Meaux had sought to convey an image appealing to fans enthralled by the latest phenomenon in pop music, then at its height. This is an example of a deceptive marketing strategy that Meaux would later similarly employ to rechristen Doug Sahm’s band as the Sir Douglas Quintet.
In August 1965 Steve Tyrell produced a session for an artist named Chuck Jackson, which was billed to Stan Greenberg of Scepter-Wand Records from New York City. Meanwhile, in a matter of just a few months (and for singles issued on a variety of labels), Meaux also produced artists such as Warren Storm, T. K. Hulin, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Doty Roy, Barbara Lynn, Joe Barry, Johnny Copeland, Ray Frushay, Johnny Williams, Joey Long, and Ivory Joe Hunter—who collectively represent almost any regional subgenre that might have viably struck pop gold.
But apart from Meaux there were plenty of other producers renting time and expertise from Gold Star Studios during this era. For example, Jimmy Duncan was a Houston songwriter and singer, very much in the mold of Pat Boone, who had founded Cue Records around 1955 and later a label called Cinderella Records. He wrote “My Special Angel,” a hit recorded by Bobby Helms for Decca Records in 1957. Duncan also wrote “Echoes of Time,”
which would be recorded by the Houston psychedelic rock band Lemon Fog in 1967. Later Duncan built his own studio complex, called Soundville, in southwest Houston. When it failed a few years later, Holford purchased it as the new home of ACA Studios.
But Duncan had fi rst recorded at Gold Star Studios as early as 1956, when he cut two Cue sides, and he came back frequently during the HSP days.
From July 1964 through July 1965, he and his various production companies staged at least fi fty-three Gold Star recording sessions. Andrus had engineered approximately the fi rst third of those, and Jones handled the rest. Archived documents show Duncan booked Gold Star sessions also for the blues artist Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, the white R&B singer Jesse Langford, the pop vocalist Jimmy Henderson, a duo called Cathy and Joe, as well as for himself and others.
There were other self-produced projects by artists hoping to break through on their own. For instance, in 1965 country singer Mickey Gilley visited the studios at least eight times to record demos or masters, including the songs “I Miss You So” and “Lotta Loving,” which were later released on Astro Records 1 3 2
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left to right: Huey Meaux, Doyle Jones, and the Dawgs, at Gold Star Studios, 1965
(photo courtesy of Gaylan Latimer, third from right)
(#106). Gilley says, “Doyle Jones engineered those for me over at Gold Star.
About six months later we did another session, and the songs that we did were ‘If I Didn’t Have a Dime’ and a B-side. . . . released on Astro [#110] in 1966.”
Meanwhile, the Houston-based producer Steve Poncio came to Gold Star Studios at least six times between May 1965 and September 1966 for recording, mixing, and mastering on blues or rock artists such as Don Cherry, Joe Hughes, Jimmy “T-99” Nelson, Piano Slim, Joe Medwick, and C.L. and the Pictures.
Not all of the clients were pop bands, however. In early November 1965, members of the Houston Symphony Orchestra returned to Gold Star Studios to record. This project, produced by Dr. Paul Carlin, featured selected orchestra musicians grouped in a smaller ensemble, conducted by Dick Anthony, performing with a special all-star choir comprising some of the best religious singers from the region. The result was a contemporary gospel album titled What Manner Love. It featured the singer Jerry Wayne Bernard with music written by Bill Harvey and others and arrangements by Dick Anthony. Lurie staged, recorded, mixed, and mastered the album over the course of four days.
This sort of project underscores again the importance of the Quinn-designed big studio room in the Gold Star legacy.
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But regardless of the quality of the facility and the artists it recorded, like any business Gold Star Studios required competent, honest management to succeed in the long run. And the HSP Corporation run was not very long.
Though its tenure marked a particularly productive era in terms of numbers and types of sessions, there was trouble ahead. Legal issues resulting in serious charges against Patterson would soon surface, threatening to destroy the whole enterprise forever. Some members of the corporation had seen it coming and got out before the situation deteriorated. Others lingered there through HSP’s demise. And a few, like the engineer Jones, simply got themselves fi red. He says,
I recorded a lot of great sessions at that studio: Roy Head, the Sir Douglas Quintet, the Pozo Seco Singers, a bunch of Duke and Peacock Records artists. I worked a lot with Huey P. Meaux, Charlie Booth, and Don Robey’s people, like Joe Scott and Wilmer Shakesnider. . . . But it didn’t work in the long run. Jack [Clement] and Bill Hall pulled out and went to Nashville.
. . . I got fi red because I had diff erences with Patterson. I thought he was a thief and told him so, and that ended my involvement with the studio. Bill Holford and Bert [Frilot] pulled out just a couple of months after I left. . . .
I quickly got tired of the scams that J. L. Patterson was running and not getting paid for my work.
Yet before this obviously bitter ending, Jones and others had a little more history to make.
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13
A House of Rock,
Despite the Muck
he hsp corporation remained intact for less than a full year, dissolving as key members and unhappy employees gradually
pulled out. But during its brief existence, its operations included the making of hundreds of recordings at Gold Star Studios, and some of those are undeniably historic. Despite the ill will generated among insiders by J. L. Patterson’s emerging reputation for bad checks, half truths, and scheming opportunism, HSP’s strong start and an especially propitious regional music scene fueled an explosion of new business that kept Gold Star Studios functioning. HSP had begun with a large engineering staff , so it took a while for Patterson’s antics to deplete the whole roster. In the meantime, groups such as the Sir Douglas Quintet and the 13th Floor Elevators, among others, used the facility to forge fundamental tracks. No matter how much bad management may have sullied the company, a new breed of clientele was clamoring to make records, some of which would become classics.
Jeff Millar’s Houston Post article from September 1965 provides a view of Gold Star Studios at essentially the halfway point of the HSP era. In recounting the recent national success of locally produced artists (such as Roy Head, whose “Treat Her Right” is cited as having already sold some 300,000
copies), Millar focuses on ACA/Gold Star Studios as Houston’s main house of hits, lauding its size and reputation. In particular, Millar quotes the company’s vice president/general manager and engineer, Bill Holford, who notes that—along with many sessions for pop music groups, commercials, and high school bands and orchestras—he had recorded six tracks there for the Kingston Trio a few months earlier.
An accompanying photograph depicts Mickey Gilley’s band recording in Studio B with Holford at the controls. Millar says the studio has so much work that it operates approximately eighteen hours per day. Ultimately, Holford ex-Bradley_4319_BK.indd 135
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plains the company’s bottom line: “We charge $32 an hour for our recording services. Figure three hours to cut two songs, both sides of a [45 rpm] record.
There’s a little more time needed for re-mixing and mastering. Each acetate master is $10. The average recording session runs around $110.” This description covers the minimum starting point for making a record—a process that would yield a single tape and one acetate master. For the cycle to come to fruition, that master would
then have to be pressed to make suffi cient copies to send to DJs and retailers, entailing additional expenses. Yet the ACA/
Gold Star Studios prices for recording, remixing, and mastering were quite reasonable for the time, suggesting that economical rates may have fueled the prolifi c level of recording activity.
As previously noted, producer Huey Meaux paid to use the studio frequently through August 1965, when he moved to his own facility for a while.
Perhaps his decision to depart was triggered by HSP’s plan to monopolize local recording services. Creating his own studio may have been Meaux’s de-fi ant assertion of independence, his unwillingness to have his projects controlled by the likes of Patterson. Whatever the case, before leaving, Meaux staged some of the sessions most important to the legacy of Gold Star Studios, featuring a group that he had dubbed the Sir Douglas Quintet.
Meaux’s concept in naming that band is well known in Texas music folklore. Given the intense public appetite for mid-1960s English rock groups performing music based on American blues and R&B, Meaux decided that Sahm could be the catalyst for a grand scheme. As Gary Hartman writes in The History of Texas Music,
Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the British Invasion, Meaux apparently selected the name Sir Douglas Quintet because it sounded “English,”
and he encouraged Sahm and the others to wear the “mod” clothing and hairstyles of their British counterparts. They may have looked much like the popular British bands of the day (despite the fact that two members of Sahm’s group were Mexican American), but the Sir Douglas Quintet’s music clearly refl ected the band’s eclectic Texas-based musical background.
Prior to that group’s fi rst session at Gold Star Studios, Sahm had been pestering Meaux to record him for at least a year. However, Meaux was busy producing and promoting hits with artists such as Barbara Lynn or Dale and Grace. But when Beatlemania began to alter the pop cultural landscape, Meaux brainstormed a new tactic. He reportedly called Sahm, told him to grow his hair long, assemble a band, and write a song with a Cajun two-step beat—a sound echoed in the familiar conjunto music of Sahm’s hometown, San Antonio.
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On January 14, 1965, in Studio A of the Gold Star Studios complex, the Sir Douglas Quintet recorded a track that married Gulf Coast R&B, a Cajun-conjunto backbeat, and elements inspired by “She’s a Woman” by the Beatles.
The result was “She’s About a Mover”—which ranks as the all-time number one recording in Jeff McCord and John Morthland’s Texas Monthly analysis of the greatest Texas songs. It was originally released on Tribe Records, one of Meaux’s labels, backed with “We’ll Take Our Last Walk Tonight” (#8308).
The record went to number thirteen on the U.S. pop charts and did equally well in the United Kingdom. In so doing it launched not just a band but a sound. Propelled distinctly by Augie Meyers’s pumping groove on Farfi sa organ (evoking a Tejano accordionist accompanying a bajo sexto), that sound fused disparate infl uences and foreshadowed the substantial musical cross-pollination that Sahm and Meyers would later cultivate with other bands (including the Texas Tornados supergroup they would form in the 1990s with Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez).
The session that produced “She’s About a Mover” was clearly a breakthrough moment in Texas music history. Jones, one of the original HSP engineers, recorded it on a three-track machine with Ampex tape. He shares these memories:
It was a very smooth and organized session with no problems. . . . Huey mastered it right after we fi nished mixing it, and he worked with Bob Lurie on that. Doug and Augie Meyers were good people to work with. After we recorded it, I never imagined that it would become a hit record or have the cult status that it has to this day. I did notice that it was something totally dif-ferent. As a matter of fact, it was even diff erent from the English sound that was prevalent in those days.
The Sir Douglas Quintet and Meaux also recorded numerous other songs at Gold Star in 1965. Invoices show they also taped “In Time” and “Wine Wine Wine” on that inaugural session. On February 23, they returned to cut
“The Tracker,” “Please Just Say So,” “We’ll Never Tell,” “In the Pines,” and
“Bill Bailey.” On April 12, they did “Working Jam,” “Bacon Fat,” “You Got Me Hurtin’,” and “The Rains Came.” Then on August 9, they made “It’s a Man Down There,” “Isabella,” and another title that is indecipherable on the invoice. “The Rains Came” (backed with the dance-themed number “Bacon Fat”
on the 45 rpm single) went to number thirty-one on the charts in early 1966.
In his book All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music, Michael Corcoran devotes a chapter called “The Genre Conqueror” to the legacy of Doug Sahm.
Describing him as “fl uent in every style of Texas music, from blues and conjunto to Cajun, honky-tonk, and psychedelic rock,” Corcoran mourns the 1999
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Sir Douglas Quintet, publicity photo, 1965
death of the man who “gave the Austin music scene its soul.” He also quotes this astute assessment by Joe Nick Patoski: “When you look back on the true originators, the real pioneers of Texas music, there are four main guys: Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, T-Bone Walker, and Doug Sahm.” Like Nelson, who had recorded his fi rst version of “Night Life” there in 1959, the innovative Sahm is thus a big part of the Gold Star Studios story.
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another important batch of Jones-engineered recordings involved a folk-pop group from Corpus Christi called the Pozo Seco Singers—the trio that propelled famous country singer-songwriter Don Williams (b. 1939) into the national spotlight. The Spanish phrase “pozo seco” translates literally as “dry well,” yet these singers found success in their recording debut at Gold Star Studios. That eff ort produced a 1965 hit single that stayed on the Billboard pop charts for fi fty-four straight weeks and led to a multiple-album deal with Columbia Records.
In addition to Williams, the lineup featured Susan Taylor and Lofton Kline; all members sang and played guitar. Their hit recording of “Time,” originally released on Edmark Records, attracted major label interest—and became the title track of their debut album in 1966. Working with producer Paul Butts (himself a folksinger and guitarist), the Pozo Seco Singers recorded “Time” at Gold Star Studios on May 23, 1965. Jones remembers it well:
That was one of the few records that I was the engineer on that I thought actually had a chance to be a hit. . . . I was real impressed with Paul Butts, and also Don Williams. Don back in those days sounded a lot like Johnny Cash.
They were all fi ne people and excellent singers and musicians. . . . Susan Taylor was the lead vocalist on “Time.” . . . I know that we recorded the song
“heads up” [live in the studio, with no overdubs].
Founding member Taylor (who is still active today as a folksinger known as Taylor Pie) off ers her recollections of the song, the session that made it famous, and the deal with Columbia Records:
Michael Merchant, who wrote the song, played bass on the session. Mike and I had a folk group when he was a senior at Miller High School. He went off to Penn State, and when he came back home after the fi rst semester, he played me this song that he had written called “Time.” I freaked when I fi rst heard it, and I asked him to teach it to me right away. He had written the song around this cool guitar lick. Well, I learned it immediately, and . . .
went over and played it to the other guys in Pozo, Lofton Kline and Don Williams. . . .
So we headed over to ACA/Gold Star to record two sides for Edmark Records. . . . Don’s song, “Hello Blues and Down the Road I Go,” was to be the A-side of the
record, and “Time” was to be the B-side. . . . I think the whole thing took three hours. We came out of there with two songs mastered and ready to go and press records. . . .
Edmark Records was out of Port Aransas, and Paul Butts had something to do with them. When we formed Pozo Seco, Paul became our manager and helped organize the deal with Edmark. He backed out of the picture when a h o u s e o f ro c k , d e s p i t e t h e m u c k 1 3 9
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Albert Grossman [1926–1986, most famous for managing Bob Dylan] came and signed the group. We put the record out and started getting airplay all around Texas. But the DJs fl ipped the record over and started playing “Time”
instead. . . . The song became a regional hit. It started in Corpus . . . made it over to San Antonio, then Houston and Dallas, and it charted everywhere that was playing it.
Following the reception the single was getting in Texas, the group got the kind of lucky break that every would-be star dreams of. Taylor continues, A guy named Joe Mansfi eld, who worked PR for Columbia in San Antonio, heard it. He got a copy of it and took off for New York to a meeting of Columbia’s national PR guys and played it to everybody. They all liked it, and when they found out that it was busting out all over Texas, they contacted us.
We signed and not much happened. . . . All of a sudden in February of 1966 they contacted us and told us that in six days we were going on a seven-day tour of the West Coast because the song had hit number one in Los Angeles. . . . Right after L.A. it went to number one in Chicago, and then as it fell there, it went number one in Boston. You have to get all the numbers in at the same time to crack the Top Ten in Billboard. We never got any higher than number forty-seven in Billboard, but the song stayed in the Top 100 for something like fi fty-four weeks. The song had an amazing ride.
House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) Page 20