House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (29 page)

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On January 14, 1965, in Studio A of the Gold Star Studios complex, the Sir Douglas Quintet recorded a track that married Gulf Coast R&B, a Cajun-conjunto backbeat, and elements inspired by “She’s a Woman” by the Beatles.

The result was “She’s About a Mover”—which ranks as the all-time number one recording in Jeff McCord and John Morthland’s
Texas Monthly
analysis of the greatest Texas songs. It was originally released on Tribe Records, one of Meaux’s labels, backed with “We’ll Take Our Last Walk Tonight” (#8308).

The record went to number thirteen on the U.S. pop charts and did equally well in the United Kingdom. In so doing it launched not just a band but a sound. Propelled distinctly by Augie Meyers’s pumping groove on Farfi sa organ (evoking a Tejano accordionist accompanying a
bajo sexto
), that sound fused disparate infl uences and foreshadowed the substantial musical cross-pollination that Sahm and Meyers would later cultivate with other bands (including the Texas Tornados supergroup they would form in the 1990s with Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez).

The session that produced “She’s About a Mover” was clearly a breakthrough moment in Texas music history. Jones, one of the original HSP engineers, recorded it on a three-track machine with Ampex tape. He shares these memories:

It was a very smooth and organized session with no problems. . . . Huey mastered it right after we fi nished mixing it, and he worked with Bob Lurie on that. Doug and Augie Meyers were good people to work with. After we recorded it, I never imagined that it would become a hit record or have the cult status that it has to this day. I did notice that it was something totally dif-ferent. As a matter of fact, it was even diff erent from the English sound that was prevalent in those days.

The Sir Douglas Quintet and Meaux also recorded numerous other songs at Gold Star in 1965. Invoices show they also taped “In Time” and “Wine Wine Wine” on that inaugural session. On February 23, they returned to cut

“The Tracker,” “Please Just Say So,” “We’ll Never Tell,” “In the Pines,” and

“Bill Bailey.” On April 12, they did “Working Jam,” “Bacon Fat,” “You Got Me Hurtin’,” and “The Rains Came.” Then on August 9, they made “It’s a Man Down There,” “Isabella,” and another title that is indecipherable on the invoice. “The Rains Came” (backed with the dance-themed number “Bacon Fat”

on the 45 rpm single) went to number thirty-one on the charts in early 1966.

In his book
All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music,
Michael Corcoran devotes a chapter called “The Genre Conqueror” to the legacy of Doug Sahm.

Describing him as “fl uent in every style of Texas music, from blues and conjunto to Cajun, honky-tonk, and psychedelic rock,” Corcoran mourns the 1999

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Sir Douglas Quintet, publicity photo, 1965

death of the man who “gave the Austin music scene its soul.” He also quotes this astute assessment by Joe Nick Patoski: “When you look back on the true originators, the real pioneers of Texas music, there are four main guys: Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, T-Bone Walker, and Doug Sahm.” Like Nelson, who had recorded his fi rst version of “Night Life” there in 1959, the innovative Sahm is thus a big part of the Gold Star Studios story.

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another important batch of Jones-engineered recordings involved a folk-pop group from Corpus Christi called the Pozo Seco Singers—the trio that propelled famous country singer-songwriter Don Williams (b. 1939) into the national spotlight. The Spanish phrase “pozo seco” translates literally as “dry well,” yet these singers found success in their recording debut at Gold Star Studios. That eff ort produced a 1965 hit single that stayed on the
Billboard
pop charts for fi fty-four straight weeks and led to a multiple-album deal with Columbia Records.

In addition to Williams, the lineup featured Susan Taylor and Lofton Kline; all members sang and played guitar. Their hit recording of “Time,” originally released on Edmark Records, attracted major label interest—and became the title track of their debut album in 1966. Working with producer Paul Butts (himself a folksinger and guitarist), the Pozo Seco Singers recorded “Time” at Gold Star Studios on May 23, 1965. Jones remembers it well:

That was one of the few records that I was the engineer on that I thought actually had a chance to be a hit. . . . I was real impressed with Paul Butts, and also Don Williams. Don back in those days sounded a lot like Johnny Cash.

They were all fi ne people and excellent singers and musicians. . . . Susan Taylor was the lead vocalist on “Time.” . . . I know that we recorded the song

“heads up” [live in the studio, with no overdubs].

Founding member Taylor (who is still active today as a folksinger known as Taylor Pie) off ers her recollections of the song, the session that made it famous, and the deal with Columbia Records:

Michael Merchant, who wrote the song, played bass on the session. Mike and I had a folk group when he was a senior at Miller High School. He went off to Penn State, and when he came back home after the fi rst semester, he played me this song that he had written called “Time.” I freaked when I fi rst heard it, and I asked him to teach it to me right away. He had written the song around this cool guitar lick. Well, I learned it immediately, and . . .

went over and played it to the other guys in Pozo, Lofton Kline and Don Williams. . . .

So we headed over to ACA/Gold Star to record two sides for Edmark Records. . . . Don’s song, “Hello Blues and Down the Road I Go,” was to be the A-side of the record, and “Time” was to be the B-side. . . . I think the whole thing took three hours. We came out of there with two songs mastered and ready to go and press records. . . .

Edmark Records was out of Port Aransas, and Paul Butts had something to do with them. When we formed Pozo Seco, Paul became our manager and helped organize the deal with Edmark. He backed out of the picture when
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Albert Grossman [1926–1986, most famous for managing Bob Dylan] came and signed the group. We put the record out and started getting airplay all around Texas. But the DJs fl ipped the record over and started playing “Time”

instead. . . . The song became a regional hit. It started in Corpus . . . made it over to San Antonio, then Houston and Dallas, and it charted everywhere that was playing it.

Following the reception the single was getting in Texas, the group got the kind of lucky break that every would-be star dreams of. Taylor continues, A guy named Joe Mansfi eld, who worked PR for Columbia in San Antonio, heard it. He got a copy of it and took off for New York to a meeting of Columbia’s national PR guys and played it to everybody. They all liked it, and when they found out that it was busting out all over Texas, they contacted us.

We signed and not much happened. . . . All of a sudden in February of 1966 they contacted us and told us that in six days we were going on a seven-day tour of the West Coast because the song had hit number one in Los Angeles. . . . Right after L.A. it went to number one in Chicago, and then as it fell there, it went number one in Boston. You have to get all the numbers in at the same time to crack the Top Ten in
Billboard.
We never got any higher than number forty-seven in
Billboard,
but the song stayed in the Top 100 for something like fi fty-four weeks. The song had an amazing ride.

The Pozo Seco Singers immediately capitalized on their hit single with two albums on Columbia,
Time
and
I Can Make It with You,
released in 1966

and ’67, respectively. The title track of the latter also charted in the Top 40.

When Kline left the group, Williams and Taylor retained the Pozo name on a follow-up LP in 1968 called
Shades of Time.
In the 1970s Williams would reemerge as an extremely popular solo artist and Nashville-based songwriter.

Yet as with many others before him, his professional recording career fi rst took off in a Houston studio called Gold Star.

given the types of recordings commonly produced there, the folk-pop sound represented by the Pozo Seco Singers was somewhat of an anomaly for Gold Star. But in September 1965 singer Kenny Rogers (b. 1937), a native Houstonian, booked two days to record and mix some tracks that fi t that mold, albeit with a slightly rockier edge. Listening to the Bob Lurie–engineered safety-copy tape from our vaults, we believe that these recordings may represent Rogers’s early concept for his vocal group the First Edition, in this case with backing on drums, upright bass, and guitar.

Meanwhile, straight-ahead rock and pop were more commonly recorded at Gold Star during this era. For every Sir Douglas Quintet, of course, there
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Pozo Seco Singers, publicity photo, 1965

were scores of Texas bands trying in vain to replicate its production of a big hit. Rock Romano was part of that bustling rock scene and recorded twice in Studio B with the group called Six Pents. “One [session] was with Doyle Jones, and the other with Bert Frilot,” he recalls. “We recorded a song called

‘Good to You,’ which was produced by Gordon Bynum, who would go on to produce the 13th Floor Elevators.”

That seminal psychedelic rock band looms large in Gold Star Studios lore.

The Elevators’ most signifi cant work there would occur in 1968 after their record company purchased the studio, but in June 1966 the original mema h o u s e o f ro c k , d e s p i t e t h e m u c k
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bers fi rst used the facility to produce some demos. Personnel on that session included Roky Erickson on vocals and guitar, Stacy Sutherland on guitar, John Ike Walton on drums, Ronnie Leatherman on bass, and Tommy Hall on amplifi ed jug. Based on the limited documentation, not much else can be determined beyond the song titles they recorded: “You Gotta Take That Girl,”

“Before You Accuse Me,” “You Can’t Hurt Me Anymore,” and “Splash 1.” As fans will note, that last song resurfaces on the debut album,
The Psychedelic
Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators,
which would be recorded in Dallas in October 1966, a few months later. Thus, this Gold Star session marks one of the Elevators’ fi rst studio experiences.

But more typical of the mid-1960s rock roster at Gold Star was the pop-fl avored style highlighted by small local labels such as Jamel Records. Owned by Charlie Jamel, it booked Gold Star sessions between April 1965 and January 1966 for a short-lived group led by Buddy Wright—fi rst referred to as the Wright 5 and later as the Wright Sounds. They cut fi ve songs there, engineered by Bert Frilot and Lurie, with mastering by Louis Stevenson. Band member David Russell recalls the process: