House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (17 page)

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Witch Doctor.” That latter, the main focus of the planned session, was an obvious attempt to capitalize on two current hits, “Witch Doctor” by David Seville and “Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley. That plan changed, however, when radio programmers chose to spin the B-side, and listeners enthusiastically responded.

That Gold Star session also marks Richardson’s formal adoption of the

“Big Bopper” persona. His D Records colleague, Eddie Noack, says in his
New
Kommotion
interview,

I was at that session. They got through, and J.P. said, “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about calling myself the Big Bopper, but I [have] done a number of commercials for the Big Yazoo [a lawn mower], and it’s all over the South, so I might call myself the Big Yazoo.”

And Pappy said, “Well, I think the Big Bopper would be better.”

Thus, an immortal nickname was born, like the hit single itself, rather casually.

Daily had ended up with the publishing rights not to the original A-side track that Richardson’s manager (Bill Hall) hoped would be a hit but instead to that off -the-cuff B-side song. Noack goes on to explain:

At the end of the “Chantilly Lace” session, Bill Hall—he denies it now but I was there—said, “What side do you want, Pappy?”

They were going to split the sides [in terms of publishing rights]—and Pappy said, “Take your pick, kid.” Bill Hall picked “Purple People Eater” for publishing, and Pappy had “Chantilly Lace.”

When it became clear that “Chantilly Lace” had popular appeal, Daily began to promote it shrewdly. Colin Escott’s essay in
The Complete D Singles
Collection
quotes Bud Daily (Pappy’s son) regarding a marketing ploy: Mercury wasn’t interested in it . . . so dad put it on “D,” and he had sold 25,000 in Texas before Mercury got interested. Sunshine Tucker [the company secretary] had a black lace party dress and she cut it up and pasted bits of it onto postcards, which were then mailed to dee-jays with a note saying

“Please play ‘Chantilly Lace.’”

Boosted by such eff orts, the song rapidly gained momentum beyond Texas, and Mercury leased the rights to the record, boosting its status nationwide.

According to their legal agreement, however, Daily was permitted to continue selling the D Records single in Texas.

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Big Bopper, publicity

photo, 1958

Leasing a hit to a larger company was a key component of Daily’s success in an industry that he—having risen through the ranks of jukebox owners and record distributors—well understood. As Noack says in
New Kommotion,
I [have] seen Pappy do this over and over. I didn’t know too much about the record business back then, and I couldn’t understand why Pappy leased the master to Mercury. He’d already sold 25 to 30,000 copies on D. He told me,

“Hell kid, a million seller would break me—because the distributors won’t pay me.” This was very amazing to me because Pappy was a major distributor himself. . . . And if they wouldn’t pay Pappy, who in the hell would they pay? But Pappy told me that the distributors have got to pay a major label like Mercury—because they were bound to keep coming out with hits.

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Other mid-twentieth-century independent record business veterans confi rm the wisdom of this counterintuitive business strategy. For instance, Meaux often alleged in conversation that distributors regularly cheated him on some of his most popular early recordings. He ultimately subscribed fully to Daily’s notion that it was better to lease a potential hit to a larger label, and in the 1960s and ’70s Meaux profi tably did so with several of his Gold Star productions.

When Mercury issued “Chantilly Lace” nationwide, it also elevated Richardson’s star status—so much so that by November 1958 he had resigned from Beaumont’s KTRM radio station and devoted himself to performing full-time. This suddenly hot performer got booked on the top shows in pop music, including that fateful tour with fellow Texan and rock pioneer Buddy Holly (1936–1959), as well as the California teen sensation Ritchie Valens (1941–1959). A few months later, on February 3, 1959, they all died together in a plane crash in Iowa.

Although, as writer Alan Lee Haworth puts it in his “Big Bopper” essay,

“most of his recordings were of novelty songs” and “his appeal was largely in his fl amboyant stage performances,” Richardson was also a talented songwriter. Though he did not record until the last two years of his short life, he is known to have composed at least thirty-eight songs, only twenty-one of which were recorded. Besides “Chantilly Lace,” Richardson also scripted two number one hits performed on record by fellow Gold Star Studios alumni: “White Lightning” (sung by George Jones) and “Running Bear” (sung by Johnny Preston). Thus, on “the day the music died” (to quote Don McLean’s famous line), we lost not only Holly, Valens, and the likable showman who had scored big with “Chantilly Lace.” We also lost a clever wordsmith whose abbreviated legacy encompasses classic hits by three Southeast Texas singers.

Like both Jones and Richardson, the singer known as Johnny Preston hailed from the Beaumont area and recorded his fi rst hit single at Gold Star Studios in Houston. A native of Port Arthur, his full name was John Preston Courville (b. 1939), and in early 1959 he was a direct benefi ciary of the budding relationship between Richardson and Daily. Preston relates how he got started:

My group and I were playing around Southeast Texas and were well known to Bopper and his manager Bill Hall. One night at a club called the Twilight Club in Port Neches, Texas, he came and asked me to come and have a meeting at the radio station. The meeting resulted in an off er from the Bopper and Hall to record “Running Bear,” which was written by the Bopper. I quickly accepted and a recording session was set up at Gold Star Studios. The Big
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Bopper was signed to Pappy Daily’s D Records, and Gold Star was the home recording facility for that label.

In mid-1958 on the fi rst trip into Gold Star we recorded “Running Bear”

and “My Heart Knows,” a song I wrote. . . . My band did not participate in the recording session. They used the Gold Star Studios band, featuring Hal Harris on guitar and with Link Davis on the dominant tenor saxophone part.

The session was engineered by Bill Quinn and was produced by the Big Bopper and Hall.

Preston’s recollections of that session also reveal a noteworthy bit of trivia about the identity of the backing singers on his version of “Running Bear”: George [Jones] was in Beaumont and, being a good friend of the Bopper’s, he

[had] heard about the project and came with us. . . . The background vocalists performing the pseudo–Native American chanting [on the record] were none other than the Big Bopper, George Jones, Sleepy LaBeef, and Bill Hall.

Preston’s treatment of Richardson’s story-song “Running Bear,” coming right on the heels of the smash hit “Chantilly Lace,” was good enough to prompt Mercury Records to accept immediately Daily’s off er of a lease agreement. So the D label did not issue this recording; like certain other Daily productions, it premiered as a Mercury single (#71474). Preston explains what transpired:

The single was released on Mercury Records through connections the Bopper and Pappy Daily already had with the label. The song entered the
Billboard
charts in September of 1959 and fi rst peaked at number seventy, then fell off the charts for two to three weeks. Bill Hall then called me and said that a major jukebox operator in St. Louis [had] ordered fi fteen thousand copies of the record for Midwest distribution, and the rest is history. The song reentered the
Billboard
pop charts . . . with a bullet and then went all the way to number one. “Running Bear” stayed at number one for nearly three weeks and to date has sold about three million copies.

As with “Chantilly Lace,” this song’s appeal reached across racially segregated marketing boundaries. As a result, “Running Bear” also rode the national R&B charts for thirteen weeks, peaking at number three. Together those two recordings made a lucrative windfall for Daily, who earned shares of their extensive profi ts not only on sales of discs issued by Mercury or D

Records but also on the royalties paid to his Glad Music publishing concern.

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Having recently completed his studio renovation, Quinn could take pride in Daily’s success with this latest pair of hits, recordings that he himself had engineered. For his major client—and a possible business partner—to be reaping such rich rewards, it surely boded well for the newly expanded Gold Star Studios.

but not even daily could always judge which songs and singers were destined for greatness. In the case of one particular D Records artist, Daily’s usually astute business acumen failed him completely. Thus, he rejected a unique singer-songwriter-guitarist, a man who would later prove himself to be one of the greatest fi gures in Texas music history. Moreover, Daily also passed on issuing the fi rst recorded version, made at Gold Star Studios, of one of that icon’s most acclaimed compositions. We speak of Willie Nelson and his brilliant song “Nightlife.”

Nonetheless, Nelson’s relationship with D Records and Gold Star Studios was signifi cant even before he recorded there in 1960. It was in Quinn’s facility on December 18, 1959, that Claude Gray had recorded “Family Bible”

backed with “Crying in the Night” for Daily’s label (#1118), two songs written by the then relatively unknown Nelson. The classic “Family Bible” soon climbed as high as number seven on the
Billboard
country charts. Though a desperate Nelson, struggling to survive in Houston, had recently sold his publishing rights to that song, its success marked his professional debut as a writer of a certifi ed country hit. It pointed toward the next phase of his storied career and encouraged him to develop more of his own material. As Joe Nick Patoski puts it in
Willie Nelson: An Epic Life,
“whatever royalties he’d lost by signing his rights away were balanced out by the word getting around that this Willie Nelson fella knew how to write songs.”

Born in Abbott, Texas, in 1933, Nelson had mainly been performing or working as a radio disc jockey in Waco, San Antonio, and Fort Worth before coming to Houston in 1959. He had already signed with D Records before leaving Fort Worth, and it was there that he had recorded his fi rst inconse-quential single for the label, “Man with the Blues” backed with “The Storm Has Just Begun” (#1084).

The decision to move to Houston was motivated by Nelson’s desire to advance his career as both a performer and a writer. As Patoski says, Nelson reasoned “if he was closer to the home offi

ce, maybe he would get more attention

from D Records and Glad Music.” Arriving in the city with little money and a family to support, Nelson gigged with local bands such as Larry Butler’s Sunset Playboys and worked for a while on the country radio station KRCT. One of his fellow musicians at the time, Wiley Barkdull (b. 1927), recalls the scene—and his own regrets about not recognizing Nelson’s genius at the time:
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One night I was playing with Link Davis, and [Nelson] sat in with us. He was a good-looking young man with a great voice, but he had the weirdest timing on his guitar and phrasing, and it was really hard to follow him. That night at the end of the show he came to me and told me that he had been playing my Hickory [label] records up in Dallas and wanted to form a band with me.

I didn’t know who he was, but he sure knew me.

At the time I had a day job, and I was playing fi ve nights a week, and I was working two TV shows a week. I was also doing fi ve weekly radio shows, so I told him, “Man, I don’t have time to start a band.” At that time I didn’t know that Willie had “Family Bible” in his back pocket and wanted somebody to help him. . . . I let that one slip by me.

Not long after that, on March 11, 1960, Nelson entered Gold Star Studios to record his fi rst sessions with Quinn. The resulting D Records single (#1131), his second, featured his own songs “Misery Mansion” and “What a Way to Live.” The supporting musicians included bandleader Paul Buskirk on guitar, Ozzie Middleton on pedal steel, Darold Raley and Clyde Brewer on fi ddles, Dean Reynolds on bass, and Al Hagy on drums. In Patoski’s opinion, “Both songs were head and shoulders above his D sessions in Fort Worth, a refl ection of the musicianship behind him, the recording facility, and Willie’s developing talents.” Thus, though this record was not a commercial hit, it likely elevated Nelson’s consciousness of what he could achieve in the recording studio.