House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (33 page)

n its hazy inception, a houston
company called International Artists was just another start-up independent record label with little experience and no interest in acquiring or operating a recording studio complex. Yet through a series of odd deals and maneuvers, orchestrated in part by J. L. Patterson, this corporation would become the fi rst rightful owner of the Gold Star facility in the post-Quinn era. It would maintain that status for about two years, 1968 to 1970, before declaring bankruptcy, losing the studio it had renamed, and getting out of the music business altogether.

Founded in 1965 as the International Artists Producing Corporation (IA), the company actively produced recordings for fi ve years, issuing twelve albums by eight diff erent bands and forty-two singles encompassing even more. That catalogue includes seminal tracks of late-1960s American rock music. As the cowriters Mike Callahan, Dave Edwards, and Patrice Eyries sum it up, “International Artists was an innovative label, releasing both early

‘psychedelic’ music and also proto-industrial rock many years before that became a genre in vogue. From today’s viewpoint, they might also be classifi ed as garage bands or even early punk rock.”

The

label’s

fi rst big draw was the Austin band called the 13th Floor Elevators, which accounted for four of the twelve IA albums and its fi rst hit single. That song, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” featured a fast-paced groove and the primal, passionate vocalizing of Roky Erickson (b. 1947). It fl irted with the
Billboard
Top 50 in the fall of 1966. Inspired by that modest success, IA soon built its small but impressive catalogue by signing the avant-garde group Red Krayola, the progressive rockers Bubble Puppy, and other groundbreaking experimental bands of the moment, as well as one vintage bluesman, Lightnin’ Hopkins.

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In so doing, IA was the unlikely vinyl vanguard of a cultural revolution that arguably sprang fi rst from Texas. The esteemed critic Chet Flippo, for one, makes the case that musical psychedelia originated in Texas, assert-ing that “The Elevators pre-dated and anticipated almost everything the San Francisco bands did.” As the dominant musical force on the IA label, the Elevators largely defi ned the company, which would follow the band’s arc of ascent and demise—seemingly mirroring its confusion along the way.

Understanding the next phase of Gold Star Studios history requires insight into both the Elevators and the whole IA corporate venture—the kind of company it was and how it came to possess and utilize the property at 5626

Brock Street. For starters, consider Flippo’s further observation: The Elevators and their record company are one of the strangest couples in music history. International Artists was a strange, faceless Houston company that, quite obviously, didn’t know the fi rst thing about music and, consequently, would sign anybody. The Elevators, as IA’s fi rst act, were a virtual baptism of fi re for the company. Neither the band nor the record company had any idea what the other was up to, but both were sure they were onto a good thing.

On the other hand, consider this opinion from Mayo Thompson, the leader of Red Krayola, which recorded two albums with the company: In its brief history, IA managed to help Houston’s emergent musical and social forces to consolidate. They had recorded the 13th Floor Elevators, Red Krayola, Lost and Found, Golden Dawn, Endle St. Cloud, Bubble Puppy, Dave Allen, and tapped Houston’s blues roots by recording an album with Lightnin’ Hopkins. They provided real production access for musical expression in Houston. And, for a time, they promoted a semicoherent set of formal and informal attitudes in a sphere of international production. With the solidity provided by IA, Houston’s underground had begun with some cohesion. Although it didn’t sweep all before it, it did manage to earn a place in the history of that period.

So who was IA? Four men had founded the International Artists record label in 1965: Bill Dillard, Noble Ginther Jr., Ken Skinner, and Lester Martin.

Skinner, whom writer Paul Drummond describes as “a music business hustler and publisher,” apparently was the catalyst for creating the label. Prior to IA’s inception, Skinner had already created Tapier Music (the publishing company that IA would use for its duration) and done some local recording production. Martin, in partnership with former Gold Star Studios engineer
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Doyle Jones, co-owned the Jones and Martin Recording Studios and the Astro Records label. Dillard, a lawyer, would maintain an offi

ce at the studio site. As

the president, he was the most involved in company aff airs. Ginther, also an attorney, was a relatively silent partner, rarely appearing at sessions.

Dillard had become part of the organization because of a prior legal con-troversy with Patterson, the Gold Star facility lessee. That situation ultimately led to IA buying the studio property in early 1968—and getting further entangled with Patterson in the process. Dillard explains how it began: The way I got involved in the business was . . . Ken Skinner and my law partner [Ginther] met at a party or somewhere, and Skinner wanted to sue J. L.

Patterson. I didn’t know Patterson or Skinner. I didn’t want to get involved, but fi nally Noble came back to me and said, “You know, Skinner is willing to pay a retainer,” and so forth. So I represented him for about six months.

While details of that case remain unexplained, it led somehow to Dillard and Ginther joining the organization in 1965. Dillard continues, Then we signed up the Elevators. Skinner told me about them. Told me that their music was trash and so forth, but for some reason a lot of people were after them. . . . Skinner wanted me to help him get the record company started. Working with him, I got hooked on the business. Anyone who said we were doing it as a tax write-off is lying. We got a little spin on the local radio stations for the Elevators, and their record began to sell—the “You’re Gonna Miss Me” single. We were trying to get it started all over the country.

Finally, Skinner—he knew a little about the business—said, “We need a good national promotion man. I know one in California. . . . Lelan Rogers.” So Lelan joined up. . . .

Rogers, a native Houstonian a generation older than the scruff y youngsters in the band, would go on to produce their fi rst two albums—and to become, fairly or not, a target of vilifi cation by some. However, as quoted by music critic Jim DeRogatis, Rogers once declared, “I didn’t produce them, I baby-sat them.”

As for IA’s acquisition of Gold Star Studios, Dillard says,

Doyle Jones, we had used him [to engineer recording sessions]. We used Walt Andrus. And there was a third [studio] called Gold Star. That’s the one we bought later—because we couldn’t work with the other two. Bill Quinn was the guy that owned it at the time. . . . but J. L. Patterson came to us and said he’d bought it, and he wanted to sell it to us—and get involved with us
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in the record business. Anyway, Patterson told us that he owned that studio.

But, knowing Patterson, he might have just leased it until he made the deal, and then bought it. [Laughter] He sold it to us. We bought it. . . . Patterson had told us that he owned Gold Star, so we bought it from him. We had no intention of doing business with him outside of buying the studio.

As soon as we’d signed the papers, he said, “I got a few personal things here I want to pick up.” So he brought a pickup truck and loaded it up with his “personal” stuff . Quinn came over—he was living next door—and introduced himself. I’d never met him. Anyway, he asked me how long I’d known Patterson. . . . He said, “He’ll be scraping the paint off the walls unless you stop him. You won’t have anything left.”

Nevertheless, the IA principals somehow fell under Patterson’s spell—

and, incredibly, became his partners. Without being privy to the particulars, we surmise that Patterson played up his status as the president of Data Industries, Inc., to convince them to align with him in some new scheme.

At any rate, here is Dillard’s explanation:

Anyway, Patterson was a hustler. He was interested in the law fi rm because Ginther was wealthy, you know. He started hanging around. . . . At that time

[late 1968], we had bought Skinner and Martin out. It was just me and Noble, really. We had it fi fty-fi fty. Patterson said that if we’d give him a third of our stock, enough to take it public, he’d go to New York and raise $100,000. We had about $40,000 that we owed, so we took him up on it, and he came back and said he had it. I never did see the money—I don’t know whether he got it or not. But he got on the board. . . . What Patterson wanted me to do was to come to Data Industries as executive vice president, and help him with that as well as International Artists.

Unfortunately for Dillard and Ginther, Patterson’s already troubled involvement with Data Industries would soon enough become IA’s problem too.

Meanwhile, Dillard says Patterson was always angling for ways to extract cash from IA, such as insinuating himself as the middleman for an alleged bribery scheme involving distant, unseen grafters. “When Patterson came back from New York, he said he’d talked to somebody who told him we never would get a number one record or get a spin in L.A. or New York until we made a deal with the Mafi a,” Dillard claims. Patterson also made expenditures replacing the very equipment that he had recently removed as “personal property.” “Patterson had decided that he was going to spend most of that $100,000 jazzing up the studio,” Dillard says. “We didn’t have a studio anymore, because he had wrecked it.”

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For the fi rst time since Quinn had folded his Gold Star Records label to concentrate solely on studio ownership, the company that owned the facility also owned the record label that mainly used it; they were one and the same.

Unfortunately, IA proved inept at running both. Marilyn von Steiger, the IA secretary following the acquisition, claims, “Ray Rush was the only person in the whole building who knew anything about the music business.”

Rush produced albums by the Elevators and Bubble Puppy, among others, at the recently rechristened International Artists Studios. He recalls how the Gold Star founder responded to having acid rockers and counterculture types on site. “Quinn was living in his house and never hung out when we were around. He was old school and thought we were rude and obnoxious,” he says.

“He headed into his house and closed the door when he saw us coming.”

Rush had encountered IA after independently producing two singles by a duo billed as Frankie and Johnny (actually K. T. Oslin and Scott Holtzman).

“IA wanted to lease the records from me, and that’s how I came to be fi rst associated with the label,” he says. “It did okay, but it is what got me involved with Dillard and Ginther.”

As for Patterson’s role in actual studio operations, both Rush and von Steiger assert that he was rarely on site. “J. L. Patterson was what I called an investor in the company,” Rush explains. “There was Bill, Lelan, Noble, and whoever else we could get to invest in the company.”

They managed to stay afl oat through 1970.

the 13th floor elevators were the trailblazing psychedelic rock band in terms of the timing of their debut, instrumental innovations, philosophi-cal underpinnings, stream of consciousness experimentalism, and intensity of performances. From the quirkiness of LSD guru Tommy Hall’s wobbly tones on the electric jug to the cascading wail of high-pitched rhymes spew-ing forth from Erickson, from Stacy Sutherland’s mind-bending guitar licks to the grinding groove conjured by the rhythm section (originally bassist Bennie Thurman and drummer John Ike Walton), they were unique. Though the band broke up in 1968, today their recordings still attract a devoted and evolving coterie of fans worldwide.

Their

fi rst album,
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators,
recorded in Dallas, had introduced their potent sound in 1966. They followed up in 1967 with their masterpiece album
Easter Everywhere,
recorded in Houston at Andrus’s studio. The next year, their label company having acquired its own recording facility, they started working there on what would become
Bull of
the Woods,
their fi nal album.

The Elevators had fi rst come to Gold Star Studios in June 1966 for a demo
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session pre-dating their debut LP. When they came back in January 1968—

this time with Danny Thomas on drums and Dan Galindo on bass—the Gold Star name would soon be gone. They recorded one song “Never Another,”

then abruptly aborted the session and Galindo exited the band.

Shortly thereafter on January 30, 1968, IA completed the purchase and renamed the facility International Artists Studios. Vivian Holtzman reported that transaction in her February 4th “Nowsounds” column and quotes Rogers saying that the Elevators would soon record there, followed by the Red Krayola and the Blox, as well as Lightnin’ Hopkins.

On February 7, 1968, the Elevators returned to resume work on the new album, tentatively titled
Beauty and the Beast.
However, producer Rogers had decided to quit the company, so Rush took over. He says, “I did quite a bit of work with the 13th Floor Elevators. Producing them was not diffi cult because

they really had an excellent knowledge of what they were about and what their limitations were.” The engineers on the various Elevators sessions at IA Studios were Jim Duff , Fred Carroll, or Hank Poole, depending on the date.

The sessions continued frequently through February and into March. Then two more were documented in April, and the last session was May 3rd.