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

by Andy Bradley, Roger Wood

  [Undead Records #002]. . . .

  I realized how much fun I was having in the studio with the creative process and being with friends. On top of that, I also realized what a great place SugarHill was. The more I found out about it, the more I wanted to come back and do some more work. . . . I immediately started planning my album and my return to Houston. I knew I would do it at SugarHill. . . . Chris had to be involved—because the chemistry was back. And I wanted to do it with

  [Andy Bradley] because [he] knew what was going on.

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  The Hometown Boys, publicity photo, 1996

  Tek and Masuak returned in early 1992 to begin working on Tek’s fi rst solo CD, Take It to the Vertical, on Red Eye/Polydor Records. Houston master saxophonist Grady Gaines performed as a special guest, soulfully blending his Gulf Coast R&B sound with that of these former punk rockers. Tek tells more about this project:

  Chris was the obvious choice to be the other guitar/keyboard player/coproducer on the album following the recementing of our relationship. I picked Scott Asheton [ex-drummer for Iggy Pop and the Stooges] and [Phil] “Dust”

  Peterson on bass because I’d played with both of them in the past. . . . We were able to put together a band spirit almost immediately, and the recording worked. My wife, Angie Pepper, came down and sang a co-lead vocal and some harmonies on the album.

  One good vibe led to another. During Tek’s sessions, Chris recruited him and studio drum technician Robbie Parrish to record an additional four tracks m o d e rn m u s i c ( a d ) ve n t u r e s

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  with him. These eventually appeared on a CD credited to the Juke Savages on Phantom Records, Australia (#20).

  These SugarHill sessions collectively played a key role in Tek’s 1990s reemergence as a performer and recording artist. They also led directly to a highly touted Radio Birdman reunion tour in 1996, the fi rst in eighteen years—which later triggered other international touring and new recordings elsewhere. Like myriad music breakthroughs before, this one started at the old studio complex on Brock Street.

  Tek adds some fi nal comments on that place:

  I have met some amazing people at SugarHill . . . Grady Gaines . . . Huey P.

  Meaux. . . . I also remember the day that we went up to the tape archives. . . .

  That was completely mind-blowing to me because to just walk in and see the multitrack tape of “She’s About a Mover”—it was like being in a gold mine of sound.

  Meanwhile the MMV-owned Discos MM label rode to new levels of Tejano success with its recent conjunto nuevo signee, the Hometown Boys. Over the course of a dozen or more CD recordings at SugarHill (all engineered, produced, or coproduced by Lanphier), the Homies racked up major sales and numerous awards, including Gold Records for 1994’s Tres Ramitas and 1995’s Mire Amigo.

  As a result of the Hometown Boys’ success, we also recorded a veteran conjunto group called Los Dos Gilbertos, plus a younger band called Los Pecadores.

  I coproduced Discos MM’s recording of the group David Olivares and XS.

  That project spawned a cross-cultural wonder, for Meaux suggested converting some 1960s rock into contemporary cumbia. Drawing from studio history, we Latinized “She’s About a Mover,” and it became a regional hit.

  At this point MMV underwent another restructuring, which left Lummis, Silva, and Leavitt in charge. They decided to close the SugarHill Sound jingle company and concentrate more fully on the Latino music market. Then in early 1993, with Lummis exiting to the corporate banking world, MMV

  next elected to scale back certain operations. It also closed Studio B, selling much of its gear and investing the proceeds in new sound equipment for the Hometown Boys, with whom Lanphier departed to work full time.

  Now on my own in charge of studio operations, I began searching for a possible short-term lessee for Studio B, which was otherwise used only for rehearsals. Seeing that historic chamber empty again depressed me. Moreover, given recent business decisions, I was uncertain about the future of MMV’s relationship with the studios. But more changes lay ahead.

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  22

  Emergence

  of a RAD Idea

  oncurrently with mmv reconsidering its commitment

  to studio ownership, I crossed paths with several people who

  would infl uence the next phase of SugarHill’s history. Through a series of fortunate affi

  liations, a new company would be born.

  It started when Robbie Parrish, who was producing a CD for singer Tony Villa, brought in Rodney Meyers to add keyboard eff ects on Villa’s album.

  Meyers, a college professor in audio technology, was also doing freelance work in digital mastering and editing—and seeking proper space in which to establish his business.

  So Meyers, Max Silva, and I convened to discuss and arrange a lease agreement whereby Meyers’s independent mastering company would become a tenant in the SugarHill building. We determined that he would occupy the second-fl oor site where International Artists had once maintained offi ces—

  the same place where Bill Quinn had originally installed the upstairs control room for the big studio.

  Meyers gutted the space, soundproofed it, and created an acoustically correct environment for processing audio. His company, Sound Engineering, began operations on site with a mastering room, a small offi

  ce, and a small

  production room. It was one of the fi rst digital mastering facilities in Houston, fi ttingly located in the city’s oldest continuously operating studio.

  Meanwhile, we briefl y leased Studio B to independent producer Dan Yeaney, who staged some freelance sessions there. Upon his departure, MMV

  sold the fi nal vintage Auditronics console, leaving only a set of Altec monitors and a two-track MCI JH-110 analog tape deck.

  However, musician and independent sound engineer Dan Workman was also searching for a place to move his own studio business. He says, Bradley_4319_BK.indd 231

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  It was 1994, and I was recording at my home studio called the Big House. . . .

  It was getting diffi

  cult to use the whole house for sessions. So I thought

  about moving to a studio and doing my work there. . . . I decided to call Robbie [Parrish]. He was Mister Network. . . . He says, “Why don’t you call Andy Bradley over at SugarHill? I think Studio B is just being used as a rehearsal place.”

  Having a stable tenant in Studio B was good news at SugarHill. “When I fi rst came over,” Workman says, “Rodney Meyers was putting in sheetrock upstairs in what was to become the mastering facility, Sound Engineering. . . .

  At the time I thought it was very cool that there would soon be a full-fl edged mastering room in the building.” In fact, mastering had not been done at 5626 Brock since Jim Duff left Gold Star in late 1968. Through the 1980s the norm was that vinyl record pressing plants handled mastering. However, in the later 1980s and the 1990s specialized independent mastering facilities became more common, especially with the digital revolution changing the nature of sound recording.

  Thus, SugarHill Studios came to house two new tenants with separate but complementary business interests. As part of the agreement with Workman, his company and SugarHill shared equipment and any overfl ow of customers. Since his client base had little if any overlap with mine, our two studio companies could collaborate eff ectively without being rivals.

  A Mackie twenty-four channel/eight-bus console and a Fostex sixteen-track analog deck that ran one-half-inch tape anchored Workman’s studio space. He also brought in a number of excellent microphones and outboard processing units. Monitoring speakers were the cl
assic Altec 604Es, Yamaha NS10Ms, Tannoy 6.5s, and Auratone sound cubes. As he transitioned into digital engineering, Workman added Tascam DA-88 modular digital recorders.

  “It took a little while to build up my client base,” Workman says. “I started to pull in a number of bands that I met at the Urban Art Bar, where I worked sound.” These included Pull My Finger (later known as Ultramaag) and Badger (later known as The Tie That Binds). He went on to work with Planet Shock, Beat Temple, Bon Ton Mickey, Brian Jack and the Zydeco Gamblers, his own band Culturcide (on the album Home Made Authority), I-45, Moses Guest, and David Brake and That Damn Band, to name a few.

  Having Workman and Meyers as tenants of the MMV-owned SugarHill Studios building developed a tripartite business affi

  liation that made sense.

  As each company pursued its own interests, we interacted regularly via refer-rals and consultations. We had developed, more or less organically, without foresight or intention, a symbiotic relationship.

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  among the sugarhill studios clients during this era, blues-rock guitarist Bert Wills was a regular. He recounts the artist-studio relationship: In late 1992 I came in with Jerry Lightfoot to record his fi rst solo album

  [Burning Desire]. Jerry was a legend in the blues scene in Texas, both white and black. . . . It is right about this time that I discovered the reverb chambers in [the] hallway. . . . and how beautiful the reverb was that could be created in them. From that day on, it became a signature sound on all of our albums. . . .

  I had [previously] been recording over at Limelight Studios. . . . They had just switched over to the early ADAT digital recording, and I didn’t like the sound or the diffi

  culty with which those clunky machines operated.

  That early digital recording was harsh and unforgiving in its sound. I really missed the warmth of analog tape. So I lobbied to go over to SugarHill—

  because [they] were using analog tape. . . . For my fi rst album, Mr. Politician

  [1993], we fi gured that a few of the cuts done at Limelight were acceptable and cut the other two-thirds of the album at SugarHill. . . .

  I remember showing up the day after the famous Huey incident [i.e., Meaux’s arrest] to do guitar and vocals overdubs on the Special Session album. . . .

  The third album we did together was the surf record, Pavones Sunset. . . .

  [We] recruited Robbie Parrish and Rick Robertson to be the band for the album, and like the previous records, we used Paul English on keyboards and Kuko Miranda on Latin percussion.

  The last album I did for Goldrhyme Records was Tell Me Why. . . . in mid-1999. We recorded the drums out in the room, behind the drum booth where the organ’s Leslie speaker lived. We got a great live kind of retro-ish sound that fi tted perfectly with those songs.

  Studio drummer and independent producer Parrish worked sessions with various artists in this time period, ranging from the country-rockabilly bandleader Jesse Dayton and his group the Road Kings to the New Age singer-songwriter-pianist Anita Kruse.

  Meanwhile, the MMV-owned label Discos MM remained active. One of the new artists it introduced was a Tejana singer and her band, Annette y Axxion.

  They eventually recorded three CDs at SugarHill, all released on Fonovisa Records. Moreover, Meyers’s Sound Engineering company took over the mastering engineering for Discos MM products, including the various releases by the Tejano band Xelencia, which continued to record at SugarHill on an almost annual basis.

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  Another project for Discos MM involved a live recording of two groups, the Hometown Boys and Los Dos Gilbertos, at a huge south Houston nightclub called Hullabaloos. We contracted Malcolm Harper and Reel Sound Recording from Austin to provide and operate a mobile truck unit outfi tted with a vintage MCI console and two twenty-four-track MCI analog tape decks.

  Malcolm and I collaborated on the engineering while Steve Lanphier handled the live mix, with Ramon Morales working the monitors. From those recordings MMV produced three diff erent CDs, one of each band performing separately and another combining tracks by both. All three albums, leased to Capitol/EMI Records, were big sellers.

  In 1996 a New York label commissioned a Jones Hall recording of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, with Christof Eschenbach conducting. After transporting and installing the necessary gear, I coengineered the project with producer Michael Fine, recording three separate three-hour sessions over two days. The result was the album titled Schubert, featuring the Schubert-Berio composition “Rendering” (from Sketches for 10th Symphony) and the Schubert-Joachim Symphony in C Major, Grand Duo, on Koch Records (#3-7382-2).

  Working on recording projects with symphony orchestras, Tejano sensa-tions, rock bands, and other such groups kept those of us based at SugarHill Studios immersed in the music. But some business issues had to be settled if we were going to keep it up.

  early 1996 brought a series of transformations to SugarHill Studios.

  Meyers changed the name of his digital editing and mastering company to Essential Sound. Workman’s Big House company had established itself as a site for digital multitrack recording—recently abetted by upgrades, including a third Tascam DA-88 recorder, a twenty-four-channel extender for the Mackie eight-bus console, Amex/Neve and API preamps, and a pair of Genelec 1030A monitors. Workman’s embrace of digital technology was counterbalanced to some degree by my preference for old-fashioned analog.

  But the biggest change occurred in April 1996 when Silva announced that MMV had decided to limit its interests to the Discos MM label, artist management, and music publishing—and thus sell SugarHill Studios. He said that MMV wished, if possible, to maintain offi

  ces and continue recording in the

  building as tenants of the new ownership.

  Meyers, Workman, and I had recently achieved a productive synergy, but now we realized that it all could quickly fall apart. So Meyers proposed that we pool resources and purchase the place as partners. And what could have been a crisis became an opportunity.

  Using the initial letter in each of our fi rst names, we became RAD Audio, Inc., a Sub-chapter S Texas corporation. In October 1996, along with two ad-2 3 4

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  ditional investors, Tom Littman and Jon Bradley (no relation to the coauthor), RAD then purchased the SugarHill Studios name and complete inventory of equipment from MMV—but not the real estate itself.

  Given MMV’s asking price for the old structure and its obscure location, we had another idea—and began scouting the metropolitan area for a more prominently situated space to establish a new recording facility bearing the time-honored SugarHill name.

  Until we found it, RAD and its recently acquired assets remained temporarily and precariously housed at the old SugarHill site. MMV, of course, continued to off er the structure and land for sale but allowed RAD to pay for utilities and maintenance and remain there in the interim.

  Over the next several months, the RAD partners searched fruitlessly for the right site to launch the envisioned new incarnation of SugarHill Studios.

  At the same time, we got surprisingly negative feedback from some of our clients regarding our plans. Again and again, people expressed dismay or disappointment that we would be moving from the historic Gold Star/SugarHill site. These factors prompted us to question the wisdom of our plans—when suddenly there was a breakthrough as MMV chose to lower its selling price signifi cantly.

  In November 1997 MMV accepted our counteroff er. Thus, already possessing its name and gear, RAD purchased the real estate that had been SugarHill Studios. We had also come to believe that it was the right thing to do, keeping all the major components of the venera
ble studio company intact and rooted to the ground at 5626 Brock Street.

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  23

  Millennial Destiny

  s new sugarhill studios owners, RAD Audio fi rst extensively remodeled the structure and the studio chambers. It was a time of fresh beginnings, both in terms of the upgraded building and the styles of music recorded there. As was customary, there

  remained a diverse range of clientele, but the biggest hits would now come from a younger generation of artists performing contemporary pop, R&B, and rap.

  The remodeling started with roof replacement, installation of new air-conditioning units, and cosmetic painting. In 1999 we also completely overhauled and redesigned the Studio B control room, including the installation of new wall surfaces, a rebuilt raised fl oor, racks, and desk. The room was equipped with a Sony MCI JH-24 analog tape recorder with twenty-four channels of Dolby SR noise reduction and four Tascam DA tape recorders providing thirty-two channels of digital recording capacity. Speakers were Altec 604s, Yamaha NS10s, and Genelec 1040s. Outboard preamps included Amek/

  Neve, API, Demeter, Benchmark, and Bellari. We had DBX, UREI, TubeTech, and Manley compressors, plus several Lexicon reverbs.

  Upon completing Studio B’s renovation, in October 1999 we temporarily closed Studio A to do the same there. We sold the Neotek IIIC console and commissioned Martin Sound to build us a new Neotek Elite board. As he had done in Studio B, Rodney Meyers redesigned, rewired, and outfi tted the control room—creating a multipurpose booth, a machine room for analog and digital tape decks, and a computer room. He also installed air locks on studio and control room doors to improve isolation. By February 2000 the new board was installed, capping RAD’s major refurbishing campaign.