House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (9 page)

Yet despite his retreat from the label business, Quinn would remain a key fi gure in the Texas recording industry for years to come. And when his IRS

troubles fi nally forced him to close the Telephone Road shop and move his equipment into his house on Brock Street, he would soon resurrect the Gold Star brand name to christen the new studio facility he would devise there.

g o l d s t a r r e c o r d s

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5

Label’s Demise, New Studio’s Rise

r e c o r d i n g i n t h e h o u s e

y late 1950 or early 1951
all recording for his own Gold Star Records label had ceased, and Bill Quinn had returned to the con-siderably less demanding life of making custom recordings and

pressings for others. With the dissolution of his label, Quinn sold or leased much of his catalogue of Gold Star master recordings to other companies. Most notably, in September 1951 Modern Records bought the rights to thirty-two unreleased masters by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Lil’ Son Jackson for the sum of $2,500. This was quite a large transaction for its time, signifi -

cant enough to merit an article in
Billboard
magazine. In 1955 the local entrepreneur known as Pappy Daily (co-owner of Starday Records and the sole owner of D Records) bought the rights to all the Harry Choates masters. In later years, Quinn would also lease numerous tracks by Hopkins and others to Arhoolie Records. Thus, though Gold Star Records was no longer releasing product on its own, many of its recordings were still being issued, or reissued, and heard.

In late 1951 Modern Records released the fi rst of the Hopkins tracks purchased from Quinn, “Bad Luck and Trouble,” followed through 1954 by

“Lonesome Dog Blues,” “Jake’s Head Boogie,” “Last Aff air,” “Another Fool in Town,” “Black Cat,” “Santa Fe,” and others. However, Modern could not duplicate Gold Star’s previous chart success with Hopkins.

Though no longer working for Quinn’s label as he had done from 1947

through 1950, the prolifi c blues composer continued to record frequently at Quinn’s studio from 1951 through 1964. These sessions occurred at the new facility that Quinn created in (and later expanded into a newly constructed building adjacent to) his residence on Brock Street, and various other labels issued these Hopkins recordings.

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Sleepy LaBeef, a rockabilly musician who fi rst visited Quinn’s studio in the mid-1950s, recalls his impressions of a typical Hopkins session at this time: One of the outstanding things was when Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins would come over. . . . Sam came over once after having a falling out with his wife.

He’d say, “Bill, turn on the mic. I’m ready to sing some blues.” Just him and his guitar, ready to record. I think Bill would sometimes pay him ten bucks a day just to sit in there and record. He might get three or might get ten dif-ferent songs, just him and his guitar. You’d hear him just stomping his foot, playing guitar and singing.

Sometime in 1950 Quinn had ceased to record at his old Telephone Road location and begun converting the bottom fl oor of his house at 5628 Brock into a recording studio. He likely continued to fi ll orders for pressings at his original shop for a while longer. Clyde Brewer, who had recorded in Quinn’s fi rst studio, says he did sessions at Quinn’s house in the summer of 1950.

With the relocation, Quinn also changed his business name from Quinn Recording to Gold Star Recording Studios, thereby retaining the brand identity he had established with his former Gold Star label. From later federal tax records (for 1958) we have ascertained that Gold Star Studios was a Sub-chapter S Texas corporation formally owned by Mr. and Mrs. Bill Quinn, with C. M. Faber (of 6731 Harrisburg Street in Houston) listed as Vice President and Richard Greenhill identifi ed as the Secretary-Treasurer.

Quinn was almost certainly oblivious to the fact that, around the same time that he renamed his company, a place called Gold Star Recording Studios was opening in Los Angeles. That famous recording center, which operated from 1950 to 1984 and produced multitudes of hits, was in no way affi liated with

Quinn’s business.

Meanwhile, following the relocation and name change, Quinn continued operating one of the major recording studios in the region. Yellow Pages listings in the 1952 Houston telephone directory show twelve companies cat-egorized under “Recording Service.” Only two of the four identifi ed in the previously cited 1944 Yellow Pages were still in operation: Lil’ Pal and the renamed Quinn enterprise. And of the twelve businesses listed in 1952, only two advertised a full range of professional recording services and air-conditioning. Those two companies were Gold Star Studios and ACA Recording Studios, then located at 1022 Washington Avenue. Bill Holford, Quinn’s chief competitor over the years to come, owned the latter.

In May 1950 Holford had opened his own facility, ambitiously dubbed ACA for Audio Company of America. For the eighteen months prior to this, Holford had been operating an audio business out of his house. ACA soon
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became an important Houston recording base for various labels (such as Freedom, Peacock, Macy’s, and Trumpet) and hundreds of musicians. As writer Gary Hickinbotham says, it was “one of the premier Texas studios of the post–World War II period.”

Nonetheless, Quinn’s new recording facility, installed on the ground fl oor of his family residence, was a worthy rival—and even more so after it would be expanded and refurbished several times in years to come. From the start, it provided ample space outfi tted with proven professional equipment manned by a fi rst-rate audio engineer. Following Quinn’s initial transformation of his house, the bottom fl oor contained the main studio room, a control room, a vocal booth, the interior staircase, and the kitchen. The overall dimensions were twenty-eight feet long by twenty-eight feet wide, with a ten-foot-high ceiling.

From the front door perspective, the control room was in the back right-hand corner of the house. At fi rst, however, it off ered no window into the main studio. So the musicians had to wait for a red “record” light to know when to begin playing.

The baby grand piano was located in the opposite back corner, by the stairway. Quinn had removed its top and used a cable attached to the ceiling to suspend a microphone above it.

In the left front corner of the fi rst-fl oor room was the vocal booth. Musician Glenn Barber describes the basic recording setup:

Bill built that booth around 1952 or so. It had wheels on it so he could move it around, but it stayed on the left as you walked in the front door most of the time. He had one of those classic Shure mics in the vocal booth, one of those chrome-plated-looking things. Then out in the studio he was using one of those big diamond-shaped RCA ribbon mics.

Judging from photographs and oral histories, the fl ooring was likely a vinyl product. Johnny Bush, who fi rst recorded there in 1956 as a drummer behind country singer Mickey Gilley, describes it as “kind of an asphalt tile fl oor.”

The studio walls were covered in a sound-baffl

ing material improvised

from egg cartons. Ted Marek’s 1957
Houston Chronicle
article quotes Quinn’s explanation:

I found that regular sound-proofi ng killed the echo but made a “dead” room.

I tried material after material on the walls to no avail, but then I discovered the egg carton. I found that the compressed papier-mâché cartons with the peaks and valleys were the answer. I tacked thousands of the cartons up on
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the walls and came up with the perfect room sound. There is no echo but the room is “live” and musicians can hear their own voices and instruments in all parts of the studio.

This space, fully remodeled, is now the state-of-the-art Studio A at the present-day SugarHill Studios complex. But in the Gold Star era, the Quinn family (and their Afghan hounds, which reportedly often lounged in the studio) maintained private residential quarters on the now-removed second fl oor.

Record producer, promoter, and entrepreneur Slick Norris adds his memory of the place: “The front door of the house led straight into the studio. He had no waiting room or reception room at all. It was pretty primitive, but the man had some ability to get a sound.”

Shelby Singleton (1931–2009), former owner of the famous Sun Records Studio in Memphis, recalls his impressions of the Gold Star space and Quinn, both before and after a major expansion: “I remember the fi rst time I met him. I was working for Pappy Daily, and I thought it was very strange to be recording in someone’s living room. But then he built the big studio in the back, and that was much better.”

not only would the size and features of the Gold Star building be signifi cantly upgraded during the 1950s, but so would the fundamental technology that Quinn utilized there. By this time, tape recorders had become the main medium for documenting and reproducing sound. Originally they did so only in mono, but by the late 1950s the stereophonic revolution was underway. Taping introduced a new step in the recording process, one that came between the actual musical performance and the wax or acetate mastering. This development surely reduced the in-studio stress on the performers and engineers. Unlike before, an imperfect “take” no longer meant a wasted piece of valuable wax. Instead, if a fl aw occurred, they simply kept the tape rolling and did another take, or they rewound the tape and recorded over the previous take as it was being erased.

Likewise, long-playing record albums became practical to conceive and produce, triggering new ways that recordings could be packaged and experienced. With a session preserved on tape, the producer could select preferred tracks and resequence them to establish material for each side of an LP disc.

Then the set of songs comprising one whole side could be transferred as a group to a wax or acetate master.

The recording medium was a ferric oxide–based tape that came on metal or plastic reels. In layman’s terms, audio recording tape was a thin strip of plastic or Mylar with a chemical solution affi

xed to the backing via a special

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type of glue. This mix of ferric oxide and glue contained enough silicone lu-bricant to allow tape to slide easily past metal guideposts and recording heads with minimal degradation of material or depositing of debris. However, thorough cleaning of the tape path has always been necessary between recording sessions, sometimes between reels. The mono and stereo tape decks both used one-quarter-inch magnetic recording tape on ten-and-a-half-inch reels that each held approximately 2,500 feet of tape. The National Association of Broadcasters established a recording speed standard of fi fteen inches of tape per second, which allowed for a little over thirty minutes of recording time per reel.

The

fi rst multitrack tape recorders, in the form of three-track machines that recorded on half-inch tape, were in use by the end of the 1950s. Stereo (or two-track) machines had achieved limited availability by 1952, and certain innovative engineers, most notably Tom Dowd of Atlantic Records, were recording in mono and stereo simultaneously. However, the major record companies did not start pressing stereo records for sale to the general public until near the end of the decade.

By 1957 Ampex had manufactured a pair of experimental eight-track machines, designed by the famous electric guitar pioneer Les Paul, and these utilized one-inch tape. Dowd ordered a third machine custom-built, and by 1958 he was recording on it. However, the recording industry at large did not adopt eight-track technology until approximately ten years later.

Prior to purchasing his own Ampex machines in the late 1950s, Quinn was using a monophonic Berlantz Concertone Recorder, with ten-and-a-half-inch reels running quarter-inch tape. This machine was an older, heavily worn contraption, but it yielded a fantastic sound by prestereo standards.

Quinn later switched over to a Magnacord mono tape deck before upgrading to stereo.

Back in those days, neither tone controls nor equalizers existed. Thus, when a client requested that the sound be “brightened” (by increasing treble) or “darkened” (by decreasing treble or increasing bass), Quinn would remove a capacitor and resistor or two from the rear of the machine and replace them with alternates that sometimes achieved the desired eff ect.

Musicians Clyde Brewer and Herb Remington say they made a habit of requesting more bass or “bottom end” at the start of a session. Apparently Quinn’s recordings tended to be trebly, no matter how much he fi ddled with capacitors or resistors. Yet the musicians report that he was usually willing to strive to achieve the desired sonic results.