Rick Hall took all the credit for the songs he produced, but his down-home endearing manner probably disarmed any client friction. A kind of doom-laden staccato beat opened Mac Davis’s Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me, with a contrasting melodic guitar note rising behind it, an unnerving mix that painted imminent personal disaster better than words. Any teenager who has just been told the relationship is over knows that. You could feel doom walk into the room before you were told it was over.
Hall did the job on the song for Mac Davis, who died this week. Davis’s lyrics were suggestive and the song could have been mediocre but that atmospheric opening portending doom made the song a masterpiece. Australia agreed, sending the track to number one in early January 1973 just as pop fans were setting off for Sunbury.
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