental for her husband, drummer Calvin Shields, for his birthday. “What is the Mustang? I’ve never heard of it”
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