House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (44 page)

However, at that time the Mercury/Polygram company underwent an executive shake-up, and Gaar was soon dropped from the label before any real success was realized.

One of the strangest pop successes of 1985 occurred with the zydeco artist known as Rockin’ Sidney (Sidney Semien, 1938–1998). Sidney brought his then-regional hit “Don’t Mess with My Toot Toot” to Meaux, who orchestrated a deal with CBS Records to release it nationally. Defying expectations, that single became so popular with diverse audiences that it earned a Platinum Record award as well as a Grammy. Meaux then encouraged Sidney to record a proper follow-up at SugarHill, but the artist was disinclined to do so—another lost opportunity perhaps.

Yet Meaux was reengaging more fully in the music business, apparently stimulated by his marginal involvement in another national hit. Turning back to his home state, Meaux then brought in Tommy McLain, T. K. Hulin, and Warren Storm to record a fl urry of singles for his Crazy Cajun label. Among
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the results were McLain’s “I’ll Change My Style Crazy Baby” backed with

“They’ll All Call Me Daddy” (#2083) and “Louisiana People” with “Roses Don’t Grow Here Anymore” (#2087). With his band Smoke, Hulin released “You’ve Been Bad” and “She’s Got a Love Hold on Me” (#2082). Storm cut “The Rains Came” and “You Need Someone Who’ll Be Mean to You” (#2093). Meaux was likely hoping to cash in on the so-called Cajun Renaissance of the mid-1980s, a time when interest in South Louisiana food and music heightened nationwide.

As part of this same eff ort, Meaux also produced new recordings by singer Jim Olivier (1951–2008), a Louisiana cultural icon best known as the host of the long-running bilingual Cajun television program
Passe Partout.
Olivier explains,

I met Huey through swamp-pop legend Rod Bernard and visited the studio several times with many of the artists from Louisiana that Huey was recording. I was programming everyone else’s music on my television program; why not my own? Huey invited me to record at SugarHill. From that point we did four more albums, all recorded there. 1981:
Sings the Cajun Way

[Swallow Records LP-6044]. 1982:
Let’s Keep It Cajun
[Swallow Records LP-6048]. 1985:
La Musique de Jim Olivier
[Swallow Records LP-6059]. 1987:
Good
Hearted Man.

During this era, Olivier recorded a single with Rockin’ Sidney for Lanor Records (#597), also produced at SugarHill.

Finally, I had the privilege of engineering a session with country singer Benny Barnes (1936–1987), just a year before he passed away. Barnes had fi rst recorded at Gold Star Studios in 1956, under the direction of Pappy Daily for Starday Records. Some thirty years later Meaux, who had produced a Barnes album for Crazy Cajun in the 1970s, asked Olivier to bring Barnes back to the studio. From the tape archives they selected a couple of instrumental backing tracks, and Barnes sang over them to create his fi nal single: “Foolin’ Myself”

backed with “You’re Telling Me Lies” on Crazy Cajun (#2089). Olivier adds this detail:

For that session I brought with me one of the greatest fi ddle players of our generation, Rufus Thibodeaux. He began his career with Bob Wills. He played with George Jones and many other greats, including Willie Nelson.

In that time period he was touring and recording with the great Neil Young.

I was happy to be able to have Rufus in on the last Benny Barnes record at SugarHill.

m e a u x ’ s f i n a l p h a s e

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In retrospect, that 1986 Barnes session now seems laden with symbolic import. For not only was it the fi nal studio performance by one of the great yet relatively unknown country singers from Southeast Texas; it was also one of Meaux’s last productions as the actual owner of SugarHill Studios. Both men had created their most impressive professional successes at that studio site.

Yet, in diff erent ways, it was time for both to move on—and for the facility itself to evolve in a new direction.

Not long after the Barnes session, Meaux announced that he was looking for a buyer for the whole property. He indicated that he was quitting the studio business but intended to maintain his personal offi

ces in the building (an

arrangement to be negotiated with the buyer).

This development arose concurrently with my ongoing discussions with Gottschalk and others regarding a proposal to start a classical record label. As part of that plan, I had also been considering investing in additional remote recording equipment. Suddenly, with Meaux’s news, several divergent opportunities seemed to coalesce at once.

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21

Modern Music (Ad)Ventures

n 1986, approximately fourteen years
after assuming ownership, Huey Meaux sold the entire property called SugarHill Studios (the building, land, equipment, and name) to a newly formed company named Modern Music Ventures (MMV). As part of this deal,

Meaux was permitted to maintain offi

ces and warehouse space in the build-

ing until his designated retirement date in 1995.

However, he essentially semiretired right away. One of the last music-business transactions Meaux handled was the 1989 major label record deal for Beaumont-born country singer Mark Chestnut. Increasingly reclusive, Meaux had no involvement in running the studios.

MMV was actually an umbrella corporation that encompassed the recently purchased SugarHill Recording Studios, SugarHill Sound (devoted to recording advertising jingles), Musica Moderna Management, the Discos MM

record label, three publishing companies, and the Foundation for Modern Music. The primary owners of MMV were Berry Bowen, David Lummis, Barry Leavitt, and Art Gottschalk, its fi rst business manager. Meanwhile, David Thompson assumed the role of studio manager, and I formally became the chief engineer, with Rod Thibault serving as maintenance technician.

Almost immediately MMV invested in a major remodeling and upgrading of Studio B. Heavy industrial carpet and painted sheetrock replaced the old burlap-covered walls. In the booths the burlap surfaces were covered in chicken wire and retextured. We raised the drum booth fl oor about a foot and fi lled the space below with sand to enhance sound isolation. The drum booth walls were double-sheetrocked and then carpeted, and the roof was covered and sealed properly. The drum booth windows were double-glassed. We improved the lighting in the studio and brightened the color scheme to suggest Bradley_4319_BK.indd 219

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a tropical Latin fl avor. The control room was remodeled in a gray and black industrial look with carpeted walls and fl oors, plus new ceiling tiles. The two small booths on the right side of the studio were converted into partial isolation space for the seven-foot Yamaha G7 grand piano.

MMV purchased an Otari MX-90II twenty-four-track two-inch tape machine and an additional eight tracks of DBX noise reduction to complement the vintage Auditronics 501 console. Fortunately we discovered some vintage Pulteq, Teletronix, UREI, and Fairchild gear stored in the warehouse—then refurbished and utilized it. We installed new eff ects racks and moved various unneeded but valuable tape decks to the smaller studio, which remained mostly unused for the moment.

This project accomplished Studio B’s fi rst major overhaul since 1973.

The 1984 work had simply repaired the hurricane damage and got the room working again. Given the reclaimed glory of the larger studio room, MMV

renamed SugarHill’s two studios, designating the recently refurbished space as Studio A and the smaller room, then used for rehearsals and dubbing, as Studio B (reversing Meaux’s nomenclature).

The MMV subsidiary Foundation for Modern Music existed to promote the recording of classical music by contemporary composers—and its projects were among the fi rst recordings made in the new era. With Bowen (the fi rst MMV president) executive producing, the Foundation recorded artists such as the Continuum Percussion Quartet, Thomas Bacon, and Sergio de los Cobos.

Another

MMV-fi nanced recording documented a live 1987 concert by jazz saxophonist Arnett Cobb performing with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and vocalist Jewel Brown at Houston’s Wortham Theater. We hired the Dallas-based Omega Audio mobile truck to handle the off -site recording. The microphone selected for Cobb’s saxophone was a Neumann tube U-67, possibly one of the very mics used on his early-1960s recordings at Gold Star Studios. Gillespie’s trumpet was rigged with an RCA DX-77 ribbon mic. Back at SugarHill Studios I mixed the album, which was produced by Thompson and Gottschalk plus Steve Williams of the Jazz Heritage Society of Texas. In 1988 Fantasy Records issued it as
Show Time
(#9659), Cobb’s last major recording.

Around this time, R&B saxophone veteran Grady Gaines (b. 1934) and his band, the Texas Upsetters, came to SugarHill to record the album
Full Gain,
released in 1988 by Black Top Records (#1041). Gaines was a living link to music history, having played early on with Little Richard, James Brown, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and many others. Black Top producer Hammond Scott (b. 1950) had brought Gaines out of semiretirement for this project, which reintroduced him to new audiences. In addition to Gaines’s regular band—

which included former Duke-Peacock pianist and vocalist Teddy Reynolds (1931–1998) and singer Big Robert Smith (1939–2006)—these sessions fea-2 2 0

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tured special guest guitarists Roy Gaines (b. 1937) and Clarence Hollimon, as well as singer Joe Medwick (1933–1992). This ensemble represented an all-star roster of Houston African American blues and R&B musicians, many of whom had previous connections to the facility. (For example, Reynolds had recorded there with Bobby Bland and Junior Parker during the Gold Star era.)

Using engineers from the New Orleans–based Black Top label and SugarHill, we recorded the marathon sessions, the last of which ran for thirty-seven hours straight. About a month later I engineered the backing horn section overdubs, with Scott in attendance as producer. The result was a critically acclaimed album, which writer Bill Dahl praises on
Allmusic.com
as “a veritable Houston blues mother-lode.”

By 1988 MMV had replaced the old Auditronics console with a Neotek IIIC, which served as SugarHill’s fl agship gear until early 2000. After selling off some now superfl uous equipment, we purchased and installed new DBX

noise reduction units and outboard eff ects units. We made a deal with Manley Labs to trade one of our plate reverbs for the rebuilding of the primary and backup electronics of the remaining EMT 140 tube plate reverb. The studio added a pair of Yamaha NS-10M near-fi eld monitors and a pair of Tannoy 6.5

near-fi eld monitors to the Altec 604E speakers and Auratone sound cubes—

all hooked up to a selector switch. Around this time, MMV also purchased a beautiful, white Pearl Birch–series six-piece drum set for Studio A, complete with all the accoutrements.

Meanwhile, Thompson had secured a new and unusual client for SugarHill: Galveston Island Outdoor Musicals (GIOM), then based at the Mary Moody Northern Amphitheater adjacent to Galveston Island State Park. Relying on taped instrumentation, GIOM staged several Broadway-style musicals each summer in its open-air amphitheater. GIOM’s previous backing tracks had been custom-recorded in England, but they were expensive to produce. So SugarHill assembled a small orchestra of local musicians who could record the necessary scores in a more timely and economical fashion. Starting in 1987 and continuing well into the ’90s, in conjunction with the GIOM music directors, we produced new instrumental soundtracks for popular productions such as
Oklahoma!
and
Hello Dolly.

Another new direction involved SugarHill Sound, a company that produced advertising jingles. Working with marketing agent Jane Witt, between 1987 and 1992 we created numerous radio and television spots, primarily but not exclusively for the Hispanic market—including the local affi liate of the

Spanish-language television network Telemundo.

Thus, by expanding beyond Meaux’s previous focus on producing potential hit singles or albums, MMV established a more stable and diversifi ed foundation for its business.

m o d e rn m u s i c ( a d ) ve n t u r e s

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Yet SugarHill remained a comfortable recording base for scores of local or regional musicians working on their own projects. One example is David Beebe, the founder of various pop-rock groups such as El Orbits and Banana Blender Surprise. Music critic Christopher Gray describes the latter as “a sugar-crazed combination of Chuck Berry, the Meters, and Fabulous Thunderbirds.” Beebe says, “Banana Blender Surprise came to SugarHill in December of 1989, with [engineer] Steve Lanphier in the gold star room with the old Auditronics 501 console,” cutting tracks for their 1990 debut album
Check Please.
Country singer Kelly Schoppa illustrates another case, having started recording at SugarHill in 1986 and producing part or all of three albums there within a few years:
Two Steps Away,
Yesterday and Today,
and
Home Is Where the Heart Is.