House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (32 page)

But because they “weren’t the greatest singers,” Becker says he and Duff “buried their parts in reverb from those live chambers in the hallway.”

Original Bad Seeds member Taylor (who incidentally is the brother of Pozo Seco’s Susan Taylor) describes the studio environment at the time: Back in the Gold Star days I remember the control room as being very stark: linoleum fl oors, white sheetrock walls, white acoustic ceiling tiles, speakers hanging from the ceiling, machines on the side wall, the small board with the huge black knobs, and a couple of chairs. There was no furniture to speak of and not much else to break up the starkness of the area. I think we were recording on four tracks. . . . They were mixing down to mono and stereo. Then over next to an unused control room was a cutting lathe, and Duff went over there to prepare an acetate copy of the fi nished tape master.

Though short-lived, the Bad Seeds made music highly favored among certain afi cionados of primal rock. Their studio recordings have been reissued on various compilation CDs, including one called
Texas Battle of the
Bands
(Collectables, 1995). Of the twelve tracks on that disc, half feature the Bad Seeds and half present Zakary Thaks, another Corpus Christi group that mined a similar vein. But Zakary Thaks, despite its also brief existence, would be a seminal ancestor of the Texas garage-punk subculture.

Consider that critic Richie Unterberger (in his
All Music Guide
profi le) refers to Zakary Thaks as “one of the best garage bands of the ’60s, and one of the best teenage rock groups of all time.” Bruce Eder (in his review of the
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The Bad Seeds, publicity photo, 1966

aforementioned CD) calls Zakary Thaks “an undeservedly overlooked group, at least as worthy of respect for their music as the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.”

Given the globally established cultlike following that still deifi es the Elevators four decades after their demise, that is high praise indeed. So who was Zakary Thaks?

The original lineup featured Chris Gerniottis on vocals (fi fteen years old on the fi rst recordings), John Lopez on lead guitar, Pete Stinson on rhythm guitar, Stan Moore on drums, and Rex Gregory on bass. Gregory says,
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We took our musical cues from the more hard-rocking bands from England—like the Kinks, Rolling Stones, Pretty Things, and the Yardbirds.

. . . Our fi rst single, released in 1966—“Bad Girl,” with the cover of a Kinks song, “I Need You,” on the B-side—was recorded in a small one-track studio in McAllen, Texas. Both sides of that record got tremendous airplay, and national distribution was picked up by Mercury Records.

Our second single on J-Beck Records, “Face to Face” and “Weekday Blues,” was done at Gold Star. . . . “Face to Face” was number one in Corpus Christi for about a month, and it went to number one in San Antonio and Austin for a couple of weeks. It also went high up the charts in Houston. . . .

We recorded a couple of more songs on that session also, and one of them was “Won’t Come Back.”

As with the Bad Seeds, the band’s Gold Star sessions were produced by Becker and engineered by Duff . In certain Texas cities in 1967 “Face to Face”

shared Top Five ranking with songs by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and other heavyweights.

“The Zakary Thaks were my hottest act,” says Becker. “We were way ahead of our time with that band. We were using controlled feedback on that record.” Unterberger also notes the power of that sound, particularly how “the group added a thick dollop of Texas raunch to their fuzzy, distorted guitars and hell-bent energy.” But he adds, “Most importantly, they were fi rst-rate songwriters.”

As for that strange band name, according to Beverly Paterson, writing in the liner notes to a CD compilation of Zakary Thaks recordings, the choice was motivated by its connotation of British exotica. She quotes Gerniottis as saying, “Somebody saw it somewhere in a magazine and it sounded diff erent.

And it also sounded English, which was perfect since we were all heavily into the whole British Invasion thing.”

Later, Zakary Thaks also issued recordings on the Cee-Bee label and the band’s own imprint, Thak Records. Their success even attracted the entrepreneurial attention of Duke-Peacock boss Don Robey and music promoter Huey Meaux, who lured the group back to Gold Star Studios to cut more tracks for possible release on Robey’s Back Beat label. Gregory recalls one such case:

I remember one session when [Meaux] brought us to Houston. . . . Bobby

“Blue” Bland was here also. He was staying at the [same] hotel with his little entourage and was also recording at Gold Star. . . .

The session that we did was produced by Andre Williams for Don Robey, who was also working in the studio with Bobby Bland. . . . One of
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Zakary Thaks, 1966

the engineers was Jim Duff and also a guy named Fred Carroll, later on. . . .

Apparently none of the songs that we recorded for Back Beat were ever released, and there were at least three or four fi nished songs.

Though the band broke up and re-formed several times between 1968 and 1972, the prime phase for Zakary Thaks was 1966 to 1968—a period that covers the evolution from its garage-punk roots into experimental psychedelia.

After the fi rst breakup Gerniottis also recorded in Houston with the similarly inclined group Liberty Bell, and some of those tracks were overdubbed and mastered at Gold Star Studios too. “Look for Tomorrow” ended up as an A-side on a Back Beat single.

Zakary Thaks was at Gold Star both before and after a new partnership would take over studio operations. The band roster was fl uctuating too. Thus, we fi nd a June 1968 International Artists invoice made out to Stan Moore for a lengthy recording and mixing session for Zakary Thaks, engineered by Fred Carroll. Featuring only Lopez, Gregory, and Moore in the power-trio format,
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that date produced several songs. Among these are some of the most vividly psychedelic Thaks tracks, including “Green Crystal Ties” and “My Door.”

Gold Star Studios served as the recording base for various other notable rock bands in the 1960s, including Leo and the Prophets, the Minutemen, and Yesterday’s Obsession. Duff recorded Yesterday’s Obsession for the Pacemaker Records single “Complicated Mind” and “The Phycle” (#262). Not much is known about the band, but its music intrigues. As Brett Koshkin describes it in his
Houston Press
blog: “A heavy-handed organ chugging along with soft vocals and some really interesting swirling guitars, ‘The Phycle’ is a true psychedelic work of audible art from Houston. Released in 1966, this single 45 stands as the solitary release by yet another one of Huey P. Meaux’s mystery groups.”

Meanwhile, an independent rock label named Orbit Records staged numerous sessions at Gold Star, all engineered by Duff , between mid-1967 and early 1968. Among the results are the Rebellers doing “The New Generation” and

“Common People” (#1114) and the Nomads doing “Three O’clock Merriam Webster Time” and “Situations” (#1121). The Nomads, featuring singer Brian Collins, were also produced by Duff .

by early 1968 the retired gold star studios owner Quinn was looking to divest himself of his holdings. For the fi rst time since he had hung a microphone in the downstairs room of his house, somebody else would own the recording site that he had founded. Quinn’s age was surely a factor in his decision, but we suspect that dealing with Patterson was growing as tiresome for him as it was for Duff and others. Summing up his view of Patterson, Duff points to certain behaviors that speak for themselves:

I remember that during the negotiations to sell the studio to International Artists, J.L. was constantly carrying things out of the building, saying that these things were personal possessions and not part of the sale. One day I was sitting in the control room with Bill Dillard [the buyer], and J.L. came in to disconnect a piece of gear, and Dillard said, “If you so much as take one more wire out of here, the deal is off , and I mean now, immediately.” He turned to me and said, “Don’t let him take one more thing out of this building.”

So Dillard goes out, gets a huge new lock, and puts it on the door. Quinn comes over and sees the new lock and says, “If you are putting a lock on the door, I’m going to put a new lock on there also.” J.L. then puts one of his locks on the door. So the damn front door had three locks on it, and they all had to give me keys so I could get in the door.

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It was a surrealistically distrustful time for the parties involved in the pending transaction. Duff adds, however, that “J.L. had no problems getting through the three locks and could get in within a minute anytime he wanted to. He would get anything he wanted.”

Despite the tensions, Patterson would continue to be marginally involved with the studio into its next regime. But he had serious legal problems of his own brewing, some of which would eventually result in felony convictions and imprisonment. Thus, the imminent sale of Gold Star to International Artists pleased Duff . After all, he was the key engineer before and after this transition, a survivor, and it signifi ed a resurrection for him. Along with new owners and staff , it would bring a diff erent identity and new priorities as the late 1960s unfolded.

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15

International Artists Record Company

t h e p s yc h e d e l i c b u s i n e s s p l a n