House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (5 page)

Maybe it is just a certain Texan instinct, informed as it is by the mythos of defi ant independence that is part of the state’s lore. Perhaps it comes down to a kind of stubborn self-trust, fueled by a tinge of healthy disdain for East Coast or West Coast cultural hegemony. For here in the largest city on the Gulf Coast, many folks—including oil-fi eld wildcatters and record producers alike—have dared to defi ne their own paths, whatever the consequences.

That mentality, of course, implies a type of strong-willed, critics-be-damned motivation that some outsiders might consider to be cocky, naïve, or even crazy. And yes, it is brash, sometimes reckless, and often more than a bit
d o m e s t i c c r u d e

9

Bradley_4319_BK.indd 9

1/26/10 1:12:10 PM

crude in its various manifestations. But at its core lies a self-suffi ciency that

can sometimes lead to rare and, despite the contradictions, even wonderful phenomena—such as a major metropolis without zoning laws, for instance.

Given his peripatetic background, Quinn could have just as well settled somewhere else. Perhaps elsewhere he could have even successfully started a career in the recording studio business. Yet the fact that he came to and stayed in Houston, becoming a naturalized Texan of sorts in the process, is essential to understanding how and why this particular man was ultimately able to transform his very residence into a storied studio complex in which the no-zoning mentality extended to musical styles and performers—a place where anything might have seemed possible for anyone who dared to dream big and trust his gut.

1 0

h o u s e o f h i t s

Bradley_4319_BK.indd 10

1/26/10 1:12:10 PM

3

The Independent Quinn

illiam russell (“bill”) quinn
was born in Amesbury,

Massachusetts, on January 8, 1904, the son of an Irish im-

migrant mother and a father about whom we have no infor-

mation. Not quite seventy-two years later, on January 4, 1976, he passed away in Houston, a death apparently noted in print at the time only in a brief
Houston Post
obituary. Though he may have departed this life and his adopted home city without much fanfare, during the many years that he resided there, Quinn created, expanded, and eventually sold the ongoing multifaceted enterprise that Ray Cano Jr. defi nes in
Texas Music History Online
as

“the oldest continuously operating recording facility in Texas.”

Known during most of Quinn’s proprietorship as Gold Star and today as SugarHill, this studio complex has been, as described by William Michael Smith in
Paste
magazine, “a virtual open mic for the sounds swirling through the honky-tonks and juke joints that dot the Gulf Coast.” Thus, as both a businessman and a music documentarian, Quinn is a signifi cant fi gure in state history and American culture. Yet in some respects, it seems he only casually aspired to achieve much success in either arena, making his accomplishments all the more remarkable.

Despite being an amateur musician himself (who reportedly played the button accordion, organ, and bass), Quinn may have originally been more interested in the technology of recording and disc pressing than in the regionally distinctive styles of music that his self-taught skills would eventually capture and preserve. For example, as Andrew Brown writes in his
Harry Choates
essay, Quinn operated “more in the manner of a glorifi ed hobbyist . . . [who had] realized his ambition when he discovered the secret to pressing records”

and who “essentially had no guiding vision when it came to the record busi-Bradley_4319_BK.indd 11

1/26/10 1:12:10 PM

ness.” However, Quinn had settled in the right place at an opportune time to make some important recordings.

The exact starting date of Quinn’s Houston residency is unknown. The aforementioned obituary, almost certainly composed or informed by a family member who would know, identifi es Quinn as a “Houston resident for 36

years”—suggesting that he had made the move by late 1939 or 1940. Producer Chris Strachwitz, in his liner note essay to
Texas Blues: The Gold Star Sessions,
suggests that Quinn’s decision to settle in the city was motivated in part by chance. It happened while Quinn was on winter break from his seasonal job as a sound technician for a New Jersey–based traveling carnival company (Royal American Shows). On their way back to the East Coast, Quinn and his fi rst wife Lona had come through Houston to visit her sister, but their car broke down, leaving them stranded without funds to pay for repairs. “Bill, however, . . . was soon earning money repairing radios,” Strachwitz writes.

Operating at fi rst out of his sister-in-law’s house, Quinn encountered a customer who asked him to fi x a nonfunctioning home disc recorder. Quinn was so intrigued by the contraption that he purchased his own disc-recording device and began to experiment with it. By 1941, he had opened his fi rst shop at 3104 Telephone Road and soon started recording individual voice messages direct to disc—mostly birthday greetings and such, novelty items sent to relatives and friends. This unexpected new direction in his vaguely defi ned business plan led him to change the name of his one-man operation from Quinn Radio Service to Quinn Recording Company, and—just like that—what was formerly a “shop” was transformed into a “studio.” The proprietor soon was profi tably producing radio jingles and other types of audio commercials, most likely his main source of income throughout the World War II years.

Fortunately for Quinn, Houston was a rapidly growing city where the demand for locally produced sound recordings, particularly those used in radio advertising, likely exceeded the supply of businesses that could accommodate the need. In a Houston telephone directory from April 1944, for example, Quinn Recording Company is one of only two clearly defi ned recording services listed in the Yellow Pages. The other is a now long-gone establishment called Sound Sales & Engineering Company, which advertised in-store and on-location recording. Two other businesses, Lil’ Pal Exclusive Radio & Record Store and a place called The Groove, were probably only retail outlets for the sale of prerecorded discs and players.

The war years and their aftermath were obviously a time of many changes throughout America, but especially so in the media that dispersed recorded music. Thus, though he probably never imagined such a possibility when he settled in Houston, Quinn would soon discover another grand opportunity, one that would cause him to develop new technological skills far beyond
1 2

h o u s e o f h i t s

Bradley_4319_BK.indd 12

1/26/10 1:12:10 PM

those required merely for engineering the single-disc recording of sound for radio ads. Still working out of his Telephone Road storefront through the end of the 1940s, Quinn would metamorphose into a maverick music producer and studio proprietor and, for a while, even a record label owner.

During this period, the Quinn family lived in a house located at 1313

Dumble Street in southeast Houston, not far from the Telephone Road studio. (Incidental numerological trivia: 1313 is also the fi rst number that Quinn used in cataloguing the productions of his Gold Star Record Company.) By 1950 Quinn’s family would move nearby in the same neighborhood to a two-story house at 5628 Brock Street, as would his studio facility, which he would rename also as Gold Star.

Today there is a small retail strip center at 3104 Telephone Road where Quinn’s original studio once stood. According to Clyde Brewer (a fi ddler, pianist, and guitarist who recorded fi rst at Quinn Recording and then later at its Gold Star and SugarHill incarnations), the now demolished original building, before becoming a studio, had housed a corner grocery store and gas station. Brewer’s earliest memories of the studio date back to 1947, when, as a teenager, he played fi ddle on a session with his uncle in the group Shelly Lee Alley’s Alley Cats.

Brewer recalls walking in off the street directly into “a fairly good-sized”

studio room with a small control room off to the right side, visible through a tiny window. In the main studio room stood a baby grand piano and a single microphone on a tall stand. Behind the studio room was another section, which contained the pressing plant and a bathroom. The walls of the studio were plain white-painted surfaces with no appreciable soundproofi ng elements. In the control room there were a large disc-cutting lathe made by Presto and a Rek-O-Kut turntable driven by a motor with a huge fan belt.

Another longtime country musician who played on many sessions, steel guitar master Frank Juricek, provides his own description:

Bill Quinn’s studio on Telephone Road was an old gas station with the pumps taken out—and might have had a grocery store also in the main building. It still had the canopy in the front, which made it easy to unload equipment even if it was raining. . . . You walked right into the studio when you walked in the front door. There really wasn’t any real entryway. In the back right corner of the room was his booth where the acetate cutter and turntable and such were. The piano would sit right in front of his booth. . . .

He had added on to the back of the building, and that’s where he had his pressing plant and all the equipment he needed to do the plating and all that other stuff .

t h e i n d e p e n d e n t q u i n n

1 3

Bradley_4319_BK.indd 13

1/26/10 1:12:10 PM

Juricek’s references to “plating” and the “other stuff ” allude to basic production techniques employed by Quinn in the late 1940s. For starters, the disc recorder with which he had begun in 1941 had soon given way to more sophisticated equipment. However, he had no tape recorders, which had been invented in Germany and largely kept secret through the war years. Such technology was not yet readily available or aff ordable to pioneering independent sound technicians such as Quinn. (Ampex premiered its later widely adopted 300 series in late 1949 and 1950.) In Quinn’s early phase, recording was still done direct to disc on masters made of wax (or in later years, acetate) at the speed of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). The 45 rpm disc did not proliferate until the 1950s. Moreover, shellac was a key ingredient for making disc material, and it was generally in short supply for nonmilitary purposes during the war.

To make a record in the studio, one or more microphones would be plugged directly into a tube mixer and/or tube preamp. While the musicians performed into the microphone(s), the resulting sound signal was passed straight to the cutting lathe, and the needle of the lathe etched this sonic information directly onto the disc. Later that wax disc would be doused repeatedly in a liquefi ed nickel bath and thus plated. The disc then became a

“mother” that could spawn as many stamping plates as necessary.

The creation of the stamping plates, or stampers, was a time-consuming and delicate process. It started by placing shellac (or in subsequent years, vinyl), as well as the preprinted front and back paper labels, in proper align-ment between the plates. Then the presses compressed those materials together, creating duplicates of the original, one at a time. These records were typically referred to as “singles,” with an A-side and a B-side, totaling two songs per disc. During this era producing an album-length recording was very diffi

cult. Why? The artists would essentially have to perform all of the material for a whole long-play (LP) side straight through, in a single sitting, with only a brief pause between each song in a set of fi ve or more. In other words, since the recording process was strictly direct to disc, there was no option for editing, adding, subtracting, or rearranging separate tracks. It is important to remember also that standard audio recording at this time was mono, not stereophonic.

Nevertheless, these wax masters were capable of rendering good recordings. The main obstacle to excellent sound fi delity, until the early 1950s, was related to the use of shellac as the primary ingredient in the copies. The subsequent introduction of vinyl (or vinylite) vastly improved the quality of pressings, allowing records to more closely represent the nuances and tones of the original musical performance.