So many distinguished and diverse musicians saw the inside of a recording studio for the fi rst time at Quinn’s original facility. Others of note include Deacon Anderson, a steel guitarist best known as coauthor of the oft-recorded novelty song “Ragg Mopp,” which was fi rst a hit for the Ames Brothers in 1950. That same year Anderson had come to Quinn Recording with Cotton 2 8
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Thompson and the Village Boys (as part of a lineup that included Clyde Brewer and Pee Wee Calhoun) to cut “How Long” and “Hopeless Love” for the Gold Star label (#1381). Hank Locklin (1918–2009) is another example of an esteemed country music veteran who got his start recording for Quinn, releasing “Rio Grande Waltz” and “You’ve Been Talking in Your Sleep” (#1341) in 1947. Similarly, vocalist Frances Turner fi rst appeared on Gold Star in 1947
performing “The Moment I Found You” and “The Curse of an Aching Heart”
(#1342).
Frank Juricek says, “A lot of people came to record with Bill. It was a fascinating time to be around while all that was happening.” Among the tracks on which he performed as a sideman were “I Left a Rose” and “Blue Eyes” by Tex Looney and His Western Stars (#1315/1316), “Drinkin’ My Life Away”
and “Blue Schottische” by Leon Jenkins and the Easterners (#1317), and the hit “Kilroy’s Been Here” backed with “Delivery Man Blues” by Aubrey Gass with the Easterners (#1318). In 1947, though still a teenager, Juricek even got Quinn to record one of his compositions. “I wrote a song back then called
‘Green Bayou Waltz,’” he explains. “Old Bill Quinn said, ‘That’s a great song!
Let’s put it out.’ So we went into the studio and recorded it. . . . It was a simple old thing, but Bill put it out [#1334], and we got some airplay.”
Country singer and acclaimed songwriter Eddie Noack (1930–1978), who would later record for numerous labels (including 4-Star, TNT, Starday, D, Mercury, Dixie, Faith, and Allstar), introduced himself to the record-listening public with sides he made for Quinn. In a 1976 interview by Bill Millar for New Kommotion magazine, Noack relates how he got started: I just called Quinn one day and he said, “Well, come on out.” My cousin Ollie and I rode a bus out there. His studio at the time seemed an adequate set-up. He had only one microphone and we cut directly to an acetate disc . . .
so you didn’t stop if you made a mistake, you just kept going. Our fi rst record, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” was Gold Star #1352.
. . . My second record, Gold Star #1357, “Pyramid Club,” was about the pyramid club craze that was storming the country. Quinn would blankly ship my record to the cities where the distributors told him the craze was happening. We sold quite a few records and got reviewed in Billboard magazine. . . . My biggest seller on Gold Star was probably the next one, “Hungry But Happy”/“Raindrops in a River” [#1371], which Bob Wills recorded about eighteen years later.
Noack adds, “On the strength of the Gold Star recordings, I was able to perform at better gigs.” He notes too that by 1951 Quinn “was about out of the record company business,” a time that signaled the end of Gold Star g o l d s t a r r e c o r d s
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Records and Quinn’s remarkable four-year run as a label owner. But, like many other musicians, Noack maintained his relationship with Quinn even after he signed with other labels “because he was renting out his studio to anyone who wanted to record.”
quite a number of events caused quinn to get out of the record label business and concentrate on simply running his studio. For example, Hopkins had broken his contract and was recording for anyone who paid cash, while many imitation artists were diluting his blues market niche. Choates had tragically died. The label’s third-best-selling artist, Lil’ Son Jackson, following a disagreement with Quinn, had departed in a huff to record elsewhere.
Coinciding with these developments was a personal situation, the death of Quinn’s fi rst wife, which may well have dispirited him too. But the last straw was likely his legal entanglement with the Internal Revenue Service.
During this era, the government imposed a luxury tax on phonograph records. Quinn had dutifully paid the government for his own pressings, but he erred in assuming that the plants with which he had subcontracted for additional pressings had also paid the tax. It turned out they generally had not, and it was Quinn’s responsibility, so the IRS eventually came after him demanding settlement of a substantial tax bill. In disgust with the whole experience, Quinn shut down the label and went back to making custom recordings and pressings for other record companies.
quinn’s independent record company would likely have been more successful if he had simply understood copyright law and the concept of registering songs, as well as leasing songs under copyright to other companies. However, naïve upstart that he was, he never copyrighted any of the songs that he recorded on his label. This oversight was augmented by the parallel ignorance of most of the songwriters who recorded for him in the late 1940s. Consequently, other performers would sometimes rerecord Gold Star–released material for other labels, even have hits with them, register the copyright for themselves, and Quinn and the original creators of such songs would not be acknowledged or compensated, nor would they have any viable legal recourse.
Another
fl aw was that Quinn only sporadically established a viable system of distribution beyond Houston, a problem that limited public exposure and availability of his products. Quinn fi lled orders for Gold Star records strictly on a COD basis, and he stubbornly refused to maintain any open accounts.
Again and again, he had turned down out-of-town requests for shipments of his records if the outlets would not agree to pay the full wholesale price up front. That also meant the retailers had no possibility of returning products 3 0
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that failed to sell. Rather than accept such a risk, many of them balked at stocking Gold Star discs.
Quinn’s preference for cash-only relationships is refl ected also in Juricek’s memories of the man, as are other insights about his basic character. He says,
Bill Quinn was a great guy, and he always had cash on him . . . didn’t trust banks and buried money in tin cans in his yard. . . . You couldn’t help but like Bill. He was easygoing. And he dressed just as simple as could be—no shirt or tie on Quinn. We all had a good time working with Bill Quinn.
Yet even if musicians generally enjoyed their collaborations with Quinn, their interests were not always well served by his approach to the record business.
In addition to the problems outlined above, there was also Quinn’s un-sophisticated approach to publicity. His sole strategy for calling attention to new Gold Star releases seems to have been occasionally to include a few free samples of new records with orders sent out to distributors. Thus, if there were no demand for these new records, then the few original copies were all that were ever pressed.
Yet despite his retreat from the label business, Quinn would remain a key fi gure in the Texas recording industry for years to come. And when his IRS
troubles fi nally forced him to close the Telephone Road shop and move his equipment into his house on Brock Street, he would soon resurrect the Gold Star brand name to christen the new studio facility he would devise there.
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5
Label’s Demise, New Studio’s Rise
r e c o r d i n g i n t h e h o u s e
y late 1950 or early 1951 all recording for his own Gold Star Records label had ceased, and Bill Quinn had returned to the con-siderably less demanding life of making custom recordings and
pressings for others. With the dissolution
of his label, Quinn sold or leased much of his catalogue of Gold Star master recordings to other companies. Most notably, in September 1951 Modern Records bought the rights to thirty-two unreleased masters by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Lil’ Son Jackson for the sum of $2,500. This was quite a large transaction for its time, signifi -
cant enough to merit an article in Billboard magazine. In 1955 the local entrepreneur known as Pappy Daily (co-owner of Starday Records and the sole owner of D Records) bought the rights to all the Harry Choates masters. In later years, Quinn would also lease numerous tracks by Hopkins and others to Arhoolie Records. Thus, though Gold Star Records was no longer releasing product on its own, many of its recordings were still being issued, or reissued, and heard.
In late 1951 Modern Records released the fi rst of the Hopkins tracks purchased from Quinn, “Bad Luck and Trouble,” followed through 1954 by
“Lonesome Dog Blues,” “Jake’s Head Boogie,” “Last Aff air,” “Another Fool in Town,” “Black Cat,” “Santa Fe,” and others. However, Modern could not duplicate Gold Star’s previous chart success with Hopkins.
Though no longer working for Quinn’s label as he had done from 1947
through 1950, the prolifi c blues composer continued to record frequently at Quinn’s studio from 1951 through 1964. These sessions occurred at the new facility that Quinn created in (and later expanded into a newly constructed building adjacent to) his residence on Brock Street, and various other labels issued these Hopkins recordings.
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Sleepy LaBeef, a rockabilly musician who fi rst visited Quinn’s studio in the mid-1950s, recalls his impressions of a typical Hopkins session at this time: One of the outstanding things was when Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins would come over. . . . Sam came over once after having a falling out with his wife.
He’d say, “Bill, turn on the mic. I’m ready to sing some blues.” Just him and his guitar, ready to record. I think Bill would sometimes pay him ten bucks a day just to sit in there and record. He might get three or might get ten dif-ferent songs, just him and his guitar. You’d hear him just stomping his foot, playing guitar and singing.
Sometime in 1950 Quinn had ceased to record at his old Telephone Road location and begun converting the bottom fl oor of his house at 5628 Brock into a recording studio. He likely continued to fi ll orders for pressings at his original shop for a while longer. Clyde Brewer, who had recorded in Quinn’s fi rst studio, says he did sessions at Quinn’s house in the summer of 1950.
With the relocation, Quinn also changed his business name from Quinn Recording to Gold Star Recording Studios, thereby retaining the brand identity he had established with his former Gold Star label. From later federal tax records (for 1958) we have ascertained that Gold Star Studios was a Sub-chapter S Texas corporation formally owned by Mr. and Mrs. Bill Quinn, with C. M. Faber (of 6731 Harrisburg Street in Houston) listed as Vice President and Richard Greenhill identifi ed as the Secretary-Treasurer.
Quinn was almost certainly oblivious to the fact that, around the same time that he renamed his company, a place called Gold Star Recording Studios was opening in Los Angeles. That famous recording center, which operated from 1950 to 1984 and produced multitudes of hits, was in no way affi liated with
Quinn’s business.
Meanwhile, following the relocation and name change, Quinn continued operating one of the major recording studios in the region. Yellow Pages listings in the 1952 Houston telephone directory show twelve companies cat-egorized under “Recording Service.” Only two of the four identifi ed in the previously cited 1944 Yellow Pages were still in operation: Lil’ Pal and the renamed Quinn enterprise. And of the twelve businesses listed in 1952, only two advertised a full range of professional recording services and air-conditioning. Those two companies were Gold Star Studios and ACA Recording Studios, then located at 1022 Washington Avenue. Bill Holford, Quinn’s chief competitor over the years to come, owned the latter.
In May 1950 Holford had opened his own facility, ambitiously dubbed ACA for Audio Company of America. For the eighteen months prior to this, Holford had been operating an audio business out of his house. ACA soon l a b e l ’ s d e m i s e , n e w s t u d i o ’ s r i s e 3 3
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became an important Houston recording base for various labels (such as Freedom, Peacock, Macy’s, and Trumpet) and hundreds of musicians. As writer Gary Hickinbotham says, it was “one of the premier Texas studios of the post–World War II period.”
Nonetheless, Quinn’s new recording facility, installed on the ground fl oor of his family residence, was a worthy rival—and even more so after it would be expanded and refurbished several times in years to come. From the start, it provided ample space outfi tted with proven professional equipment manned by a fi rst-rate audio engineer. Following Quinn’s initial transformation of his house, the bottom fl oor contained the main studio room, a control room, a vocal booth, the interior staircase, and the kitchen. The overall dimensions were twenty-eight feet long by twenty-eight feet wide, with a ten-foot-high ceiling.
From the front door perspective, the control room was in the back right-hand corner of the house. At fi rst, however, it off ered no window into the main studio. So the musicians had to wait for a red “record” light to know when to begin playing.
The baby grand piano was located in the opposite back corner, by the stairway. Quinn had removed its top and used a cable attached to the ceiling to suspend a microphone above it.
In the left front corner of the fi rst-fl oor room was the vocal booth. Musician Glenn Barber describes the basic recording setup:
Bill built that booth around 1952 or so. It had wheels on it so he could move it around, but it stayed on the left as you walked in the front door most of the time. He had one of those classic Shure mics in the vocal booth, one of those chrome-plated-looking things. Then out in the studio he was using one of those big diamond-shaped RCA ribbon mics.
Judging from photographs and oral histories, the fl ooring was likely a vinyl product. Johnny Bush, who fi rst recorded there in 1956 as a drummer behind country singer Mickey Gilley, describes it as “kind of an asphalt tile fl oor.”
The studio walls were covered in a sound-baffl
ing material improvised
from egg cartons. Ted Marek’s 1957 Houston Chronicle article quotes Quinn’s explanation:
I found that regular sound-proofi ng killed the echo but made a “dead” room.
I tried material after material on the walls to no avail, but then I discovered the egg carton. I found that the compressed papier-mâché cartons with the peaks and valleys were the answer. I tacked thousands of the cartons up on 3 4
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the walls and came up with the perfect room sound. There is no echo but the room is “live” and musicians can hear their own voices and instruments in all parts of the studio.
This space, fully remodeled, is now the state-of-the-art Studio A at the present-day SugarHill Studios complex. But in the Gold Star era, the Quinn family (and their Afghan hounds, which reportedly often lounged in the studio) maintained private residential quarters on the now-removed second fl oor.
Record producer, promoter, and entrepreneur Slick Norris adds his memory of the place: “The front door of the house led straight into the studio. He had no waiting room or reception room at all. It was pretty primitive, but the man had some ability to get a sound.”
Shelby Singleton (1931–2009), former owner of the famous Sun Records Studio in Memphis, recalls his impressions of the Gold Star space and Quinn, both before and after a major expansion: “I remember the fi rst time I met him. I was working for Pappy Daily, and I thought it was very strange to be recording in someone’s living room. But then he built the big studio in the back, and that was much better.”
not only would the size and features of the Gold Star building be signifi cantly upgraded during the 1950s, but so would the fundamental technology that Quinn utilized there. By this time, tape recorders had become the main medium for documenting and reproducing sound. Originally they did so only in mono, but by the late 1950s the stereophonic revolution was underway. Taping introduced a new step in the recording process, one that came between the actual musical performance and the wax or acetate mastering. This development surely reduced the in-studio stress on the performers and engineers. Unlike before, an imperfect “take” no longer meant a wasted piece of valuable wax. Instead, if a fl aw occurred, they simply kept the tape rolling and did another take, or they rewound the tape and recorded over the previous take as it was being erased.
Likewise, long-playing record albums became practical to conceive and produce, triggering new ways that recordings could be packaged and experienced. With a session preserved on tape, the producer could select preferred tracks and resequence them to establish material for each side of an LP disc.
Then the set of songs comprising one whole side could be transferred as a group to a wax or acetate master.
The recording medium was a ferric oxide–based tape that came on metal or plastic reels. In layman’s terms, audio recording tape was a thin strip of plastic or Mylar with a chemical solution affi
xed to the backing via a special
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type of glue. This mix of ferric oxide and glue contained enough silicone lu-bricant to allow tape to slide easily past metal guideposts and recording heads with minimal degradation of material or depositing of debris. However, thorough cleaning of the tape path has always been necessary between recording sessions, sometimes between reels. The mono and stereo tape decks both used one-quarter-inch magnetic recording tape on ten-and-a-half-inch reels that each held approximately 2,500 feet of tape. The National Association of Broadcasters established a recording speed standard of fi fteen inches of tape per second, which allowed for a little over thirty minutes of recording time per reel.
House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) Page 6