House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music)
Page 4
The war years and their aftermath were obviously a time of many changes throughout America, but especially so in the media that dispersed recorded music. Thus, though he probably never imagined such a possibility when he settled in Houston, Quinn would soon discover another grand opportunity, one that would cause him to develop new technological skills far beyond 1 2
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 12
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
those required merely for engineering the single-disc recording of sound for radio ads. Still working out of his Telephone Road storefront through the end of the 1940s, Quinn would metamorphose into a maverick music producer and studio proprietor and, for a while, even a record label owner.
During this period, the Quinn family lived in a house located at 1313
Dumble Street in southeast Houston, not far from the Telephone Road studio. (Incidental numerological trivia: 1313 is also the fi rst number that Quinn used in cataloguing the productions of his Gold Star Record Company.) By 1950 Quinn’s family would move nearby in the same neighborhood to a two-story house at 5628 Brock Street, as would his studio facility, which he would rename also as Gold Star.
Today there is a small retail strip center at 3104 Telephone Road where Quinn’s original studio once stood. According to Clyde Brewer (a fi ddler, pianist, and guitarist who recorded fi rst at Quinn Recording and then later at its Gold Star and SugarHill incarnations), the now demolished original building, before becoming a studio, had housed a corner grocery store and gas station. Brewer’s earliest memories of the studio date back to 1947, when, as a teenager, he played fi ddle on a session with his uncle in the group Shelly Lee Alley’s Alley Cats.
Brewer recalls walking in off the street directly into “a fairly good-sized”
studio room with a small control room off to the right side, visible through a tiny window. In the main studio room stood a baby grand piano and a single microphone on a tall stand. Behind the studio room was another section, which contained the pressing plant and a bathroom. The walls of the studio were plain white-painted surfaces with no appreciable soundproofi ng elements. In the control room there were a large disc-cutting lathe made by Presto and a Rek-O-Kut turntable driven by a motor with a huge fan belt.
Another longtime country musician who played on many sessions, steel guitar master Frank Juricek, provides his own description:
Bill Quinn’s studio on Telephone Road was an old gas station with the pumps taken out—and might have had a grocery store also in the main building. It still had the canopy in the front, which made it easy to unload equipment even if it was raining. . . . You walked right into the studio when you walked in the front door. There really wasn’t any real entryway. In the back right corner of the room was his booth where the acetate cutter and turntable and such were. The piano would sit right in front of his booth. . . .
He had added on to the back of the building, and that’s where he had his pressing plant and all the equipment he needed to do the plating and all that other stuff .
t h e i n d e p e n d e n t q u i n n
1 3
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 13
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
Juricek’s references to “plating” and the “other stuff ” allude to basic production techniques employed by Quinn in the late 1940s. For starters, the disc recorder with which he had begun in 1941 had soon given way to more sophisticated equipment. However, he had no tape recorders, which had been invented in Germany and largely kept secret through the war years. Such technology was not yet readily available or aff ordable to pioneering independent sound technicians such as Quinn. (Ampex premiered its later widely adopted 300 series in late 1949 and 1950.) In Quinn’s early phase, recording was still done direct to disc on masters made of wax (or in later years, acetate) at the speed of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). The 45 rpm disc did not proliferate until the 1950s. Moreover, shellac was a key ingredient for making disc material, and it was generally in short supply for nonmilitary purposes during the war.
To make a record in the studio, one or more microphones would be plugged directly into a tube mixer and/or tube preamp. While the musicians performed into the microphone(s), the resulting sound signal was passed straight to the cutting lathe, and the needle of the lathe etched this sonic information directly onto the disc. Later that wax disc would be doused repeatedly in a liquefi ed nickel bath and thus plated. The disc then became a
“mother” that could spawn as many stamping plates as necessary.
The creation of the stamping plates, or stampers, was a time-consuming and delicate process. It started by placing shellac (or in subsequent years, vinyl), as well as the preprinted front and back paper labels, in proper align-ment between the plates. Then the presses compressed those materials together, creating duplicates of the original, one at a time. These records were typically referred to as “singles,” with an A-side and a B-side, totaling two songs per disc. During this era producing an album-length recording was very diffi
cult. Why? The artists would essentially have to perform all of the material for a whole long-play (LP) side straight through, in a single sitting, with only a brief pause between each song in a set of fi ve or more. In other words, since the recording process was strictly direct to disc, there was no option for editing, adding, subtracting, or rearranging separate tracks. It is important to remember also that standard audio recording at this time was mono, not stereophonic.
Nevertheless, these wax masters were capable of rendering good recordings. The main obstacle to excellent sound fi delity, until the early 1950s, was related to the use of shellac as the primary ingredient in the copies. The subsequent introduction of vinyl (or vinylite) vastly improved the quality of pressings, allowing records to more closely represent the nuances and tones of the original musical performance.
1 4
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 14
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
Frank Juricek, 1948 (courtesy of Frank Juricek)
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 15
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
Juricek performed on numerous Quinn-produced tracks starting in the late 1940s, including sessions with fellow musicians such as Hank Locklin, Leon Payne, Ernie Hunter, Lester Voytek, Red Novak, Pete Machanga, and singer Frances Turner. Later, after the studio moved to Brock Street, he played also on Quinn-engineered tracks produced by Pappy Daily. Refl ecting on those experiences, Juricek emphasizes the unique role that Quinn played in the regional music scene at the time:
He was the fi rst man doing the real recordings in Houston. . . . I used to hang out at the studio all the time, and I wanted to know how you took those acetate discs and turned them into masters. So he took me back there and showed me the whole process. . . . He showed me the plating process, and then he showed me what I called the “waffl
e” that he put between the labels in
the press—and out came the record. It looked like a waffl
e iron because of the
excess that came out around the edge of the press that had to be trimmed off .
According to Brewer, Quinn’s early recording sessions typically involved only one microphone—with the musicians arranged around it and the singer and primary instrumental soloist positioned closest. Because it was a direct-to-disc recording process, during each session Quinn had to hover watchfully with a clean paintbrush in hand, gently pushing toward the center of the disc the shavings dug out by the needle. By the end of the song, Quinn would have
“a big glob of wax” to discard.
As for the ambient environment, Brewer also notes that there was no heat or air-conditioning in Quinn’s Telephone Road building—a factor that could aff ect the whole recording process. He shares the following anecdote: We were on a two-day session when a wicked cold snap came through Houston during the night, following the fi rst day of recording. The next morning Bill had to use a blowtorch to heat up the motor in the l
athe so that it would maintain a constant speed during the second day.
Accounts such as these illustrate only some of the challenges and problems that an early recording engineer such as Quinn had to address to create his products. Because the few major record companies were zealously protective of industry secrets and technology, he had to fi gure out the process and acquire workable studio equipment on his own. Moreover, because the federal government still controlled most of the nation’s shellac supply (and the major record companies dominated the limited market for the rest), he also had to scramble to procure the raw material for making records.
1 6
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 16
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
But Quinn ingeniously pulled it off . He somehow arranged to purchase an older, phased-out pressing-plant machine from an unidentifi ed source.
Then he inquisitively began to tinker with it—experimenting, modifying, and updating it until it could meet his needs. He also scoured the city’s resale shops and garage sales, buying all the old 78 rpm records that he could fi nd.
He then pulverized them in a coff ee bean grinder, melted down the resulting shards and dust, and thereby reclaimed the reconstituted shellac-based material. However, the paper labels attached to the recycled records somewhat con-taminated the resulting substance, and that lack of purity negatively aff ected the sound quality it was capable of reproducing. Nonetheless, the process worked. Because the recycled matter was pliable and doughy, it was generally nicknamed “biscuit.” Mack McCormick, who knew Quinn fi rsthand, says that Quinn regularly scheduled “biscuit days” devoted to acquiring old records for reprocessing to yield ingredients for making new ones.
As a result, Quinn achieved a rare status for the 1940s, one unprecedented in Texas and throughout most of the South: self-suffi
ciency not only in mak-
ing recordings but also in mastering them, electroplating them, and then pressing multiple copies for distribution and sale. As Brown writes in the aforementioned liner notes, Quinn “had found an independent way to go from the studio to the warehouse, and so was free to put regional talent in record stores. He sneered at the monopoly, thereby helping to end it.”
t h e i n d e p e n d e n t q u i n n
1 7
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 17
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
4
Gold Star Records
ill quinn must have had an open mind about the music he recorded. Being an outsider to the region, he perhaps lacked the generally ingrained social prejudices of most middle-aged white men in the South at the time. His initial focus was simply on making the kinds of records that might get stocked on jukeboxes and in music stores in Houston and along the Southeast Texas coast. As a result, by 1947
he was readily producing sessions featuring black musicians as well as white, or featuring lyrics sung in either French or English. The styles he recorded predominantly refl ect the working-class tastes and demographics of the time and place: country, Cajun, gospel, and blues.
As a pioneer in the nascent business of independently recording, reproducing, and distributing roots music for popular consumption, Quinn faced many challenges. Having mastered the studio and pressing plant process, he next needed to align with a record label—a separate company that would handle business relationships with performers and product marketing. Ever the self-reliant individual, Quinn opted to create his own record label—twice, in fact. However, both would be relatively short-lived enterprises. More profi cient as an engineer than as a music mogul, for most of his career Quinn chose to concentrate solely on studio and plant operations. Yet during the approximately six years that he owned record labels, Quinn produced many historic discs.
Ownership of a record label should not be confused with ownership of a recording studio or pressing plant. A record company signs individual artists or groups to contracts, pays for recording sessions in studios and the creation of products in plants (but does not necessarily own those facilities), arranges for distribution and marketing of products, accounts for and pays royalties Bradley_4319_BK.indd 18
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
(ideally, at least), and so on. On the other hand, a studio is the physical facility (equipped with sound-recording technology and serviced by in-house engineers) in which a recording session takes place and in which the results are subsequently mastered for reproduction. A pressing plant is a factory, separate from the studio, in which multiple duplicate copies of that product are rendered.
Grasping those distinctions is particularly important because Quinn would ultimately use the same brand name, Gold Star, for both a record label and, after relocating to Brock Street, his major studio facility. In other words, Gold Star Records is a separate enterprise from Gold Star Studios, though Quinn was proprietor of both. But before he ever began using the Gold Star name, back when he was doing business as Quinn Recording Services, he would make his initial foray into label ownership.
In league with someone—though exactly who is not clear—Quinn fi rst launched the Gulf Record Company label in July of 1944. In his Harry Choates liner notes, Andrew Brown cites Frank Sanborn and Orville “Bennie” Hess as the original partners, based on a DBA statement acknowledging the same.
Nevertheless, Brown also points to evidence suggesting that W. Kendall Baker may have been involved rather than Hess. Moreover, Quinn later is reported to have insisted, to musicologist Paul Oliver, that Vernon Woodworth was his only business partner at the time. Whatever the case, the Gulf gamble failed, coming as it did before Quinn had discovered the right artists, built his own pressing plant, or established any distribution strategy. Within a year of its creation, it was abandoned and replaced by Quinn’s Gold Star imprint.
According to Chris Strachwitz, Quinn told him that the fi rst commercial release on the doomed Gulf label was a 78 rpm disc featuring an artist identifi ed as Tex Moon performing an A-side song entitled “When We Planted Old Glory in Japan.” To date we have not been able to verify, however, that this record was ever actually issued to the retail market. It seems more likely that a Gulf disc attributed to Woody Vernon, “I’m Lonesome But I’m Free” backed with “A Rainy Sunday Night,” was the fi rst actually to be marketed. This recording was released with the catalogue number Gulf 100 (a numeration often used for the start of a series in recording). Moreover, Woody Vernon is known to have been the stage name of Vernon Woodworth, the man whom Quinn later identifi ed as his sole partner in the Gulf venture. Complicating matters, however, is Strachwitz’s implication that Tex Moon may have also been a stage name for Woodworth.
Whoever the singer might have been, the novice label owner Quinn fi rst struggled to get from the recording studio to the retail marketplace because he had no pressing equipment. In fact, the main signifi cance of Quinn’s Gulf Records debacle may be that it prompted him to build his own pressing g o l d s t a r r e c o r d s
1 9
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 19
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
plant. As Quinn soon discovered, the big record companies that controlled the only extant pressing facilities did not generally do custom pressings for small independent fi rms. He searched widely for a pressing service, thinking for a while that he had found one in Janette Records of Richmond, Virginia.
However, when it became clear that Quinn needed pressings not for some vanity project but for discs intended for commercial distribution on jukeboxes, that company (which had recently been absorbed by a major label, Decca Records) also refused. Quinn could have given up then, assuming that such obstacles, reinforced as they were by the policies and powers of the dominant corporations, were insurmountable. The only alternative, once again, was self-reliance. So Quinn located, bought, and transported the previously described used pressing machine and began to refurbish it and learn, entirely on his own, how to make duplicate discs of his recordings.
Only four singles released on the Gulf label have been
accounted for to date, those identifi ed by the catalogue numbers 100, 103, 105, and 3000. The missing numbers in the 100 series may have been assigned to other releases, but so far no evidence of that has been discovered. Of that group, the most signifi cant is arguably “Nails in My Coffi
n” (#103), written and performed by
Jerry Irby. Although the record did little for Irby’s performing career, the song was good enough to soon be covered by both Floyd Tillman and Ernest Tubb, two giants of country music. Tillman’s version, recorded for the Columbia label (#36998), debuted in August of 1946 and peaked at number two on the country charts. Tubb’s treatment, released by Decca (#46019), came out in December of 1946, charting as high as number fi ve. Bolstered by such professional acknowledgment of his skills, Irby established a reputation as a songwriter. Incidentally, he returned to the studios in 1959 and rerecorded “Nails in My Coffi
n” for Hi-Lo Records (#1244/1245) as the fl ip side to “The Sea.”
Gulf single number 3000 is also noteworthy. It presents an African American group called Jesse Lockett and His Orchestra performing the songs
“Blacker the Berry” and “Boogie Woogie Mama.” Dating from early 1946, this recording features an incipient R&B sound, and it may well be the fi rst of such recordings ever made in Houston. Thus, it set the stage for the many important blues and R&B recordings that Quinn would soon produce on the Gold Star label.