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

by Andy Bradley, Roger Wood

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  Firedogs, and the prolifi c blues and R&B songwriter-musician Oscar Perry (1943–2004).

  Lam explains that Meaux did not focus so much on discovering artists who had the right material as on generating hit-worthy material via in-house composers, including Perry. Lam says,

  I worked quite a bit with Oscar Perry. Oscar would come and lay down these hellacious instrumental tracks, and then he would have all these diff erent lyricists come up with melodies and put down vocals. They would try to make hit records out of these tracks. Huey certainly had a wealth of talent around him in those days.

  Meaux eventually employed a large songwriting staff . He was not only searching for that special song to match with a particular performer. Having signed the writers to publishing contracts with his own company, the boss would also benefi t from royalties a hit song generated. Like Daily and Robey before him, Meaux understood that a sizable share of the profi ts for a successfully marketed record ultimately went to the publisher. By the time Meaux sold SugarHill Studios, his hedonistic lifestyle and other fi nancial commit-ments were likely funded almost entirely with income generated by his song-publishing interests.

  According to an archived offi

  ce document, one of the earliest recording

  sessions at the newly acquired studios was also perhaps the most unlikely.

  It was engineered and produced by Meaux himself, before his new technical staff had been hired, and it featured the Jamaican progressive reggae artist known as Burning Spear (Winston Rodney, b. 1948). Intrigued as we are by this revelation, we have no other information about this session. However, it shows that Meaux’s SugarHill would attract performers from a diverse array of genres.

  But as in its previous incarnations, this studio complex would also remain a base for blues and gospel recording. Under Meaux’s ownership, Robey’s various Houston-based labels resumed their relationship with the facility, and his associates were among the fi rst paying customers at SugarHill Studios.

  For instance, invoice #101, dated October 13, 1972, is a bill to Pilgrim Outlets, a gospel group on Robey’s Song Bird label. Invoice #102 appeared four days later, made out to Bobby Bland, Robey’s biggest star on Duke.

  Between December 30, 1972, and January 10, 1973, there were thirteen other invoices issued for Bland, with another six coming in May 1973. This was the very month that Robey sold all of his music holdings to ABC/Dunhill, so perhaps these sessions were part of the deal. We also have a copy of a budget request, made in February 1973 by producer Robert Evans, to cut eight 1 8 6

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  sides featuring Bobby Bland in May at SugarHill—a request which came from Duke Records and went to ABC/Dunhill. So while Robey was negotiat-ing the sale of his companies, he continued recording at SugarHill. February and March of 1973 also brought sessions with other Robey artists, including Eugene Williams, Bobby Carter, and Willie Banks, as well as gospel groups such as the Smiling Jubilaires, Gospel Chariots, Simaires, and Ziontones.

  This high level of commercial activity perhaps helped Robey demonstrate to the prospective corporate buyer that his labels were still actively producing records. We infer also that Bland’s massive amount of recording just prior to the completion of the sale likely produced tracks used on at least one subsequently released album. For instance, several track titles listed on invoices later reappear on Bland’s fi rst ABC/Dunhill LP, titled His California Album, including “I Don’t Want to Be Right,” “This Time I’m Gone for Good,” “Going Down Slow,” and “Right Place at the Right Time.”

  As for Meaux’s own projects, one of his more obscure but fascinating artists in the early ’70s was the singer known as Little Royal (b. Royal Torrance), an emotive soul singer who released one album. A generation later, several rap artists, most prominently Ice T, would sample some of those tracks on their own productions. Between 1972 and 1974 Meaux recorded lots of Little Royal material. Two of his singles on Meaux’s Tri-Us label charted in the R&B

  category and were distributed by Starday. “Jealous” (#912) went to number fi fteen in May 1972 and was the title track for his only album, released by King Records in a presumed deal with Meaux (and reissued on CD by the Japanese label P-Vine in 2007). Later, the single “I’m Glad to Do It” (#916) registered at number eighty-eight on the charts. Tri-Us issued several others:

  “I’ll Come Crawling”/“You’ll Lose a Good Thing” (#913), “I Surrender”/“Soul Train” (#915), and “Don’t Want Nobody Standing over Me”/“Keep on Pushing Your Luck” (#917).

  Gaylan Latimer became a staff songwriter for Meaux “under an assumed name, Emery Capel,” he says. “This was so I could also be an ASCAP affi liate. Under that name I wrote some songs that were recorded at SugarHill for Bobby Bland and Peggy Scott.” But during this time Latimer was also a member of a group called Heather Black, which recorded a live album that was overdubbed and mixed at SugarHill in late 1972. It was subsequently released on another Meaux label, Double Bayou Records.

  Roger Harris recalls other SugarHill sessions he engineered:

  My fi rst real session was with Floyd Tillman, some great country music, and he was a great old guy. . . . I did sessions with Sonny Rae and Fancy, a husband and wife combo. I did a lot of recording with Oscar Perry. . . . I did sessions with Bobby Byrd from James Brown’s band. . . . also Freddy Fender.

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  Pat Brady, another studio engineer, off ers insight about the Austin-Houston connection that was nurtured by SugarHill:

  A band from Austin that I worked with was Freda and the Firedogs, alias Marcia Ball and her band. Actually we recorded a lot of bands from Austin because the scene there was just beginning, and Houston was still the place to do serious recording. You could tell that she had “it” then, and she still has it now. . . . Her musicians were just spirited, fun-loving, high-energy guys, and they were good.

  One of those musicians was Bobby Earl Smith, now an attorney in Austin.

  He explains the scenario that brought them to SugarHill in 1973 and ’74: Freda and the Firedogs had become a very popular band in Austin and around Texas. John Reed was the guitar player in the band. David Cook was steel and electric guitar and also accordion. I played bass. Freda was, of course, Marcia Ball, the vocalist and piano player.

  We met Huey P. Meaux through Doug Sahm, who was a tireless promoter of Freda and the Firedogs. . . . We started to back him up quite a bit and be the opening act at concerts. He started sitting in with us every so often. Doug started telling us about Huey.

  Doug was on Atlantic Records when we formed the band. Jerry Wexler had signed Doug, and he’d signed Willie Nelson. He also off ered us a contract. . . . We screwed around for quite a while, thinking we could get something better, and eventually signed nothing. Marcia has often said that this incident set her career back quite a number of years. After that mess Doug said, “Well, I’ve been talking to Huey, and he is interested.” Doug said,

  “Huey is real groovy.”

  Huey called my wife early one day and turned his Cajun charm on her and eventually got us to agree to come and do a demo. He knew about the aborted Atlantic contract from both Doug and Wexler. . . . We were cautious about Wexler, so of course, we would be cautious about Huey. But we cut a demo there. . . . We recorded a master at the studio.

  We also backed up Floyd Tillman on an album for Huey. . . . We didn’t do the whole album, but we did a bunch of the songs on that Tillman record.

  We did one cut with Doug Sahm in the same period . . . called “Hot Tomato Man” [issued as a single on Meaux’s Crazy Cajun label, #2004].

  Harris adds to the memories of this phase of studio operations: I remember doing a remix of a Barbara Lynn song, “
Lose a Good Thing,”

  which he put out on his Crazy Cajun label. That was one of my fi rst sessions 1 8 8

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  ever for Huey. I think the tape was from Cosimo’s Studio in New Orleans.

  Then I did some work with Tommy McLain. . . .

  I did a lot of work with Sonny Landreth. . . . There was some really good music there. “She Left Me a Mule to Ride” was the fi rst song on the tape we created. It was a whole demo album that we did for Warner Brothers Records . . . in 1974. Sonny is an incredible talent and player, especially on slide dobro, [but] Warner never signed Sonny. I think that Huey might have asked too much on the contract or some other screwup.

  As for those Landreth sessions, we note that much of the material described by Harris was later released on CD as one of the numerous “Crazy Cajun”

  compilations issued in 1999 by the UK-based Edsel Records.

  That series encompassed over thirty separate CDs, each featuring one of the many artists whom Meaux recorded in the 1960s and ’70s (including Oscar Perry, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Barbara Lynn, Clifton Chenier, Frenchie Burke, and various others). The series was made possible when Meaux’s accountants leased the rights to a large quantity of master tapes from his vault to Edsel in order to raise funds to settle Meaux’s debts following his 1996

  arrest and incarceration. The Crazy Cajun series is laden with hundreds of tracks recorded at SugarHill Studios—and thus are valuable historical documents of a time, a place, and the many sounds of Meaux’s productions.

  after approximately one year of working for Meaux, Harris departed.

  Brady, who had arrived in March 1974, took over most of his projects and set about improving on equipment maintenance. He describes that experience and off ers additional information about the studio:

  When I got here the boards in both studios were noisy, and it was real hard to get a clean take on tape. . . . It took me a while to track everything down.

  Despite the few problems, the sound of the equipment and the studios were fi rst-rate. The guys before me were like mix engineers, and they weren’t good at maintenance.

  The other engineers that were hanging out here were Crash Collins and Robert Evans. . . . The studio had basically lost its edge because it was so badly maintained. But with better maintenance things improved quickly.

  Studio A was totally dead [soundwise] in those days. The green burlap was Huey’s idea. It was fi ve rows of acoustic insulation over the brick, and then chicken wire, and the burlap over that. So if you poked the burlap you’d feel the chicken wire holding the insulation against the wall.

  My take on this building is that it was well built and designed. The walls are divorced from the fl oor. If you go down to the bare walls and look at where they meet the fl oor, you’re going to see a couple rows of that black tar 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 9

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  paper, so that there’s really insulation between the concrete fl oor and the walls. The walls . . . are double rows of concrete block fi lled with sand. Those double thick walls did a great job of keeping the outside sounds from coming in. The green burlap all over the walls meant that nowhere in the room did you have any fl utter echoes, and the room was reasonably dead. Thus, when you had bands . . . who all wanted to play in the same room together, if the room was live, you would be in big trouble to get any kind of isolation on individual instruments. The little booths in the back of the room also helped a bit, especially the small one with the Leslie speaker cabinet in it.

  Although already possessing technical expertise that he brought to his job, Brady learned much more about production and mixing from his new employer. We close this chapter with his memories of the role Meaux played in getting the right sound:

  Huey was always in on the critical parts of sessions, vocals and mixing. He would sit next to me, to my right, and he had a big old rolling chair, and he would be, like, leaning back in it, and you never knew what he was thinking, but, boy, that little wheel was just turning all the time.

  What he was listening for was quite diff erent to what we engineers were trying to achieve. . . . Huey set the tone for all mixing. I mean, from the moment I sat down to mix a tape, he said, “You’re doing it all wrong.” I was bringing up instruments and sound, kind of getting a half-ass low end. But he said, “The fi rst thing you’re going to do is you’re going to stick that big bass drum in there—boom, boom—and I want to see those needles come up to here, you know.” And he’d be fattening it up and just getting a nice big low thump at the bottom, but also a nice little pop at the top end of the thump at the bottom. Then he’d bring up the bass guitar, match it to the kick drum so they had somewhat equal weight, dead center, and then he’d start bringing in the snare and the toms and the cymbals. He’d always do his drums and his bass and get all that established. From that moment on, we would start adding piano. . . . The vocals were last, always. We’d start putting in the rhythm instruments and then the leads. You’d think of it like you were building a house, foundation up to the top with vocal, or maybe, like a pyramid.

  So Roger [Harris], Crash, and myself—we all learned from the best, Huey himself. That’s why when you hear his old records they had more bass and more drum sounds than most records of that era. They were just fat and easy to dance to, and you have got to remember, most radios in cars were little six-inch speakers, and you had to fatten stuff up to sound good in them. Motown Records understood that concept. . . . and so did Huey Meaux.

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  18

  The Freddy Fender

  Phenomenon

  ccasionally the biggest breakthroughs come by sheer

  accident. At fi rst, no matter how diligently or intelligently an artist, a producer, and others may have worked, their eff orts may have just fallen fl at. But then, rarely, and only for the lucky ones, something unplanned and unforeseen happens, and—eureka!

  A new pathway, a new energy, a new previously unnoticed possibility is suddenly there.

  An important change in American popular music history occurred in 1975

  when the Country Music Association bestowed its prestigious “Single of the Year” award on a certain recording produced by Huey Meaux at his SugarHill Studios. Sung by Freddy Fender, a Mexican American from South Texas, that single was unprecedented in ways that signifi ed a cultural shift. The song was the very fi rst release ever to be number one simultaneously on both the country and the pop charts, a remarkable achievement. But more to the point, it was the fi rst bilingual song ever to register on the country charts. Its mainstream success was a true phenomenon.

  That best-seller, “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” earned Gold and Platinum Record Awards—and anchored the fi rst Platinum country album ever. Billboard magazine named its singer the 1975 “Male Vocalist of the Year,” regardless of genre. Given that kind of adulation, it is no wonder that critical opinion has generally acclaimed Meaux’s genius in getting Fender to sing part of a country ballad in Spanish.

  However, as good as Meaux often was at cracking the code for crafting a hit, this groundbreaking vocal interpretation may well have been triggered by a fortuitous fl uke.

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  Enter the scene, compliments of the eyewitness testimony of recording engineer Pat Brady, who starts by describing the instrumental track over which Fender would reluctantly sing:

  “Teardrop” originally came from Nashville, and the sixteen-track reel I worked on had the original tracks from the Nashville tape transferred to it.

  We then erased all except the drums, bass, and keyboards. It was written by Vivian Keith and Ben Peters, who have had a lot of hits.

  Fred
dy had written a whole bunch of songs and was not really happy about the way Huey was forcing certain songs [by others] down his throat.

  Freddy listened to a run-through of the track, but he didn’t want to do that one, and we were doing lots of other songs at the time. It’s just that Huey had a knack of dropping things on people—I mean, just surprising them a bit. And he insisted that we go ahead and do the song right away.

  So as Freddy listened to it for the second time, he started making notes

  [of the lyrics] on a big yellow pad, and when he got done, he put it out on a music stand in the A Studio. So I set up one of our U-67s, or maybe it was the U-47 [vintage Neumann microphones]. Then we started doing vocals.

  However, as Brady goes on to describe, they did a couple of takes, and then a propitious accident occurred:

  But on one take, he didn’t remember the words. . . . He dropped the yellow sheet on the fl oor at the end of the fi rst verse. And before he had time to reach down and pick it up, the second verse came around—and that’s when he did it in Spanish. When the instrumental break came, he was able to reach down and pick up the lyrics, and he fi nished the bridge in English.

  Huey sat bolt upright when that happened and said, “Let’s keep that!” . . . So we left the Spanish verse, just like it was from that one take.