Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section guitarist Jesse Willard “Pete” Carr, who played on hits including “Kodachrome,” “Tonight’s The Night” and “Down on Mainstreet,” died today at the age of 70. Praise and accolades immediately began rolling in for one of the musicians other musicians call “great.”
Carr, who was considered in the same league with Duane Allman, moved from Florida to Alabama in 1966 to play guitar for a band called The Five Minutes. He replaced Eddie Hinton, who left that band to pursue studio work, and Carr told interviewers later that “irony and fate” led him to replace Hinton again when Hinton left the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
As the lead guitarist for the Muscle Shoals session band and a close friend of the Allman brothers, Carr would meet and play with Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson and Hank Williams Jr., among others. Carr worked with Phil Walden in Macon, Georgia, on the then-new recording label Capricorn. And he had his own group LeBlanc and Carr that released the album “Midnight Light.”
He also loved to produce and engineer music. “I even loved doing the final mix downs of the projects,” he told an interviewer. “I loved all the different ways you could affect the sounds of the drums, guitars and vocals when mixing the final product. That really is the make or break phase of recording.”
Asked once to rank his biggest thrills in music, Carr cited meeting Paul Simon. He would play guitar at the Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park before almost a half-million people.