House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (47 page)

“It took a little while to build up my client base,” Workman says. “I started to pull in a number of bands that I met at the Urban Art Bar, where I worked sound.” These included Pull My Finger (later known as Ultramaag) and Badger (later known as The Tie That Binds). He went on to work with Planet Shock, Beat Temple, Bon Ton Mickey, Brian Jack and the Zydeco Gamblers, his own band Culturcide (on the album
Home Made Authority
), I-45, Moses Guest, and David Brake and That Damn Band, to name a few.

Having Workman and Meyers as tenants of the MMV-owned SugarHill Studios building developed a tripartite business affi

liation that made sense.

As each company pursued its own interests, we interacted regularly via refer-rals and consultations. We had developed, more or less organically, without foresight or intention, a symbiotic relationship.

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among the sugarhill studios clients during this era, blues-rock guitarist Bert Wills was a regular. He recounts the artist-studio relationship: In late 1992 I came in with Jerry Lightfoot to record his fi rst solo album

[Burning Desire].
Jerry was a legend in the blues scene in Texas, both white and black. . . . It is right about this time that I discovered the reverb chambers in [the] hallway. . . . and how beautiful the reverb was that could be created in them. From that day on, it became a signature sound on all of our albums. . . .

I had [previously] been recording over at Limelight Studios. . . . They had just switched over to the early ADAT digital recording, and I didn’t like the sound or the diffi

culty with which those clunky machines operated.

That early digital recording was harsh and unforgiving in its sound. I really missed the warmth of analog tape. So I lobbied to go over to SugarHill—

because [they] were using analog tape. . . . For my fi rst album,
Mr. Politician

[1993], we fi gured that a few of the cuts done at Limelight were acceptable and cut the other two-thirds of the album at SugarHill. . . .

I remember showing up the day after the famous Huey incident [i.e., Meaux’s arrest] to do guitar and vocals overdubs on the
Special Session
album. . . .

The third album we did together was the surf record,
Pavones Sunset. . .
.

[We] recruited Robbie Parrish and Rick Robertson to be the band for the album, and like the previous records, we used Paul English on keyboards and Kuko Miranda on Latin percussion.

The last album I did for Goldrhyme Records was
Tell Me Why. . .
. in mid-1999. We recorded the drums out in the room, behind the drum booth where the organ’s Leslie speaker lived. We got a great live kind of retro-ish sound that fi tted perfectly with those songs.

Studio drummer and independent producer Parrish worked sessions with various artists in this time period, ranging from the country-rockabilly bandleader Jesse Dayton and his group the Road Kings to the New Age singer-songwriter-pianist Anita Kruse.

Meanwhile, the MMV-owned label Discos MM remained active. One of the new artists it introduced was a Tejana singer and her band, Annette y Axxion.

They eventually recorded three CDs at SugarHill, all released on Fonovisa Records. Moreover, Meyers’s Sound Engineering company took over the mastering engineering for Discos MM products, including the various releases by the Tejano band Xelencia, which continued to record at SugarHill on an almost annual basis.

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Another project for Discos MM involved a live recording of two groups, the Hometown Boys and Los Dos Gilbertos, at a huge south Houston nightclub called Hullabaloos. We contracted Malcolm Harper and Reel Sound Recording from Austin to provide and operate a mobile truck unit outfi tted with a vintage MCI console and two twenty-four-track MCI analog tape decks.

Malcolm and I collaborated on the engineering while Steve Lanphier handled the live mix, with Ramon Morales working the monitors. From those recordings MMV produced three diff erent CDs, one of each band performing separately and another combining tracks by both. All three albums, leased to Capitol/EMI Records, were big sellers.

In 1996 a New York label commissioned a Jones Hall recording of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, with Christof Eschenbach conducting. After transporting and installing the necessary gear, I coengineered the project with producer Michael Fine, recording three separate three-hour sessions over two days. The result was the album titled
Schubert,
featuring the Schubert-Berio composition “Rendering” (from
Sketches for 10th Symphony
) and the Schubert-Joachim
Symphony in C Major, Grand Duo,
on Koch Records (#3-7382-2).

Working on recording projects with symphony orchestras, Tejano sensa-tions, rock bands, and other such groups kept those of us based at SugarHill Studios immersed in the music. But some business issues had to be settled if we were going to keep it up.

early 1996 brought a series of transformations to SugarHill Studios.

Meyers changed the name of his digital editing and mastering company to Essential Sound. Workman’s Big House company had established itself as a site for digital multitrack recording—recently abetted by upgrades, including a third Tascam DA-88 recorder, a twenty-four-channel extender for the Mackie eight-bus console, Amex/Neve and API preamps, and a pair of Genelec 1030A monitors. Workman’s embrace of digital technology was counterbalanced to some degree by my preference for old-fashioned analog.

But the biggest change occurred in April 1996 when Silva announced that MMV had decided to limit its interests to the Discos MM label, artist management, and music publishing—and thus sell SugarHill Studios. He said that MMV wished, if possible, to maintain offi

ces and continue recording in the

building as tenants of the new ownership.

Meyers, Workman, and I had recently achieved a productive synergy, but now we realized that it all could quickly fall apart. So Meyers proposed that we pool resources and purchase the place as partners. And what could have been a crisis became an opportunity.

Using the initial letter in each of our fi rst names, we became RAD Audio, Inc., a Sub-chapter S Texas corporation. In October 1996, along with two ad-2 3 4

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ditional investors, Tom Littman and Jon Bradley (no relation to the coauthor), RAD then purchased the SugarHill Studios name and complete inventory of equipment from MMV—but not the real estate itself.

Given MMV’s asking price for the old structure and its obscure location, we had another idea—and began scouting the metropolitan area for a more prominently situated space to establish a new recording facility bearing the time-honored SugarHill name.

Until we found it, RAD and its recently acquired assets remained temporarily and precariously housed at the old SugarHill site. MMV, of course, continued to off er the structure and land for sale but allowed RAD to pay for utilities and maintenance and remain there in the interim.

Over the next several months, the RAD partners searched fruitlessly for the right site to launch the envisioned new incarnation of SugarHill Studios.

At the same time, we got surprisingly negative feedback from some of our clients regarding our plans. Again and again, people expressed dismay or disappointment that we would be moving from the historic Gold Star/SugarHill site. These factors prompted us to question the wisdom of our plans—when suddenly there was a breakthrough as MMV chose to lower its selling price signifi cantly.

In November 1997 MMV accepted our counteroff er. Thus, already possessing its name and gear, RAD purchased the real estate that had been SugarHill Studios. We had also come to believe that it was the right thing to do, keeping all the major components of the venerable studio company intact and rooted to the ground at 5626 Brock Street.

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23

Millennial Destiny

s new sugarhill studios owners,
RAD Audio fi rst extensively remodeled the structure and the studio chambers. It was a time of fresh beginnings, both in terms of the upgraded building and the styles of music recorded there. As was customary, there

remained a diverse range of clientele, but the biggest hits would now come from a younger generation of artists performing contemporary pop, R&B, and rap.

The remodeling started with roof replacement, installation of new air-conditioning units, and cosmetic painting. In 1999 we also completely overhauled and redesigned the Studio B control room, including the installation of new wall surfaces, a rebuilt raised fl oor, racks, and desk. The room was equipped with a Sony MCI JH-24 analog tape recorder with twenty-four channels of Dolby SR noise reduction and four Tascam DA tape recorders providing thirty-two channels of digital recording capacity. Speakers were Altec 604s, Yamaha NS10s, and Genelec 1040s. Outboard preamps included Amek/

Neve, API, Demeter, Benchmark, and Bellari. We had DBX, UREI, TubeTech, and Manley compressors, plus several Lexicon reverbs.

Upon completing Studio B’s renovation, in October 1999 we temporarily closed Studio A to do the same there. We sold the Neotek IIIC console and commissioned Martin Sound to build us a new Neotek Elite board. As he had done in Studio B, Rodney Meyers redesigned, rewired, and outfi tted the control room—creating a multipurpose booth, a machine room for analog and digital tape decks, and a computer room. He also installed air locks on studio and control room doors to improve isolation. By February 2000 the new board was installed, capping RAD’s major refurbishing campaign.

Some of RAD’s new clients included progressive Celtic ensembles, such as the band Clandestine, an eclectic group featuring Emily Dugas, Jennifer Bradley_4319_BK.indd 236

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Hamel, E. J. Jones, and Greg McQueen. Early on in the new SugarHill ownership, Clandestine recorded the album
The Haunting,
followed a year later by
To Anybody at All
(produced by Irish musician Jerry O’Beirne). In 1999 the Rogues—featuring Randy Wothke, Brian Blaylock, Lars Sloan, and Jimmy Mitchell—recorded their acclaimed album
Off Kilter
at SugarHill.

But it was not all bagpipes and bodhrans. Nineteen ninety-eight also brought us the Chinese American Christian organization known as the New Heart Music Ministry, directed by Yen Schwen Er. He was a doctoral candidate in violin performance at Rice University who fi rst performed at SugarHill on “sweetening” sessions to enhance various recordings. That led to New Heart recording its fi rst CD,
You Are My God,
at SugarHill. Since then, we have recorded roughly one album per year for this internationally touring group, which includes a full choir with lead vocalists, drums, bass, guitar, piano, electronic keyboards, percussion, violin, viola, fl ute, Chinese fl ute, oboe, cello, and French horn.

The California-based pop-rock band Smash Mouth visited SugarHill twice to cut special tracks for radio or fi lm. Dan Workman recalls they fi rst recorded

“a punk-rock version of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’” for promotional use by Major League Baseball on Clear Channel Radio stations, and their producer was enamored of the vintage equipment and historic studio. Later, Smash Mouth returned to cut vocals for a song for the 1998 fi lm
Half Baked.

Workman adds, “The vocals were recorded on top of a track sent by [the British electronic duo] the Chemical Brothers, who were the producers of the movie soundtrack.”

Having signed to a new label, Vanguard Records, blues guitarist Tab Benoit returned to SugarHill Studios to recapture the magic he had previously cooked up there on his acclaimed 1992 debut disc. Coproducing with Benoit, I engineered the session live in the studio with his band, resulting in the well-received 1999 album
These Blues Are All Mine.

By then, RAD had added Ramon Morales to the general engineering staff , replacing Steve Lanphier, who was mainly recording and producing Tejano groups for Discos MM. Steve Christensen, who started as an intern in 1998, would later replace Morales.

While we made many other late-1990s recordings, none topped those by a young female vocal group from Houston who would go on to dominate the
Billboard
charts with a string of SugarHill-produced hits like no artist since Freddy Fender.

by the turn of the present century, Destiny’s Child had become a pop cultural phenomenon. These singing and dancing teenage girls had debuted with an eponymous CD on Columbia Records in 1998. They scored successively bigger sales with the multi-Platinum follow-up albums: 1999’s
m i l l e n n i a l d e s t i ny

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