Dillard hired me to be in charge of A&R and staff producer. Back then I was trying to record the Elevators, the Bubble Puppy, about ten other acts, run the record label, and collect money, and all that on the phones, and it wasn’t working so well. So Dillard had brought in Fred Carroll. Fred was a very talented man and a good producer.
The main blame in the whole IA debacle can be leveled again at Patterson. When he joined up, his main thing was to get rid of me. . . . But to Dillard’s credit, he wouldn’t have any of that.
While Rush eventually left the company, Carroll survived at the tumultu-ous IA Studios almost till the end. In 1970 he produced two of the last few singles to be released on the label: “She Wears It Like a Badge” backed with
“Laughter” by Endle St. Cloud (#139) and “Ginger” backed with “Country Life” by Ginger Valley (#142). Thereafter, Carroll voluntarily departed.
Compounding the personnel and fi nancing issues that threatened the organization, under recent management the quality of the recording equipment had diminished and IA lagged behind in adapting to new technologies.
A clever teenager named Kurt Linhof became the last recording engineer to be hired by IA (he was also the bassist for the rock group the Children). He provides his rookie insights on the matter:
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The management attempted to modernize the facility on a shoestring budget but was never able to complete the operation. We were never able to get the new custom-built twenty-four-channel console designed by freelancer Dennis Bledsoe to completely work. The modular design channel strips and master modules were purchased from Los Angeles. Dennis Bledsoe designed the chassis and motherboard that the purchased modules would fi t into. . . .
Only nine tracks were in operation because the moment a tenth module was installed, the entire mixing console went into wild and crazy oscillations due to a huge number of ground loops. Eventually IA brought in a couple of technicians from Los Angeles. The best that they were able to do was get eleven channels working.
With things going wrong on all fronts, and most bills going unpaid, Linhof actually became an indispensable employee, the only person left who could handle recordings. Thus, he was able to remain employed on site through the end—one of “the only people getting any money out of the cash-strapped company,” he says.
Linhof also witnessed a late change in administration that seemed to indicate, in his opinion, questionable judgment. “While I was there, the IA executives installed Dale Hawkins [the writer of the song “Suzie Q”] as the new president of International Artists,” he reports. “But Hawkins rarely ever visited the facility.”
The last act to be signed to IA was a vocal rock group called Denim, and Linhof engineered its studio debut. Denim recorded only a few tracks of cover songs—one of which, a treatment of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, actually garnered local radio airplay and got national attention via an article in the July 7, 1970, issue of Billboard. Linhof says, “I was nineteen, and I got a credit on the cover of Billboard as a production engineer.
‘Producer’! Can you imagine? I was nineteen, and I’d been riding the knobs for all of two weeks.”
Thus, even while the IA Corporation was hurtling toward demise, positive things were happening for Linhof. Paul Clagett, a member of Denim, says of him, “He was a good guy who helped us with harmonies and such.” As one of the fi nal IA bands to record, Denim soon discovered its new label was not going to survive. “We met a band named Ginger Valley who told us some stuff about IA not being honest, a bunch of crooks, et cetera,” Clagett recalls. “After a period of almost a year we were able to get out of the contract with IA due to the fact that we were never able to do any more recording.”
Eventually the bankruptcy proceedings and subsequent IRS-related investigation caused IA Studios to cease operations and leave the property in dormancy. When the legal dust later settled, it no longer belonged to any of d i s i l l u s i o n e d d i s s o l u t i o n
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the former IA principals. As Dillard explains, “The attorneys got the studio as part of their fee for representing us in the bankruptcy. And they in turn sold it to Huey P. Meaux.”
Linhof’s
fi nal duty as the sole remaining employee of International Artists Studios was to assist agents from the bankruptcy court in shutting down the building and padlocking the doors.
The IA bankruptcy and subsequent loss of the property engulfed also the Quinn family house—the place where Gold Star Studios had been founded.
For most of the 1960s, Quinn had resided nearby while Patterson leased the studio facility, concocting deals and partnerships that fi nally brought it all into disgrace. By 1971 Quinn was eventually forced to vacate his longtime home at 5628 Brock Street, as it was legally part of the property seized by the lawyers. He died elsewhere in Houston just a few years later.
as a final piece of evidence from the public record regarding Patterson’s character, we note that in a separate and unrelated case, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, in March 1976 affi
rmed his conviction on three felony
counts of wire fraud and acknowledged his role in various other crimes. (See United States of America, Plaintiff -Appellee, v. J. L. Patterson, Jr., Defendant-Appellant. ) He was thereafter sentenced to prison.
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17
Meaux Moves In,
SugarHill Ascends
he failed international artists Producing Corporation went into receivership in August 1971. By late fall, the record producer Huey Meaux, recently released from prison himself, acquired the former Gold Star Studios via bankruptcy auction. Having paid the attorneys’ fees, he received the land, building, and any remaining contents.
Meaux was already quite familiar with the Gold Star facility, having been there during sessions for “Chantilly Lace,” “She’s About a Mover,” and many other hits. But after the Patterson regime had emerged, Meaux departed.
Always a shrewd observer, he perhaps had distrusted Patterson from the start.
Following Meaux’s term in the state penitentiary for violating the Mann Act (by driving a prostitute across state lines to a Nashville convention), he was looking to make a fresh start in the record business. And now that this piece of real estate was up for grabs—and at a bargain price—Meaux was keen to return on his own terms.
Songwriter-musician Gaylan Latimer recalls how the timing of the IA bankruptcy meshed with Meaux’s schedule:
I remember driving around Houston with Meaux looking for a new location for a studio in late 1971. We stopped by Gold Star and discovered that nothing was going on. The studio was partially torn up, and the gold star
[emblem] had been covered up with carpet. Huey made a mental note that it wouldn’t be long before this studio could be acquired. Not long after that, International Artists went bankrupt and the property was for sale. Huey immediately took action and acquired the studios.
The Meaux era fi rst brought a new moniker for the place, SugarHill Studios—a phrase that appealed to Meaux’s fancy, inspired by a street name in southwest Houston. Besides, as he often pointed out, it did not evoke any Bradley_4319_BK.indd 181
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particular music genre and thus would leave the future of the enterprise open to any potential type of production.
As the next step in revitalizing the place, Meaux took the big studio room in the back (recently used as warehouse space) and converted it into offi ces.
He also transformed its dormant control room into his personal offi ce. Thus,
SugarHill would begin producing recordings only in the smaller studio.
However, the new p
roprietor soon realized that he would require a second studio room to maintain a balance between his own in-house recording projects and the other cash-paying business that he needed to attract to stay afl oat fi nancially.
In February 1973 Meaux hired the necessary workers and remodeled the interior of Bill Quinn’s attached house (the original Gold Star studio space).
They gutted the structure and removed the upstairs fl ooring, leaving in place the load-bearing wooden beams, then sealed and soundproofed all window openings. This shell then was refashioned into new studio space. They constructed also a two-story addition, connected to the front of the house, in which they built a large control room and, above it, a tape vault. The dimensions for the main studio room were twenty-eight feet long by twenty-eight feet wide, with a twenty-two-foot-high ceiling—the largest such facility in Houston at the time.
Adjacent to the primary recording space, there were four isolation booths of varying sizes, plus a drum chamber. Red carpet covered the fl oor, and acoustic tiles adorned the ceiling. The wall surfaces featured red burlap, stuff ed from behind with fi berglass insulation. The room’s interior décor conveyed a rustic Mexican hacienda theme.
This newly designated Studio B had the largest control room in town, stocked with the custom-designed tube board with Audiotronics modules and the sixteen-track Ampex MM-1000 that came with the property. Meaux also purchased and installed one sixteen-track Scully tape recorder and a used Ampex 440 eight-track machine.
Musician Mike Taylor, of the Bad Seeds, talks about his employment during the earliest days of the new company:
I actually worked for Huey P. Meaux for about a year and a half just after he bought Gold Star and renamed it SugarHill. The console that we used in Studio A was an old Spectrasonics board that he bought used from a guy called “The Chief” in Philadelphia. . . . It was just him and me and no one else. I believe it was late 1971 or early 1972 when I started.
With Taylor as the only resident employee early on, Meaux relied on various freelancers and subcontractors to fulfi ll his goals. One of those was Hank Lam, an audio, video, and repair technician. He says of Meaux, 1 8 2
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He wanted me to do some repair work . . . on the board and the Scully sixteen-track. He had a lot of equipment, and quite a bit of it was not working at the time. He had a lot of people working at building stuff but no repair staff . When I fi rst walked into the building, Studio B wasn’t in operation, and Quinn’s old house was standing unused. Only the gold star room was operational. . . .
In Studio B, after Huey converted it in early 1973, he had the custom-built tube board that probably was left over from the IA days. It had a bunch of tube modules . . . in a badly designed custom frame . . . [with] voltage rails, like train tracks, under the board. I spent quite a few days fi xing it. . . .
The speakers in the A room were Altec 604Es with mastering lab crossovers driven by Altec power amps. In the B room the speakers were Altec A-10s, also with an Altec power amp.
By early 1973, Meaux had hired a British engineer named Roger Harris, wooing him to Houston from a freelance position at a famous Alabama studio. Harris says,
I fi rst came to the USA and went to Muscle Shoals Studio, and they gave me a little job. Then one day Huey called his old partner-in-crime Jimmy Masters, the chief engineer. . . . So they recommended me to Huey, and he said, “Come on down to Houston, brother. . . . I got a house for you, a studio, and a salary. I’ll take care of you.” . . .
Sure enough, he had everything all set up for me, and put me to work right away. When I arrived, he had Studio A and Studio B. . . . Studio A was sixteen tracks with that great Scully machine and a board. . . . Huey had a great [Teletronix] LA-2A compressor that sounded incredible. We ran everything through it, especially vocals. I ran bass through it, and it made the bass and all of the instruments just jump out at you. The old Scully sixteen-track machine was the best ever. It sounded fantastic, like analog with Dolby SR.
Through his various expenditures on the property, equipment, and personnel, Meaux had refurbished the old Gold Star facility and positioned SugarHill for success. As the ’70s unfolded, the return on his investment would be huge.
prior to embarking on his sugarhill enterprise, Meaux had already established himself as a savvy record producer and promoter. But by the time he sold SugarHill in 1986, he had been involved, directly or indirectly, in the production of approximately fi fty singles or albums that earned Gold Record awards. Together with Pappy Daily and Don Robey, Meaux helped put Houston on the musical map of the world.
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Though his personal proclivities would lead to multiple prison terms and ultimately public disgrace, the fact remains that Meaux played a major role in creating some of postwar America’s favorite records. Writing in Texas Monthly after Meaux’s 1996 arrest, Joe Nick Patoski bluntly acknowledges the man’s crimes and double life but also calls him “a musical wizard—the man behind more hits made in Texas and Louisiana in the last half of the twentieth century than anyone else.”
Meaux’s
fi rst notable achievement as a producer had come with the 1959
hit “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” by a singer billed as Jivin’ Gene (Gene Bourgeois). Over the next few years and with a variety of diff erent singers, Meaux scored again and again, producing records such as “You’ll Lose a Good Thing” by Barbara Lynn, “I’m a Fool to Care” by Joe Barry, and “I’m Leaving It Up to You” by Dale and Grace. “The reason why I had so many hits,” Meaux explained to Patoski, “was that around this part of the country you’ve got a dif-ferent kind of people every hundred miles—Czech, Mexican, Cajun, black.”
And certainly a multicultural dimension imbues the long list of artists who made hit records with Meaux. For someone with the right song and the right voice for it, regardless of ethnicity or gender, he controlled a pipeline to the big time.
Meaux was one of the few independent outsiders who could do consistent commerce with Nashville or New York without becoming part of their respective music-industry establishments. Most of his earliest hits were recorded in Louisiana, but from about 1962 on, Houston was his base of operations.
There, often at Gold Star Studios, he developed a reputation for canny production instincts—and taking whatever fi nancial advantage he could in any transaction.
Former studio engineer Jim Duff off ers this profi le:
Huey was a Cajun, originally from Louisiana, with a manner of talking that defi ed any form of the English language that I had ever heard. His distinctly Southern-accented voice spouted a vocabulary that was a mixture of Cajun and black jive, laced with more than a little of his own homespun philosophi-cal idioms and four-letter words.
As did Duff , many folks found Meaux’s colorful persona to be engaging, and there are numerous testimonials regarding his humor and capacity for generosity. Even some artists who may have been fi nancially outwitted by Meaux profess to care for him on a personal level. As Roy Head puts it, “You know, when it comes to the business of music, I love Huey and I hate him.
He is what he is and will always be my brother and my friend.”
Doug Sahm—whose Sir Douglas Quintet was named, produced, and promoted by Meaux—visited SugarHill Studios several times during Meaux’s 1 8 4
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ownership. Sometimes he came to record, but often seemingly just to see someone for whom he obviously had a deep aff ection. Sahm’s longtime collaborator Augie Meyers has been known to joke in retrospect about Meaux’s one-sided contracts and dubious accounting practices, but he also claims a depth of friendship that belies oversimplifi ed characterizations of the man as a con artist.
Apart from any fraternal feelings between Meaux and others, what almost universally garners musicians’ respect for the man was his ability to pinpoint the right elements for crafting a hit. As Duff says,
Huey had the knack for knowing what might be a hit record if the circumstances were correct. Generally his detractors were either jealous producers who failed to have hits, or exceptionally jaded or stupid musicians who thought that the world owed them a living. Huey produced, leased, or sold many hit records and artists to the major labels and gave many singers a chance to make it into the big leagues.
An unsigned “Producer’s Profi le” article in a 1969 issue of Cashbox magazine describes Meaux as a music business fi gure worthy of emulation and quotes him explaining the keys to his success:
Huey’s approach to producing might serve as a guideline for young producers. . . . “The thing that makes a hit record is the promotion behind it.
Number two is the material. Number three is the producer, and number four is the singer. I think the man behind the desk who’s handling the promotion is the hit-maker. The song is way more important than any singer. If the song is right, it doesn’t matter who sings it. Anybody can have a hit with a good piece of material. . . . Songs have to be about reality, about the simple things, about the hound dog stretching by the split-rail fence, about the things we walk over, the things we miss, the things that are the beautiful part of living.”
Regardless of his many fl aws, when it came to grasping how words and music can touch human beings and motivate them to buy records, Meaux knew far more than most. And by the time he had completed renovations at SugarHill Studios, he was ready to put that knowledge to work.
originally as a repair and maintenance technician and later as a studio engineer, Lam witnessed the initial phase of activity at Meaux’s refurbished facility. “There were plenty of recordings going on,” he reports. “Huey had people skillfully trying to make hit records.” Among the artists Lam worked with in the early ’70s were country star Freddy Fender (1937–2006), the Gulf Coast blues-rocker Marcia Ball (b. 1949) with her original group Freda and the m e a u x m ove s i n , s u g a r h i l l a s c e n d s 1 8 5
House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) Page 26