“Moonlight Mailman.”
Brady recalls other SugarHill recordings of that time:
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Donny King recorded a version of the old Cookie and the Cupcakes hit
“Mathilda.” Huey leased it to Warner Brothers Records, and it charted on Billboard country and went as high as number twenty. We also did a version of another old song, “I’m a Fool to Care,” . . . [which] charted [at number seventy-two].
Donny King . . . had been part of Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys. “Mathilda”
was recorded in a style you would pretty much expect from a Wills sideman—some excellent swing. Huey released the record on his American Pla-boy label [#1983] for distribution through the Southwest. . . . Andy Wickham, head of Warner’s Country A&R, snapped it up and released it—and an album produced by Meaux.
Meaux pursued a new direction via an ongoing western swing revival, which had been triggered in part by two exceptional Austin-based neotraditionalist bands: Asleep at the Wheel (which would later record independently at SugarHill) and Alvin Crow and the Pleasant Valley Boys. In 1975 Crow recorded a single for Meaux’s Crazy Cajun label, “Retirement Run” backed with “Country Ways” (#2001). The Pleasant Valley Boys featured a number of prominent talents, including Bobby Earl Smith on rhythm guitar and Herb Steiner on steel. But the record made little impact. Crow claims that was because Meaux was distracted from promoting it. “When Freddy Fender hit big,” he explains, “quite a number of the artists that Huey signed fell by the wayside.”
However, Meaux continued to record numerous artists. One from his home state was Tommy McLain, who says,
I fi rst met Huey P. Meaux [in 1965] when he took [my recording of “Sweet Dreams”] and promoted it all over the country and helped break it in Philadelphia. . . . I wrote the B-side, “I Need You So,” and it was later recorded by Freddy Fender. I recorded nine or ten albums with Huey and some of it has come out on Edsel Records in Europe. . . .
“Jukebox Songs” was one of my regional hits from SugarHill. I recorded that with my two boys, Barry Lynn and Chad McLain. Barry played drums and Chad played guitar also on “Baby Dolls.” The Backwoods Bayou Adventure album was picked up by CBS and released in Canada and Europe.
McLain also recorded a Crazy Cajun LP with Fender during this phase titled Friends in Show Business. Looking back, McLain says, Recording at SugarHill with Huey was the best. The engineers were terrifi c, and so were the musicians. If he needed special players, he would fl y them 2 0 0
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in. Otherwise, they were the best from Texas and Louisiana. The recording sessions there were like nowhere else. It was the big time, and it was going on! Huey knew about the music business, and he had a great spirit about him. He was a great father-fi gure in the music business.
Warren Storm, another swamp-pop singer, reviews his experience at Meaux’s studio:
I fi rst came to SugarHill in 1965, when it was called Gold Star, and recorded a few things for Huey back then. In the 1970s we must have recorded at least a hundred masters. He must have released at least twenty or twenty-fi ve singles. The fi rst actual album was that record we did for CBS/Starfl ite in 1978.
We had several releases on Huey’s subsidiary Starfl ite. . . . That European label, Edsel, put out a CD called King of the Dance Halls. . . . One of the 45s that got good regional airplay was “King of the Dance Halls.” “Things Have Gone to Pieces” made some noise on Billboard. . . . I did a lot of country out there and some swamp pop. I also did some blues.
But of all the SugarHill productions that Meaux would bankroll with his Fender-windfall profi ts, perhaps the most personally satisfying, if not prof-itable, resulted in a new album and two singles by Sahm. That LP, called Texas Rock for Country Rollers, credited on the cover to Sir Doug and the Texas Tornados, is an obscure 1976 gem. In addition to Sahm’s performance on lead vocals, guitar, piano, and fi ddle, this ten-track set features musical backup from Augie Meyers, Atwood Allen, Harry Hess, Jack Barber, and George Rains. Produced by Meaux, the album was engineered by Moody, who also performed on acoustic guitar. Like Fender’s recent smash hit Teardrop LP, this one was released on ABC/Dot, as were the two singles. The latter featured “Cowboy Peyton Place” and “I Love the Way You Love” (#17656), as well as “Cryin’ Inside Sometimes” backed with “I’m Missing You” (#17674), all of which appear also on the LP.
Through this album project, not only was Meaux reconnecting with a protégé but also perhaps repaying Sahm for recommending Fender—advice that had yielded huge rewards for both of Sahm’s old friends. Meaux also reunited Sahm and Fender in the recording studio—producing tracks for the Crazy Cajun LP Re-Union of the Cosmic Brothers (#1013).
the cash flow generated by the Fender phenomenon encouraged Meaux to invest in more studio equipment. By adding new technology to the inventory of vintage tube equalizers, compressors, and microphones already there, the studio would appeal to a wider range of clients.
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Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender, 1975
At the time of the upgrade, the tape machines had been a Scully with sixteen-, four-, and two-track decks, and an Ampex 440 eight-track that ran one-inch tape. There were also two tube EMT 140 plate reverbs housed up above the control room in the tape vault. Studio B had a Fairchild multispring reverb.
Control room monitors were Altec 604E speakers with Master Lab crossovers and a matching Altec power amp. Studio monitors were Altec A-10s.
Moody, the chief engineer, provides this overview of the changes in the studio’s hardware situation at the time:
Most of my early recordings were done in Studio A. Until we got the MCI tape recorders and Auditronics boards, the serious recording was done in A.
Demo sessions and a lot of experimentation with gear were done in the B
Studio, which had a lot of old gear. We wound up buying two of everything for the studios. Eventually we had two boards, two MCI sixteen-track machines, two sixteen-channel Dolby A racks, four MCI two-track machines with Dolby A as well. Following the arrival of the new equipment, I moved over to Studio B to do the main recording. The new gear began arriving in very early 1976, and we did the B room fi rst.
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As part of the remodeling, Studio B’s control room was walled in sheetrock covered in red burlap. The fl oor was carpeted and a wooden railing installed around the raised section of fl ooring. Meaux modifi ed the other control room too, covering most of the acoustic tile walls with cedar wood paneling or cork tiles. He also installed a sloping false ceiling lined with absorbent baffl es.
Lines ran from the plate reverbs so that both studios would have access to them. The reverb chamber closer to the smaller control room was dedicated primarily to its use. The other chamber was wired to Studio B. Sixteen lines ran between the two studios connecting the two consoles together, for use in the event of a very large recording project. As early as 1973, equalized phone lines had been installed in the Studio B control room closet so that live broadcasts to radio could be readily engineered.
In late 1978, directly behind Studio B Meaux built an air-conditioned warehouse, space that he would later lease from new owners. Having started a label called Starfl ite and secured a 1979 distribution deal with CBS Records, Meaux used the warehouse for shipping and receiving of products.
The
Starfl ite label launched with three artists—Fender, Storm, and McLain—who were featured in a huge coming-out concert at Mickey Gilley’s famous nightclub and broadcast on local radio.
Earlier in the evening Meaux had hosted a cocktail party/dinner at the Galleria Plaza Hotel for key media personnel and a number of visiting record executives.
With such big deals being negotiated and new opportunities abounding, Meaux gradually participated less in studio production. “Huey wasn’t one for hanging around in those days,” says Latimer. “He would pop in and give his blessings and go back to whatever he was doing. In the ’60s he would hang in there with us, but not in the latter part of the ’70s. He was busy doing other things.”
By that point, “Huey was an armchair producer,” says Moody. “A lot of the time he was in the offi
ce taking care of the business or running Freddy’s ca-
reer . . . involved in the process—but not sitting in the studio for ten to twelve hours a day.”
Given the affl
uence that he had achieved as a result of Fender’s success,
Meaux could now aff ord to hire others to man the studio productions. In less than a decade, he had transformed himself from recently paroled ex-con to a struggling studio owner/producer to high-profi le music magnate. Trusting his wheeler-dealer instincts and good ears, Meaux had turned his life around, fi nancially speaking at least.
But beyond that, Meaux had also resurrected the music business reputation and hit-making tradition of the oldest recording studio in the state.
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19
The Later ’70s and
Early ’80s
y the later 1970s huey meaux and SugarHill Studios were famous nationwide, and several notable bands or musicians from beyond the region trekked there to record. Some of them came
because of connections they had made with Meaux, some to per-
form for live radio broadcast, some to handle a task while touring, and some to utilize the facility’s vintage equipment. Regardless of their motivations, there was an upsurge in the number of visitors who ventured to SugarHill.
In October 1973 the California rock group Little Feat came to Houston for two concerts at Liberty Hall. At SugarHill Studios they also staged a four-song set (which lasted about twenty-fi ve minutes) for live broadcast on KPFT-FM radio. In addition to founding guitarist and singer Lowell George (1945–
1979), the classic lineup of Paul Barrere, Bill Payne, Richie Hayward, Sam Clayton, and Kenny Gradney performed. The set they delivered is a dazzling display of surrealistic rock and R&B, preserved on a reel of one-inch eight-track tape in the studio vault. The songs are “China White,” “Somebody’s Leaving Tonight,” “Dixie Chicken,” and “Tripe Face Boogie.” Roger Harris engineered, and the recording quality is superb. Little Feat thus helped in-augurate the live-broadcast relationship between SugarHill and KPFT that fl ourished throughout the 1970s and has continued, in various forms, to the present.
We wish we had archived tape to document the studio’s complete history, but some known sessions remain mysterious. “I was also the engineer on the Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes recordings done here. I don’t know if any of that material ever got released,” says Mickey Moody. We do have confi rmation, through Nugent’s management company, that the bombastic rocker (b. 1948) recorded at SugarHill in the ’70s. Moody adds, “A lot of times they Bradley_4319_BK.indd 204
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would record, and then when we were completely done, they would take the reels with them, and that’s the last that we would hear about it.”
Even more surprising, the eclectic pop-rock composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Todd Rundgren (b. 1948) recorded at SugarHill in late 1975 and early 1976. Like much of his acclaimed studio work, these sessions reportedly involved Rundgren playing most of the instruments and doing all the vocals himself. Some of the results can be found on his 1976
album Faithful. Of this unique project Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes, Presumably Faithful celebrates the past and the future by juxtaposing a side of original pop material with a side of covers. Actually “covers” isn’t accurate—the six oldies that comprise the entirety of side one are re-creations, with Rundgren “faithfully” replicating the sound and feel of the Yardbirds . . .
Bob Dylan . . . Jimi Hendrix . . . Beach Boys . . . and the Beatles. . . . It’s remarkable how close Rundgren comes to duplicating the very feel of the originals.
Pat Brady, one of the studio engineers, explains why Rundgren had traveled to Houston to cut these tracks:
One of the reasons he wanted to come down here is because we had a working Telefunken U-47 [microphone], and by that time they had stopped making them, and they were rare gems. It was a mic you could only fi nd in certain studios. Anyway, he came here for that mic and all the other tube gear that we had here. The original songs he was rerecording were all done on tube gear, and we had a lot of it. . . .
Todd was recording material that came out on his Faithful album. He did that Beach Boys hit “Good Vibrations” here. He did re-creations of diff erent groups, and he did them really well. . . . He brought a number of reels that weren’t fi nished that he fi nished here, and in some cases he was doing whole new songs. Mickey Moody handled whatever engineering Todd didn’t do himself.
Moody adds, “I know that some of what we worked on wound up on the album Faithful. At the same time we cut a lot of tracks that were not fi nished here. . . . I know he was totally happy with what he did here and took the tapes back to the Northeast for more work.”
Staff songwriter and musician Gaylan Latimer provides additional insights: “Every so often Huey would tell me to tell all the guys that the building was off -limits for a couple of days, and Todd would have been one of those times.”
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During the same era, Texas-based acts were still frequently using the facility, of course. And in 1975 one of the hottest Austin ensembles was the posthippie western swing revivalist group known as Asleep at the Wheel. This Ray Benson–led band was coming off a successful album release on Capitol Records when it recorded two tracks at SugarHill for the 1976 follow-up release. That eff ort, Wheelin’ and Dealin’, would earn spots on both the country and pop LP charts and, like its predecessor, would yield three hit singles and receive a Grammy Award nomination.
Benson recorded both SugarHill tracks with his Wheel lineup of the moment: Chris O’Connell, Floyd Domino, Tony Garnier, Scott Hennige, Danny Levin, Bill Mabry, Lucky Oceans, and Leroy Preston. One of the hits they made there, “Miles and Miles of Texas,” remains a signature number for the band today. In his “Artist’s Song Notes” commentary for Lone Star Music, Benson explains the background of this classic track:
In 1974, Tommy Allsup and I went over to Hank Thompson’s publishing company to see if they had any old tunes we might want to do. We turned up this gem, “Miles and Miles of Texas,” which was a demo from around 1950.
It had never been recorded . . . so we cut it in Houston, TX for our album, Wheelin’ and Dealin’. Since then it has become a Texas standard and a song forever associated with Asleep at the Wheel. A tip of the ole Stetson to Diana Johnston and the late Tommy Camfi eld for writing this great ode to the Lone Star State!
The special guest guitarist on the SugarHill recording of “Miles and Miles”
was Bucky Meadows.
During the same session Asleep at the Wheel also taped “They Raided the Joint,” an album track. This blues boogie featured guest appearances by the venerable jazz saxophonist Arnett Cobb and the former Bob Wills sideman and fi ddler/mandolinist extraordinaire Johnny Gimble, as well as additional sax work by Link Davis Jr. Moody says, “I engineered, and production was handled by committee.”
Of the many diverse SugarHill productions, the weirdest involved Kinky Friedman and His Texas Jewboys in 1976. Over a series of days,
they cut several tracks for the album Lasso from El Paso, coproduced by Meaux. As David Lonergan writes in St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, “Friedman achieved his musical high-water mark with an album on the Epic label, Lasso from El Paso. (The song was originally titled ‘Asshole from El Paso,’ a parody of Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee,’ but Epic required a title change before issuing the record.)” On parts of the album recorded elsewhere (including a live concert performance), Friedman (b. 1944) featured guests such as Bob Dylan, 2 0 6
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Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr. Musicians on the SugarHill tracks, along with Friedman, included Jim Atkinson, Tom Culpepper, Bill Ham, Brian Clarke, Terry Danko, Ira Wilkes, and Major Boles.
Moody recalls those sessions:
The album we did for Kinky . . . only problems we had were his people. He had a hard-core bunch of followers that went everywhere with him. When people in Houston heard he was making an album at SugarHill, tons of people showed up wanting to hang out. It was a real hassle to keep them under control while we were trying to record. Even the mayor’s wife wanted to hang out during the recording, and we had to organize security. Except for that, we all had a hot time making the record.
The former bassist from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, British musician Noel Redding (1945–2003), also recorded at SugarHill Studios in 1976. Both Brady and Moody handled engineering duties at various sessions, staged over three weeks, cutting tracks for Redding’s Blowin’ album, his second for RCA Records. “The album rocked harder than its predecessor,” William Ruhlmann writes, “and, recorded largely in the US, seemed to have more of an American, on-the-road feel.” “There were six or seven guys in the band,”
House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) Page 29