House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music)
Page 18
“mailbox money.”
McCracklin continues the story, explaining also how Gold Star Studios came to be involved:
We started the recording over at Robey’s studio in his building, with Joe Scott producing. But Joe wasn’t happy with some of the playing, and he went over to your studio [Gold Star] and replaced some of the music behind my voice. . . . I used my own road band on the [fi rst] recording of that song. The other song we did was . . . “Steppin’ Up in Class.” I recorded those sides for Imperial Records. . . . “Think” was a Gold Record for me.
Among the studio musicians whom Scott employed to rerecord the selected instrumentation for overdubbing was the drummer Bubbha Thomas. The engineer for that session was Frilot, who handled the mixing as well. As for his role on the track, Thomas says, “The reason I got the Jimmy McCracklin thing was because they really liked my backbeat. Robey would say, ‘You tell that damn drummer’—me—‘to play that same backbeat he used on the O. V.
[Wright] session last week!’”
McCracklin adds, “I think that we might have done maybe four other songs during that time period.” In fact, he staged several additional sessions specifi cally at Gold Star Studios in 1965. We have three invoices made out to Imperial Records for Jimmy McCracklin for that same year: a recording session on April 21, a mixing session on April 26, and then twelve straight hours of recording and mixing on September 28. In the company vault we also have a safety master of six untitled tracks labeled as “Jimmy McCracklin/Imperial Records.” Such artifacts are physical reminders of the sometimes surprising, multifaceted history of Gold Star Studios.
while robey’s recording conglomerate scored big with secular music, it was also deeply involved in the production of gospel recordings. As a result, some of the greatest performers in that genre came from across the nation to record in Houston. In a few cases, they are known to have done sessions at Gold Star Studios too.
1 1 8
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 118
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
For instance, the Sunset Travelers—who originally had featured the singer Wright—indeed traveled, several times, from Memphis to Houston to record. They came twice in 1961 alone, producing at least fi fteen sides at those sessions. Where they recorded (and whether at one or two studios) is not documented. But in October of 1964 the Sunset Travelers are known to have returned to Houston for sessions at Gold Star Studios. They recorded eleven tracks there—some of which appear on the group’s Peacock Records LP entitled On Jesus’ Program (#122).
Even nonreligious music fans are likely to know of the Mighty Clouds of Joy. Writing in All Music Guide, Jason Ankeny calls them “gospel’s preeminent group,” adding that they “carried the torch for the traditional quartet vocal style” even while “pioneering a distinctively funky sound.” Formed in Los Angeles in 1955, they signed with Peacock Records in 1960 (which was already home to several gospel supergroups). There they made a large number of best-selling gospel singles and albums for Robey’s company. In particular, we know that their 1965 single “I’ll Go” (#3025) was recorded at Gold Star Studios, and it was reportedly a mainstay of Billboard’s “Hot Spiritual Singles” chart for that year. Likewise, their 1965 album, A Bright Side, was a top-seller, and much of it was recorded at Gold Star (featuring veteran session players such as Thomas, Hollimon, and Evans).
Though gospel music had never been the primary focus of Quinn’s studio, it had been recorded there on many sessions in the 1950s—typically by white country singers with cagy producers who sensed that old-time Christian numbers on the B-sides might help sell records. But the Duke-Peacock connection distinguished Gold Star Studios as a recording site for some of the biggest groups in the history of black gospel.
Similarly, though African Americans had recorded at Quinn’s facility since the late 1940s, the Duke-Peacock connection signifi ed also a changing dynamic in terms of race relations. Given Robey’s self-confi dent demeanor and obvious fi nancial success, as well as his tendency to employ brilliant fellow African Americans (such as Johnson or Scott) in key positions of author-ity, blacks took on increasingly high-profi le roles among the studio’s clientele.
In some cases, the blacks were now the bosses exploiting and promoting the talents of whites—and marketing music (such as Head’s “Treat Her Right”) that appealed to both groups. Writer Tim Brooks notes “the signifi cant socio-economic and cultural contributions Robey made to the industry and to the convergence of black and white popular music,” and then sums up a key fact:
“He was a rare breed, a black man succeeding in a white man’s business, in the South, at a time when that was not encouraged.”
In part because of Robey’s involvement with studios such as ACA and Gold Star, scores of blacks and whites—musicians, engineers, managers, 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 9
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 119
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
producers, songwriters, staff members, and such—worked together in close proximity. For some, it was perhaps the fi rst time to experience a racially integrated professional environment. And despite whatever frictions may have occasionally transpired, some of them, at least sometimes, collaborated creatively in ways that were rare in Texas at the time.
Producer and songwriter Flery Versay provides his own insight on the matter:
I arrived in Houston with my partner Robert Staunton in 1967. We came from LA via Motown Records. Robert had written to Don Robey of Duke and Peacock Records. He asked us to come down to Houston to be staff songwriters, and I wound up being head of A&R for a couple of years, around 1966
and 1967. . . .
I am glad that I got to work with a lot of white cats in the late ’60s. Race relations were a big deal if you listened to the media. They made it out to be a lot worse than it really was. In the entertainment business, everybody pretty much got along. And I’m glad that my experience made that possible.
Of course, Robey’s business sense was focused on making money, not necessarily making racial harmony. But because he needed, and could pay for, the services and facilities that an experienced studio such as ACA or Gold Star could off er, Robey nonetheless may have inadvertently stimulated racial integration in the 1960s recording scene in Houston, the largest city in the South.
Whatever his motive, as an entrepreneur Robey had blazed new trails. Even the cantankerous “Gatemouth” Brown, the fi rst artist he ever recorded, had to admire what Robey had achieved—a feat that until the mid-1960s had yet to be matched. Brown, as quoted in Gart and Ames, off ers this assessment: “He pulled off something in America that no one else ever pulled off [before]. We had the only world-renowned black recording company, the biggest.”
The Duke-Peacock story is thus unique. Moreover, the fact that it includes Gold Star Studios adds yet another dimension to that site’s claim to a special status of its own.
1 2 0
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 120
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
12
The HSP Corporation
Experiment Begins
y 1965 j. l. patterson, who was leasing Gold Star Studios from the retired Bill Quinn, had developed a concept that, he hoped, would give him and his partners in the facility unprecedented control of the regional recording market—and make lots of money.
Patterson essentially convinced several previous competitors and independent contractors to join forces with him under a single corporate umbrella.
This larger company’s staff thus comprised many of the best recording engineers from the Houston-Beaumont area. Most prominent in this partnership was Bill Holford of ACA Studios, one of Houston’s most reputable recording companies. By coupling ACA’s business and staff with Gold Star’s, this new hybrid corporation was primed to dominate the recording services industry in and beyond the state’s largest city. It was called the HSP Corporation, based on
the initial letter of each founding offi
cer’s surname. Formed on May 1,
1965, it supplanted Patterson’s previous JLP Corporation as the organization operating Gold Star Studios. And for a while, it worked out very well.
Its principals were (in H-S-P sequence) Holford (vice president/director), Louis Stevenson (president/director), and Patterson (secretary/treasurer).
Ultimately there were several other people involved too, including former Sun Records engineer Jack Clement and producer Bill Hall, previously of the Gulf Coast Recording Company in Beaumont. Engineers included Doyle Jones, Hank Poole, Bert Frilot, Bob Lurie, Gaylan Shelby, and others.
By this time, engineer Walt Andrus had left to create his own recording company. By late 1965 Huey Meaux, a former regular Gold Star client, would be gone too, as he elected to build his own studio, called Recording Services, in nearby Pasadena. However, he would make some serious Gold Star history before departing, and eventually he would return.
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 121
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
For a while, Patterson’s newly formed corporation operated as ACA/Gold Star Recording Company, based at the original Gold Star Studios on Brock Street. Though the HSP Corporation would ultimately fail as a business partnership, during its tenure in charge of Gold Star, that already historic facility continued to host important hit-making sessions in a wide range of genres.
Despite issues of mismanagement and mistrust that would ultimately dis-solve HSP, the company employed outstanding sound engineers. One of the best, who would eventually depart in disgust to form his own studio, was Jones. He had started working for Patterson in August 1964. As an inside observer during the corporate transition from JLP to HSP, Jones off ers this summary of the evolution of the company:
Patterson was a clever guy. He started the JLP Corporation, which included me in some great plan to corner the market on all the recording in Houston. . . . At fi rst it also included Jack Clement and Bill Hall from Beaumont and Louis Stevenson and Bob Lurie, who had come from owning a studio in Paris, France. It was successful enough at the beginning for Patterson to expand the company and rename it the HSP Corporation. That is when he added Bill Holford and Bert Frilot. For about a year we were the busiest studio anybody had ever seen. . . . J.L. had cornered the market on all the best engineers in Houston, and there was almost nowhere else to go, except for maybe Walt Andrus’s studio over on Broadway. If J.L. hadn’t been such a crook, the sky was the limit as far as what might have been.
Stevenson, the president, was an investor who also served as resident studio technician, mastering engineer, and disc cutter. (During this time period the studio still cut its own acetates on the Gotham/Grampian lathe.) Stevenson played a key role in modifying and repairing studio equipment during the HSP era. Bob Lurie, already an excellent engineer, became one of the resident disc-cutters too. He brought with him a Steinway grand piano and installed it in the big studio.
Because Patterson’s vision for HSP required it to be staff ed with numerous engineers and do a high volume of business, he expanded the Gold Star facility. In 1964 Patterson had commissioned Jack Clement (b. 1931) to design a recording room as part of a major studio expansion. Upon completion, this new building, connected to the front of the big studio room, housed the “gold star” room, so called because of the emblem installed on the studio fl oor.
The structural addition also encompassed two new acoustic reverb chambers, plus the old front entryway to the studio complex.
Studio B ran twenty-one feet long by twenty feet wide, with a seventeen-foot-high ceiling. The walls were covered in common acoustic tiles and strate-1 2 2
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 122
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
gically placed rectangular panels made of a cloth-covered absorbent material that reduced room echoes. The ceiling was T-grid with acoustic tiles. The fl oor was a thick, light-gray-colored linoleum tile with the aforementioned emblem placed slightly off center.
The adjoining control room measured twenty feet long by twelve feet wide, with a thirteen-foot-high ceiling. It was long and narrow, with the shorter side facing into the studio. The linoleum fl oor was raised nearly eighteen inches above the ground to allow cable troughs to run underfoot. The walls were acoustic tiles except for a corkboard surface (for extra absorbency) on the back wall behind the engineer’s seat.
The designer, Clement, has excelled in recording, publishing, and writing American music for over fi fty years—and was already well established in the industry when he started working with Patterson in 1964. As an engineer, for instance, Clement had previously recorded Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and other icons at Sun Records in Memphis. Later, following his stint in Houston, he would produce Charley Pride and establish his own hit-making studio in Nashville. There he would record albums for singers Townes Van Zandt and Waylon Jennings, among many others. Scores of artists—from Hank Snow to Dolly Parton to Tom Jones—have covered his songs.
Here Clement recalls his introduction to Patterson and Gold Star Studios:
My fi rst memories of the place were when J. L. Patterson asked me to come over and visit. There was only one studio at the time; it was the big one in the back. He asked me to help him build a second studio.
It started when I moved to Beaumont and built . . . Gulf Coast Recording Studios. I partnered with Bill Hall. We both had equipment, and we moved it into that new studio. I recorded B. J. Thomas a couple of times and also worked with Don Robey a bit.
Then one day Patterson came along. At the time I owned all this gear and was thinking about moving back to Nashville. He talked me into moving to Houston. So we cut all the gear loose and moved to Houston in late 1964.
Patterson had the big fi ne room in the back, but he wanted a second room. I designed and built it from the ground up—footings, foundations, and everything. It was a well-built building. I did the layout and the acoustics inside as well. Then we put in these two echo chambers. . . .
My concepts for the Gold Star studio were that I wanted it good and
“dead” with very controllable sound. . . . I would deaden the walls and be able to move refl ective partitions in to change the sound and tune it up when I wanted to. The walls were a cloth covering with fi berglass insulation behind it. The cloth would have had about nine inches of fi berglass behind it. This t h e h s p c o r p o r at i o n e x p e r i m e n t b eg i n s 1 2 3
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 123
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
went from the ceiling down to about three feet from the fl oor. There was a wood border all around the studio from the fl oor up to the three-foot level, and that was a sort of a bass trap that ran around the room. My approach to designing a studio is to make it good for the musicians to hear each other. I would start with it fairly dead and then tune it up as I would go. That studio I built in Houston was solid. We put these pylons in the ground every so-many feet; it should not have moved at all.
The control room had a gang of four-channel Ampex mixers chained together and fed an Ampex four-track one-half-inch machine and a one-quarter-inch mono machine and maybe a stereo deck also. . . . They had a lot of good mics: all the Neumann tube mics and RCA ribbons and some Altec dynamics. . . .
I brought all my clients from Beaumont to work there. I remember recording Mickey Newbury at Gold Star, one of the fi rst clients of the new studio I had just built.
As for the reason his tenure at Gold Star Studios did not last longer, Clement off ers this cryptic analysis:
J.L. was a very interesting character, and I didn’t want to get in too deep with him. He had a lot of wild ideas. His main thing was this burglar alarm system called Vandalarm. It worked on sound, and apparently it was reliable, and he sold a bunch of them. That’s how he got his money. . . . After a while I decided to move back to Nashville and took my equipment back with me.
While Clement’s time at Gold Star Studios was limited, it w
as signifi cant.
First, he brought impressive music-establishment credentials to the enterprise. Before his arrival, the self-taught Quinn had designed and installed every facet of this recording facility. Clement’s work on the 1964 expansion project infused the complex with a fresh professional perspective. Moreover, Clement literally changed the size, shape, and quality of the facility, and many of his modifi cations remain intact and in use today. But his quick departure, bolstered by his observations about Patterson (whom he depicts as motivated by money, not music), suggests that he sensed that something was not right with HSP.
Jones soon came to a similar conclusion about Patterson. Jones says,
“When I came over to work in late 1964, the gold star room was about a week away from completion.” Thus, he worked mainly in the new, state-of-the-art location. But given the conditions under which he would leave Gold Star Studios, he has no nostalgia for the site. “I have not set foot in the building since that time,” he explains. “The whole experience with J. L. Patterson’s running of those studios left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.”
1 2 4
h o u s e o f h i t s
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 124
1/26/10 1:12:16 PM
Another engineer, Hank Poole, had originally worked at Houston’s KILT
radio before taking a position at ACA Studios. Thus, with the HSP consolida-tion, Poole moved to Gold Star Studios. He says,
I came over to Gold Star when the two Bills, Quinn and Holford, merged. I guess they fi gured between them they would have a lock on it. I think that J. L. Patterson was in trouble fi nancially and tried to put the ACA/Gold Star concept together, and fi gured that the two of them could do real well together. . . .