House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (42 page)

Staff songwriter and musician Gaylan Latimer provides additional insights: “Every so often Huey would tell me to tell all the guys that the building was off -limits for a couple of days, and Todd would have been one of those times.”

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During the same era, Texas-based acts were still frequently using the facility, of course. And in 1975 one of the hottest Austin ensembles was the posthippie western swing revivalist group known as Asleep at the Wheel. This Ray Benson–led band was coming off a successful album release on Capitol Records when it recorded two tracks at SugarHill for the 1976 follow-up release. That eff ort,
Wheelin’ and Dealin’,
would earn spots on both the country and pop LP charts and, like its predecessor, would yield three hit singles and receive a Grammy Award nomination.

Benson recorded both SugarHill tracks with his Wheel lineup of the moment: Chris O’Connell, Floyd Domino, Tony Garnier, Scott Hennige, Danny Levin, Bill Mabry, Lucky Oceans, and Leroy Preston. One of the hits they made there, “Miles and Miles of Texas,” remains a signature number for the band today. In his “Artist’s Song Notes” commentary for
Lone Star Music,
Benson explains the background of this classic track:

In 1974, Tommy Allsup and I went over to Hank Thompson’s publishing company to see if they had any old tunes we might want to do. We turned up this gem, “Miles and Miles of Texas,” which was a demo from around 1950.

It had never been recorded . . . so we cut it in Houston, TX for our album,
Wheelin’ and Dealin’.
Since then it has become a Texas standard and a song forever associated with Asleep at the Wheel. A tip of the ole Stetson to Diana Johnston and the late Tommy Camfi eld for writing this great ode to the Lone Star State!

The special guest guitarist on the SugarHill recording of “Miles and Miles”

was Bucky Meadows.

During the same session Asleep at the Wheel also taped “They Raided the Joint,” an album track. This blues boogie featured guest appearances by the venerable jazz saxophonist Arnett Cobb and the former Bob Wills sideman and fi ddler/mandolinist extraordinaire Johnny Gimble, as well as additional sax work by Link Davis Jr. Moody says, “I engineered, and production was handled by committee.”

Of the many diverse SugarHill productions, the weirdest involved Kinky Friedman and His Texas Jewboys in 1976. Over a series of days, they cut several tracks for the album
Lasso from El Paso,
coproduced by Meaux. As David Lonergan writes in
St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture,
“Friedman achieved his musical high-water mark with an album on the Epic label,
Lasso from El
Paso.
(The song was originally titled ‘Asshole from El Paso,’ a parody of Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie from Muskogee,’ but Epic required a title change before issuing the record.)” On parts of the album recorded elsewhere (including a live concert performance), Friedman (b. 1944) featured guests such as Bob Dylan,
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Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr. Musicians on the SugarHill tracks, along with Friedman, included Jim Atkinson, Tom Culpepper, Bill Ham, Brian Clarke, Terry Danko, Ira Wilkes, and Major Boles.

Moody recalls those sessions:

The album we did for Kinky . . . only problems we had were his people. He had a hard-core bunch of followers that went everywhere with him. When people in Houston heard he was making an album at SugarHill, tons of people showed up wanting to hang out. It was a real hassle to keep them under control while we were trying to record. Even the mayor’s wife wanted to hang out during the recording, and we had to organize security. Except for that, we all had a hot time making the record.

The former bassist from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, British musician Noel Redding (1945–2003), also recorded at SugarHill Studios in 1976. Both Brady and Moody handled engineering duties at various sessions, staged over three weeks, cutting tracks for Redding’s
Blowin’
album, his second for RCA Records. “The album rocked harder than its predecessor,” William Ruhlmann writes, “and, recorded largely in the US, seemed to have more of an American, on-the-road feel.” “There were six or seven guys in the band,”

Brady says. “And these guys were really happy, jolly, drunken guys. . . . It was a kind of loose session that lasted a long time.”

closer to home, new orleans pianist and vocalist Mac Rebennack (b.

1940), better known by his stage name Dr. John, also cut an album at SugarHill during this phase of operations. This blues, funk, and R&B arranger, producer, and musician had been a friend of Meaux’s since the early 1960s. In 1973

Dr. John had achieved major pop stardom with the Allen Toussaint–produced LP
In the Right Place.
However, by the later ’70s his career was stalled. During this time he came to Houston and recorded, perhaps adding to older unreleased tracks Meaux already had on tape. Ultimately at least seventeen tracks were completed at SugarHill Studios by 1977, engineered by Moody.

They evidently all remained unreleased until the Edsel label (England) issued
Dr. John: The Crazy Cajun Recordings
in 1999. Then in 2000 the same tracks were licensed also to Demon Music Group (England), which reissued them under the title
Hoodoo: The Collection.

Along with Dr. John on piano and vocals, these recordings also featured late-Seventies SugarHill Studios mainstays such as keyboardist Leo O’Neil, drummer Dahrell Norris, bassist Ira Wilkes, three diff erent guitarists (including Moody), and backing vocals by the Merlene Singers. O’Neil adds, “I would write arrangements for Mac [Dr. John]. Huey and Mac were good friends, and
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Huey had him record all kinds of songs on piano and vocal, and then bass, drums, and other instruments were added later.”

Pop singer and former teen actor Rick Nelson (1940–1985) was also a Meaux acquaintance and reportedly performed anonymously on guitar on numerous SugarHill Studios sessions in the late 1970s. He was part of a behind-the-scenes crew of top-rate players that Meaux sometimes hired.

So was James Burton—famous for his guitar work on recordings by Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and others. Moody recalls, “Ricky was a good friend of Huey’s, as was James. Ricky did a lot of recording of his own music, and we used him as a guitar player and backup singer. James played in Ricky’s band and would do sessions for us whenever he was in Houston.”

It was an exceptionally busy time at SugarHill Studios. Musician Gordon Payne even recalls Waylon Jennings, with whom he was touring, coming there to do “voice-overs for
The Dukes of Hazzard
TV show.”

By the late 1970s Meaux had raised the profi le of SugarHill Studios in a way that attracted many nonlocal stars and new types of business.

nevertheless, the renaissance at SugarHill Studios also impacted the local music scene profoundly. For one, it provided a place of employment for songwriters, arrangers, and session musicians. Also, it hosted recording sessions for various artists living in the area at the time—including future star Lucinda Williams.

Latimer describes the SugarHill environment in those days:

While the hits were being cut in Studio B, a group of musicians and songwriters and I were busy in the gold star room cutting demos of all the songs that had been written by the staff writers. Musicians on the demo sessions were Billy Block or Robbie Parrish on drums, Rick Robertson on bass, the various songwriters playing guitar, and Leo on keyboards. Huey paid us twenty-fi ve dollars a day to come in and record demos. One day we would record all of the songs I had written recently. The next day we would do Danny Epps’s songs, and then the next day it would be Oscar Perry’s, and so on.

The building was absolutely hopping, and it was wild times. It was a real free time. We would go in and cut and play songs all day long.

Guitarist Kenny Cordray adds, “I remember coming in one morning at 10 a.m. and—literally did twelve to fi fteen songs’ worth of guitar tracks and solos—not leaving until well after dark.” He also opines that engaging in this expedited process, though exhausting, was good training. He points out,

“Gaylan was one of the better writers in Houston and benefi ted by having all of this recording done.”

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However, Houston-based musicians such as Latimer and Cordray also used SugarHill Studios to record some of their own projects. By 1978 they had re-formed the group called Heather Black with some new members. They then recorded what Latimer calls a “rock ’n’ roll album with a jazz infl uence,”

but it never got released. “We had horn players like Kirk Whalum and Larry Slazak on the record. Huey wouldn’t have anything to do with it; he didn’t like it, or understand it,” Latimer says. “It wasn’t rock-pop with verse, hook, and out. It was complex music, and Huey didn’t get off to that stuff .”

During this time, Latimer introduced Meaux to a Texas singer (born Chris Geppert, 1951) who would go on to achieve major pop stardom under his stage name, winning fi ve Grammy Awards for his 1979 debut album on a major label. Latimer reports,

Quite a few members of Heather Black eventually left and joined up with Chris Geppert and formed the Christopher Cross Band. I brought Chris to Huey as a possible artist for Huey’s label, and Huey authorized a demo session in 1977. . . . Huey decided not to sign Christopher Cross, and just shortly after this session, the band signed with Warner Brothers Records, and “Sail Away” took Chris to a hit record.

Given the amount of traffi

c through the studio doors in those days, it is no

wonder that Meaux might have erred occasionally in evaluating a prospect.

They were plentiful and often impressive. Brady recalls,

Jerry Jeff Walker would come in with a friend named Big John Stuckey. John owned a tattoo parlor and was a big ol’ Texas boy, huge guy. . . . We never formally recorded him, but I always put two mics on him, one on guitar and one on vocal. I recorded him straight through the board and went to the two-track machine. . . . He would do songs that would literally bring tears to our eyes because they were so tender.

Brady also speaks highly of a local country-rock group he recorded, called Dogtooth Violet. “This was a great band and I severely loved these guys: Bob Oldrieve, Joe Lindley, and Marty Smith,” he says. “This was some of the best folk-rock that I had ever heard.” Band cofounder Oldrieve tells how they came to record at SugarHill:

We were playing at a club on Main Street called Papa Feelgood’s. Huey P.

Meaux came out to see us and heard us. He liked the band and wanted us to come in the studio and do some demos. . . . Shortly after doing this session, he approached us with a record deal. We thought about signing with him,
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and we knew that anybody who had success from Houston had gone through him. But we turned him down.

Oldrieve goes on to express his regrets at declining Meaux’s off er to produce a real record, and within a few years the group had disbanded to pursue other projects.

As the 1970s were ending, one of the hottest folk-rock groups in the region was called St. Elmo’s Fire. One of the singers was Connie Mims. “Everybody told us that we should make a record. I think we came to SugarHill because it was SugarHill. The studio was having hit records, and everybody knew that,”

she says. Craig Calvert, St. Elmo’s Fire singer-songwriter-guitarist, adds,

“SugarHill came with a great rep, and already had a lot of success under its belt. . . . We wanted to entice record companies into signing us, and we needed something on tape to do that.”

In 1977 Crazy Cajun Records issued a Meaux-produced album by Doak Snead called
Think of Me Sometime
(#1096). But Meaux was simultaneously looking to exploit the Tejano music scene in some fashion. In 1977 he recorded the Latin Breed, breaking ground in the San Antonio–based vanguard of the highly produced, modernized Tejano sound. The resulting album on the BGO label,
A New Horizon
(#1143), was coproduced by Meaux and bandleader/saxophonist Gilbert Escobedo. The lead singer of the group, Adalberto Gallegos (b. 1956), also recorded a solo album at SugarHill during the same time. Called
La Voz de Adalberto Gallegos,
it was released on the GCP label (#144) and coproduced by Meaux and Gallegos. Moody engineered both projects.

But of all the area artists who recorded at SugarHill Studios in this era, perhaps the most noteworthy was the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, an intermittent resident of Houston during much of the 1970s and early ’80s.

In 1980 she went to SugarHill to record the eleven tracks for
Happy Woman
Blues,
her fi rst album of original material.

Years later, following the Grammy Award for her 1998 album
Car Wheels
on a Gravel Road,
Williams became a major star on the alternative country scene. By 2001,
Time
magazine even declared her “America’s best songwriter.”

But in the late ’70s Williams was relatively unknown beyond the nurturing environs of places like the Houston acoustic folk music club called Anderson Fair. In 1978, after sending a demo tape to Moses Asch of Folkways Records in New York City, she had gone to Jackson, Mississippi, to record her fi rst album, which comprised covers of folk and blues standards. In 1979 it was released to little notice on the Folkways imprint.

Back in Houston, Williams next worked at SugarHill on
Happy Woman
Blues,
her debut recording as a songwriter. During April, May, and June of
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