Fame Studios	famestudios.com
Muscle Shoals Sound	mssound.com
Johnny Sandlin	johnnysandlin.com
Ducktape Music	ducktapemusic.com
Drive By Truckers	drivebytruckers.com
Lakland	lakland.com
Kubicki	kubicki.com
Jimmy Johnson	jimmyjohnsonmusic.com
Legends of Muscle Shoals	legendsofmuscleshoals.com
Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section Biography	allmusic.com

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BOOKS:

David Hood is featured in the book, "How the Fender Bass Changed the World" by Jim Roberts. Purchase the book at Back Beat Books or Amazon.

MAGAZINE ARTICLES:

Excerpts from Article in DRUM! & drumlink.com:

by Jay Galen and Andy Doerschuk

Like the cross-laminated plies of a maple shell, a great rhythm section is all about a drummer and bass player being so locked, it's as if they're resonating as one. A great rhythm section is synonymous with groove - a deep, swinging, potent pocket. The kind that gets your heart pumpin' and your feet stompin'. The kind that has you uttering, "Man, these guys are tight."

Well, after weeks of polling DRUM! staffers and contributors, after hours of debating and refining, we've assembled a list of what we believe are arguably the 25 best rhythm sections of all time. We've even gone out on a limb and ranked 'em...

Our criteria? A few basic questions. Did they leave an indelible mark? Has their music endured? And ultimately, did they spark a movement that fundamentally changed the way a particular style of music was played?

Agree. Disagree. But there is no denying that the following rhythm sections have had a major impact on us all.

...........

18. Roger Hawkins & David Hood. In 1969 four young white kids from Alabama decided to form a band that would come to be known as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. They opened their own recording studio, and offered their services to all comers, which would eventually include such legends as Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Rod Stewart, Wilson Pickett, and Paul Simon. Drummer Hawkins and bassist Hood knew which side of their bread was buttered, so while their parts became part of the lexicon for a generation of garage rhythm sections, they never stepped on the singer's toes. Their secret was a loose groove that made you want to dance like a fool.

Article from Bass Player magazine (September 2000):

David Hood

Hundreds of hit records as Muscle Shoals Sound Studios’ bassist from the ’60s to today; new CDs with Little Milton, Frederick Knight, and Bobby Blue Bland; assembling band for percy Sledge for the W.C. Handy Music Festival.

Sound

“The producers and engineers I work for want a clean, solid sound that will cut through but not clash with the other instruments—so I rarely use effects or excessive EQ.”

Gear

Lakland 55-94 Deluxe 5-string, Kubicki Ex-Factor, ’57 Fender Precision, ’76 Alembic 4 (“a veteran of 1,000 recordings”), plus Lakland Joe Osborn, G&L 5, Hofner “Beatle” Bass, and Peavey Midibase Demeter dube direct box and/ore a tube pream direct to the board

Settings

Preamp volume at 11-12 o’clock. On active basses, volume on full and tone controls flat. On passive basses, all controls on full. “After hearing a playback I may adjust the sound slightly. I rarely do more than add a little low-mid boost or change the pickup bend slightly.”
On classic tracks such as the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” Be Altitude: Respect Yourself [Stax]: ’61 Fender Jazz w/all controls on full, recorded direct with a 60-watt Fender Bassman and Concert 4x10 monitor. “This was true for all the records I played on from the mid ’60s to the mid ’70s—Aretha, Rod Stewart, Traffic, Paul Simon, and all the rest.”

Tips

“Other instruments can really affect the bass in the final mix. Overtones from poorly tuned tom-toms can kill a bass sound and even make it seem out of tune. Other things to watch out for are acoustic guitars, congas, and the keyboard player’s left hand. Always listen to the first playback and solo the bass, bass drum, and any other instruments that could muddy up the sound. Then you can make adjustments.”

From Bass Player Magazine (August 1999):

“This is a bass-intensive office,” says David Hood, opening an envelope at a paper-cluttered desk amid instruments, amps, cardboard file boxes, photos, gold records, and assorted care magazines inside Alabama’s storied Muscle Shoals Sound Studios. The envelope yeilds a check—payment for another round of “I’ll Take You There” Chevy ads. “To use it on a commercial they have to pay the original musicians at current jingle scale—whether or not they cut it again. So far this year I’ve made $2,000 from it, and I didn’t have to do anything.”

Well, not exactly, David played the signature line and solo on the ’72 Staple Singers classic, one in the decades-long parade of hits that stretches from his work with R&B/roots stars such as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Jimmy Cliff (including “Sitting in Limbo”) to pop-rokers such as Box Scaggs, Rod Stewartt, Paul Simon, and Bob Seger to recent sessions ranging from Joe Louis Walker to Jimmy Buffett to the Oak Ridge Boys. “I guess ‘I’ll Take You There’ is my most famous line,” David notes. “I got $71 for that session, and I probably did another song that day”

Though he’s punched the clock at Memphis and Nashville studios and logged a few road hours—including a ’72 Traffic tour—David is best known for his workdays in northwest Alabama’s Quad Cities area. (That’s Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, Florence, and Tuscumbia, of course.) Born in Muscle Shoals in 1943, Hood studied piano early on and later took up trombone and then bass, which he played with a hard-working frat-party band called the Mystics. When the group broke up David got a job at his father’s tire store, right down the street from Rick Hall’s Fame Studio. “I started hanging out there,” Hood says. “The guy who was playing bass moved to guitar, and Rick Hall started bringing in Tommy Cogbill and later on Jerry Jemmott. I heard them and thought, Gosh, if I want to do this I’ve got to play like them. So I started working really hard.”

David began doing demos at Fame, and in ’66 he played on a Percy Sledge hit, “Warm and Tender Love.” More and more work followed, and in ’69 the rhythm section of Hood, drummer Roger Hawkins, guitarist Jimmy Johnson, and keyboardist Barry Beckett made the bold move of leaving Fame and buying their own studio. Working for producers, such as Atlantic’s legendary Jerry Wexler, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section created a sound and a body of music that defines the golden age of Southern R&B.

On a stiffling August afternoon David and I rendezvoused at a Kmart Parking lot on Route 133 and headed to Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, now housed in a former power plant turned Naval Reserve station along the Tennessee River in Sheffield. Pausing now and then to open mail and answer phone calls, David showed off the studio and his basses while we talked about his career.

How many sessions do you think you’ve done?

Gosh, I don’t know. Thousands. Sometimes we would cut 50 tracks in a week. The producer would run in these songwriters, we would record theier track, they would leave and finish it, and we would never know what it was. Later on it would come out and I’d say “Is that us? It sounds familiar.” For a while we were a track factory, and we were really good at it. We could make them all sound good and different enough. But it’s hard over the long run. You start to burn out.

How do you keep up your concentration playing track after track?

I don’t have a secret; I just have to shut out everything else and go into this state of mind where there’s nothing but the music. When you’re doing that and you lock into a real good thing, it’s almost like you’re floating—your body’s doing it withouth your having to think about it. That’s a great thing, and I don’t think it happens as much with rhythm sections that are thrown together.

A lot of players say it’s easier to be spontaneous playing live than in the studio.

I’m sure that’s ture, because you don’t have to do everything perfect. But I’m a shy person. I really don’t care about having an audience. My audience is the speakers and the producer and the engineer. I don’t get satisfaction from playing live that I do from going into a control room and hearing a really good playback

It was a trip during the Traffic tour, thoough. I’d never even been to concerts as big as the ones we played—I hardly even knew who Traffic was when they called. We had to make chord sheets, and of course when I got onstage I couldn’t see the charts, and I couldn’t hear anything because I was used to using headphones—it was all jsut a big roar. It was difficult at first, but by the end of the tour I was having a lot of fun. But I couldn’t wait to get back to the studio.

Do you remeember your first session?

The band I played in booked the session—the lead singer’s father put up the money. We rehearsed the song and just went in and played it. I wasn’t scared or nervous, because I didn’t know I should be. It was only after I started working for other people that I got nervous. Everybody else had been playing longer than me, and I always felt I was a little behind. Back then it was all mono, so if you messed up it was stop and start all over again—there was no punching in. That was a bloodbath at first, because Rick Hall was a taskmaster who didn’t mind embarassing you infront of everybody. That’s when I learned to just cancel my feelings and put everything out of my mind except the job at hand. I loved the job though—I was learning new things and getting paid. Even though it wasn’t a lot of money, it was better than working at the tire store.

What was it like working with Jerry Wexler?

He scared me to death when I first met him—this New York Yankee accent came over the talkback in the studio: “David, would you come up here please?” “Oh, God, what does he want? He’s gonna fire me!” We laugh about this now, but he’s a tough old guy, and in those days he was a really tough guy. Think about it: He produced Ray Charles on “What’d I Say?” He produced records I listened to before I even thought about being a musician. he’s not a musician at all, but he’s got the ultimate taste and ears.

It was tough being his bass player, because he had the best ones working for him before me. I came in after Tommy Cogbill and Jerry Jemmott on the Aretha stuff, and I was scared to death. But I just had to psyche that fear out of my head and work. He was from such a different culture, and even the words he used were funny. We would say, “Play da da da da.” But he would say, “Davey, play gi gi gon gon.” “We’d go, Gi gi gon gon? What’s that mean?” But he has great intuition and depth of knowledge. If I wasn’t getting something quite right, he would make it work. He could tell me where to accent and where to push, and he knew that when something is in the pocket, it can be one click faster os slower and it won’t work. He could tell when it was there.

Do you and Roger Hawkins have any particular routine for working out parts?

Sometimes we work out some little pattern ahead of time, and other times we just start playing and fit together somehow without saying anything. For me that’s because I was the last one to come into the scene, and I had to listen to everybody and make sure I was doing the right thing. I had to learn to lock in rather than to lead, because I was the new guy.

Most of the drummers I’ve worked with say they like working with me because I don’t fight with them. So if I’m working with a good drummer I sound good, and if I’m working with a bad drummer I sound bad.

Have you been in many sessions where something just doesn’t work?

Yeah, a lot—and I hate it. It’s your whole sould on the line. Plus after all these years I have a reputation to live up to. But I’ve learned you can’t force things; if it’s not working one way you just try something else. Usually it helps to simplify. I’m not a real technical player anyway, so I’m mosre comfortable playing less. Having a good sound and playing in tune and in time is much more important than chops. You’re not playing for yourself or for other bass players—you’re playing to make a song come out. It’s not brain surgery. It’s all about entertainment. If you’re not pleasing someone, you’re wasting your time.

Don’t get me wrong, though—I love for somebody to give me a challenging line. Even if I don’t nail it exaclty, it’s fun to do my version of it. I get tired of sessions where nobody has any suggestions; that’s not any fun. I know what I know, so it’s fun to get outside ideas.

How do you approach working with artists you’re not familiar with?

I just listen. That’s the most important thing anybody can do. If the a guy’s piano player I listen to his left hand. If he’s a singer, I try to put my licks between his phrases. If it’s a guitar player I listen to the bass strings. I think that’s what we always did as a rhythm section—we always tried to support and enhance what people did and not take over in any way.

I get the feeling you don’t get into a lot of arguements during sessions.

Sometimes we argue among ourselves in the rhythm section, because we don’t beat around the bush. Roger might say, “Hey, do this,” and I say, “Look, you play the drums and I’ll play the bass.” It’s funny to us, but other people think, Shit, they’re gonna get in a fight. But you have to do that. As a rhythm section we’ve been together over 30 years, and we don’t mind saying, “That don’t work, try something else.” You can’t have an ego about it, because you’re all working toward making the song sound good. It’s not about the drums or the bass.

Did you ever feel starstruck with some people?

In the beginning I did, and Aretha Franklin was one of them. I had a Columbia record called Trouble in Mind that I thought was wonderful, and when they said they were bringing her here I said, “Hot dog! I’m going to get to work with her.” On those first sessions I played trombone, but later I got to play bass with her, and that was fun. She’s such a great vocalist and piano player that you can just pattern your part after what she’s doing.

Any great sessions that stand out for you?

I loved all the Staple Singers and Stax stuff, and there have been some great Atlantic things produced by Jerry Wexler as well as Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd. I enjoyed working with Phil Ramone, and I got to work with Otis Redding when he was producing. He taught me a lot of things about rhythm and feel, like playing on the upbeat when you would normally be playing on the downbeat. His feel was so good, and you can hear it in all of his records—horn lines and everything. You can tell Otis had a hand in that. I’ve been privilaged to work with a lot of other great people. Some of the early Bob Seger stuff was fun, and so was Paul Simon, the he got kind of weird toward the end. He had heard “I’ll Take You There” so he called Stax and said “Who are those Jamaican musicians?” They told him, “Those are some white boys from Alabama.” When he first came down here he told us, “This is the song, I want you all to just do what you do.” We did and were very successful. But toward the end he figured, “Gosh, these guys aren’t musical geniuses or anything—I know more than they do.” So he started dictating every note, and it didn’t sound as good.

Any other bad sessions come to mind?

There haven’t been that many, but we’ve had a few where the artists were hard to get along with and talked down to us. You try to forget those. But luckily most people come here because they’ve heard what we’ve done and want to work with us. They’re happy to be here.