House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (21 page)

Frank Davis, a regular performer at the Jester Lounge, made his recording debut on
Look, It’s Us!
He later became a successful recording engineer himself. Davis off ers these recollections:

[Gold Star engineer] Dan Puskar was a really neat guy of Polish descent. He had all kinds of wonderful innovations for recording. We were recording on a three-track half-inch tape machine made by Ampex. . . . Bill Quinn was not around for these sessions. Dan pretty much did it all by himself. And of course, the sessions were all pretty late at night. There were lots of little sessions recorded over a couple of weeks. . . .

The sessions were orchestrated very well. There were several large groups and a bunch of individuals, and everybody got equal time. Everyone accompanied themselves, and there were no extra musicians on the gig. . . .

There was a neat thing that Dan did while he was recording me. When I performed on stages around town, most of them were thin plywood, and I would tap my foot near the base of the mic stand and get some extra percussion. Dan set up a board for me to sit on and play and to tap my foot on—

and put a mic underneath it. It was really great and added a nice touch to the sound of the recording. Basically he built a small platform for me to sit on—a foot or so above the fl oor of the studio.

Clark, one of the most revered Texas-born songwriters of our time, worked in the early 1960s as art director for Houston’s CBS-affi

liated television sta-

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tion, KHOU. He had then just begun hanging out in folk clubs and composing his own songs. Though he would ultimately settle in Nashville, his Houston years were a key time in his prolifi c career. As his booking agent Keith Case puts it in an online profi le,

Moving to Houston, Clark began his career during the “folk scare” of the 1960s. Fascinated by Texas blues legends like Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’

Hopkins and steeped in the cultural sauce piquante of his border state, he played traditional folk tunes on the same Austin-Houston club circuit as Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker. . . . Eventually, Clark would draw on these roots to fi rebrand his own fi ddle-friendly and bluesy folk music, see it embraced as country, and emerge as a songwriting icon for connoisseurs of the art.

Clark shares with us his memories of the genesis and execution of the Jester album project:

This was my fi rst recording in a studio, for sure. I believe that this was also K. T. Oslin’s fi rst recording as well. We were all playing this folk joint called the Jester, and Scott and Vivian Holtzman felt that we should make a record, and most of us had never made a record before. We all felt that it would be exciting and interesting to do this. I remember that everybody who participated in the record came to the studio, and we recorded in shifts. Those that weren’t recording were sitting around listening to the others.

Though the Jester album was never widely distributed, this unusual LP

highlights the generally underappreciated vibrancy of the Houston folk scene in the early 1960s—and makes yet another case for the historical signifi cance of Gold Star Studios.

back in the 1950s gold star studios—especially via its affi

liation with

Pappy Daily’s Starday, D, and Dart labels—had played an important Texas role in the rockabilly revolution. But by the early years of the next decade, the genre commonly called rock was rapidly changing. For many in the younger generation, the formerly cool rockabilly sound and persona were now considered antiquated. Gone were the greasers with the ducktail haircuts and their countrifi ed mannerisms. Instead, more record-buying youth were identifying with a style that overtly embraced the infl uence of postmodern urban black music, particularly R&B, and rejected the hillbilly connotations. That movement would accelerate under the infl uence of the so-called British Invasion bands. But American rock and pop were already evolving in new directions, and several Gold Star Studios productions provide evidence of that trend.

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The Jades, in front of Gold Star Studios, 1961

A group billed as C.L. and the Pictures were an early white R&B-inspired Texas rock band. The original lineup featured C. L. Weldon on vocals, Charlie Broyles on guitar, Trent Poole on drums, Leroy Rodriguez on bass, and two sax players, Leo Grimaldo and Glenn Spreen. While the group’s biggest hit,

“I’m Asking for Forgiveness,” was recorded at ACA Studios, they also recorded some classic blue-eyed soul tracks at Gold Star Studios, songs such as

“Smacksie Part II,” “I’m Sorry,” and “For the Sake of Love.”

As for that last song, Poole relates that it came to them from an impeccable source, the black Creole musician Clarence Garlow (1911–1986), best known for his 1949 hit “Bon Ton Roula,” recorded in Houston on the Macy’s label. Poole explains how he interacted with Garlow to buy the rights to new material:

He was an old guy who wrote songs, and people bought them from him. . . .

I was working with Huey P. Meaux and Steve Tyrell in the early ’60s. . . .

And I would go . . . to this old garage apartment and knock on the door, and this guy would hear me and say, “Hold on a minute.” Then the door would open, but I couldn’t see in. He’d just hold the door and say, “You got fi fty dollars?”—because they always sent me with a fi fty-dollar bill.

I’d say, “I got the money.” . . . Then he’d shut the door, and I’d hear him rummaging around in there for a bit. Then he’d come back to the door and hand me a song written on a paper bag like you get your groceries in.

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So he wrote us a song . . . called “For the Sake of Love,” and we recorded it at Gold Star with an engineer by the name of Dan Puskar. We were nineteen and twenty years old. Dan was like thirty-fi ve and an accomplished musician, and he helped us with the song. It was the only record we made that became popular on Houston radio stations, KYOK and KCOH.

Getting airplay on those two prominent African American–oriented stations represented new ground for a white rock group in Houston at the time—a situation that later led to some confusion. Poole continues, “The song became big in Houston, and we were invited to come play live at the radio stations. When we showed up, they discovered we were white guys and Latinos. It was a bit awkward at fi rst, but they fi nally warmed up to us, and we played all afternoon.”

While C.L. and the Pictures never achieved much fame beyond the region, several of their musicians did so as individuals. One of those was session horn player Luis (aka Louis) Gasca (b. 1940), who launched his recording career at Gold Star Studios but later achieved national stature in the music industry, recording with a diverse range of superstars, ranging from Janis Joplin to Count Basie to Van Morrison to Carlos Santana to Brasil ’66 to Mongo Santamaria, and many others. This trumpeter went on to establish himself not only as a versatile session musician but also as a jazz composer and band conductor.

Somewhat similarly, during the nascent phase of his recording career, the artist now known as Mark James ventured into Gold Star Studios. A native Houstonian born Francis Zambon (1940), he recorded his fi rst song, “Jive Note,” there in 1959 for the Vamalco label (#503). By 1960 he had changed his professional name. At Gold Star he also made an early demo recording of one of his compositions, “Suspicious Minds,” which would later become a hit for Elvis Presley, as would a song cowritten by James called “Always on My Mind.” Another singer from Houston, B. J. Thomas (b. 1942), would earn a Gold Record Award in 1968 with James’s composition “Hooked on a Feeling,”

which hit again in 1974 via an eccentric cover version by the Swedish group Blue Suede.

Today James owns Music Row Studio in Nashville and resides in Santa Monica, California. He provides an insightful recollection of Gold Star Studios at the time of his recording-industry initiation:

I had singles mastered at Gold Star because Quinn was a good mastering engineer. I also played guitar on a bunch of things at the studio. On my own recordings, I was moving back and forth between the studios, mostly at Bill Holford’s [ACA Studios]. Quinn’s studio was busier than Holford’s because of Pappy’s involvement, so it was easier for me to get in over at Holford’s.

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. . . When I was seventeen or eighteen I went in [to Gold Star] and cut that instrumental “Jive Note” and put a vocal song on the other side. When it went to number one in Houston, I realized then at an early age that maybe I could really do this.

Another major music business fi gure to emerge from this time and place was Steve Bilao, a guy who grew up literally around the corner from Francis Zambon in southeast Houston. However, like his childhood friend, Bilao soon changed his Italian surname. Since then this vocalist, songwriter, producer, and industry mogul has been known as Steve Tyrell.

Tyrell’s fame today extends in multiple directions in the Los Angeles–based entertainment industry, including roles as a singer or songwriter for a number of fi lms, plus productions for Dionne Warwick, Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder, Bette Midler, Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, and many others. Moreover, in more recent years he has recorded several successful albums as a singer of jazz and pop standards. But Tyrell got started in music recording at Gold Star Studios—during his tenure as the second singer in C.L. and the Pictures.

Some of Tyrell’s bandmates in the Pictures also migrated to entertainment centers to forge their own careers. Trent Poole became a successful studio drummer in Los Angeles. Sax man Glenn Spreen fi rst attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York, and then moved to Nashville and became a record producer. He also wrote the string arrangements for Elvis Presley’s recording of “Suspicious Minds,” as well as for Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are.”

Tyrell was also involved in producing Joyce Webb (b. 1940), a popular local singer who later served a ten-year stint as featured vocalist with the Houston Pops Orchestra. Having made her fi rst recordings for the Austin-based Domino’s label at age 17, Webb also cut 45 rpm singles for various other record companies nationwide, including Ric Tic, Golden World, Warner Brothers, Probe-ABC, Columbia, Lee-Roy, and Epic. In Houston she frequently did sessions as a backup singer at Gold Star Studios, working there fi rst when Quinn was chief engineer and later with successors such as Walt Andrus, Bert Frilot, Doyle Jones, and Jim Duff . She also recorded there with producer Tyrell in the 1960s on the single “I Sang a Rainbow,” released on Warner Brothers Records (#7048).

Among other young talent that graduated, in a sense, from early ’60s sessions at Gold Star Studios to become part of the national musical industry were two acclaimed drummers: Willie Ornelas and Tony Braunagle.

After relocating to Los Angeles, Ornelas became one of its premiere session and touring musicians. His studio work has included sessions with
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Dionne Warwick, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, Dolly Parton, José Feliciano, Andy Williams, Dean Martin, David Foster, Larry Carlton, Bill Champlain, Al Jarreau, and others. He has also worked in television, contributing to soundtracks for shows such as
Hill Street Blues,
LA Law,
Magnum PI,
NYPD Blue,
Greatest American Hero,
White Shadow,
Boston Public,
The King of Queens,
Law
and Order,
The Love Boat,
and others.

Yet the impressive Ornelas résumé begins with session work back in his hometown. He relates,

The fi rst session I ever did was in the big studio at Gold Star. It was probably in 1961, and Bill Quinn was the engineer. He was an older gentleman who just generally told us what to do, and we did it—because we were idiots.

It was a group called Cecil and Anne. We had a hit record in Houston back then, called “You Wrote This Letter,” and it was the fi rst group I ever played with. . . . It was for a local label that Lelan Rogers had at the time, called Sabra Records [#520].

Soon, however, Ornelas bid farewell to Texas. “I left Houston in 1966 for the fi rst time and went on tour with B. J. Thomas,” he says. They appeared together on the teen-music-oriented TV show called
Where the Action Is,
setting the stage for the long and productive career that Ornelas has fashioned for himself on the West Coast.

Though he gigged throughout Texas for much of his early career, Ornelas’s childhood friend and fellow drummer Tony Braunagle eventually ended up in Los Angeles too. His album session credits include work with Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones, Johnny Nash, Dionne Warwick, and others—as well as production of a 2006 project by Eric Burdon. He too did demos and session work at Gold Star Studios before setting off on the major phase of his career.