House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (35 page)

Yet the historic studio would also fi gure into the next phase of his career, for there he discovered his potential as a producer. Thompson explains, I cut John David Bartlett’s fi rst demos at Gold Star for IA as a producer. They were the fi rst to place that kernel of an idea in my mind. And I did go on to produce a lot of records in England later. John David was the fi rst session that I did where it was not my own band or my own project.

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Today Red Krayola, however the name might be spelled, are revered by some, derided by others, and unknown to most. However, they undeniably made unprecedented recordings that forced listeners to examine cultural assumptions about musicality. Writing in
Oxford American,
the band’s fi rst drummer, now famous as the novelist Fredrick Barthelme, sums up the ethos that informed their undertakings:

Because we couldn’t play all that well, we had to do something else, something more interesting, and since we were art-inclined, we went that route, leaning on every possible art idea at every turn. Soon we were making “free music,” playing long improvised pieces heavily invested in feedback, random acts of auditory aggression, utterances of all kinds. We began to have big ideas about ways to listen to music, and what “music” was.

Meanwhile, having failed to profi t much from the Red Krayola’s two LPs, the IA administration was refocusing its priorities. Though the late-1960s youth-culture marketplace was rapidly changing, IA needed something like a hit single—the proven formula for success in the industry—to revitalize the company.

IA found its momentary commercial salvation in a Texas progressive rock quartet that reportedly found the inspiration for its name in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World:
the Bubble Puppy. Originally based in San Antonio and then Austin, this band featured vocalist-guitarist Rod Prince backed by guitarist Todd Potter, bassist Roy Cox, and drummer Dave Fore. When they signed with IA, the group moved to Houston. At its studio there, they recorded tracks that became IA’s highest-charting single and its only Top 200 album.

Potter explains how the group came to IA—and the consequences: In 1968 we ventured to Houston to play at the Love Street Light Circus [psychedelic nightclub]. . . . International Artists discovered us in that room.

IA was home to the Elevators, the Red Krayola, and several other Texas psychedelic groups. Unfortunately, the label’s legendary roster was inversely proportional to both its business acumen and its treatment of the artists.

They waved the contract in front of us, and the Elevators were saying, “Don’t do it.” It was our fi rst exposure to a record deal, and we just went for it. In hindsight, I don’t know that it was the worst thing we could’ve done. Given our style, it’s possible that major labels would’ve passed us over. I think this was a label that was willing to take a chance on this style of music.

We moved to Houston, to a house not far from Gold Star, and holed up in the studios with a producer named Ray Rush. He was a West Texas veteran who’d worked with Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison. We combined a progressive rock time signature with a crunchy, dive-bombing guitar riff .

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The Bubble Puppy’s big single “Hot Smoke and Sassafras” hit number fourteen on the
Billboard
singles charts and earned a Gold Record award. As for the song’s title, Potter says,

We composed the song in the studio. We went home after playing the song, and we needed some words. We were watching
The Beverly Hillbillies
on TV.

Granny was berating Jethro for something, and she goes, “Hot smoke and sassafras, Jethro! Can’t you do anything right?” That’s where it came from.

Released in December of 1968, the song got heavy rotation on rock radio, fi rst in Texas and soon nationwide. By the spring of 1969 the group was lip-synching its hit on
American Bandstand.

Poole engineered the Bubble Puppy sessions. He says,

I recorded “Hot Smoke and Sassafras” for the Bubble Puppy, and then the album
A Gathering of Promises.
That band was way ahead of their time, and that album had a great ’60s sound to it. We didn’t use any booths on the recording. We had everybody out in the open, and we had David Fore, the drummer, over in one corner. Rod Prince and Todd Potter, the two guitar players, were real talents in that band. Roy Cox was sort of the manager, a major songwriter, and he played bass in the group. A lot of people said we had one of the best sounds of that era. The Beatles were killing everybody back in those days with that incredible songwriting team, but many people said that
A Gathering of Promises
had a better sound than the Beatles or anybody else. I am very proud of that album. Everything was cut live at one time, except the vocals and hand claps.

We were using an Ampex MM-1600 sixteen-track machine. The board we were using was six of these Ampex M10 tube mixers that had been modifi ed with some low- and high-pass fi lters, and had a patch panel added. . . . We had three mixers for the left channel and three for the right. . . . We had to do a lot of patching to use the sixteen tracks. . . . It was a bit primitive, but it sure sounded good.

Unfortunately, despite the fi ne studio work and the opportunity to open concerts for major touring bands such as the Who, the Bubble Puppy could not replicate the success of that fi rst brilliant album.

According to Prince’s “The Tale of Bubble Puppy 1966–1972,” the problems were rooted in IA’s ineptitude, particularly its decision not to lease the hit single to a major label (supposedly the Beatles’ Apple imprint was interested) and its dismissal of producer Rush.

For his part, Rush says, “Working with the Bubble Puppy and their album
A Gathering of Promises
was defi nitely a highlight of my time at IA.”

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Bubble Puppy, publicity photo, 1968

Prince writes, “Ray Rush was very much the fi fth member. Awesome production skills, adept at pulling the true song from one’s brain. The loss of Ray was the fi nal blow—there was nothing left at IA musically, and the Puppy WAS music.”

generally speaking, ia embittered many of the artists it signed to contract. The beleaguered company is often accused of having mismanaged marketing, production, and especially money. The norm seems to have been for artists to be put on a small weekly cash allowance (as an advance against future earnings), which some say never increased (no matter how many records sold) and sometimes failed to materialize. However, Dillard, IA’s president, steadfastly disagrees: “It’s ridiculous. There’s no truth to it. They got a lot more than their royalties.”

Given the rift between labor and management over such issues, as well as the spirit of the age, the musicians came together and creatively staged a protest. Singer-songwriter John David Bartlett sets the scene:
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In mid-to-late 1968 the Bubble Puppy were in-studio, working. The re-formed 13th Floor Elevators were in fi nishing the
Bull of the Woods
album.

A number of the other bands were also waiting their turn to work on their albums. They [IA] were way behind on paying everybody or giving advances.

Nobody had gotten any money for weeks. Everyone was broke and hungry, and they wanted us to record some more. So all the musicians got together and went to management and told them that they had this idea for an IA supergroup that would record an a cappella vocal song—that we wanted to record and they could release it as a supergroup single. Management got all excited and set up the session. We had worked up the chorus of the song, and it was a repeating chant of “hamburger-hamburger-hamburger-hamburger.”

And then various singers would go “I needa” or “we all needa.” Management didn’t think it was too funny, but . . . they got the message.

The Lost and Found, previously known locally as the Misfi ts, were another esoteric psychedelic rock band that signed with IA—reportedly following their involvement in a drug bust that put them in need of legal representa-tion. Lead guitarist Jimmy Frost has claimed that a retainer for IA attorney services was factored into their contract. The band, which included Peter Black on guitar and vocals and James Harrell on bass, with various drummers, recorded two singles and one album,
Everybody’s Here,
for the IA label.

The second IA single was “When Will You Come Through” and “Professor Black,” engineered and produced by Carroll. Following an exhausting tour across the South, which IA claimed was a fi nancial loss, the band quit in a pay dispute.

Another IA artist was Sterling Damon, actually a stage name of singer-songwriter Mel Douglas. “They changed my name to Sterling Damon because of the British Invasion and the psychedelic rock movement,” he says. Though he recalls recording enough material at IA sessions to make an album, the company issued only one Damon single (#108), featuring “Rejected” and “My Last Letter.”

The aforementioned Bartlett had come to IA in 1967 because his high school English teacher was the mother of Red Krayola’s Thompson. “Mayo and I became friends, and Mayo introduced me to the art scene, and also to the executives at International Artists,” Bartlett says. He provides an insider’s account of IA operations:

IA owned two houses [where] they would put their bands up while they were in town to record. . . . They would send a van to pick up the bands and bring them to the studio. They would arrive at the building, head into the studios, and were told, “Play music, make a record, now!”

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The big studio in the back of the building was closed and used for storage—and as a hangout for the musicians who were waiting their turn to record. . . . IA was storing hundreds of boxes of records in there. We often threw records at each other and at the walls while we were hanging out in there. . . . We’d sleep on top of those boxes—there were so many of them. . . .

It was pretty strange.

Given such an environment—and not only the schism between labor and management, but also the gap between young hippies and older business-men—IA might have seemed to some of the musicians to be a microcosm of all that was wrong with a corrupt establishment.

the former gold star studios had been a key site for recording Texas blues, epitomized by Lightnin’ Hopkins, almost since its inception. During IA’s bizarre proprietorship, Hopkins returned to jam with some members of the 13th Floor Elevators. These sessions broke racial barriers and generation-al obstacles simultaneously, uniting the elder Hopkins with the latest cohort of longhaired youth to form the rhythm section of the primordial psychedelic rock group.

The most recent drummer for the Elevators, Danny Thomas, explains how it came to be:

The Elevators were friendly with all the other popular acts around and hung out with Johnny Winter, and Billy Gibbons, and also with a lot of the black musicians in the area. . . . I got to play drums on the Lightnin’ Hopkins album for IA. I can thank Lelan for that. Duke Davis played bass on that record. He was our [fi rst] replacement for Danny Galindo when he left the band.

There was a harmonica player that was a friend of Lightnin’s, named Billy Bizor. We would pick him up for the sessions. . . . He was a legendary harp player in his day. Snuff y Waldron also played piano on some of those songs. . . .

The engineers on the Lightnin’ album were Jim Duff and Fred Carroll.

Duff provides additional context for these sessions—and an anecdote involving two of the Beatles:

Lightnin’ would do an album for almost anybody for six hundred dollars. He wouldn’t sign a contract with anyone. I recorded part of the album that he did for International Artists that Lelan Rogers produced.