House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (27 page)

So he took me over to this little beer joint in Houston in an area they call Frenchtown. And here was this black man with a huge accordion on his chest and playing the most unbelievable low-down blues I’d ever heard in my life—and singing it in this bizarre French patois! . . . So as soon as Lightnin’

introduced me, Clifton said, “Oh, you’re a record man. I want to make a record tomorrow.”

Strachwitz explains the situation further in the Schultz article: “He hadn’t had a single in some years, so he fi gured any white guy that’s in the record business, that must be it. I fi nally agreed. We went over to Bill Quinn’s studio on February 8, 1964.”

From our own 2003 interview with Strachwitz, the story continues: Yeah, but what showed up the next day was not only Clifton and his drummer [the duo Strachwitz had previously seen], but he brought the whole damn band! And he said, “You know, Chris, that old French stuff isn’t hitting. I’ve got to make rock ’n’ roll records.”

I said, “Well, I don’t know. What I heard last night knocked me out.” . . .

Anyway, he had a drummer and a guitar player and an electric bass man and a piano player. . . . Thank goodness, the bass literally didn’t work because the whole damn paper on the cone of the bass speaker had come off . And the guitar player’s amp started smoking. So we were down to piano, accordion, and drums. We were getting closer [to the desired sound], except for the repertoire. He didn’t want to do that French stuff , so we did “Ay Ai Ai” and “Why Did You Go Last Night.” That was his fi rst single for Arhoolie Records [#45-506]. The engineer on that session was a guy named J. L. Patterson, and he wasn’t very good, but the record sounded okay.

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Clifton Chenier, Houston, 1965 (photo by and courtesy of Chris Strachwitz) The next year Strachwitz returned to Gold Star Studios to produce a full album of Chenier tracks. Incidentally, two months earlier, he had also recorded Hopkins there with Lurie engineering. But for the May 11, 1965, session with Chenier, Jones engineered—with the retired Quinn looking on. Following his initial Gold Star session with the disappointing Patterson, Strachwitz was pleased to work with Lurie and Jones, commenting especially on the latter’s ability to record drums and bass eff ectively.

That 1965 album session yielded the Arhoolie LP
Louisiana Blues and
Zydeco
(#1024), which introduced thousands of far-removed fans to this Gulf Coast musical hybrid. Most of the tracks were also issued on 45 rpm singles—in deference to the jukebox market and radio. In the Schultz article, Strachwitz explains that after taping one particularly potent number, on which Chenier was accompanied only on rubboard and drums, he received some insider advice: “Bill Quinn, who was standing behind me, said, ‘Chris, that’s going to sell down here; it’s got that sound.’” The veteran Quinn was right, for that track, “Louisiana Blues” (#509), became the closest thing to a hit single that Arhoolie had ever released. Strachwitz had improvised that simple song title when he could not translate Chenier’s French phrasing. As he tells Schultz, “If we had put the French name on there, the jockeys prob-t h e h s p c o r p o r at i o n e x p e r i m e n t b eg i n s
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ably wouldn’t have played it. But this way, they put it on, and the fi rst note just killed you. You just heard that unbelievable low-down song, and it doesn’t really matter which language he’s singing in.”

Two tracks from
Louisiana Blues and Zydeco
and two from Chenier’s fi rst Gold Star session appeared on the 2003 Arhoolie CD
The Best of Clifton Chenier
(#474). Of the fourteen studio-recorded songs on that retrospective compilation (three others were taped live in concert), ten were made in Houston. Of those, eight were products of Gold Star Studios—the earliest tracks, the ones that fi rst established Chenier as a force in roots-music recording.

two major artists, both of whom had launched their recording careers earlier at Gold Star, returned during its HSP phase: country singer George Jones and blues master Albert Collins.

When Jones visited the refurbished facility in 1965, it had been eight years since his last session there. For Jones to record again at the relatively humble site of his fi rst hit, after having earned his place by then among the Nashville country music elite, was a notable exception to the norm. But though he was mainly based in Tennessee, he was still working with Pappy Daily, the Houston man who had made him a star. The 1965 Gold Star session occurred after Patterson had handled a live recording project for Jones and Daily at the Houston country music venue Dancetown USA. The tape of that concert was then brought back to the studios, mixed, and delivered to Glad Music, Daily’s company.

That arrangement likely set the stage for Jones’s return to Gold Star Studios. Two months later, on March 31, Doyle Jones (no relation) engineered a session there featuring George Jones singing duets with Johnny Paycheck (1938–2003), perhaps an experiment based on Daily’s recent success with Jones in the duet format. This project was for the Musicor label, which the A&R man Daily partly owned.

Having been Jones’s mentor from the start, Daily had brought him to Musicor in 1964 too. As cowriters Mike Callahan, Dave Edwards, and Patrice Eyries point out in “The Musicor Records Story,” Daily and Jones almost immediately scored several hits that revived the label—in part by producing a series of duets, released throughout 1965, between Jones and Gene Pitney, Musicor’s only previous star.

Given those results, it seems likely that Daily was angling for another hit duet by pairing Jones with Paycheck. However, no recordings from that session seem to have been issued. A few years later Paycheck, as lead singer of the group billed as the Jones Boys, would perform again in that role with Jones on a 1970 hit single. Moreover, in 1980 Paycheck and Jones would join forces to make an all-duets album for Epic Records. Thus, that 1965 Jones-Paycheck session at Gold Star Studios may not have yielded much itself, but
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it perhaps laid the foundation for subsequent collaborations between the two singers.

Like Jones, who had cut his initial hit there in 1955, the blues star Collins revisited Gold Star Studios during the HSP era. Though much had changed, it was the same site where in 1958 the rookie guitarist had recorded his original version of “The Freeze.”

Collins returned in April 1965 for at least two sessions, both engineered by Doyle Jones. The producer was Bill Hall (1929–1983), Clement’s partner in the previously mentioned Beaumont studio. Hall too was familiar with Gold Star, having been there when the Big Bopper (whom he had managed and coproduced) cut “Chantilly Lace,” as well as when Johnny Preston recorded

“Running Bear,” among various other occasions.

Hall had also elsewhere previously recorded several singles by Collins, most of which were issued on one of his Beaumont-based labels, Hall-Way or Hall Records, or on TCF. As Andrew Brown explains in e-mail correspondence with the authors, the TCF company was a subsidiary owned by the famous movie studio Twentieth Century Fox (hence, the initials), which evidently had made a licensing arrangement with Hall to supply masters. The resulting discs were released either on TCF or under a combined TCF-Hall logo.

Hall had produced Collins’s 1962 hit, “Frosty,” issued on his namesake imprint (#1920). That number, a hot-selling single, reappeared in 1965 on the fi rst Collins LP, a compilation of Hall-produced recordings. The album was originally titled
The Cool Sounds of Albert Collins,
issued by TCF-Hall (#8002).

In 1969, after Bob Hite (of the California-based band Canned Heat) had introduced Collins to white audiences, those album tracks were licensed to Blue Thumb Records and reissued on LP as
Truckin’ with Albert Collins
(BT-8). In 1991 that album resurfaced on CD, issued by MCA (#10423).

Given that background, we surmise that Hall’s purpose in recording Collins at Gold Star in April 1965 may have been to create the additional tracks he needed to fi ll out that debut album, which was released later that same year. Of the twelve tracks comprising that record (and its subsequent reissues under alternate titles), nine had previously been released on singles for Hall Records or TCF. However, three numbers—“Kool Aide,” “Shiver

’n’ Shake,” and “Icy Blue”—were evidently new recordings, as there is no documentation of their existing before they showed up on
The Cool Sounds of
Albert Collins.

If Hall did produce those three mystery tracks during the April 1965 sessions, then the signifi cance of Gold Star Studios in relation to Collins takes on a new dimension. For not only is it the site where Henry Hayes recorded Collins’s fi rst single; it may also be where Hall recorded one-quarter of the tracks featured on his debut album.

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in addition to those in the blues, country, and zydeco genres, numerous artists were recording pop or rock during the HSP phase of operations.

In this regard, producer Ray Rush was an important client. In 1964 and ’65

he self-fi nanced sessions at Gold Star on at least nineteen separate occasions, each documented by a separate invoice issued in his name. Additionally, there are numerous invoices identifying Rush as producer on sessions bankrolled by other clients: Hickory Records, Zenith Productions, and D. W. Martin.

Rush had moved from West Texas to Houston around 1961, seeking to advance his career in the music business. Within a few years he was deeply involved there in recording a variety of regional artists—including the fi rst hit by B. J. Thomas. As for his frequent sessions at Gold Star then, he says, “Bill Quinn was around but wasn’t doing any sessions. He was a really nice guy.

The engineers I worked with the most were Doyle Jones and Bert Frilot.”

Among the artists Rush produced there was a band called the Triumphs.

They scored a regional hit for Joed Records with “Garner State Park” backed with “On the Loose” (#117). By the time the group’s second and third singles were released (#118, #119), their name had changed to B. J. Thomas and the Triumphs, foreshadowing the pop stardom that lay ahead for the lead singer.

Rush recounts the phenomenon:

“Garner State Park” was a huge local hit for B. J. Thomas. It was recorded on the 5th of April 1965. I remember that the song stayed at number one in Houston for at least a month, if not longer. I also remember that it sold a lot of records locally, and that was why it was picked up and rereleased on Hickory in 1966.

One of the original members of the Triumphs, Don Drachenberg, shares his memories of the band and the session that produced their most-well-known recording:

We recorded “Garner State Park” at Gold Star. . . . Our engineer was Doyle Jones. B. J. Thomas was in the band from 1959 to 1966. We both sang on

“Garner State Park.” Tim Griffi

th was the lead guitarist. Bass was played by

Tom Griffi

th. Fred Carney played keyboards. Drums were played by Teddy

Mensick, and we also had two horn players—but all they did on that cut was sing background vocals: Gary Koeppen, trumpet, and Denny Zatyka, sax.

In less than a year Thomas had gone solo and released his debut album.

Drachenberg explains:

B. J. left the band in March of 1966. Huey [Meaux] and Charlie Booth then recorded some sides at Gold Star and some in New York. They took those
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and the best cuts from the Pasadena sessions and turned that into B. J.’s fi rst album for Scepter,
Tomorrow Never Comes.

That album included a remake of the Hank Williams tune “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which unexpectedly soared to number eight on the pop charts, catapulting the young Houston singer into the national spotlight.

One of the musicians who played on Thomas’s debut album was Aubrey Tucker—a composer, arranger, trombonist, and music educator who had earlier worked with various jazz luminaries. He had started doing freelance session work at Gold Star Studios in 1964, fi rst for radio commercials as well as for country, rock, and pop producers. Regarding
Tomorrow Never Comes,
Tucker recalls,

It pretty much launched his career. A lot of people have forgotten about this record. There were a lot of members of the Houston Symphony used on that album. It was a big orchestral recording. The sessions that I was on for this album were done [at Gold Star], not over at Huey’s studio in Pasadena.

Within a couple of years, hit songs such as “Hooked on a Feeling,”

“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and “I Just Can’t Help Believing” had made B. J. Thomas a major force in pop music. But Thomas’s fi rst modest achievement as a recording artist, the one that powered him toward prominence, came from those early Gold Star sessions.