House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music)

by Andy Bradley, Roger Wood

  Musician Melvin Jackson says that his fi rst Duke-Peacock session at Gold Star took place “in a gigantic room that was like being in a Quonset hut.” In a subsequent period that he estimates to have been “between 1965 and 1968,”

  he worked there “in a smaller room [a studio addition,] and it had a gold star in the fl oor.” He also remembers recording a Bland session engineered by Robert Evans “in the early ’70s, after Huey Meaux bought [and renamed] the studio.”

  A Fifth Ward native, ace guitarist Clarence Green (1934–1997) not only worked on Duke-Peacock sessions at Gold Star Studios backing others but also recorded there as a front man with his own group. As Gart and Ames point out, “Often he and another guitarist, Clarence Hollimon, would team in the studio to lay down background tracks for artists such as Junior Parker, Bobby Bland, Joe Hinton, O. V. Wright and others.” Impressed with Green’s instrumental skills, and aware of his fervent popularity on local stages, Robey fi nanced a 1966 session for Clarence Green and the Rhythmaires. The result, issued on Duke (#399), was the single “Keep a Workin’” and “I Saw You Last Night.” Robey later released another—“I’m Wonderin’” and “What Y’all Waiting on Me”—on Duke (#410). Meanwhile, Green and his band remained a vital presence on the Houston scene for the rest of his life. And while his affi

  liation as a front man for one of Robey’s labels was short-lived, Green’s string-bending blues often evoked the classic Duke-Peacock sound.

  beyond the duke and peacock labels, Robey also reaped big dividends, especially in the 1960s, from the Back Beat imprint that he created in 1957.

  Back Beat became the Texas home for a more progressive style of music that would ultimately be known as soul, and it is part of the Gold Star story too.

  Robey found Back Beat success with the exquisite soul singer Joe Hinton—

  but not right away. In 1959 the Duke-Peacock owner had recruited the young 1 1 0

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  vocalist from a gospel group, the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, which was then recording for Peacock. For the fi rst few years, Hinton’s solo career foundered, but in 1963 he broke through with the minor Back Beat hit “You Know It Ain’t Right” (#537). Shortly thereafter Hinton came to Gold Star Studios, presumably for the fi rst time, to cut another Back Beat single featuring “There’s No In Between” and “Better to Give Than Receive” (#539). The latter track also ranked on the Billboard R&B charts, besides receiving the “hot” designation in its pop listings for October 12, 1963.

  However, the Back Beat song for which Hinton will always be remembered is the Willie Nelson–penned classic “Funny (How Time Slips Away)” (#541), and it too was recorded at Gold Star. Like so many of Nelson’s prime compositions (such as “Crazy,” which was fi rst a hit for Patsy Cline), this number was not initially linked in public consciousness to the man who wrote it. In fact, Texas country singer Billy Walker had introduced it to predominantly white audiences with his 1961 rendition, which went to number twenty-three on Billboard’s country charts. But when Hinton, an African American, cut his own hit interpretation of the dramatic ballad, it changed the whole dynamic of Nelson’s potential as a songwriter. That recording established Nelson’s fi rst major success as a crossover songwriter—that is, someone whose material could appeal to artists and audiences of sharply contrasting demographics.

  Accordingly, it represents a key moment in pop cultural history.

  Hinton’s recording of “Funny (How Time Slips Away)” peaked at number thirteen on the pop charts in August of 1964, making it Robey’s biggest Back Beat hit up to that date. Apart from Hinton’s fi ne singing and Nelson’s elo-quent writing, the arrangement and instrumentation were also superb, a key element in making this recording a masterpiece of well-crafted sound. Owens remembers Scott and Capel working on the distinctive arrangement back at the Erastus Street studio. Later, when the song was actually recorded at Gold Star, with Walt Andrus engineering, Owens played trumpet and led the horn section.

  The Back Beat version opens with a fl ourish of trumpets. Horns then coo harmoniously in the background as Hinton suavely articulates the opening line—“Well, hello there. My, it’s been a long, long time.” They punctuate the fi rst verse with a brassy blast of passion on the turnaround. Obbligato guitar lines spun seamlessly by Hollimon distinguish the second verse, and the horns gracefully emerge with more prominent embellishments in response to the singer on the third. As the musical tension builds toward conclusion, Hinton’s over-the-top falsetto climbs even higher, wavering brilliantly at the climax.

  Robey brought Hinton back to Gold Star Studios at least one more time that year. The resulting Back Beat single, “I Want a Little Girl” and “True d u k e - p e a c o c k : t h e g o l d s t a r c o n n e c t i o n 1 1 1

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  Joe Hinton, publicity photo

  (by Benny Joseph), early 1960s

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  Love” (#545), charted in both the R&B and pop categories of Billboard. With this new hit, coming on the heels of “Funny,” Hinton had put Back Beat in the 1965 national spotlight. But that very same year, one of his label mates would score an even bigger hit.

  Robey’s achievement was clearly dependent in part on the genius of his A&R staff —producers such as Scott, Don Carter, and Jimmy Duncan.

  Scott, in particular, was his most valuable man, an in-house employee with a salaried position. But given the wide scope of Robey’s fi ve-label empire, the owner also often called on other independent producers to fi nd prospective talent and songs. Moreover, by the 1960s Robey racially integrated his operations by also working with white producers such as Charlie Booth and Huey Meaux—an affi

  liation that led to Robey’s most successful single ever, a 1965

  hit cowritten and performed by Roy Head.

  Both Booth and Meaux were involved in bringing Head to Robey’s attention. As a producer Booth had previously produced one bona fi de regional hit with the single “Down on Bending Knees” by the singer and guitarist Johnny Copeland (1937–1997), released on Booth’s own label, Golden Eagle (#101).

  That track too—the fi rst by another of Houston’s great African American blues performers—had been recorded at Gold Star Studios in 1963, and invoices show that Booth frequently produced his own sessions there between 1960 and 1967. But neither he nor Meaux posed any threat to a big wheel such as Robey, whose acumen and achievement they generally admired. As Copeland says in Bill Dahl’s liner notes for The Johnny Copeland Collection,

  “All of us, we were all feelin’ in the wind. Huey was a barber. Charlie Booth, he was a recording artist. We didn’t really have a lot of knowledge about the business. Not as much knowledge as Mr. Robey.”

  Booth claims to have met Robey during a high-stakes game of craps without realizing at fi rst who he was. Afterwards, and shocked to have learned his identity, Booth says (as quoted by Gart and Ames), “I told him I was a producer, and he said he was interested, especially in some of my white soul groups for his Back Beat label.” That invitation led to Booth and Meaux introducing Robey to the dynamic singer Roy Head and his band the Traits, which laid the foundation for the recording that would become the Back Beat label’s all-time best-seller, “Treat Her Right” (#546). Texas Monthly writers Jeff McCord and John Morthland rank that track among the hundred best Texas songs ever recorded. It also, of course, is one of the most successful recordings ever produced at Gold Star Studios.

  Roy Head and the Traits were a crowd-pleasing band of rowdy young white musicians based in San Marcos and working the Central Texas nightclub circuit. While much of their musical orientation had evolved from country and rock, their signature song is generally considered pure R&B—what Ron d u k e - p e a c o c k : t h e g o l d s t a r c o n n e c t i o n 1 1 3

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  Wynn in the All Music Guide to Rock accurately describes as “one of the great pieces of uptempo soul in the mid ’60s.” Writing in the Austin Chronicle, Margaret Moser adds,

  ”Treat Her Right” defi ed genre and lured those who heard its siren call.

  Written by Roy Head and Gene Kurtz, the song swaggered with an elastic rhythm bolstered by the punch of brass . . . and its double-entendre lyrics promised heaven “if you practice my method just as hard as you can.” With twelve bars and three chords, “Treat Her Right” delivered heaven in 125 seconds fl at.

  The Gold Star session that produced this classic disc is documented on invoice #19411 for June 6, 1965. The lineup for the Traits on this recording included Gene Kurtz (electric bass), Gerry Gibson (drums), Johnny Clark (lead guitar), Frank Miller (rhythm guitar), Dickie Martin (trumpet), Doug Shertz (tenor sax), with Head on vocals and fl amboyant dance moves. The engineer, Doyle Jones, has vivid memories of that date, including his take on a previous instance of the interracial tensions that Head’s affi

  liation with Robey’s label

  could sometimes trigger. He says,

  Charlie Booth had sold the rights to Roy Head and the Traits to Don Robey prior to them coming in to record at the studios. Don sent Roy and the band in to record with one of his guys in charge of the session. Well, the black and the white [guys] couldn’t exactly get it together, and it was a fi asco; what it was, was a damn mess. I think that we might have spent thirty hours over a period of a few days trying to get something recorded.

  Well, everybody gave up, and about a week later Roy called and booked a session. We did it on a rainy Sunday, June 6, 1965, and it was the fi rst time I ever got a tip at a recording session. It really embarrassed me because I knew that Roy was selling insurance, and I knew that I wouldn’t give him ten dollars [the amount of the tip] for the whole session. Turns out that three of the four songs from that session made the charts and, of course, “Treat Her Right” was a monster hit.

  As Jones indicates, the race-tinged uneasiness could have permanently derailed the whole project. Moreover, that fi rst studio experience foreshadowed the tensions that Head would sometimes experience, after “Treat Her Right”

  became popular, when he appeared at venues in which most of the patrons expected him to be black. In Moser’s article Head recounts one particularly infl uential incident and how he overcame it, backed in this case by African American musicians:

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  There was a black disc-jockey convention in Houston, at one of the biggest black clubs in the country. Robey didn’t want me to go on stage, didn’t want people to know I was white. . . . A couple [of ] folks said, “You need to let him play ’cause there’ll be a problem if we don’t.” When I went on stage, the place went silent. “Oh, God,” I thought. “I gotta do something now.” Joe Scott’s band backed me—Bobby “Blue” Bland’s band—and after I got started, they were high-fi ving, throwing hats in the air. The next day “Treat Her Right” was played all over the United States by black stations.

  The R&B market enthusiastically embraced the song, which eventually peaked at number one on the Billboard charts for that genre. But it also zoomed up the pop charts simultaneously, where it rose to the number two position—and stayed there for eight straight weeks. Only the strength of the Beatles (who commandeered the top slot fi rst with “Help,” followed immediately by “Yesterday”) kept this Back Beat single from scoring the ultimate honor in the pop category too.

  Since 1965 the song has been recorded by all manner of major artists, from Otis Redding to Mae West to the Box Tops (with Alex Chilton on vocals) to Jerry Lee Lewis to Barbara Mandrell to Johnny Thunders (ex–New York Dolls) to George Thorogood to Los Straitjackets with Mark Lindsay (of Paul Revere and the Raiders fame) on vocals. There are live versions by Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Neil Diamond, and the Tragically Hip, among others.

  As Jones previously noted, Head and his band had recorded four tracks on the session that yielded “Treat Her Right,” and two of the remaining three cracked the Billboard charts too. “The Apple of My Eye” (#555) peaked at number thirty-two, and Head’s cover of the Willie Dixon blues “My Babe” (#560) registered at number ninety-nine. Though the original Traits soon broke up, Head continued to record for Back Beat using the Duke-Peacock studio band (billed nonetheless as the Traits). In 1966 Head returned to Gold Star Studios to record a single featuring “Wigglin’ and Gigglin’” (#563), soon followed by

  “To Make a Big Man Cry” (#571). Both of those records charted respectably just outside the Hot 100.

  The great vocalist O. V. Wright scored yet another classic Back Beat hit in 1965 with “You’re Gonna Make Me Cry” (#548), also recorded at Gold Star Studios. It was the fi rst national Top Ten single by this electrifying performer, considered by many among the greatest deep-soul singers of all time. Backed with “Monkey Dog,” it peaked at number six on Billboard’s R&B charts, while also crossing over into the pop realm’s Hot 100. At Gold Star Wright also cut Back Beat singles such as “Poor Boy” and “I’m in Your Corner” (#551), “I Don’t Want to Sit Down” and “Can’t Find True Love” (#544), plus “Gone for Good” and “How Long Baby” (#558).

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  Roy Head, publicity

  photo, 1965

  With artists such as Wright, Hinton, and Head, Robey helped defi ne mid-1960s soul music from a Texas perspective. That in so doing he also used the engineers and facilities of Gold Star Studios is further evidence of the unique role that this recording complex has played in music history.

  a few of the hit records made at Gold Star Studios by artists linked to Robey ended up being released on labels that he did not control. A prime example of that seemingly unlikely scenario is the song “Think,” written and performed by Jimmy McCracklin (b. 1921). Released in 1965 on the California-based Imperial Records (#66129), it went to number seven on the R&B charts 1 1 6

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  and number ninety-fi ve in the pop category. Its status as a classic would be confi rmed years later by its inclusion on the multidisc compilation Mean Old World: The Blues from 1940 to 1994, issued by the Smithsonian Institution—

  though the liner notes by Lawrence Hoff man mistakenly identify Los Angeles as the song’s recording site. Yet “Think” was actually recorded independently by McCracklin in Houston, where he made use of both Robey’s in-house studio on Erastus Street and the Gold Star facility across town.

  Though born in St. Louis, McCracklin was a California resident and a proponent of the West Coast blues sound for the entire second half of the twentieth century. After launching his recording career with Globe in 1945, he went on to issue other singles and albums on numerous labels nationwide, including Modern, Atlantic, Swing Time, Checker, Mercury, and many others—as well as Robey’s Peacock brand. That arrangement had evolved during a two-week special engagement featuring McCracklin (along with Big Mama Thornton, Billy Wright, and Marie Adams) at the Bronze Peacock nightclub in 1952. McCracklin’s fi rst Peacock single, issued later that year, off ered the minor hit “My Days Are Limited” (#1605). Peacock released four other McCracklin singles over the next few years, but by 1954 he had moved on to another company.

  However, McCracklin continued to perform periodically in Houston, a regular stop on his tours across the South. Though his formal ties with Robey’s label were broken, McCracklin evidently maintained a friendship with the A&R man Scott, which likely led to McCracklin recording one of his most famous songs in Houston. “I had an agent in New York who was booking me in Houston all the time. So I was in your area a lot,” McCracklin explains. “
The song ‘Think’ just came to me one day, and I wanted to record it.”

  Being in Houston as he was at the time, McCracklin turned to his former associates at Duke-Peacock to bring his plan to fruition. Someone there, presumably Scott, facilitated McCracklin’s initial use of the offi ce-building studio. Whatever arrangements may have been made to garner Robey’s approval of this plan are unclear. But the wheeler-dealer label boss, via his commonly evoked alias, did receive publishing credit as cowriter of “Think”—and hence a half-share of the composer royalties in perpetuity. As is widely known (and covered in more detail in Wood’s Down in Houston), after being criticized for claiming writer’s credit for countless songs that he had simply purchased outright from others, Robey had adopted the pseudonym Deadric Malone (based on a combination of his own middle name and his wife’s maiden name—

  often abbreviated in credits as D. Malone) to use in such situations, which for Robey were numerous indeed. He thereafter still received the lucrative royalty payments but avoided some of the public embarrassment (for allegedly taking advantage of desperate artists by buying and publishing their songs without acknowledging their role as the actual creators). Because “D. Malone” appears d u k e - p e a c o c k : t h e g o l d s t a r c o n n e c t i o n 1 1 7

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  with McCracklin’s name in the songwriting credits on this Imperial Records disc, we infer that Robey perhaps permitted the traveling blues musician to make use of the Duke-Peacock studio and ace producer in exchange for a piece of the songwriting action. Gambler that he was (by his own self-description), Robey had to like the odds. After all, assuming no other sessions were scheduled at the time, he would have nothing to lose for allowing McCracklin into his studio; however, if the song proved to be a hit (as it did), Robey could earn some fat and easy royalty checks—what musicians of his era often called