House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (39 page)

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.

Freddy 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.

Thus, though Meaux has often been depicted as having brilliantly coaxed Fender into singing part of this song in Spanish, random chance and linguistic improvisation may have been at play.

Of course, Meaux did recognize the power of Fender’s reinterpretation of the original lyrics—the beauty of his organic, eff ortless, and ultimately tran-scendent blending of the two languages of his heritage. Moreover, Meaux evidently did so at the very moment that he fi rst heard it. As they say in the industry, the man had good ears.

But after Fender had taped the vocal track for what would prove to be his life-changing hit single, there was yet one other unplanned moment, another improvised idea that would infuse this masterpiece recording with a crucial
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element of sonic texture. One of the other SugarHill staff engineers, Roger Harris, explains how during a subsequent meal break, fortuity struck yet again:

“Before the Next Teardrop Falls” was . . . on eight-track. So we dubbed the reel over to the sixteen-track, and then we went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant across town. We brought back to the studio the little band from the restaurant. And for a case of Tecate beer, they overdubbed accordion and Mexican guitars on the song. This changed the complexion of the song.

That spontaneous decision, presumably made by Meaux, to incorporate authentic Mexican-style instrumentation gave the song its crowning grace.

Though nobody had possessed the strategic insight to prepare in advance for it, given the surprising developments during Fender’s previous vocal session, it complemented his performance perfectly.

Genius is sometimes simply a matter of making the connections at hand, combining readily available components in an innovative way. Over the course of putting together Fender’s original recording of “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” the singer and the producer had trusted their instincts and created something beautiful and unique. But during the actual studio production, and for a good while thereafter, they had little reason to believe that they had intuitively built a megahit.

Meaux had originally received the song from a friend, producer Shelby Singleton from Nashville. Singleton said he believed that this composition could be a bona fi de hit, but that no one in Nashville, where it had been previously recorded by various singers, could do it justice. He then suggested that one of Meaux’s “characters” might be able to do the job. As Singleton explains, “‘Teardrop’ was written by two of our staff writers. The Freddy Fender recording was the thirty-fi fth recording of the song. The song made the bottom of the charts each time it was released, but never was a big hit till the Freddy recording.”

By the time they produced their defi nitive version of the song at SugarHill Studios, Meaux and Fender had already been collaborating in vain for a couple of years, trying to resurrect Fender’s career—which had been launched back in the 1950s when, known as “El Bebop Kid,” he was playing rock ’n’

roll and doing Spanish-language covers of Elvis Presley songs. Based on the fervent recommendation of Doug Sahm, who as a teen had idolized Fender after seeing him perform at a San Antonio drive-in movie theater, Meaux had sought out the singer. In 1972 he found him washing cars in Corpus Christi. A week later Meaux signed him to his Crazy Cajun label. They tried several new angles in search of ’70s success, including even reggae. Harris
t h e f r e d dy f e n d e r p h e n o m e n o n

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says that shortly before the “Teardrop” session, he engineered “an album for Freddy Fender, thirteen or fourteen songs. . . . Huey had gone to Jamaica and brought back an eight-track reel of reggae rhythm tracks that we transferred to the sixteen-track. We then added Freddy’s voice to them.” But the results of that album—and their partnership in general thus far—had been mediocre at best, leading to some artist-producer tensions.

Thus, when Meaux played the “Teardrop” demo and urged the singer to give it a try, Fender had bristled and asserted his distaste for doing a country song. Meaux’s persistence and manipulation eventually led to Fender desul-torily scribbling the lyrics and cutting some tracks to appease the producer.

But the magic that transformed that session depended on Fender dropping his page of notes and improvising a verse in his people’s language.

“I have always felt that the Spanish that Huey and Freddy put in the song was the main reason it became a big hit,” says Singleton. As for his motivation, beyond support for his own staff songwriters, for off ering the song to another producer, Singleton adds, “At the time Huey was struggling, and I wanted to help him as a friend, so I gave him the tracks.”

Thus, through a series of atypical circumstances, one of the biggest records of the mid-1970s came to be. Not only was the single well received nationwide, but so was the subsequently released album of the same name, which spawned even more hits. Brady off ers this account of its success: It was actually the number four record [album] of all in 1975 in sales . . . and I mean he’s up there with Elton John and some of the other pop stars of that year—the fourth-largest-selling album of that year! And that was a shock to me when I found out that it was that big. Prior to coming to Houston I had worked PR for CBS Records for about fi ve years, so I knew a bit about the music business. The album sold like crazy. . . . It was the fi rst country album to be certifi ed Platinum, which was quite a milestone. I’m not sure they made a big deal out of it at the time here in Houston, but it was something in
Billboard.

Based on the success of the “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” single, Meaux had placed Fender’s identically titled debut album on a major label, ABC/Dot.

According to
Nashville City Beat
magazine, by the end of that year it had already sold 650,000 copies in the LP format and another 450,000 on cassettes.

Since then it has sold millions more, right into the MP3 era.

Thanks to the tip from Sahm, who later formed the Grammy Award–

winning Texas Tornados supergroup with Fender and others, Meaux had achieved the biggest hit record of his career. Though he had changed the site’s name from Gold Star to SugarHill, Meaux had also produced it in the
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same Houston studio where, almost ten years earlier, he had recorded the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “She’s About a Mover,” the big break in Sahm’s storied career.

But the success of the Fender recording did not come right away. Meaux fi rst vigorously shopped the master tape to a variety of larger labels, only to be repeatedly rebuff ed. Finally, still believing in the magic of that taped moment, he issued the recording himself on his Crazy Cajun label, paired with

“Waiting for Your Love” as the B-side (#2002). Then, given his limited distribution network and his inability to match the major labels’ well-funded promotional eff orts, Meaux personally committed to getting the record heard.

Brady picks up the story:

Huey then hit the road with a ton of records in the trunk of his car. He also took with him a bunch of cash and allegedly a bunch of not-so-legitimate drugs to use as incentive for the disc jockeys at the many country music radio stations out in the Texas countryside to play the record. Whatever the methods used, Huey got them to play the record. As they say, the rest is history.

As Meaux was fond of pointing out, promotion was the key that made a record a hit, and with “Teardrop” he had proven it yet again.