House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (36 page)

Mansel Rubenstein . . . was managing him at 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
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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:

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.