Famed Muscle Shoals music producer Rick Hall has died.

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Rick Hall and his family gave me my first job in the music business, and nobody in the industry ever worked harder than Rick. Nobody. American music wouldn’t be the same without his contributions. His death is a huge loss to those of us who knew him and those who didn’t.

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“The first thing we egotistical studio musicians noticed was the b string on the guitar was flat. We looked at each other like ‘they may be great but they can’t tune a guitar.’ And then of course, the first groove starts, and it was the most trite lyric,” said Putnam, speaking on the phone from his home in the Nashville area. “Something about I want to hold your hand, and the chord progression was a stock Isley Brothers chord progression that had been used in a million songs.”

The track was so unimpressive that Rick Hall, owner of the FAME Studios where they were working, reached over and stopped the tape. They had work to do and listening to a bunch of trite Brits who could barely hold a tune was not a productive use of their time.

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“We found as we came back from dinner and entering our dressing rooms, some beautifully engraved invitations to come to the British Embassy at midnight and meet the Beatles. And we looked at them, and we’re scheduled to fly out at about 11:30, back to Nashville,” Putnam said. “So we took a vote. All of us wanted to go to the British Embassy. We’re still not interested in meeting the Beatles. We saw them on the Sullivan Show and honestly thought that they were overhyped, a bunch of cute kids, with a trite song. But I remember saying to David Briggs (the piano player), my mother would be so impressed if I went to the British Embassy.”

But they had work the next day. Crossing studio owner Rick Hall was a prospect that could have cost them their jobs. They decided against it, and in youthful anger, destroyed the invitations. “We were 22 years old,” Putnam lamented. “Can you imagine tearing them up while we were upset? And we threw them in a waste bin and went on and opened the show.”

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Years later, Putnam would run into George Harrison in Los Angeles while producing music and eventually work with him on his Dark Horse label in England. But he still remembers his missed opportunity on that fateful night in D.C.

“I recited all these stories to him. And he laughed at our folly, George is a great guy with a great sense of humor,” Putnam said.

On that night in 1970, Harrison told Putnam the real reason they were picked to play that show in 1964. “He said, ‘Norbert, if you had come to the British Embassy that night, John Lennon was the one. He would have kissed your boots,'” Norbert said. One of the Beatles was plainly a big fan of their work. “He spent hours trying to imitate [your band] on his early recordings,” Harrison explained. It was a gratifying feeling for Norbert, who 50 years later, still looks back on that wild seven-hour ride in D.C. history fondly.

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