House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (22 page)

Another

R&B-infl uenced rocker with a Gold Star pedigree is Jerry LaCroix, an extraordinary vocalist and tenor sax player from Beaumont. Though he is best known for his roles with Edgar Winter’s White Trash, the legendary Gulf Coast bar band the Boogie Kings, or the famous group Blood, Sweat, and Tears, LaCroix recorded some obscure but powerful records at Gold Star Studios in the 1960s.

LaCroix’s initial work there yielded the 1961 single “Band Doll,” credited to Jerry and the Dominoes on Meaux’s Teardrop Records. Next, under the pseudonym Jerry “Count” Jackson, he recorded “Falling in Love” for Meaux, released on Vee-Jay Records (#563). Later, the Boogie Kings, featuring Jerry LaCroix and G. G. Shin on vocals, recorded there, again for Meaux. At that point LaCroix’s talents propelled him to higher-profi le gigs beyond Southeast Texas. But approximately thirty years later, LaCroix returned to the Houston
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studio where he had cut his fi rst tracks to record the 1999 CD
Better Days
with Jerry Lightfoot (1951–2006).

Other prominent musicians who passed through the studios in the early 1960s include Johnny “Rabbit” Bundrick, who eventually played keyboards for the Who. Another was Snuff y Walden, a guitarist who later appeared on hit tracks by Stevie Wonder, Heart, and REO Speedwagon—and received a 2004 Emmy Award for his music on the hit TV show
West Wing.

However, of the many artists who fi rst recorded at Gold Star and went on to make successful careers in music, some did so without leaving Houston.

Instead, they became stalwarts of the local scene. Guitarist and bassist Rock Romano (sometimes billed as Dr. Rockit) has led his own band and played with scores of other highly regarded regional groups. Since 1988 he has also owned and operated his own studio, called the Red Shack.

Romano’s career path began, like so many others, in Quinn’s Brock Street facility. He recollects the scene:

My earliest memories of Gold Star Studios were probably between late 1961

and early 1963. . . . We were all grouped in a circle around one big fat mic, possibly a U-47, hanging down from the ceiling. The singer was standing closer to the mic than the rest of us. Then when the sax player needed to take his solo, he’d run up under the mic, and then he’d back up from the mic.

Romano’s exposure to this now quaint method for group recording perhaps laid the foundation for his ultimate vocation. As a Houston-based studio owner and engineer, every time he positions the mics today for a group performance or mixes overdubs created in isolation, he follows—consciously or not—a path fi rst blazed by Quinn.

Perhaps the youngest of all the artists who fi rst recorded at Gold Star Studios in the early 1960s were the Champagne Brothers. That band was a regionally successful white R&B-pop group, originally from South Louisiana, composed of male siblings, managed and promoted by their parents.

Don Champagne relates his childhood experiences as a Gold Star Studios recording artist:

We moved to Houston when I was nine and started playing gigs full-time. . . .

I was about ten years old the fi rst time I ever came over here to record . . . in 1961. We had signed a contract with Huey P. Meaux, and he put us on his Typhoon label and then later on his Teardrop label. We would be playing a gig in town and he would call up and say, “Y’all come to the studio as soon as you are through.” Charles, my brother, who was the lead singer, would be warmed up, and Huey would say, “What do you want to cut?” Or he would
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have a specifi c song in mind and kind of lead us through it. Another guy who was involved in the production was Steve Tyrell. . . . Many times after we’d rehearsed it a bit we would get the fi nished track on the fi rst take. After we were done, later they would add strings and voices to the recording. It was amazing to us, what they sounded like after they were done.

We did “It’s Raining”/“Robin” [Typhoon #2003], “Stranger to

You”/“Chickawawa” [Typhoon #2002], and one called “Let’s Live”/“I’ll Run Away, Far Away” [Teardrop #3042]. “Stranger to You” went to number one in the areas around Houston and in East Texas and Louisiana. The success of that record and some of the others guaranteed us a great deal of work.

The Champagne Brothers recorded numerous other 45 rpm singles released on several regional labels. In their prime, they were major players on the upper–Gulf Coast pop music scene—as evidenced by a chart from KOLE

radio for September 4, 1963, which ranks their song “Stranger to You” as number one. At the height of their popularity, they also toured the region as the opening act for national stars such as the Righteous Brothers, the Everly Brothers, and the Four Seasons.

With groups like the Champagne Brothers, time was ushering fresh players onto the studio fl oor to sing and play into those suspended mics. And for the founder and chief engineer, time was pointing out the door.

in july of 1963 bill quinn partially retired, leasing his Gold Star Studios to an entrepreneur named J. L. Patterson, who had already been involved on some projects there. Patterson had worked as a franchised agent for a company called Century Records, a California-based label that specialized in custom record pressings for high school and college marching bands. Given its booming population and numerous colleges and universities, Houston was an ideal location for Patterson. His control of the studio off ered additional ways for him to capitalize on what he already knew—and soon would learn—

about the recording business.

Based on the paperwork available in the SugarHill archives, it is possible to piece together a partial view of Patterson’s evolving role in the daily operations. For example, we have a Gold Star receipt dated August 14, 1964, that shows J. L. Patterson as lessee and Doyle Jones as engineer. Two invoices from December 22, 1964, show Patterson actually engineering separate sessions for recordings by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Floyd Tillman. We also have a February 2, 1965, document from the JLP Corporation, dba Gold Star Recording Company, with the names of Patterson and Jones included as key members of the group.

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Meanwhile, as Patterson took over, Quinn and his wife continued to reside nearby. Who knows what it was like for Quinn to cease running the studio while still living on site? Maybe he was simply relieved to be free of the responsibilities he had voluntarily shouldered in building his business. But we think that perhaps he also sometimes missed it.

As a musician who was working in the studio from 1961 through 1965—

an era overlapping the founder’s transition out of the control booth and into retirement—Mel Douglas observed Quinn in the last stage of his involvement with studio operations. When queried about his memories of the man, Douglas evokes a striking image:

Bill Quinn was an older man. He was nicely dressed and had fairly long gray hair. He was a real pleasant and outgoing guy. He reminded me of one of those older actors, like Jimmy Stewart. I was real impressed with the way he did things. It seemed like he tried to accommodate everyone who asked him for things. He was always talking and friendly, even when he was cutting me the acetate dubs after the session was over.

This description of Quinn in the twilight of his career suggests a professional who clearly loved his work and the environment in which he did it. In retrospect, part of Quinn’s achievement is that he practically invented this job and this workspace for himself. It is perhaps no wonder that he may have seemed so satisfi ed and fulfi lled as he practiced his well-honed craft.

After all, this mild-mannered yet defi antly self-reliant maverick had learned almost everything he knew about sound recording technology entirely on his own—no training or mentorship. Since leaving that carnival company back in 1939, this husband and father had remained successfully self-employed, dependent solely on his own ingenuity and vision, a good provider. He had designed and expanded the very studios in which he had daily worked—structures that were literally an extension of his family’s home. When it came to trusting one’s instincts and endeavoring to be true to them, he seems to have got it right.

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11

Duke-Peacock

t h e g o l d s t a r c o n n e c t i o n

he significance of
Houston-born music magnate Don Robey in postwar independent recording history, previously documented in various books and articles, is immense. However, few if any writers have noted that Robey conducted numerous recording

sessions at Gold Star Studios. This fact challenges the common (and false) assumption that Robey recorded mainly in the studio that he had constructed inside his offi

ce building in 1954. For the better informed, it contrasts

with the generalized knowledge that Robey utilized ACA Studios for many Houston recordings. Nonetheless, Robey’s role as the fi rst nationally prominent African American record-label boss is also part of Gold Star Studios history.

As the proprietor of Peacock Records, founded in 1949, Robey had launched several stars of urban blues and early R&B—infl uential performers such as Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (1924–2005) and Willie Mae “Big Mama”

Thornton (1926–1984)—as well as gospel stalwarts such as the Original Five Blind Boys, Bells of Joy, Dixie Hummingbirds, and Mighty Clouds of Joy. As the owner also of Duke Records, acquired in 1952 from David James Mattis, Robey forged a fusion of its original Memphis sound with fresh talent from Texas. That move triggered a succession of hit recordings by Bobby “Blue”

Bland (b. 1930), Johnny Ace (b. John Alexander, 1929–1955), Junior Parker, Roscoe Gordon (1928–2002), and many others. As the creator of other labels—Sure Shot, Back Beat, and Song Bird—Robey introduced hit-making artists such as Joe Hinton (1929–1968), O. V. Wright (1939–1980), and Roy Head (b. 1941) to popular culture. And Robey did it all in or near his home neighborhood of the Fifth Ward.

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His base of operation was located at 2809 Erastus Street in what is now an inconspicuous rectangular building covered in whitewashed stucco. Today its only distinguishing architectural feature is a wing-shaped protrusion, pointing skyward, above the front door. From 1945 through most of 1953, this unusual protuberance carried a neon sign that spelled out “Bronze Peacock”

and outlined an image of the namesake bird. That establishment—a nightclub featuring live jazz orchestras on stage, fi ne dining in the main room, and a reputation for high-stakes gaming opportunities in the back—was so impressive in its time that Johnny Ace biographer James M. Salem refers to it as “Las Vegas in Houston.” The Bronze Peacock too was owned by Robey, and along with his Buff alo Booking Agency, it had been his primary focus until he entered the record business.

Today the Bronze Peacock is remembered as one of the fi nest African-American-owned-and-operated entertainment venues in the mid-twentieth-century South. But in 1953, four years after cutting his fi rst recordings, Robey closed it, concentrating thereafter on his record labels and their affi liated

artists. He then remodeled the nightclub structure, transforming it into his corporate headquarters. Within another year he had commissioned the building of a recording studio there too. Given the phenomenal success of his fi rst two labels, Robey’s amalgamation of operations has often been referred to as Duke-Peacock, or sometimes simply as Peacock. Thus, that Erastus Street property has often been called, misleadingly, the Peacock studio. Yet Robey’s robust achievement depended almost entirely on hits produced elsewhere.

When Robey retired in 1973 and sold his music business holdings to ABC/

Dunhill Records, that deal encompassed fi ve record labels, a catalogue of close to 2,700 song copyrights (which he had typically purchased outright from cash-starved songwriters), approximately 2,000 unreleased masters, and contracts with over one hundred artists. Yet his success as a capitalist (whose medium just happened to be music recording) should not overshadow his impact on cultural history. For example, Jerry Zolten, in his book
Great God A’mighty!:
The Dixie Hummingbirds,
acknowledges that “Robey signed some of the most important artists in African-American blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel, making Peacock a prime force in the business of recording American roots music.” Moreover, in the
Handbook of Texas Online
Ruth K. Sullivan writes of Robey, “Although controversial because of his shrewd business practices and dealings with artists, he is credited with substantially infl uencing the development of Texas blues by fi nding and recording blues artists.” Indeed, hundreds of people—instrumentalists, singers, songwriters, arrangers—were part of the collective creative process that ultimately made Duke-Peacock so profi table, and Robey provided a way to showcase their talents.