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

by Andy Bradley, Roger Wood

  liation with Gold Star, Patterson, or each other. Thus,

  when he naïvely introduced himself to them by referencing his employer, his polite queries were abruptly dismissed. Baffl

  ed by what he took to be rude,

  close-minded behavior, Duff turned his attention to upgrading the studio and rebuilding its business—which had obviously suff ered from the HSP fi asco and the defection of clients to competitors.

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  Duff had learned that Jones and Andrus were moving from four-track to eight-track recording while Gold Star lagged behind. Unable to convince Patterson to invest immediately in new technology, Duff ’s counterstrategy was to mail an attractive brochure to former customers announcing changes in management and policy, and a new economical custom-record deal. His initiative helped. “After I put out that brochure about the studio, we started getting pretty busy,” Duff recalls. “Then when Gabe Tucker [a Pappy Daily associate] found out that I was running the studio over here, he started coming back to Gold Star. After that a bunch of his people also came over to record with me.”

  During

  Duff ’s tenure only the smaller studio room was in full operation.

  The big studio room was used mainly for storage—and lacked equipment, Duff reports. By that time, some gear may have already been repossessed from Patterson, or some may have belonged to Holford, who rightfully would have taken it with him. Duff says,

  J.L. was leasing gear from three diff erent leasing companies—and was constantly writing hot checks to all of them. I remember a day when all three leasing companies turned up to repo the equipment. He also sold his accounts receivables to three diff erent companies. One day a guy showed up with two bounced checks and a truck to pick up the equipment. We called up over at Vandalarm [another Patterson company], and he came running over and took the guy out to lunch at Benihana’s, took the two cold checks back, and wrote a new hot check to cover the fi rst two and another payment. I said to him after the guy left, “J.L., you can’t write him that check. We don’t have enough in the studio account to cover that much.” He mumbled quietly, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” That was always his answer.

  Bewildered,

  Duff nonetheless worked on in the one available studio, which despite some older technology remained well stocked for making records.

  The control room featured the Stevenson-designed mixer, which comprised four Ampex M35 mixers slaved together with pan pots and high- and low-pass fi lters. The multitrack deck was an Ampex 350 four-track machine. The mix decks were an Ampex 350 mono recorder and an Ampex 351 stereo machine.

  There were also some Pulteq tube equalizers and Fairchild tube compressors.

  Microphones included Neumann U-67s, Neumann U-47s, an AKG C-12, and RCA DX-77s and 74 Juniors.

  With this gear Duff threw himself into recording music, leaving business aff airs to Patterson and hoping for the best. Given some of the exciting projects he would soon engineer—such as an album featuring Lightnin’ Hopkins jamming with members of the 13th Floor Elevators—Duff ’s enthusiasm for the work helped to counterbalance his other concerns, at least for a while.

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  duff’s gold star experience concentrated mainly on recording country music, blues, and especially the explosion of late-Sixties garage bands experimenting with new directions in rock.

  As for his work with country singers, Duff had fi rst cut tracks with Utah Carl, the hillbilly-singer persona of Carl Beach, who was from Galveston. Duff also recorded one of the earliest sessions by Texas-born singer Gene Watson (b. 1943), who Duff notes “would eventually go on to have a pretty big career in the country music world.” Additionally he recorded two tracks by Richie Moreland, as well as more sessions with Mary McCoy, including a duet with Jimmy Copland on a song he had cowritten with Sonny Hall, “Somewhere There’s Someone.” It and “Kiss and Make Up” were issued together as a single on Tonka Records. McCoy also cut another Hall composition, “Ring on My Finger,” for Tonka Records. Working with McCoy introduced Duff to some of the key supporting players in the local country scene at the time, including Frenchie Burke, Herb Remington, and Clyde Brewer—as well as to Hall himself.

  Duff did not actually record, but helped shape Hall’s production of, the album Portraits of Floyd Tillman. As Duff explains, “They cut the album at Ray Doggett’s studio, but Sonny was not satisfi ed with the fi nal mix, so he brought it to me to enhance it a little, cut the master acetate, and to get the albums pressed.”

  Gold Star Studios would also remain a fertile site for blues recording throughout the 1960s. In the 1971 book Nothing but the Blues, edited by Mike Leadbitter, for instance, Bruce Bastin writes about doing research in Houston from May to July 1966. He recounts meeting Clifton Chenier, Elmore Nixon, and Lightnin’ Hopkins—and being invited to a recording session: I called Elmore the next day to be told he was off to the Gold Star studios to record with Lightnin’. Lightnin’ then came to the phone and suggested that I come on down. The session was held to make a promotional tape for a young Negro singer names Jimmy Ray Williams. . . . Lightnin’ was on guitar. Also accompanying was Elmore on piano and his cousin Robert “Red”

  Ingram on drums. . . . Elmore said they’d (he and Lightnin’) recorded about two weeks ago. Lightnin’ later said that he is contracted to go to Gold Star studios, the tapes are then mailed to the contacts and he gets paid by post; a rather hygienic way of recording, which may account for the mass of Prestige

  [Records] material [issued on LPs]. . . . Bill Quinn, he stated, still owned the Gold Star studios, lived next door to it, but nowadays leased it out.

  This report from a European blues researcher provides a fairly objective snapshot of the close relationships that artists such as Hopkins and Nixon maintained with Gold Star Studios—where both of them had recorded often t h e h s p a f t e rm at h a n d a n e w d i r e c t i o n 1 4 9

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  over the years. Though it slightly pre-dates Duff ’s arrival on the scene, it suggests the kind of blues milieu in which he would soon be immersed.

  Another major blues artist who returned for one last session at Gold Star Studios was former Duke star Junior Parker. Having broken with Robey in 1966, Parker signed with Mercury Records. On June 13, 1967, during Duff ’s tenure, Mercury funded a mixing and editing session for Parker’s “I Can’t Put My Finger on It” (Mercury 72699), which peaked at number forty-eight on the Billboard R&B charts in late August.

  But the blues player Johnny Winter (b. 1944) was one of Duff ’s most frequent clients. Duff recalls that on many occasions (which generally went undocumented in liner notes) Winter played guitar as a supporting musician on blues or R&B sessions at the studio. However, Winter also recorded at Gold Star Studios as a featured artist.

  The

  album

  Birds Can’t Row Boats, released on LP in 1988 on Relix Records (#2034), contained a number of tracks recorded at diff erent studios in Houston and Beaumont between 1965 and 1968. Two cuts came from Gold Star, both engineered by Duff . One of those, “Take My Choice,” included Texas blues singer Calvin “Loudmouth” Johnson. The other, “Tramp,” recorded when Winter served briefl y as leader of the Traits in 1967, was previously released on 45 rpm disc by Universal Records. However, the session pairing Winter and Johnson set the stage for another Gold Star project.

  In mid-1967, Roy Ames of Home Cooking Records produced an album featuring Winter and Johnson, also engineered by Duff . Ames writes in the liner notes,

  In 1967 Johnny Winter told me he’d love to record an album with a genuine down-home bluesman. Albums were less popular than they are now; usually we cut only four or fi ve songs at a session and would rele
ase the best two on a 45. One of my previous records featured a real down-home bluesman, Calvin “Loudmouth” Johnson, growling “I got a lien on your body, I got a mortgage on your soul” over a slow grinding beat that had brought the record some success. Johnny listened to the 45 and halfway through lifted up the needle to exclaim, “That’s it. Let’s do it.” The tracks for this album were recorded on May 17, 1967. We used Calvin’s band with Johnny on lead guitar.

  Loudmouth couldn’t help but be impressed with Johnny, blurting out at various times while the recordings were in progress his enthusiasm for Johnny’s playing. After the session Loudmouth told me, “I never heard a white boy could play the guitar like that!”

  Originally recorded for Home Cooking Records, the album Blues to the Bone has since been reissued on CD on various labels, including Collectables 1 5 0

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  (#0675) and Relix Records (#2054), and most recently under the title Raw to the Bone on Thunder and Sky Ranch Records (#724384008727).

  On projects such as these, Duff was introduced to recording Texas blues at a time when it was reaching across the generation gap and the racial divide to appeal to new fans. He would fi nd other such opportunities in the near future, but most of his sessions involved recording groups of young white men who, inspired by the late-1960s cultural revolution, were redefi ning the possibilities of rock.

  even before the psychedelic rock record label International Artists bought Gold Star Studios in 1968, lots of Texas garage bands were recording there, and many of those were embracing a hazy ethos of surrealism, experimentalism, and altered states of consciousness as the twisting path to new musical forms.

  One of the most sought-after psychedelic rock singles in Houston music history, for instance, is a song called “Wake Me Up Girl” by the Continental Five. Though never a big seller in initial release, copies command large dollars at record auctions. Little is known about the band except that they were from the LaMarque/Texas City area (southeast of Houston) and recorded at Gold Star Studios in the summer of 1967, with Duff engineering. “Wake Me Up Girl” was written by Karl Horn, whose name appears on a Gold Star invoice as the person who paid for the recording, mixing, and pressing of one hundred 45 rpm records (issued on the band’s eponymous label). A second pressing came later, producing more copies for a label called Radel. To date, only two of the fi rst batch of discs—pressed on the purple Continental label—

  have surfaced. The original four-track recording resides in the tape vault at SugarHill Studios.

  A better-known band of this ilk that recorded at Gold Star was the original Bad Seeds (not to be confused with the postpunk group of the same name formed by Australian Nick Cave in the 1980s). As Bruce Eder and Richie Unterberger assert in All Music Guide, “The Bad Seeds were the fi rst rock group of note to come out of Corpus Christi, Texas, itself a hotbed of garage-rock activity during the middle/late 1960s.” The Bad Seeds comprised Rod Prince (guitar), Mike Taylor (guitar and vocals), Henry Edgington (bass), and Bobby Donaho (drums). The band was signed to J-Beck Productions, an important label for late-Sixties Texas rock owned by Jack Salyers and Carl Becker.

  Having

  fi rst recorded in Corpus Christi, in early 1966 the Bad Seeds came to Houston for a four-and-a-half-hour session engineered by Lurie. It yielded one of their most acclaimed releases, “All Night Long” backed with “Sick and Tired” for J-Beck (#1004). When the group broke up in late 1966, Prince later t h e h s p a f t e rm at h a n d a n e w d i r e c t i o n 1 5 1

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  joined the rising psychedelic ensemble called Bubble Puppy, which too would record at Gold Star. But as Eder and Unterberger point out about the Bad Seeds,

  They stayed together long enough to record three singles during 1966, of which two, “A Taste of the Same”/“I’m a King Bee” and “All Night Long”/“Sick and Tired,” are unabashed classics of blues-based garage-punk, three of them originals by Taylor (who wrote most of their originals) or Prince. . . . The band’s sound was the raunchy Rolling Stones–infl uenced garage-punk typical of Texas rock groups in the mid-’60s.

  Becker produced the Bad Seeds. “My earliest memories of Gold Star Studios would have to be in late 1966. Those fi rst sessions would have been the Bad Seeds and Tony Joe White,” he says. In addition to the Bad Seeds tracks, Becker recalls cutting at least four other songs, featuring the Louisiana-born swamp-rock singer White (b. 1943, best known for his 1969 hit “Polk Salad Annie”). Becker adds, “the backup band on those singles was the Bad Seeds.”

  But because they “weren’t the greatest singers,” Becker says he and Duff “buried their parts in reverb from those live chambers in the hallway.”

  Original Bad Seeds member Taylor (who incidentally is the brother of Pozo Seco’s Susan Taylor) describes the studio environment at the time: Back in the Gold Star days I remember the control room as being very stark: linoleum fl oors, white sheetrock walls, white acoustic ceiling tiles, speakers hanging from the ceiling, machines on the side wall, the small board with the huge black knobs, and a couple of chairs. There was no furniture to speak of and not much else to break up the starkness of the area. I think we were recording on four tracks. . . . They were mixing down to mono and stereo. Then over next to an unused control room was a cutting lathe, and Duff went over there to prepare an acetate copy of the fi nished tape master.

  Though short-lived, the Bad Seeds made music highly favored among certain afi cionados of primal rock. Their studio recordings have been reissued on various compilation CDs, including one called Texas Battle of the Bands (Collectables, 1995). Of the twelve tracks on that disc, half feature the Bad Seeds and half present Zakary Thaks, another Corpus Christi group that mined a similar vein. But Zakary Thaks, despite its also brief existence, would be a seminal ancestor of the Texas garage-punk subculture.

  Consider that critic Richie Unterberger (in his All Music Guide profi le) refers to Zakary Thaks as “one of the best garage bands of the ’60s, and one of the best teenage rock groups of all time.” Bruce Eder (in his review of the 1 5 2

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  The Bad Seeds, publicity photo, 1966

  aforementioned CD) calls Zakary Thaks “an undeservedly overlooked group, at least as worthy of respect for their music as the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.”

  Given the globally established cultlike following that still deifi es the Elevators four decades after their demise, that is high praise indeed. So who was Zakary Thaks?

  The original lineup featured Chris Gerniottis on vocals (fi fteen years old on the fi rst recordings), John Lopez on lead guitar, Pete Stinson on rhythm guitar, Stan Moore on drums, and Rex Gregory on bass. Gregory says, t h e h s p a f t e rm at h a n d a n e w d i r e c t i o n 1 5 3

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  We took our musical cues from the more hard-rocking bands from England—like the Kinks, Rolling Stones, Pretty Things, and the Yardbirds.

  . . . Our fi rst single, released in 1966—“Bad Girl,” with the cover of a Kinks song, “I Need You,” on the B-side—was recorded in a small one-track studio in McAllen, Texas. Both sides of that record got tremendous airplay, and national distribution was picked up by Mercury Records.

  Our second single on J-Beck Records, “Face to Face” and “Weekday Blues,” was done at Gold Star. . . . “Face to Face” was number one in Corpus Christi for about a month, and it went to number one in San Antonio and Austin for a couple of weeks. It also went high up the charts in Houston. . . .

  We recorded a couple of more songs on that session also, and one of them was “Won’t Come Back.”

  As with the Bad Seeds, the band’s Gold Star sessions were produced by Becker and engineered by Duff . In certain Texas cities in 1967 “Face to F
ace”

  shared Top Five ranking with songs by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and other heavyweights.

  “The Zakary Thaks were my hottest act,” says Becker. “We were way ahead of our time with that band. We were using controlled feedback on that record.” Unterberger also notes the power of that sound, particularly how “the group added a thick dollop of Texas raunch to their fuzzy, distorted guitars and hell-bent energy.” But he adds, “Most importantly, they were fi rst-rate songwriters.”

  As for that strange band name, according to Beverly Paterson, writing in the liner notes to a CD compilation of Zakary Thaks recordings, the choice was motivated by its connotation of British exotica. She quotes Gerniottis as saying, “Somebody saw it somewhere in a magazine and it sounded diff erent.

  And it also sounded English, which was perfect since we were all heavily into the whole British Invasion thing.”

  Later, Zakary Thaks also issued recordings on the Cee-Bee label and the band’s own imprint, Thak Records. Their success even attracted the entrepreneurial attention of Duke-Peacock boss Don Robey and music promoter Huey Meaux, who lured the group back to Gold Star Studios to cut more tracks for possible release on Robey’s Back Beat label. Gregory recalls one such case:

  I remember one session when [Meaux] brought us to Houston. . . . Bobby

  “Blue” Bland was here also. He was staying at the [same] hotel with his little entourage and was also recording at Gold Star. . . .

  The session that we did was produced by Andre Williams for Don Robey, who was also working in the studio with Bobby Bland. . . . One of 1 5 4

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