Percy Sledge has died at age 73.
If you haven’t yet, you should check out the Muscle Shoals documentary Anne-Laurie wrote about last year. Sledge got his start with a record cut at Muscle Shoals (“When a Man Loves a Woman”) and it’s also where Aretha started recording her breakthrough album “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”. There’s an amazing number of songs you hear on the radio that have a certain sound that is just somehow distinctive that were all cut in Muscle Shoals: “Never Loved A Man”, “When A Man Loves A Woman”, “Brown Sugar”, “I’d Rather Go Blind”, “Kodachrome”, just to name a few.
The movie should come with the label “Trigger Warning: Bono” because there’s way too much Bono. He’s so self-important and pretentious that he makes big egos like Mick Jagger and Aretha seem like regular people who just walked in off the street.