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

by Andy Bradley, Roger Wood

Shortly thereafter on January 30, 1968, IA completed the purchase and renamed the facility International Artists Studios. Vivian Holtzman reported that transaction in her February 4th “Nowsounds” column and quotes Rogers saying that the Elevators would soon record there, followed by the Red Krayola and the Blox, as well as Lightnin’ Hopkins.

  On February 7, 1968, the Elevators returned to resume work on the new album, tentatively titled Beauty and the Beast. However, producer Rogers had decided to quit the company, so Rush took over. He says, “I did quite a bit of work with the 13th Floor Elevators. Producing them was not diffi cult because

  they really had an excellent knowledge of what they were about and what their limitations were.” The engineers on the various Elevators sessions at IA Studios were Jim Duff , Fred Carroll, or Hank Poole, depending on the date.

  The sessions continued frequently through February and into March. Then two more were documented in April, and the last session was May 3rd.

  That the album took so long to record is not surprising, given that this troubled band, particularly its lead singer, was in crisis. Duff remembers recording three songs for the Elevators—“Livin’ On,” “Scarlet and Gold,”

  and “May the Circle Remain Unbroken”—and witnessing a brawl between Erickson and Hall. Duff recounts the scene:

  Roky was about to begin vocals on the new material. Prior to vocal sessions Roky always had the studio cleared and recorded with no one present except the engineer and the gray cat. Tommy Hall insisted on remaining and wanted to coach Roky through his new song. At this point Roky went on a tirade . . . and proceeded to wrestle him to the fl oor—beating him soundly.

  Then he grabbed a guitar and was about to brain him with it when Duke Davis and I pulled Roky off Tommy.

  The once brotherly band was fracturing—due, no doubt, to creative diff erences, rampant drug abuse, and the well-documented psychological problems Erickson was starting to experience. As Michael Hall puts it in Texas Monthly, during those sessions, “Roky was in and out of clarity.” Hall also quotes the blunt assessment of the Elevators’ original bassist Ronnie Leatherman, who had quit the band in 1967 but, following Galindo’s departure, fi lled in on the fi nal studio album: “He was a vegetable.” Dorian Lynskey, writing in The Guardian, sums up the dominant view of the aftermath: i n t e rn at i o n a l a r t i s t s r e c o r d c o m p a ny 1 6 3

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 163

  1/26/10 1:12:18 PM

  What Erickson became famous for was losing his mind. In 1969, he pleaded insanity over a drugs charge and spent three years in a Texas mental institution, from which he emerged somewhere south of normal . . . a befuddled wreck, burbling about aliens and demons.

  Whatever the cause of Erickson’s mental disarray—LSD, schizophrenia, the trauma of being institutionalized, or some combination of the three—he became . . . a tragic totem of the relationship between drugs, music and mad-ness.

  By early May, Erickson’s mental breakdown was so severe that IA gave up hope of resurrecting its strongest-selling band to date. With an unfi nished LP, IA decided in July to take a collection of previously scrapped studio tracks, overdub them with fake applause, and release the results on an album with the blatantly misleading title Live. Carroll engineered that project, and the bulk of the work was done on a single day, July 8th. This infamous LP was released later in August. Rush says, “The Live Elevators album was Bill Dillard’s idea, to make catalogue. I had to sell that stuff to distributors, and, of course, they were not stupid. I would ship to the distributors and most of them came back.”

  Meanwhile, the tapes for the new studio album remained momentarily on the shelf at IA Studios. Thomas, the drummer for those tracks, sums up the scenario:

  Beauty and the Beast was the next project we worked on, and it was never fi nished as that album. We got started on the album, and then all hell broke out.

  Roky went into a mental institution. Eventually Tommy broke Roky out of the institution by taking the door off its hinges. They came by the studio on their way to California.

  The last thing we did as a band was “May the Circle Remain

  Unbroken.” . . . We would go into the studio and camp out for three or four days in a row, and go through a number of engineers. One guy would start nodding off , and he’d call in the next guy and so forth. They were Jim, Fred, and Hank Poole; those were our guys. Fred Carroll did a masterful job of putting “May the Circle” together because we were just sitting around and jamming; we were hitting and missing a lot. I was playing a beat with my thumbs on the back of an acoustic guitar. Fred came running in and miked me up. Stacy was sitting on a stool. Roky was playing organ and singing. You know, we weren’t even set up, and they came running in and miked everything up—because it looked like the last time we might be together. . . .

  “Livin’ On” was done for Beauty and the Beast. I [and] Flery Versay, who was an arranger from Motown working for Don Robey of Duke and Peacock 1 6 4

  h o u s e o f h i t s

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 164

  1/26/10 1:12:18 PM

  Roky Erickson, early 1970s (photo

  by and courtesy of Doug Hanners)

  Records, . . . did the horn parts for that with three members of the Houston Symphony . . . also “Never Another.” . . . The Symphony players came down to the studio after a concert one night, and we did that recording at about two in the morning.

  When IA decided to fi nish Beauty and the Beast, it was renamed Bull of the Woods. We had to call Ronnie Leatherman back to play bass, because Danny Galindo had split by then. The rest were works in progress and had to be fi nished. The original sessions for what was to be named Beauty and the Beast produced seven songs. They were all fi nished before Tommy and Roky split.

  They are as follows: “Livin’ On,” “I Don’t Ever Want to Come Down,” “Never Another,” “Wait for My Love,” “Dr. Doom,” “Fire in My Bones,” and “May the Circle Remain Unbroken.” The rest were works in progress and had to be fi nished.

  Sutherland later regrouped the remaining members to fi nish off the LP, with Carroll and Poole engineering. Bull of the Woods, the fourth and last album by the 13th Floor Elevators, was released in December 1968.

  The IA session sheet for August 14–15, 1969, shows that Erickson was booked for solo recordings. Biographer Paul Drummond says, “Roky demoed i n t e rn at i o n a l a r t i s t s r e c o r d c o m p a ny 1 6 5

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 165

  1/26/10 1:12:18 PM

  some new material at Gold Star Studios” on July 25 and August 14. But the Elevators were no more. Erickson remains a legendary fi gure, not only in rock music history but in studio folklore.

  For example, I recall Beth Thornton, who worked in the IA offi ce, recounting the day Erickson entered the building with a Band-Aid in the middle of his forehead. She said that when she quizzed him about it, he informed her that it was to cover his “third eye.”

  Mike Taylor, from the Bad Seeds, recalls another incident:

  Engineer Jim Duff went off to pick up Roky and bring him to the studio. He arrived back without him and told us they were on their way back when the police stopped them. Roky was wearing an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat and had a Band-Aid on his forehead. The police were talking to him and he wouldn’t answer them at fi rst, but then he peeled off the Band-Aid, which was covering a drawing of an eyeball. He said, “Offi

  cer you’ll have to speak into

  my eye.” They took Roky away for evaluation or something and let Jim go.

  Even though fewer than half of their recordings were done there, the 13th Floor Elevators are a key part of the history of the former Gold Star Studios.

  It is the place where they made those early 1966 demo tracks—and the place where, with the numerous 1968 sessions for Bull of the Woods, they cut their last tracks. During the brief interval they became the greatest Texas rock band of their time, pioneers of the psychedelic subgenre, and mythic. Their visionary cohesion, thou
gh tragically brief, still resonates with musicians and fans today.

  formed by young intellectuals with ties to the University of St. Thomas in Houston, the Red Krayola are sometimes described as a “literate band,” but that phrase misleads. With their avid experimentation with atonal music and their somewhat dada-inspired approach to recording sounds from various sources, they were pioneers of minimalist performance art and psychedelic noise rock, the latter best exemplifi ed by tracks labeled “Free Form Freakouts,”

  interspersed among the other tracks, on their debut album.

  That 1967 disc, Parable of the Arable Land, was the second LP issued by IA.

  Recorded in Houston at Andrus’s studio, it off ered music more aligned with that of postmodern composers such as John Cage or Karl Heinz Stockhausen than with traditional rock. “If the Red Crayola had gone to New York instead of California,” writes Chet Flippo, “they might have ended up as the Velvet Underground.”

  On the fi rst LP, the spelling “Crayola” was used, but since that orthogra-phy denoted a trademarked name, they had to change it. Hence, the second 1 6 6

  h o u s e o f h i t s

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 166

  1/26/10 1:12:19 PM

  LP, God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail with It, established the artsy ensemble’s ultimate signifi er. It was recorded in 1968 at IA’s newly acquired studios. The group originally comprised Mayo Thompson (b. 1944) on vocals and guitar, Steve Cunningham on bass, and Rick Barthelme (b. 1943) on drums. Tommy Smith replaced Barthelme before the second album.

  Duff recalls engineering studio sessions for the Red Krayola.

  They were very normal-looking, intelligent college students, but what they referred to as their “music” would make a basket case of a middle-aged, booz-ing recording engineer. . . .

  One night they brought about forty people into the studio with pots and pans and a motorcycle. In order to fi nd out what this conglomeration was going to do to my equipment, not to mention my ears, I asked them to demonstrate what was going to happen so that I could prepare microphone placement and get a level. They started the motorcycle, and everyone was beating on the pots and pans. I saw one man standing right in the middle of this noise who did not have a pot or pan. When I checked to see what he was doing, I broke up. He was standing there, as serious as any symphony musician, striking two matchsticks together.

  Duff let the tape roll and documented the phenomenon as best as he could.

  Before long, though, Carroll would take over for the fi nal engineering.

  Band founder Thompson (who later joined Pere Ubu and performed in other collaborations—sometimes as Red Krayola) recalls those 1968 recording sessions.

  My fi rst album was mixed mono; the second, done at Gold Star, was mixed in stereo. . . . We did our fi rst album at Walt Andrus’s studio, and then International Artists acquired—and I do not know what that means—Gold Star Studios. . . . Lelan Rogers was already gone. So we were kind of cut loose to produce ourselves. We sat in the studio one, two, three nights in a row experimenting with [Duff ]. We did this over a period of a few weeks, and we recorded about twenty tunes.

  As for the record label and studio space that Red Krayola was sharing with IA’s most famous band, Thompson says,

  The Elevators were still around at the time; it was before Roky . . . was institutionalized. . . .

  The big studio in the back was used for meetings, and the Elevators and other bands would rehearse [there], and they also used it for storage. In fact, i n t e rn at i o n a l a r t i s t s r e c o r d c o m p a ny 1 6 7

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 167

  1/26/10 1:12:19 PM

  I remember the Elevators trying out a new bass player back there once while we were recording. . . . Duke Davis and Roky just sitting in the back jamming and learning all the Elevators’ tunes.

  Consonant with their reputation for experimentalism and using nonmu-sical sounds, Red Krayola approached the former Gold Star building as an opportunity to explore. “Everything we wanted to do could be done in the

  [smaller] studio,” Thompson says. “It had a big black curtain that went down one side of the room so you could change the acoustics if you needed to.”

  Then he adds,

  I guess that we had the funniest use of the Gold Star reverb chambers. One night we just decided to do something funny in the chambers. So we went to a 7-11 store and got a whole bunch of those little paper bags. . . . So we had a whole stack of these things, and we opened up the chamber and crawled in there. We put a guitar in one corner, then we started blowing up the bags with air, and then we popped them, wadded them up, and threw them at the guitar. We recorded the whole process and used it in a song called “The Shirt.” We added some tracks to that, but it was basically the song.

  I think we were the only guys at the time—except for the engineers who moved mics around in them—who ever saw the insides of the reverb chamber. The studio had a spring reverb and a plate reverb in those days, but we had the live chambers. If you asked the engineer for a longer reverb time, he would disappear for a few minutes and then come back, and it would be done.

  You can hear the results of this experiment and other odd tracks they produced on site on God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail with It. Its twenty mostly fragmentary “songs” (featuring cryptic titles such as “Ravi Shankar: Parachutist” and “Dirth of Tilth”) include one called “Listen to This,” which runs all of eight seconds, features a spoken introduction (the title phrase), and comprises a single note. A peculiar sonic document, more acoustic than its heavily electric predecessor, this album would be the group’s fi nal release before they disbanded and Thompson pursued other projects.

  Yet the historic studio would also fi gure into the next phase of his career, for there he discovered his potential as a producer. Thompson explains, I cut John David Bartlett’s fi rst demos at Gold Star for IA as a producer. They were the fi rst to place that kernel of an idea in my mind. And I did go on to produce a lot of records in England later. John David was the fi rst session that I did where it was not my own band or my own project.

  1 6 8

  h o u s e o f h i t s

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 168

  1/26/10 1:12:19 PM

  Today Red Krayola, however the name might be spelled, are revered by some, derided by others, and unknown to most. However, they undeniably made unprecedented recordings that forced listeners to examine cultural assumptions about musicality. Writing in Oxford American, the band’s fi rst drummer, now famous as the novelist Fredrick Barthelme, sums up the ethos that informed their undertakings:

  Because we couldn’t play all that well, we had to do something else, something more interesting, and since we were art-inclined, we went that route, leaning on every possible art idea at every turn. Soon we were making “free music,” playing long improvised pieces heavily invested in feedback, random acts of auditory aggression, utterances of all kinds. We began to have big ideas about ways to listen to music, and what “music” was.

  Meanwhile, having failed to profi t much from the Red Krayola’s two LPs, the IA administration was refocusing its priorities. Though the late-1960s youth-culture marketplace was rapidly changing, IA needed something like a hit single—the proven formula for success in the industry—to revitalize the company.

  IA found its momentary commercial salvation in a Texas progressive rock quartet that reportedly found the inspiration for its name in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: the Bubble Puppy. Originally based in San Antonio and then Austin, this band featured vocalist-guitarist Rod Prince backed by guitarist Todd Potter, bassist Roy Cox, and drummer Dave Fore. When they signed with IA, the group moved to Houston. At its studio there, they recorded tracks that became IA’s highest-charting single and its only Top 200 album.

  Potter explains how the group came to IA—and the consequences: In 1968 we ventured to Houston to play at the Love Street Light Circus [psychedelic nightclub]. . . . International Art
ists discovered us in that room.

  IA was home to the Elevators, the Red Krayola, and several other Texas psychedelic groups. Unfortunately, the label’s legendary roster was inversely proportional to both its business acumen and its treatment of the artists.

  They waved the contract in front of us, and the Elevators were saying, “Don’t do it.” It was our fi rst exposure to a record deal, and we just went for it. In hindsight, I don’t know that it was the worst thing we could’ve done. Given our style, it’s possible that major labels would’ve passed us over. I think this was a label that was willing to take a chance on this style of music.

  We moved to Houston, to a house not far from Gold Star, and holed up in the studios with a producer named Ray Rush. He was a West Texas veteran who’d worked with Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. We combined a progressive rock time signature with a crunchy, dive-bombing guitar riff .

  i n t e rn at i o n a l a r t i s t s r e c o r d c o m p a ny 1 6 9

  Bradley_4319_BK.indd 169

  1/26/10 1:12:19 PM

  The Bubble Puppy’s big single “Hot Smoke and Sassafras” hit number fourteen on the Billboard singles charts and earned a Gold Record award. As for the song’s title, Potter says,

  We composed the song in the studio. We went home after playing the song, and we needed some words. We were watching The Beverly Hillbillies on TV.

  Granny was berating Jethro for something, and she goes, “Hot smoke and sassafras, Jethro! Can’t you do anything right?” That’s where it came from.

  Released in December of 1968, the song got heavy rotation on rock radio, fi rst in Texas and soon nationwide. By the spring of 1969 the group was lip-synching its hit on American Bandstand.