House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (16 page)

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In February 1965, LaBeef returned to Gold Star Studios for a session paid for by the Nashville branch of prestigious Columbia Records, his new label. A Gold Star invoice shows it was a four-hour session that consumed two reels of tape. LaBeef explains how it came to pass.

Don Law Sr. [Columbia Records producer] came down to Houston and made the arrangements with Bill Quinn. . . . Mickey Gilley was visiting the studio during the session, and Kenny Rogers was playing upright bass with us.

I had Wiley Barkdull on piano, and Dean Needham on one of the guitars, maybe lead guitar, Eddie Hamler on drums.

Bill Quinn did the engineering, and Don Law was A&R producer on the session. He had called me from Nashville, and I was working at the Wayside Lounge, which is just a few blocks away from the studio in Houston. Just before we went on stage, the waitress said, “Hey, Sleepy, you got a call from Nashville. Columbia Records wants to talk to you.”

I said, “Yeah, I’ll bet.” Sure enough, it was Don Law. He said that he had set up studio time at Gold Star, and we went over and cut a few things. And I was with Columbia for four years. We recorded in the big studio, and Bill had some really fi ne equipment at that stage. I think we were recording on three tracks.

Of the Gold Star–produced records that initially launched his career, LaBeef says, “Those songs I did in ’57 and ’58 actually sold more the second time around in Europe than they had done in the States.” Despite the fact that he recorded late in Daily’s Starday tenure and soon departed, LaBeef remembers the label fondly. “We still receive royalty checks from the Daily family,”

he says. “Starday has paid better than every company I have ever been with.”

Daily’s involvement with Starday had always been a joint venture, ultimately shared in equal partnership with Don Pierce, who had moved the company to Nashville and linked it with the Mercury label. However, by July 1958, as writer Colin Escott puts it, “Mercury was dissatisfi ed with Starday because Pierce and Daily hadn’t delivered much in the way of hits, and the deal between Pierce and Daily fell apart at the same time for reasons that have never become entirely clear.”

So Daily got out, leaving Starday (as well as the Dixie label that he and Pierce had recently launched), and created yet another label with himself as the sole owner. Taking the initial letter of his family name, Daily proclaimed his new enterprise D Records. Based in Houston, it adds another chapter to the Gold Star Studios story.

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8

Daily’s Dominance

and D Records

s it merely a coincidence
that the timing of Pappy Daily’s creation of D Records corresponds with that of Bill Quinn’s studio expansion? Probably not. It seems reasonable that Daily, going out on his own in a new Houston-based label venture, would make sure

that he had suffi

cient studio space and upgraded equipment there to meet

his needs. Given his previous success, especially with George Jones (whom he was continuing to produce for the Mercury label in Nashville), Daily understood the prevailing industry standards and technical requirements of a fully professional studio. The recent improvements at the Gold Star recording facility thus served his interests.

Whatever his level of investment in the expansion may have been, it was likely off set by the fact, as Daily knew, that he could record with Quinn more cheaply than anyone else could record in Nashville. For instance, writer Deke Dickerson quotes Daily’s former Starday partner Don Pierce explaining why he chose fi rst to record Roger Miller at Gold Star Studios in Houston: “Down there we could cut for fi ve dollars per song per man. In Nashville, it was $41.25 per man per three-hour session.”

As his prolifi c output suggests, Daily’s strategy for D Records was to conduct lots of sessions, keep the costs down, secure the publishing rights, hope for a regional hit, and if he got one, lease it promptly to a major label, and collect the profi ts (without having to handle major distribution or promotion).

As Colin Escott writes, “From the beginning, Pappy saw ‘D’ as an experimental label or a ‘look-see’ label as it was called then. . . . If anything looked likely to sell on a national basis, he would try to interest Mercury in picking up the master.”

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Given the pop cultural climate of 1958, the initial D Records releases of-fered an odd mix of traditional country and rock. However, Daily soon created another label, Dart, where he would increasingly channel most of the rock

’n’ roll repertoire. Thus, the D label gradually evolved into what writer Kevin Coff ey calls “a bastion of traditional country and honky-tonk against the double-barreled assault of rock ’n’ roll and lush Nashville Sound country pop.”

Like Starday before, both of Daily’s new self-owned labels did a substantial amount of recording at Gold Star Studios. Most sessions featured artists living in or near Houston between 1958 and 1965. Ultimately, approximately 40

to 50 percent of the massive D Records catalogue was recorded with Quinn engineering and Daily or Gabe Tucker (D’s vice president, 1915–2003) producing.

The

fi rst D Records national hit was “Talk to Me Lonesome Heart” (#1006), the fl ip side of “Changeable,” both recorded by James O’Gwynn in June 1958.

This classic country tearjerker reached number sixteen on the
Billboard
charts.

Having fi rst recorded for the Nucraft and Azalea labels, O’Gwynn had next released one single for Starday. However, with the subsequent dissolution of Daily’s Starday interest, O’Gwynn was a free agent. He says, “I then signed with D Records in 1958. I had two hit records with D and made my debut on the Grand Ole Opry with the help of Jim Reeves. I then moved to Nashville in 1961.” O’Gwynn’s second D Records hit was “Blue Memories.” Backed with

“You Don’t Want to Hold Me” (#1022), it peaked at number twenty-eight on the national charts.

Other notables in the early D Records–Gold Star Studios collaboration include Eddie Noack, who temporarily betrayed his country roots and cut the rockabilly sides “My Steady Dream” and “Can’t Play Hookey” for the fi rst D

release (#1000). This record, perhaps an embarrassment to the country traditionalist Noack, was released under the pseudonym Tommy Wood. However, later in 1958 Noack did put a D single on the country charts, rising to number fourteen with “Have Blues Will Travel” (#1019), his biggest seller. He followed it up with country ballads such as “Don’t Look Behind” (#1060) or loping shuffl

es such as “Walk ’Em Off ” (#1037).

Glenn Barber, a Gold Star Studios regular and Starday alumnus, followed Daily to D Records too. In 1958 he cut his fi rst D single, “Hello Sadness”

backed with “Same Old Fool Tomorrow” (#1017). He then recorded numerous obscure classics, such as “Your Heart Don’t Love” (#1069) and “New Girl in School” (#1098), all produced at Quinn’s studio. “It is a strange thing,”

Barber says, “where a lot of the records I made for D, which didn’t make it nationally, are the ones that I get asked about the most nowadays. I get ques-tions from Europe all the time about those songs.”

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At Gold Star Studios in May 1959, Barber cut his D Records version of

“Most Beautiful” (#1069), a track that he would later rerecord in Nashville and make a major hit. Barber recalls the session being produced “right after

[Quinn] moved into the big room in the back.” Working with the Gold Star house band, in 1960 Barber cut songs such as “The Window” (“a song about suicide,” he says) and his own rockabilly-infl uenced composition “Another You” (#1128). Though none of his D singles made much commercial impact, Barber epitomizes the level of solid country talent that Daily featured on hundreds of recordings.

In addition to recording local country singers, Daily had other strategies.

Having leased the rights from Quinn, D Records reissued the old Gold Star Records singles by the late Harry Choates. D Records also prospected for the elusive hit disc by crossing over into other genres. For example, Daily made a tentative foray into the burgeoning Hispanic market by recording artists such as Gaston Ponce Castellanos, who released “Que-Chula-Estas” backed with

“Si-Yo-Te-Quiero” in early 1959 (#1038).

Daily sometimes gambled with novelty records spoofi ng current events with cornball humor—utilizing the technique of lifting one-line phrases from previously recorded songs and inserting them as responses to ques-tions posed by a faux radio reporter. Ray Jackson’s 1958 track “Texas-Alaska”

(#1012) is one such example, a calculated attempt to capitalize on news of Alaska’s pending admission to statehood in 1959, a federal decision that made Texas no longer the largest state in the nation. Seizing the opportunity to satirize this indignity from a Texan’s perspective, Daily lifted one-liners and sampled vocals from other recordings to patch together this topical piece.

The humor pretty much falls fl at though, and as Escott points out, the main goal seems to have been to incorporate snippets of “as many of Pappy Daily’s copyrights as could be squeezed into two-and-a-half minutes.”

Often his ideas went nowhere, but Daily experimented relentlessly in hopes of producing another hit. Believing that such a phenomenon could not really be predicted, he elected to generate a large volume of singles of various types, trusting in the law of averages to occasionally reward his strategy. The deal he had worked out with Quinn granted him easy access and presumably economical rates for recording on a whim at Gold Star Studios. And just as he had hoped, sometimes he got lucky.

among the scores of d records
artists whom Daily produced at Gold Star Studios, one stands above all the rest in terms of both profi ts and fame.

J. P. Richardson (1930–1959), better known as the Big Bopper, recorded

“Chantilly Lace” (#1008) there in 1958, a massive hit then and an oldies radio staple for decades. Prior to that, in 1957, Richardson had made one Mercury-7 2

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Starday Records single for Daily, “Crazy Blues” backed with “Beggar to a King”

(#71219), released under the name Jape Richardson. It did not do much, but

“Chantilly Lace”—originally just a B-side fi ller song—unexpectedly soared to number six and stayed on the pop charts for twenty-fi ve straight weeks. In a sign of signifi cant cross-racial appeal, the song also spent fi fteen weeks on the R&B charts, rising to number three. With the fi rst hint of major success, Daily had leased it to Mercury Records, securing nationwide distribution and promotion.

Since then this certifi ed Gold Record has become a multi-Platinum classic. Having recently achieved the “BMI Three Million Airplays” milestone, it is one of the most recognizable hits in rock ’n’ roll history, and has graced the soundtracks of several fi lms.
Texas Monthly
writers Jeff McCord and John Morthland rate it one of the one hundred best Texas songs. The most famous record in Daily’s D Records and Starday career, it is also one of the biggest hits ever produced at Quinn’s studio. The song spawned Richardson’s only album,
Chantilly Lace
(Mercury #MG-20402), which was fi lled out with other singles recorded there.

In “Chantilly Lace” Richardson dramatizes a comic monologue (representing one end of a telephone conversation between an excitable young man and his girlfriend) before breaking into song for a sixteen-bar rock-shuffl e

chorus that is punctuated by his impassioned assertion of “that’s what I like!”

It is the cool-daddy Big Bopper persona, of course, that underlies the record’s appeal, as Richardson exudes a cocky machismo that is clearly defenseless against his female antagonist’s charms. But the deliciously raw-sounding backing band deserves its due too, as it lays down the rollicking groove over which Richardson’s jive-talking character performs. Guitarist Glenn Barber provides a fi rsthand recollection of the Gold Star session that produced this unique single:

I didn’t play the lead on “Chantilly Lace.” I played a kind of tic-tac guitar part over the bass line. The actual lead guitar player was Hal Harris. I’m fairly sure that Floyd Tillman played rhythm guitar on it. The sax was none other than Link Davis. I believe that Herb Remington played steel. The drummer was a guy named Bill Kimbrough. . . . Doc Lewis played piano.

According to well-circulated accounts, as well as testimony from one of the principals, Richardson had penned “Chantilly Lace” while riding in the backseat of a car with fellow Beaumont-area disc jockey Huey Meaux, traveling from Port Arthur to Houston for those fi rst recording sessions at Gold Star Studios. Meaux confi rms that Richardson scribbled the lyrics as an af-terthought for the B-side to his novelty song “Purple People Eater Meets the
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