House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music)
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Poole engineered the Bubble Puppy sessions. He says,
I recorded “Hot Smoke and Sassafras” for the Bubble Puppy, and then the album A Gathering of Promises. That band was way ahead of their time, and that album had a great ’60s sound to it. We didn’t use any booths on the recording. We had everybody out in the open, and we had David Fore, the drummer, over in one corner. Rod Prince and Todd Potter, the two guitar players, were real talents in that band. Roy Cox was sort of the manager, a major songwriter, and he played bass in the group. A lot of people said we had one of the best sounds of that era. The Beatles were killing everybody back in those days with that incredible songwriting team, but many people said that A Gathering of Promises had a better sound than the Beatles or anybody else. I am very proud of that album. Everything was cut live at one time, except the vocals and hand claps.
We were using an Ampex MM-1600 sixteen-track machine. The board we were using was six of these Ampex M10 tube mixers that had been modifi ed with some low- and high-pass fi lters, and had a patch panel added. . . . We had three mixers for the left channel and three for the right. . . . We had to do a lot of patching to use the sixteen tracks. . . . It was a bit primitive, but it sure sounded good.
Unfortunately, despite the fi ne studio work and the opportunity to open concerts for major touring bands such as the Who, the Bubble Puppy could not replicate the success of that fi rst brilliant album.
According to Prince’s “The Tale of Bubble Puppy 1966–1972,” the problems were rooted in IA’s ineptitude, particularly its decision not to lease the hit single to a major label (supposedly the Beatles’ Apple imprint was interested) and its dismissal of producer Rush.
For his part, Rush says, “Working with the Bubble Puppy and their album A Gathering of Promises was defi nitely a highlight of my time at IA.”
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Bubble Puppy, publicity photo, 1968
Prince writes, “Ray Rush was very much the fi fth member. Awesome production skills, adept at pulling the true song from one’s brain. The loss of Ray was the fi nal blow—there was nothing left at IA musically, and the Puppy WAS music.”
generally speaking, ia embittered many of the artists it signed to contract. The beleaguered company is often accused of having mismanaged marketing, production, and especially money. The norm seems to have been for artists to be put on a small weekly cash allowance (as an advance against future earnings), which some say never increased (no matter how many records sold) and sometimes failed to materialize. However, Dillard, IA’s president, steadfastly disagrees: “It’s ridiculous. There’s no truth to it. They got a lot more than their royalties.”
Given the rift between labor and management over such issues, as well as the spirit of the age, the musicians came together and creatively staged a protest. Singer-songwriter John David Bartlett sets the scene: 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 7 1
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In mid-to-late 1968 the Bubble Puppy were in-studio, working. The re-formed 13th Floor Elevators were in fi nishing the Bull of the Woods album.
A number of the other bands were also waiting their turn to work on their albums. They [IA] were way behind on paying everybody or giving advances.
Nobody had gotten any money for weeks. Everyone was broke and hungry, and they wanted us to record some more. So all the musicians got together and went to management and told them that they had this idea for an IA supergroup that would record an a cappella vocal song—that we wanted to record and they could release it as a supergroup single. Management got all excited and set up the session. We had worked up the chorus of the song, and it was a repeating chant of “hamburger-hamburger-hamburger-hamburger.”
And then various singers would go “I needa” or “we all needa.” Management didn’t think it was too funny, but . . . they got the message.
The Lost and Found, previously known locally as the Misfi ts, were another esoteric psychedelic rock band that signed with IA—reportedly following their involvement in a drug bust that put them in need of legal representa-tion. Lead guitarist Jimmy Frost has claimed that a retainer for IA attorney services was factored into their contract. The band, which included Peter Black on guitar and vocals and James Harrell on bass, with various drummers, recorded two singles and one album, Everybody’s Here, for the IA label.
The second IA single was “When Will You Come Through” and “Professor Black,” engineered and produced by Carroll. Following an exhausting tour across the South, which IA claimed was a fi nancial loss, the band quit in a pay dispute.
Another IA artist was Sterling Damon, actually a stage name of singer-songwriter Mel Douglas. “They changed my name to Sterling Damon because of the British Invasion and the psychedelic rock movement,” he says. Though he recalls recording enough material at IA sessions to make an album, the company issued only one Damon single (#108), featuring “Rejected” and “My Last Letter.”
The aforementioned Bartlett had come to IA in 1967 because his high school English teacher was the mother of Red Krayola’s Thompson. “Mayo and I became friends, and Mayo introduced me to the art scene, and also to the executives at International Artists,” Bartlett says. He provides an insider’s account of IA operations:
IA owned two houses [where] they would put their bands up while they were in town to record. . . . They would send a van to pick up the bands and bring them to the studio. They would arrive at the building, head into the studios, and were told, “Play music, make a record, now!”
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The big studio in the back of the building was closed and used for storage—and as a hangout for the musicians who were waiting their turn to record. . . . IA was storing hundreds of boxes of records in there. We often threw records at each other and at the walls while we were hanging out in there. . . . We’d sleep on top of those boxes—there were so many of them. . . .
It was pretty strange.
Given such an environment—and not only the schism between labor and management, but also the gap between young hippies and older business-men—IA might have seemed to some of the musicians to be a microcosm of all that was wrong with a corrupt establishment.
the former gold star studios had been a key site for recording Texas blues, epitomized by Lightnin’ Hopkins, almost since its inception. During IA’s bizarre proprietorship, Hopkins returned to jam with some members of the 13th Floor Elevators. These sessions broke racial barriers and generation-al obstacles simultaneously, uniting the elder Hopkins with the latest cohort of longhaired youth to form the rhythm section of the primordial psychedelic rock group.
The most recent drummer for the Elevators, Danny Thomas, explains how it came to be:
The Elevators were friendly with all the other popular acts around and hung out with Johnny Winter, and Billy Gibbons, and also with a lot of the black musicians in the area. . . . I got to play drums on the Lightnin’ Hopkins album for IA. I can thank Lelan for that. Duke Davis played bass on that record. He was our [fi rst] replacement for Danny Galindo when he left the band.
There was a harmonica player that was a friend of Lightnin’s, named Billy Bizor. We would pick him up for the sessions. . . . He was a legendary harp player in his day. Snuff y Waldron also played piano on some of those songs. . . .
The engineers on the Lightnin’ album were Jim Duff and Fred Carroll.
Duff provides additional context for these sessions—and an anecdote involving two of the Beatles:
Lightnin’ would do an album for almost anybody for six hundred dollars. He wouldn’t sign a contract with anyone. I recorded part of the album that he did for International Artists that Lelan Rogers produced.
Mansel Rubenstein . . . was managing him a
t the time of the IA album.
We were cutting the session, and . . . my receptionist . . . called me and said,
“Mansel is on the phone and wants to talk to Lightnin’.”
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So I said he was in a session, but she insisted I talk to him. So I got on the phone and he said, “Jim, I’ve got to talk to him.”
I said, “You know how he is about being bothered while he [is] in a recording session.”
Mansel said, “You’ve got to go and get him because Paul McCartney and John Lennon are in Houston, and Lightnin’s their hero. They saw him when he was over in London, and they’re in Houston and want to talk to him.”
So I went and got him and said, “Mansel really needs to talk to you, and it’s real important that you talk to him because some very special people want to see you.”
So he gets on the phone and says, “I ain’t got time to mess with those fools”—and hangs up the phone! He didn’t care about anything except cutting those tracks and making his money.
Assuming the veracity of this account, imagine what might have transpired, under more welcoming circumstances, if Hopkins, Lennon, McCartney, and part of the Elevators had all met—and in a recording studio.
But the fusion of Hopkins’s old-school blues with the Elevators’ vibe is intriguing enough on its own, and it defi nitely happened. The result was the sixth IA LP, Free Form Patterns, a disc reissued on CD under the same title on various labels (Collectables, Charly, Fuel 2000), but also titled as Refl ections on the Bellaire label.
The two strikingly diff erent LP covers IA used for this album suggest its dual nature and cross-cultural signifi cance. One fi t the traditional mode, featuring a photograph of Hopkins in a white suit, dark shirt with open collar, gold chain around the neck, and Panama hat perched cockily on the side of his head. The graphics are simple, with Hopkins’s name in all capital letters printed in a vertical line, running from bottom to top, on the left side and the album title imposed in slightly off -kilter horizontal fashion across the top.
However, the alternative cover, for the same album, evokes the psychedelic poster art of the era. Against a black background, with lots of squiggly line drawings in red bordering the bottom and top, the album title emerges in wavy asymmetrical block lettering squeezed around the borders of an oblong shape, inside which the artist’s name appears in oddly formed block lettering in partial shades of red, white, and sky blue.
Bartlett, one of the youngest IA hippies, relates his behind-the-scenes role in the Hopkins sessions: “When they recorded the Free Form Patterns LP, . . .
IA got me a fake ID, and my job was to go pick up a bottle of Scotch every day, then go pick up Lightnin’ and bring him over to the studio. I sat through all of those sessions because I was his gofer.”
Duff , who engineered about half the tracks, indicates that the Elevators 1 7 4
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members were absent for those—but that another famous Texas blues guitarist also participated:
It was strange to do a blues album in the middle of all that psychedelia. I think Lelan did that album for his own personal satisfaction. I don’t know if they included any of the talking on the IA album [see the Fuel 2000 reissue]. Between songs Lelan would interview him. . . . The band that I was recording were all his own musicians and were all black—except for Johnny Winter, who was playing lead guitar. . . . He was often in the studio doing session work. One day after IA had taken over the building, he came in to talk to Dillard and to ask to be signed to the label. . . . Dillard asked me about Winter, and I told him, “You are crazy if you don’t sign him! He is a great musician.” . . . Well, Dillard didn’t listen to me, and he let Johnny go.
Though IA passed on Winter, the guitar slinger soon signed with Columbia Records and became a national star. But the Hopkins recording project forever links IA with Texas blues. Whatever its fl aws, IA’s experimental nature supported a project that could not have been produced at many places elsewhere in Texas in 1968—another milestone in the heritage of a unique recording facility.
while ia had its corporate hands full producing its own artists, its studio was still a viable commercial facility booking independent projects, and various other producers made use of it as the 1960s came to an end and the corporation stumbled toward bankruptcy. For example, Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records returned on November 6, 1969, to record tracks for the Clifton Chenier album called King of the Bayous. Duff engineered, in what may have been his last session before leaving IA.
Cassell Webb, now an established singer and producer in England, was in the Houston late-1960s rock group called the Children. She sums up a local musician’s view of the IA Studios environment in this era:
I remember so many occasions when there were jam sessions going on at Gold Star, people would just arrive totally spontaneously and quite often they would be recorded. . . . I was on the second Red Krayola album. . . . Janis
[Joplin] defi nitely went to Gold Star several times because I saw her at parties in the building, and she participated in some of the jam sessions.
Kenny Cordray, a former member of the Children, acknowledges the festive fun that often prevailed there during free time, but he says it rarely carried over to the recording process:
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Even though we were hippies, there was a certain sense of order to the sessions. Everything was real straight. You had a certain time for the session. It was all business. I don’t recall there being too much of a party atmosphere. It was real serious; you were in a real recording studio trying to make a record.
But Cordray makes it clear that, from a player’s perspective, this recording facility was a cool place to be:
Most musicians in Houston loved the vibe or the great attitude at the studio.
The most famous thing about this studio was the reverb chamber—and that the studios were a great place where guys got stoned and hid out. That sound was unique to many hit records recorded there in the mid-to-late Sixties. . . .
This studio always got great guitar tones.
However, in assuming ownership of the historic Gold Star property, IA had again miscalculated, for what was intended to be a valuable asset ultimately only hastened the company’s failure.
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16
Disillusioned Dissolution
ust a few years after j. l. patterson had fi rst proposed that he join IA and raise funds for a stock off ering, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, would review and uphold the conviction in a case in which Patterson testifi ed about participating in stock fraud. We quote from the fi rst paragraph of the summary fi ndings of United States of America, Appellee, v. M. Perry Grant and Service Securities, Inc., Appellants, decided May 25, 1972:
The evidence presented at trial established that Grant, operating through Service, a securities broker dealer, and in conjunction with J. L. Patterson, the president of Data Industries Corporation of Texas, Inc. (“Data”), and others, defrauded public investors in connection with an off ering of a new issue of Data stock.
Elsewhere in this document Patterson is defi ned as “a co-conspirator but not a defendant” because “he had agreed to cooperate with the government in the prosecution of this case.” It also establishes that the criminal conspiracy began in December 1968 and the defrauding carried over through 1969. This period closely corresponds to that of IA’s acquisition and fi rst year of operation of the former Gold Star Studios. Patterson’s stock fraud included manipulating the apparently clueless IA principals to
entrust him with handling a move into the corporate stock market.
Determining how much IA suff ered fi nancially because of Patterson’s ne-farious actions is not easy. But the many problems the company experienced in its last two years of existence were insurmountably exacerbated, if not solely caused, by Patterson’s court-proven ability to mislead investors. Hence, IA’s Bradley_4319_BK.indd 177
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ownership of the former Gold Star Studios contributed directly to its downfall via the consequent affi
liation with Patterson.
“When IA acquired Data Industries, it was the beginning of the end of IA,”
says producer Ray Rush. What had started off merely as a record label company and then expanded into studio ownership eventually morphed a third and fatal time. By the summer of 1969, following a merger of IA with the Patterson-controlled Data Industries, the new conglomeration had purchased a Nashville company called Southern Plastics, the home of an independent record-pressing plant. IA took control of operations and began pressing its own products there too. Bill Dillard had even moved his offi
ce there. Making
such a big acquisition required hefty fi nancing, payment of which eventually came due. That was perhaps the fi nal trigger in causing IA to crash. It was the inevitable outcome of a wild fl ight that—with Patterson navigating for the novice pilots—had been doomed from the start.
“Well, the bank called in the loans. And we didn’t have the cash to pay them,” explains Dillard. “We would have made it, even fi ling for bankruptcy. We went down because of the IRS. If we hadn’t fi led bankruptcy, they wouldn’t have shown up.”
Rush
off ers his take on the managerial disarray that had precipitated the downfall: