House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) (6 page)

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Frank Juricek, 1948 (courtesy of Frank Juricek)

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Juricek performed on numerous Quinn-produced tracks starting in the late 1940s, including sessions with fellow musicians such as Hank Locklin, Leon Payne, Ernie Hunter, Lester Voytek, Red Novak, Pete Machanga, and singer Frances Turner. Later, after the studio moved to Brock Street, he played also on Quinn-engineered tracks produced by Pappy Daily. Refl ecting on those experiences, Juricek emphasizes the unique role that Quinn played in the regional music scene at the time:

He was the fi rst man doing the real recordings in Houston. . . . I used to hang out at the studio all the time, and I wanted to know how you took those acetate discs and turned them into masters. So he took me back there and showed me the whole process. . . . He showed me the plating process, and then he showed me what I called the “waffl

e” that he put between the labels in

the press—and out came the record. It looked like a waffl

e iron because of the

excess that came out around the edge of the press that had to be trimmed off .

According to Brewer, Quinn’s early recording sessions typically involved only one microphone—with the musicians arranged around it and the singer and primary instrumental soloist positioned closest. Because it was a direct-to-disc recording process, during each session Quinn had to hover watchfully with a clean paintbrush in hand, gently pushing toward the center of the disc the shavings dug out by the needle. By the end of the song, Quinn would have

“a big glob of wax” to discard.

As for the ambient environment, Brewer also notes that there was no heat or air-conditioning in Quinn’s Telephone Road building—a factor that could aff ect the whole recording process. He shares the following anecdote: We were on a two-day session when a wicked cold snap came through Houston during the night, following the fi rst day of recording. The next morning Bill had to use a blowtorch to heat up the motor in the lathe so that it would maintain a constant speed during the second day.

Accounts such as these illustrate only some of the challenges and problems that an early recording engineer such as Quinn had to address to create his products. Because the few major record companies were zealously protective of industry secrets and technology, he had to fi gure out the process and acquire workable studio equipment on his own. Moreover, because the federal government still controlled most of the nation’s shellac supply (and the major record companies dominated the limited market for the rest), he also had to scramble to procure the raw material for making records.

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But Quinn ingeniously pulled it off . He somehow arranged to purchase an older, phased-out pressing-plant machine from an unidentifi ed source.

Then he inquisitively began to tinker with it—experimenting, modifying, and updating it until it could meet his needs. He also scoured the city’s resale shops and garage sales, buying all the old 78 rpm records that he could fi nd.

He then pulverized them in a coff ee bean grinder, melted down the resulting shards and dust, and thereby reclaimed the reconstituted shellac-based material. However, the paper labels attached to the recycled records somewhat con-taminated the resulting substance, and that lack of purity negatively aff ected the sound quality it was capable of reproducing. Nonetheless, the process worked. Because the recycled matter was pliable and doughy, it was generally nicknamed “biscuit.” Mack McCormick, who knew Quinn fi rsthand, says that Quinn regularly scheduled “biscuit days” devoted to acquiring old records for reprocessing to yield ingredients for making new ones.

As a result, Quinn achieved a rare status for the 1940s, one unprecedented in Texas and throughout most of the South: self-suffi

ciency not only in mak-

ing recordings but also in mastering them, electroplating them, and then pressing multiple copies for distribution and sale. As Brown writes in the aforementioned liner notes, Quinn “had found an independent way to go from the studio to the warehouse, and so was free to put regional talent in record stores. He sneered at the monopoly, thereby helping to end it.”

t h e i n d e p e n d e n t q u i n n

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4

Gold Star Records

ill quinn must have had
an open mind about the music he recorded. Being an outsider to the region, he perhaps lacked the generally ingrained social prejudices of most middle-aged white men in the South at the time. His initial focus was simply on making the kinds of records that might get stocked on jukeboxes and in music stores in Houston and along the Southeast Texas coast. As a result, by 1947

he was readily producing sessions featuring black musicians as well as white, or featuring lyrics sung in either French or English. The styles he recorded predominantly refl ect the working-class tastes and demographics of the time and place: country, Cajun, gospel, and blues.

As a pioneer in the nascent business of independently recording, reproducing, and distributing roots music for popular consumption, Quinn faced many challenges. Having mastered the studio and pressing plant process, he next needed to align with a record label—a separate company that would handle business relationships with performers and product marketing. Ever the self-reliant individual, Quinn opted to create his own record label—twice, in fact. However, both would be relatively short-lived enterprises. More profi cient as an engineer than as a music mogul, for most of his career Quinn chose to concentrate solely on studio and plant operations. Yet during the approximately six years that he owned record labels, Quinn produced many historic discs.

Ownership of a record label should not be confused with ownership of a recording studio or pressing plant. A record company signs individual artists or groups to contracts, pays for recording sessions in studios and the creation of products in plants (but does not necessarily own those facilities), arranges for distribution and marketing of products, accounts for and pays royalties Bradley_4319_BK.indd 18

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(ideally, at least), and so on. On the other hand, a studio is the physical facility (equipped with sound-recording technology and serviced by in-house engineers) in which a recording session takes place and in which the results are subsequently mastered for reproduction. A pressing plant is a factory, separate from the studio, in which multiple duplicate copies of that product are rendered.

Grasping those distinctions is particularly important because Quinn would ultimately use the same brand name, Gold Star, for both a record label and, after relocating to Brock Street, his major studio facility. In other words, Gold Star Records is a separate enterprise from Gold Star Studios, though Quinn was proprietor of both. But before he ever began using the Gold Star name, back when he was doing business as Quinn Recording Services, he would make his initial foray into label ownership.

In league with someone—though exactly who is not clear—Quinn fi rst launched the Gulf Record Company label in July of 1944. In his
Harry Choates
liner notes, Andrew Brown cites Frank Sanborn and Orville “Bennie” Hess as the original partners, based on a DBA statement acknowledging the same.

Nevertheless, Brown also points to evidence suggesting that W. Kendall Baker may have been involved rather than Hess. Moreover, Quinn later is reported to have insisted, to musicologist Paul Oliver, that Vernon Woodworth was his only business partner at the time. Whatever the case, the Gulf gamble failed, coming as it did before Quinn had discovered the right artists, built his own pressing plant, or established any distribution strategy. Within a year of its creation, it was abandoned and replaced by Quinn’s Gold Star imprint.

According to Chris Strachwitz, Quinn told him that the fi rst commercial release on the doomed Gulf label was a 78 rpm disc featuring an artist identifi ed as Tex Moon performing an A-side song entitled “When We Planted Old Glory in Japan.” To date we have not been able to verify, however, that this record was ever actually issued to the retail market. It seems more likely that a Gulf disc attributed to Woody Vernon, “I’m Lonesome But I’m Free” backed with “A Rainy Sunday Night,” was the fi rst actually to be marketed. This recording was released with the catalogue number Gulf 100 (a numeration often used for the start of a series in recording). Moreover, Woody Vernon is known to have been the stage name of Vernon Woodworth, the man whom Quinn later identifi ed as his sole partner in the Gulf venture. Complicating matters, however, is Strachwitz’s implication that Tex Moon may have also been a stage name for Woodworth.

Whoever the singer might have been, the novice label owner Quinn fi rst struggled to get from the recording studio to the retail marketplace because he had no pressing equipment. In fact, the main signifi cance of Quinn’s Gulf Records debacle may be that it prompted him to build his own pressing
g o l d s t a r r e c o r d s

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plant. As Quinn soon discovered, the big record companies that controlled the only extant pressing facilities did not generally do custom pressings for small independent fi rms. He searched widely for a pressing service, thinking for a while that he had found one in Janette Records of Richmond, Virginia.

However, when it became clear that Quinn needed pressings not for some vanity project but for discs intended for commercial distribution on jukeboxes, that company (which had recently been absorbed by a major label, Decca Records) also refused. Quinn could have given up then, assuming that such obstacles, reinforced as they were by the policies and powers of the dominant corporations, were insurmountable. The only alternative, once again, was self-reliance. So Quinn located, bought, and transported the previously described used pressing machine and began to refurbish it and learn, entirely on his own, how to make duplicate discs of his recordings.

Only four singles released on the Gulf label have been accounted for to date, those identifi ed by the catalogue numbers 100, 103, 105, and 3000. The missing numbers in the 100 series may have been assigned to other releases, but so far no evidence of that has been discovered. Of that group, the most signifi cant is arguably “Nails in My Coffi

n” (#103), written and performed by

Jerry Irby. Although the record did little for Irby’s performing career, the song was good enough to soon be covered by both Floyd Tillman and Ernest Tubb, two giants of country music. Tillman’s version, recorded for the Columbia label (#36998), debuted in August of 1946 and peaked at number two on the country charts. Tubb’s treatment, released by Decca (#46019), came out in December of 1946, charting as high as number fi ve. Bolstered by such professional acknowledgment of his skills, Irby established a reputation as a songwriter. Incidentally, he returned to the studios in 1959 and rerecorded “Nails in My Coffi

n” for Hi-Lo Records (#1244/1245) as the fl ip side to “The Sea.”

Gulf single number 3000 is also noteworthy. It presents an African American group called Jesse Lockett and His Orchestra performing the songs

“Blacker the Berry” and “Boogie Woogie Mama.” Dating from early 1946, this recording features an incipient R&B sound, and it may well be the fi rst of such recordings ever made in Houston. Thus, it set the stage for the many important blues and R&B recordings that Quinn would soon produce on the Gold Star label.

by 1946 quinn had dropped the gulf records brand and founded a new company, Gold Star Records, which became one of the earliest and most successful independent record labels in the South. More importantly, it was the fi rst in Texas devoted to country, blues, and Cajun music—and the fi rst to produce a national hit.