Guitarist Pete Carr’s work has reached virtually every listener, even if his name remained largely unknown. As a premier session musician he lent his touch to Bob Seger’s “Main Street,” Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome,” and Luther Ingram’s “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right,” while also engineering and producing dozens of additional chart successes. Born April 22, 1950, in Daytona Beach, FL, Carr took up the instrument at thirteen amid the mid-’60s British Invasion, later absorbing R&B and blues to become a fluent stylist across any idiom. In 1968 he relocated to Decatur, AL, to join the Five Minutes; when that group disbanded he settled in Muscle Shoals, where he engineered, produced, and played guitar before assuming the lead-guitar chair in the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section. That unit supported Bob Seger, Paul Simon, and countless other artists on major commercial releases. Throughout the 1970s Carr continued session work, engineering, and production in the region, issuing two solo instrumental albums, Not a Word on It in 1975 and Multiple Flash in 1978. He performed on both acoustic and electric guitar during Simon & Garfunkel’s 1980 world reunion tour, which culminated in the HBO Concert in Central Park. By then computers had captured his interest; he began experimenting with novel data-storage methods for music and pursued computer-science studies in Florida through the 1980s. Equally adept at every stage of record production and at emerging digital technologies, Carr stayed a first-call session guitarist whose contributions permeate modern pop, even though he never achieved widespread fame. He died June 27, 2020, in Florence, AL, at the age of seventy.
