House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (26 page)

cer’s surname. Formed on May 1,

1965, it supplanted Patterson’s previous JLP Corporation as the organization operating Gold Star Studios. And for a while, it worked out very well.

Its principals were (in H-S-P sequence) Holford (vice president/director), Louis Stevenson (president/director), and Patterson (secretary/treasurer).

Ultimately there were several other people involved too, including former Sun Records engineer Jack Clement and producer Bill Hall, previously of the Gulf Coast Recording Company in Beaumont. Engineers included Doyle Jones, Hank Poole, Bert Frilot, Bob Lurie, Gaylan Shelby, and others.

By this time, engineer Walt Andrus had left to create his own recording company. By late 1965 Huey Meaux, a former regular Gold Star client, would be gone too, as he elected to build his own studio, called Recording Services, in nearby Pasadena. However, he would make some serious Gold Star history before departing, and eventually he would return.

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For a while, Patterson’s newly formed corporation operated as ACA/Gold Star Recording Company, based at the original Gold Star Studios on Brock Street. Though the HSP Corporation would ultimately fail as a business partnership, during its tenure in charge of Gold Star, that already historic facility continued to host important hit-making sessions in a wide range of genres.

Despite issues of mismanagement and mistrust that would ultimately dis-solve HSP, the company employed outstanding sound engineers. One of the best, who would eventually depart in disgust to form his own studio, was Jones. He had started working for Patterson in August 1964. As an inside observer during the corporate transition from JLP to HSP, Jones off ers this summary of the evolution of the company:

Patterson was a clever guy. He started the JLP Corporation, which included me in some great plan to corner the market on all the recording in Houston. . . . At fi rst it also included Jack Clement and Bill Hall from Beaumont and Louis Stevenson and Bob Lurie, who had come from owning a studio in Paris, France. It was successful enough at the beginning for Patterson to expand the company and rename it the HSP Corporation. That is when he added Bill Holford and Bert Frilot. For about a year we were the busiest studio anybody had ever seen. . . . J.L. had cornered the market on all the best engineers in Houston, and there was almost nowhere else to go, except for maybe Walt Andrus’s studio over on Broadway. If J.L. hadn’t been such a crook, the sky was the limit as far as what might have been.

Stevenson, the president, was an investor who also served as resident studio technician, mastering engineer, and disc cutter. (During this time period the studio still cut its own acetates on the Gotham/Grampian lathe.) Stevenson played a key role in modifying and repairing studio equipment during the HSP era. Bob Lurie, already an excellent engineer, became one of the resident disc-cutters too. He brought with him a Steinway grand piano and installed it in the big studio.

Because Patterson’s vision for HSP required it to be staff ed with numerous engineers and do a high volume of business, he expanded the Gold Star facility. In 1964 Patterson had commissioned Jack Clement (b. 1931) to design a recording room as part of a major studio expansion. Upon completion, this new building, connected to the front of the big studio room, housed the “gold star” room, so called because of the emblem installed on the studio fl oor.

The structural addition also encompassed two new acoustic reverb chambers, plus the old front entryway to the studio complex.

Studio B ran twenty-one feet long by twenty feet wide, with a seventeen-foot-high ceiling. The walls were covered in common acoustic tiles and strate-1 2 2

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gically placed rectangular panels made of a cloth-covered absorbent material that reduced room echoes. The ceiling was T-grid with acoustic tiles. The fl oor was a thick, light-gray-colored linoleum tile with the aforementioned emblem placed slightly off center.

The adjoining control room measured twenty feet long by twelve feet wide, with a thirteen-foot-high ceiling. It was long and narrow, with the shorter side facing into the studio. The linoleum fl oor was raised nearly eighteen inches above the ground to allow cable troughs to run underfoot. The walls were acoustic tiles except for a corkboard surface (for extra absorbency) on the back wall behind the engineer’s seat.

The designer, Clement, has excelled in recording, publishing, and writing American music for over fi fty years—and was already well established in the industry when he started working with Patterson in 1964. As an engineer, for instance, Clement had previously recorded Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and other icons at Sun Records in Memphis. Later, following his stint in Houston, he would produce Charley Pride and establish his own hit-making studio in Nashville. There he would record albums for singers Townes Van Zandt and Waylon Jennings, among many others. Scores of artists—from Hank Snow to Dolly Parton to Tom Jones—have covered his songs.

Here Clement recalls his introduction to Patterson and Gold Star Studios:

My fi rst memories of the place were when J. L. Patterson asked me to come over and visit. There was only one studio at the time; it was the big one in the back. He asked me to help him build a second studio.

It started when I moved to Beaumont and built . . . Gulf Coast Recording Studios. I partnered with Bill Hall. We both had equipment, and we moved it into that new studio. I recorded B. J. Thomas a couple of times and also worked with Don Robey a bit.

Then one day Patterson came along. At the time I owned all this gear and was thinking about moving back to Nashville. He talked me into moving to Houston. So we cut all the gear loose and moved to Houston in late 1964.

Patterson had the big fi ne room in the back, but he wanted a second room. I designed and built it from the ground up—footings, foundations, and everything. It was a well-built building. I did the layout and the acoustics inside as well. Then we put in these two echo chambers. . . .

My concepts for the Gold Star studio were that I wanted it good and

“dead” with very controllable sound. . . . I would deaden the walls and be able to move refl ective partitions in to change the sound and tune it up when I wanted to. The walls were a cloth covering with fi berglass insulation behind it. The cloth would have had about nine inches of fi berglass behind it. This
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went from the ceiling down to about three feet from the fl oor. There was a wood border all around the studio from the fl oor up to the three-foot level, and that was a sort of a bass trap that ran around the room. My approach to designing a studio is to make it good for the musicians to hear each other. I would start with it fairly dead and then tune it up as I would go. That studio I built in Houston was solid. We put these pylons in the ground every so-many feet; it should not have moved at all.

The control room had a gang of four-channel Ampex mixers chained together and fed an Ampex four-track one-half-inch machine and a one-quarter-inch mono machine and maybe a stereo deck also. . . . They had a lot of good mics: all the Neumann tube mics and RCA ribbons and some Altec dynamics. . . .

I brought all my clients from Beaumont to work there. I remember recording Mickey Newbury at Gold Star, one of the fi rst clients of the new studio I had just built.

As for the reason his tenure at Gold Star Studios did not last longer, Clement off ers this cryptic analysis:

J.L. was a very interesting character, and I didn’t want to get in too deep with him. He had a lot of wild ideas. His main thing was this burglar alarm system called Vandalarm. It worked on sound, and apparently it was reliable, and he sold a bunch of them. That’s how he got his money. . . . After a while I decided to move back to Nashville and took my equipment back with me.

While Clement’s time at Gold Star Studios was limited, it was signifi cant.

First, he brought impressive music-establishment credentials to the enterprise. Before his arrival, the self-taught Quinn had designed and installed every facet of this recording facility. Clement’s work on the 1964 expansion project infused the complex with a fresh professional perspective. Moreover, Clement literally changed the size, shape, and quality of the facility, and many of his modifi cations remain intact and in use today. But his quick departure, bolstered by his observations about Patterson (whom he depicts as motivated by money, not music), suggests that he sensed that something was not right with HSP.

Jones soon came to a similar conclusion about Patterson. Jones says,

“When I came over to work in late 1964, the gold star room was about a week away from completion.” Thus, he worked mainly in the new, state-of-the-art location. But given the conditions under which he would leave Gold Star Studios, he has no nostalgia for the site. “I have not set foot in the building since that time,” he explains. “The whole experience with J. L. Patterson’s running of those studios left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.”

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Another engineer, Hank Poole, had originally worked at Houston’s KILT

radio before taking a position at ACA Studios. Thus, with the HSP consolida-tion, Poole moved to Gold Star Studios. He says,

I came over to Gold Star when the two Bills, Quinn and Holford, merged. I guess they fi gured between them they would have a lock on it. I think that J. L. Patterson was in trouble fi nancially and tried to put the ACA/Gold Star concept together, and fi gured that the two of them could do real well together. . . .

We cut loose all the equipment from Fannin Street [ACA’s mid-Sixties location] and moved over to Brock Street and put the gear into the big studio in the back of the building. . . .

Eventually Bill Holford left and moved back over to Fannin. . . . But we sure turned out some mighty stuff in the time that we were there.

While the people employed there generally concur on the high quality of the new studio equipment and design, the HSP Corporation lasted little more than a year.

some of the most historically significant Gold Star Studios recordings to occur during the HSP regime featured Clifton Chenier (1925–1987).

Though he had cut 1950s-era singles elsewhere for labels such as Elko and Specialty, his fi rst Gold Star sessions changed his life and added a zesty new infl uence to the American musical vocabulary. Chenier and producer Chris Strachwitz (b. 1931) launched their long-term affi

liation there. And those

Gold Star Studios recordings became the primary medium by which Arhoolie Records introduced the future King of Zydeco to popular consciousness.

As Cub Koda says of zydeco in
All Music Guide,
“Chenier may not have invented the form—an accordion-driven, blues-inspired variant of Cajun music played for dancing—but he single-handedly helped give it shape and defi ned the form as we know it today.” While Chenier and the black Creole music that he personifi es came from southwest Louisiana, Houston has played a key role in its evolution, as documented extensively in Roger Wood’s book
Texas
Zydeco.
During the prime of his career, Chenier resided in the Frenchtown section of the city’s Fifth Ward, and it was there that Strachwitz fi rst heard him perform—the very night before their fi rst Gold Star Studios session.

The California-based producer was introduced to Chenier by Lightnin’

Hopkins, who had been the focal point of Strachwitz’s fi rst fi eld trip to Houston in 1959. Later Hopkins had started recording for the Arhoolie label.

During his early visits to Houston, Strachwitz had also witnessed fi rsthand the vibrant black Creole music scene. As he told writer Barbara Schultz in a
Mix
magazine interview,

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I caught some of the early zydeco people who were just beginning to kick into gear in Houston at that time. This was in ’60, and nobody had ever heard of this stuff except in these few beer joints down there. I was lucky to meet up with this fellow Mack McCormick, who lived in Houston and was not only trying to be Lightnin’ Hopkins’ manager, but he also knew a lot about the scene, the ethnic music in Houston.

In 1961 Strachwitz and the infl uential McCormick (who had coined the now-standard spelling of the word
zydeco
in 1959) made fi eld recordings of various black Creoles performing a primitive strain of this strange music at Houston venues. But it was not until 1964, when Hopkins suggested that Strachwitz accompany him to hear his “cousin” perform, that the producer would experience Chenier. As Strachwitz relates in Wood’s
Down in
Houston: