EAST TEXAS UNFILTERED w/J. Chad Parker: Featuring Robin Hood Brians

Local music legend Robin Hood Brians joins East Texas UNFILTERED with J. Chad Parker. Robin Hood talks about how music came naturally to him from the start, and that gift shaped the course of his life.
Robin Hood breaks down how he built his studio on Sunnybrook Drive in Tyler. He explains how that studio became the place where ZZ Top recorded its first albums. He was a key part of shaping the early sound that helped make the band famous around the world. Robin Hood also shares a wild story about recording Ike and Tina Turner and what it was like to watch that tension up close in the studio.
Robin Hood shares how music still drives him today.  His love for songwriting, church music, and the creative process has kept him working for decades in the music business. This is a memorable conversation about a man who made music history right here in Tyler. Be sure to like and subscribe for more great East Texas stories.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know you hear of people saying uh that some people just have an ear for music and and you saying I guess you're one of those Yeah, I was born with just just a natural talent, and the ninth grade I told my parents I'm not going back to piano lessons, you can whip me, you can beat me, you can grab me, I'm not going back. That's when I started just really playing the piano for the fun of it. I didn't enjoy the piano lessons because it was just so regimented in reading the music. In fact, my daughter loves to tell a story about me when I was uh taking those piano lessons. I asked my teacher, play this through for me, you let me see how you want me to play it, but she played it while I listened carefully. And I went home and I learned it by ear. Well when I came back, I put the music up there, and I would look up there and I played it, and she went over and she put her hand on her head to Robin, it's a miracle. Tuesday you couldn't read music. Today, you can transpose. I got it wrong.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Welcome to another episode of East Texas Unfiltered. I'm your host, Jay Chad Bark. Today we're gonna talk music. More specifically, we're gonna talk producing music. We're gonna talk to someone who's been in it for over 60 years based on my research. He's gonna tell us how it all got started and what he's doing today amazingly, which is working uh six days a week in his mind. Robin Hood, thank you for being here. Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure. You know, I've seen bits and pieces of your story on different interviews on the internet, but today we hope to, you know, to start from the beginning and find out, you know, how you learned to love music and how you got into it. Um and it seems it was early life in Corsicana, was it?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

You are absolutely correct. I had uh a music teacher, a singing teacher. Her name was Aline Trimble at the time. Uh she later moved to Dallas and married uh one of Leo, what his name was Leo Byrd, he's one of the Admiral Byrd family. Um and so I remember a performance in Corsicana, so I had to be six or younger, where I had to sing bell bottom trousers, coat of navy blue, she loves her sailor, and he loves her too, and do a somersault on the stage. It was the Lions Club uh variety show over there. And that's how I started. Was that uh through the school? No, that was that was through the Lions Club that they did that. Really? Um and I somewhere in my house, my mother has an article out of the Dallas Morning News that I've got to find that uh that she had clipped out of the Dallas Morning News about they call me the little man with a big voice because my voice was fairly low for a kid. Uh in fact, having that voice later on got me in the choir at Christchurch when I was only 13. I was an acolyte and Paul Grubb was the choir director. Paul Grubb from the brass line. Yeah. And I put the cross in the holder and was putting it in, and these two big hands hit me right here. And he said, Hey son, you got a nice voice. Said, You're gonna sit over there and sing with the choir. He said, You can still do your acolyte stuff, but you're gonna sit with us. I said, Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Well, I know you've been in the choir 72 plus years. Yeah. I mean, so obviously you love to sing and you love to be around music. I'm gonna keep doing it till I get it right. After the Lions Club, you know, gig, it seems like you kind of got the bug for something, you know, musical, theatrical. Is that is that really where it started?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Well, when we moved over here to Tyler uh when I was six, uh started piano lessons with Mrs. Durst. Her studio was right across the st well, next to Faulkner Studio, right across the street from the old high school downtown. And I didn't enjoy those lessons. Um I like to play piano just by ear, but I have ADHD. And back then they didn't know what it was. You were just hyper. I was just a hyper kid at uh always changing the subjects and doing things, and my wife refers to my Robin Williams moments when I come up with some line that I just blurt out. But um I didn't enjoy the piano lessons because it was so regimented and reading the music. In fact, uh my daughter loves to tell the story about me. When I was uh taking those piano lessons, I asked my teacher one Tuesday, play this through for me, and let me see how you want me to play it. Well, she played it. Well, I listened carefully, and I went home and I learned it by ear. Well, when I came back, I put the music up there, and I would look up there and I played it, and she went over and she put her hand on her head and said, Robin, it's a miracle. She said, Tuesday you couldn't read music. Today you can transpose. I got it in the wrong key.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Well, that's amazing. You know, you hear people saying uh that some people just have an ear for music.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Uh and and you seem I guess you're one of those Yeah, I was born with just just the natural talent. And in the ninth grade, I told my parents, I'm not going back to the piano lessons. You can whip me, you can beat me, you can ground me, I'm not going back. So they said, Well, if you're not gonna practice, we won't waste the money. And that's when I started just really playing the piano for the fun of it. And that went on until I was in high school. And well, let me back up. I had a quartet starting in the fourth grade. John Bass was one of the singers. Son Son? Son Son. Yeah, he was the bass. The sports uh the sportster, that that store that was here for many years. And then in in Hog Junior High, I had a quartet. Francis K. of Reynolds. Reynolds K. Uh John Stanley.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Um John Stanley, any relation to J. D. Stanley Stanley's barbecue?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

No, he he he was not akin to that. Uh and trying to remember the other, remember John John Bass, Francis Kay, John Stanley, and me. That's four. Um, and we had a group called the Four Roses. And uh sometimes Mrs. DeMontell, our choir director over at Hogg's Junior High School, would accompany us. Otherwise, we would just sing a cappella. When we were a cappella, we were the four roses. When she would accompany us, we were the four roses and a fifth. Now you wouldn't do that today, probably in the public school systems, but you know, I and I was always the one who had to grab whatever was left. Because John John sang the bass, Frances sang the lead, John Stanley sang the tenor part, and I just reached out to find whatever was left because I had a natural knack for finding harmonies. Anytime I'd be driving down the street and hear an Everly Brothers song, I'd sing the third part always. And uh, you know, it was just what I felt.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

It was just natural. How did you get from Corsicana to Tyler and when was that?

SPEAKER_00 7:33

Uh in 1945, uh my father retired from the oil business and bought a farm out near Edom. And we raised peaches, roses, gladiolas, uh Dutch iris, and uh the freeze of 1949 killed three crops of roses. The ones that were a year old, the ones that had just been put in cuttings, the ones that had ready to be harvested. My daddy said, I've had enough. He said, if I get a dry hole in the oil business, I'll know it in six weeks. I don't have to wait a year, two years to get blown out of business. So he went back into the oil business. And we we only lived out on that farm for one year because of the school system. It was really terrible. The school had burned down, so they were holding all the classes in the gymnasium with just blackboards separating. And uh uh my parents said this can't be. And so my grandmother, who was a rather strange lady, she had done everything. During World War II, she packed parachutes in Pyote, Georgia, or South Carolina, wherever it is. Uh she was working at Myron Schmidt, and she had an apartment uh in the red, it was a red apartment building across from the old high school, next to Faulkner Studio. It's now painted gray. My father referred to that as a tenement district. But there was no place to get a house. You couldn't buy a house after World War II in 1946.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

No, there were the they were no houses. They weren't building houses. Right. Nobody they were the war effort was or actually was a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Yeah, it was a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

And your grandmother was kind of like a rosy riveter, you know, where they talk about women that went into work in the military, you know, construction, whatever jobs because most of the men were off in uh you know, Europe somewhere. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Or and so we all moved into that little apartment, and I went to uh second, third, and fourth grade in Gary Elementary. My dad went to Gary, Hogg, both. And then I went to Hogg and had that quartet, and I was in the choir. When I got to high school, I was in the choir, and Clyde Wolford was the director, great director. We loved him. He was fantastic. And uh I enjoyed that. I did not have a great voice, still don't. Uh allergies right now are about to kill me. I mean, when you see trees extra high, you come out in the morning and your black car is is yellow, you know it's gonna be like this. Right now. I know. But uh I really enjoyed music in high school. It was a it was a big part of my life. I'd had a trio and John Bass once again was singing with me. And um I don't know, I I didn't know for sure whether I I was gonna go into music. I was the photographer for the Lion's Tale, which was the the the newspaper at Tyler High School. It was Tyler High School, and so I considered going into photography. Of course, my father was in the oil business, so I went to TJC. I I majored in geology for one semester, then I changed to business for one semester, then I changed to music for one semester. Anybody say ADHD? Well, you just you you were curious about a lot of subjects. Exactly. And I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Um for my graduation, my sister, who was a magnificent architect, was living in New York. So she sent me a round trip ticket to New York. I went up there and interviewed with some photographers, considered going up there, but I ended up back here, going to school, working for Faulkner Studio, and I had a band. So I put together a friend of mine built a little mixer for me, and I would record wherever there was room. The women's building auditorium was a good place. Uh, the basement of our church, there was a piano down there. I would go to different schools and churches and set it up. And I recorded some uh on the stage at Tyler Junior College. And finally my parents said, Well, this is enough that we because what had happened is when I first heard Jerry Lee Lewis playing a whole lot of shaking going on, I said, That got you. I'm gonna learn to do that. And my friends laughed at me, said, Yeah, sure. So when Jerry Lee Lewis came here, he came to the Mayfair building. I came to the Mayfair building. I knew the guys at the radio station. They said, Robin Hood, you're gonna be their guide. So I hooked up with them. Uh the band was looking for beer, so I had to take them to Kilgord back. Uh I got to sit there in the hotel room that was a little piano and watch him up close. And so I wrote a song called Dissa Idabit. And we've got it here for you.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Oh Lord. There it is. There it is. Yeah. You know, I listened to that on the internet and I said to Chris, the producer, I said, Look, this sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis and and a Elvis, but it sounds a lot like Jerry Lee Lewis. It it did. Oh yeah. 1958, this record gets made, is what it says, right? Yep.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Um It was an interesting session because uh I I I should tell the whole story here. When I did the demo, I went down to KTBB radio session. They had a piano, so I did the demo, and Randy Robbins played drums. Randy's father was had the jukebox route here. And he he sent the demo to a distributor in Dallas, and he sent it to Fraternity Records, and Fraternity Records called and wanted to sign me. Well, Randy's parents wanted the act to be Randy and Robin. Well, Harry Carlson, the president of Fraternity, said, No. I want to hi we want to sign the singer-songwriter, and that's all. And so that was a a bit of a sad moment for me because of the fact that his father had helped me get it sent off to the right people. But I went to Nashville and I was sharing a session with a guy named Dale Wright, who had had a hit called She's Neat. Now, back then uh union sessions were four hours. So Dale was gonna get two hours and I was gonna get two hours. Well, he went three and a half hours. That left me 30 minutes. So they said, Well, at least we'll get one song. Let's give the just a head a bit. So Owen Bradley sat down and they started playing the piano and they put me over there on a microphone and I stopped. I said, Mr. Bradley, can I show you the piano part for this, please? He said, Sure. Well I sat down and I just started doing it. He said, Stop. He said, Can you sing and play at the same time? I said, Yeah. He said, Roll that mic over here. So I did it. And they said, That's a take, do a safety. So we did it again. And then they sent me over back over there, and I did the flip side, which was a song written by a disc jockey. Harry Carlson was real good about helping disc jockeys. So he always was able to come back when things were bad, because he had a lot of friends. And this song was called Without You. And it was probably the most paradoxical thing for this record to be on one side. And what would I do if I had to do without you? A lot different deal. Well, when we left, I heard Lou Douglas, the arranger, tell Harry Carlson, said, Harry, the kid's got talent, but he's got to make up his mind whether he wants to be Jerry Lee Lewis or Ben Crosby. Because they were so different.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Well, you know, before we keep on going, tell us how you got the name Robin Hood.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Well, that's funny because I'm a junior on my birth certificate. Robin Hood Bryans Jr. But later on we found some writings by my father's older sister, Aunt Allie. She wrote that I had a younger brother born five years my junior. His name was Robert Franklin Bryans, but he didn't like his uncle Frank when so when he was seven years old, he wanted to change his name. And they said, What do you want to change it to? And he said, Robin Hood. Because of the story? I guess. So that's what we're left with. But I'm still on my birth certificate a junior. So it must be true because when my my father died and my mother applied for the his uh Army uh you know retirement, they couldn't find a Robin Hood. But they did find a Robert F. Bryans. And so you're really not a junior? I'm really not a junior.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

I'm uh now the name itself, early on, did it did it open you up to people. Oh, yeah, it did. It opened me up to get my butt whipped in the third grade. That's what it did over at Gary Elementary. I mean, I just knew that was coming, even though we've never talked about that.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

But Well, imagine you're you're in the third grade. Right. I know uh your name's Robin Hood. You're four-eyed, that's what they call me, four-eyed. You like the choir. Yeah. You you you you left football practice early on Thursdays to go to piano lessons. Uh so during the summer between the third and fourth grade, my daddy taught me how to fight. He said, son, you won't have to fight much. Said all you have to do is just stand there, and when one of them come up to you, they're not they're gonna be running at you. Said, they won't expect it. Just pop one of them in the nose and stand there with your arms crossed. And I did. My daddy gave a lot of good advice. Back when I was 16, and I I had a I have a weak chin, so I grew the beard to to overcome that. But people making fun of you. You had a record and, you know, you've played music and sang. And I asked my daddy, I said, How do you keep people from laughing at you? And he said, Laugh with them, and then poke fun at them, and you'll end up being buddies. And it worked.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Well, you know, you we were talking about this uh uh Eddie bit and this song because you wrote that song and you played uh piano and you sang. Yeah. Did you ever get any money? Uh did you get compensated for that record?

SPEAKER_00 18:31

You know, well, I was paid union scale. Like yeah, that's a very legitimate record label back then, but it never did sell enough that I'd ever get any royalties on it. Uh it was what they called back then a turntable hit. It was it was very popular in certain cities uh where it got good airplay, but it and funny thing about it is years later I realized that if you take my melody, you realize that sometime later it was copied. Going to a party at the County Jail, prison band was there, and they began to wing. That's why I said Elvis. Yeah. Earlier. That's rock.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

I mean, it's identical to mine, but nobody noticed it until there were no uh, you know, copyright infringement cases back then. That's true. Right? Yeah, not many. Um how about the play? You know, the radio play, was there any back here where you kind of got a boost as kind of a local celebrity? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

I was a Tyler Texas star is what I are. It was it was great because when I started my studio, it was instrumental in helping attract people. Instant credibility. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Yeah. Exactly. So this is out in 58. How old uh a man are you in 1958 when you go up there and make this record? I'm just out of high school. Okay. And then you've got this college thing going on. You've worked at Faulkner Studio. When is it that in your mind you think about having your own studio?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Well, the day we left Owen Bradley Studios in Nashville, I told my parents, this is what I want. I want one of these. Did you see a soundboard, a mixer, or something? Well, they they actually had small little ampex mixers, and and the the booth up there was a booth. They cut off the corner of the room. What they did, they went to a house on 16th Avenue South, and they went in and they cut out the floor in the living room and dining room. And so they had from the basement all the way up to the second floor to give high ceilings, and they cut off a corner to make the booth, and uh that was the original studio. You walk through this door into the office and walk through this door and go downstairs to the actual studio. And I told my parents, I said, this is what I want to do. I want a recording studio. And so the the portable mixer that I had that I would take to the church or the woman's building or wherever was just to learn to record until I got to the point where I could have a studio. Finally, I was recording a lot of records in the living room, and I took the little porch and turned that into a control room, and my parents finally said, We can't take this anymore. We this boy's gotta have a studio.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

I mean, everything you learned about acoustics and sounds and things of that nature, uh, was that all just kind of on the job?

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Well, partly, but I had some mentors. Um far as the engineering is concerned, uh in Dallas I got to visit with a man named Tommy Loy. Some of the older folks in your audience will remember a little short, bald-headed trumpet player that would come out and play the Star Spangled Banner on his trumpet while people would sing it. That was Tommy Loy. He was uh a trumpet player in a jazz band. He worked at a recording studio up there. He was a mentor, he would teach me things. And then uh there was an engineer at KDOK named Roby Morgan. I told Roby what I wanted. I said, I want a mixing board with 10 inputs. I want a I want a uh a control and a equalizer, high and low equalizer, and I want two channels out. And he said, Well, you have to build it. There's nothing made out there. And so he took the schematic of a voice of music recorder, a little home recorder, and copied the mic preamp in that, except he put a very expensive Thortison transformer on the front to make it a pro, and he built one of them. It was plug-in, it's a little mini box. I mean, you couldn't go out and buy mic pre's. You had to take a box and drill a hole and mount a tube socket and mount another socket and mount the transformer, put all the resistors and condensers and build it. And when you had one, then I copied that nine times. And we made ten of them. And the I'll get you pictures of that. Is this it? That's it.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

Okay. So we anticipated and and believed that this was the first mixing board that you built. Yeah. And so we're looking at this. Yeah. I mean, this is not something, so the audience knows that you could go out to a music store like Munt Music and say, I'd like to buy something like this.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Well, I could give you a long list of things you could not go out and buy. You couldn't buy headphone boxes. So I had to get little mini boxes, drill the holes, put the plugs and all, and wire it in. You couldn't buy a direct hookup to hook a bass or a guitar directly into the mic. You had to get the transformer and the box and build it. I built so much on that studio.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

It is, you know, I've always wondered, just being a person who loved music and just never knew how to play an instrument. But when I saw, you know, um shows about people recording, recording songs, you'd always see someone in the booth with a big mixing board, and they were moving these things around. And, you know, I always wondered, how in the world do they know where to move all of those things?

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Well, I tell the younger generation, with that board right there, I would record mono.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

We had one track. You mean just one song and say, okay, this is the take we're going to use. We would record sometimes for six, seven hours.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

To get the one. Because every musician had to get it right at the same time. Right. You couldn't bring it back in. No. Because the engineer had to get it right. So the very first control on the left, this one over here, that was the vocal. And there was no such thing as a limiter or compressor for the vocal. So I had to sit there and vary the sound of the vocal to keep him from being loud and do all yeah. Or two. Yeah, well both. Yeah. Just just keep him alright and then control the others at the same time. I mean, it was like a one-arm circus there. Um but I uh that console sounded really, really good because Roby was a good engineer. He he was he was a good friend, and uh he would never charge me anything.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Well, he probably loved music and he probably wanted to help people that also loved music. Yeah, he did, and he uh he was he was a good soul. You you you you're coming off this, you know, kind of local fame from the record. You've got this new fangled machine that's built. Do you open up your first studio uh with this stuff, kind of looking for people to come to record?

SPEAKER_00 25:43

I was already busy recording in the living room. Okay, you were Oh, I was fully operational recording sessions every week. That's why the parents said, enough of this.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

And this is in the 60s. Yeah. Okay, in the 60s, one has to wonder who are the people that would come that would want to pay to record in the 1960s?

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Part of my clientele was a group who did square dance records. Part of my clientele was um uh there was a record shop here, Mrs. Anton, Anton's record shop. She had a little label called Titex Records. She had several artists she recorded, and people started coming from all around I would get people from Shreeport.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Tillman Would they buy local content that was made, you know, because there wasn't such a big distribution of artists across the country?

SPEAKER_00 26:37

No, these were people who were putting out records nationally. Really? Yeah. In fact, Billy Jean Horton, Johnny Horton's widow, came over and recorded in my living room. She said, I'm gonna find out where you make this sound if I have to tear the walls out. And uh Did it make a good sound in the living room? Yeah, it I mean Yeah, it well well, because I had to cheat. I I had to record the bass direct so there was no bass amp rolling in there. The piano had a big quilt over it to keep the drums from getting in there. Um and the guitar amps were turned toward the wall with a big pad over there and the mic right in the speaker so they could turn them down. You know, it was it was, you know, I mean, those are tricks of the trade kind of, I guess, that you learn and experiment with. Yeah. See that microphone right in the middle, the big one hanging there? Yes. That microphone is the girl that got away from me. My sister, being an architect, moved to Spain. She designed holiday inns, Hilton Inns. She was a genius. And she was designing the American School of Madrid's new buildings and the Quaishler Corporation buildings over there. She said, I'm going to Germany, and I said, I want a Neumann or Telefunken, they called it, U 47, and I sent her the money. She went over to Munich, went to the factory, paid the money, said, Your mic's on the way. She didn't tell me that that Telefunken was no longer selling the Neumann U 47 as theirs, and they sent me this one, which was a Telefunken. Oh, there's gonna be some people out there that watch this and go, you fool. It was a Telefunken ELA M250, which is very similar to the 251. Those microphones today are$40,000. And I traded it off because my clients looked at it and it didn't look like the U47, and they didn't trust the sound. I should have kept it, but I moved on and bought more Neumanns. But I do have a microphone very similar. That microphone was made by AKG in Germany, in uh Switzerland, and I have an AKG C12, which is virtually the same microphone now. What name did you use for the first studio that you had? Bryan's Recording Studios. Now we know it didn't stay Brian's. No, not very long, because everybody called it Robin Hood's. Right. Besides, people in in print would say Brian apostrophe S, as though Joe's barbershop. Yeah. And my dad laughed at that, and so I said, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and change it.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

So Robin Hood Studio comes into you know existence um probably with the di I don't know if you have any logo or marketing back then. This is what you have now. That's the new logo.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

The old one was uh an actual stained glass I had made. It's still at the studio, it's about that big square. Carrie Kent, uh, who did stained glass here in Tyler, had a girl working for him that did it, and it's beautiful. I used that for years. But several years ago I asked my son to uh take that same design and turn it into something more modern, and this is what he did. But my father, mother, and I built that studio. We did everything except the hadide blocks. Is it at the same location that it was? Yep. On Sunnybrook? Yep. We poured the slab. My father knew how to do everything. Um and so we had the hadide blocks laid, and we did all the carpentry and the roofing and the plumbing and the electrical and the interiors, and did you insulate it? I'm I'm assuming Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

It was I mean ceiling, floor, years ago.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

A car came down Sunnybrook and jumped the curb, jumped over a creek about nine feet long, hit on it and went over and hit a house, and we didn't even hear it because we were so well insulated.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Well, obviously, you know, the one thing that I hear from you is that your parents were very supportive in in this endeavor that you they knew you loved. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Well, looking back at it, my father had been in the oil business uh uh most of his life, but the last ten years was not good to him. Um he um he was drilling mostly where there was shallow production in Illinois, Indiana, and uh Tennessee. And he he knew there was oil there, but they reached contract depth and they hadn't found it. The partner said, Ah, we'll write it off. Drill another one a little deeper. In his lifetime, he saw three people come back and lease places where he had drilled, go deeper and become multi, multi-millionaires. Yeah, that's got to be frustrating if you understand the business. Yeah, and he uh he he didn't have a dime when he died. He died four months after the studio opened.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Really? Yeah. So he really never got to see you fully operational and flourishing? Well, yeah, he did. In the living room.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

In the living room. No. We were blowing and going for those four months. Okay. I mean, Tillman Franks uh brought groups over from Freeport and uh it started with a bang. When did he die?

SPEAKER_01 32:13

November of 63. Okay, so that takes us to 63. Have you written any other songs that you've actually sang or played and made a record on after 1958? Oh yeah, I had several.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

I had one called uh Um Goodbye So Long Honolulu.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

I I found that one coming back from the from the war. 1969. That record was put out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

Um and then uh I did a song called Girl of St. Martinville about my wife. Um Mouse and the Traps was was one of the first groups I worked with. They played in Monroe. Monroe, Louisiana. And they swapped sets with uh a girls group from South Louisiana called The Girls. And they handed me their business card and they got back and said, You need to contact these girls. One singer is really good. So I went down to hear them, fell in love with a bass player.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Which was Suzanne? Yep. I was gonna ask you how you met her, but I guess and this was in the 60s, right? This was in 1970. 1970. This is an old photograph of Mouse in the Trap with the Beatles look, yeah. Um headband.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Well, that's Bugs Henderson. That's Bugs, yeah. And uh Ken Nardo Murray, Dave Stanley. And I'm trying to remember the name of this keyboard player, David. I'm gonna get in trouble for this. Tim Gillespie was the first keyboard player. And then we had this one, and now they've got a a guy named uh Gary Freeman, who's University of North Texas really great. Um but anyway, they handed me the card, so I went down and visited with them, and they worked in the studio a little bit, but they they weren't gonna go all of them into music because they were all college girls and they were getting their degrees and different things, and so I knew that wasn't gonna uh ever mature.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

They weren't gonna be the go-go's. No. Remember the go-go's? Oh yeah. Fur you know, the first the kind of girls group that really blew out in the early 80s.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But uh no, I met Suzanne and uh it was it was a long courtship, seven years. Was she from England? She was from St. Martinville, Louisiana. She had a a a distinctive accent, right? It's funny that some of the people from down there have an accent almost like well, it it comes from the French, but yeah, it's almost like a New York in some cases. It doesn't sound southern at all.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

No, no. I mean it does. Did you like that about her? Is that what was somewhat attractive?

SPEAKER_00 35:05

Be nice, Robin. Uh what did I like about Susan? Well, there wasn't anything not to like. She was beautiful. She was beautiful, she was gentle. Um with me with ADHD, I I listened to Dr. Laura some on the radio, and Dr. Laura was talking to a lady one time and she said, said, You're a fool. Said, you keep arguing with your husband. He cusses somebody that pulls out in front of him in the car, and then you cuss him. Said, you need to be on his side. Well, Suzanne knows how to put out testosterone fires. And that's with gentleness and love and support.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Simple as that. And she's been with you ever since. Absolutely. I mean, yeah. I guess you got married in somewhere in the 70s. 77 or 8, I can't remember. So in the 70s, I guess the studio is really, you know, really rolling. Yeah. I mean, and you're learning, I'm assuming, because you you even get a new board at some point, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 36:10

I shortly before I recorded Z Z Top, I chumped off and paid$30 something thousand dollars. That's not it. It's the one before that. I'll have to get you a picture to insert. Uh, it was an electrodyne. Electrodyne was made in California. It was the first modular console that was really heavy duty. And one of the great things about it was the sound. When you buy a console, there's different reasons that you want to buy one, but for most people, it's the sound created by the mic pre. Because the the sound is created by the microphone and the mic preamp. Once you get that sound built up to line level, you've done your hard work. And that console had an incredible mic pre. So when I sold it after I had done Z Z Top, I bought an MCI console because I needed more tracks. Well, my friend Jerry Mylam that sold it to me up in Illinois, I talked to him, I said, Jerry, I lost that sound. I don't have that big, thick, bright sound anymore. He laughed and he said, Robin, I've got several clients said the same thing. You're gonna have to buy API mic pre's. I said, Okay. Well, I didn't know what they cost. A rack of four of them was thirty five hundred dollars. So I started buying API mic pre's. And I bought quite a few of those, and then I've added Neve to them. So the sound that I get now is API and Neave because that's the kind of mic preeves I use.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

The sound on the Z Z Top albums that you worked on was the the original sound that you wrote lost for a while? Well, that special sound on Z Z Top was created by overdubbing. Right. I was gonna get to that. I know that you had uh tried to get Bill Hamm, their manager, to accept overdubbing on a couple of other occasions before you finally sent him off to the country tavern.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

Yeah, the first time they came up, they were called the moving sidewalk. And I didn't hear from them for a while, and then they came back and they said we've changed our name to Z Z Top. Well, everybody back then, you know why. You know what the tie-in is zigzag and top. So years later. Zigzag being the papers, the rolling papers.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

Right, for rolling cigarettes, and top was the other one. So and it sounded a lot cooler than the moving sidewalks. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

So escalators. The escalators. Yeah. Years later, uh, Dale Hawkins, who was very important in my studio, he brought a lot of groups in and produced a lot of hit records. Dale said, Robin, did I ever tell you about Bill Hamm calling me about the name change on ZZ Top? I said, No. He said, Bill called and told me, I've made a mistake. I have allowed my bosses at Daily Brothers distributors to own part of this act, and I want to cut them out legally. How can I do it? Change the name. And Dale said, sh, get out of business, don't do any business for 90 days of any kind. After 90 days, form a new group with the same members. And they did that. And I know that to be true because my first check for the moving sidewalk session came from Daily Brother distributors. After that, they came from Lone Wolf Productions, which was Bill Hamm's company. But yeah, they kept I kept trying to do everything. You know, uh the reason Bill Hamm felt that way is that he when he was a promotion man for Daily Brothers, he he booked a group in San Antonio for a hop. They got on stage and didn't sound anything like their records because they'd done so much overdubbing in the studio. And he made a vow. When I produce a group, there's not going to be any overdubbing. Well, he brings me one guitar, one bass, and a set of drums. You're talking about Z Z Top. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:30

I mean, you've got to be able to do that. So what do I do? Frank Beard. Yeah. Right. Good musicians, but still only three.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Right. So on the third session that they came up, I told Bill in advance, I said, we got to get Bill out of the studio. Uh I told Billy, Gibbons, I said, we got to get Bill out of the studio because I've got to show you this. Now I had already done this trick. Is this how y'all look back then? Uh I cannot deny or tell a lie.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

That is how we look back then. Do you think it was this the Trace Hombre session, the third album that you'd done with them, or is this one of the first ones?

SPEAKER_00 41:05

This is one of the first ones because Billy didn't have any beard. Bill, Bill, Billy Gibbons was clean-shaven back then. But uh anyway, um, I told Billy what we're gonna do, and I got my mother in on it.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

What did Billy say? Did he say, yeah, let's try it? He said, Yeah, yeah, we'll try it.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

And so um I told Bill, I said, Bill, uh, you've been promising these guys you're gonna bring them some ribs from a country tavern. It's time. They're hungry. And Bill Billy Gibbons sat there and said, Yeah, I don't think I can play me no blues until I get me some barbecue. And he said, Well, where is this place? So I took him in the other room. And on cue, my mother told a lie. She said, Well, you have to pay for them in advance on it with a credit card, because I wanted him to have money invested so he wouldn't turn around. Once he realized it was in Kilgore. Yeah. So he paid for him and I told him how to get there, and he left. I said, Billy, we got about an hour and forty minutes, let's go. So we went out and recorded the basic track of Lagrange. And when he f finished, I told uh Dusty and Frank, I said, You guys can rest. And I just went out and pulled on the strings enough to slightly detune them. I said, Now double that part. And he did. Which means play it again. Same exact part.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

The opening to Lagrange, everybody knows, right? That's ever heard the song.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

If you listen on headphones very carefully, you'll hear the first guitar come in on the left side. And after the drum roll, diddly diddle diddle, you hear the second one come in on the right side. That's the only time you can hear that. And that's you using the two different panning them 45 degrees like this. And the difference in the tuning created the bigness of the sound. It that created that float that made it bigger than life that even translates on little bitty speakers. When they were there, did they just play or did they also do the vocals? You know, they they never did the vocals when they recorded the tracks. In fact, they told me that they didn't even have lyrics written for them. They just came up with riffs and recorded and did those, made them what they ought to be, and then went home and wrote the lyrics for them and came back. Now I don't know if that's true or whether Bill Ham didn't want them revealing the the titles. Because, you know, a hook of a song is the song. If you if you if you gave me the the hook of some great song, somebody else could write the exact same song. It would be different lyrics, different melody, but they steal your idea. And I that may have been. I don't know. I'll never I have to ask Billy about that.

SPEAKER_01 44:02

Did it change how you were paid if if it included vocals at your studio versus the music? No. It was just so much an hour. All right. Okay. So back then, there wasn't so much a producer's credit. You know how you know how you I should have gotten producer's credit. Yeah, I mean, you hear that today.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Well, but Bill Ham was meaner than a junkyard. Was he like Colonel Tom Parker? He was like Hotilla, the producer. And I didn't dare rock the boat. He took the producer's credit.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

Well, of course. I mean, you say that, but that's kind of like you know, there's been movies and stories about Elvis' manager being very controlling. Right.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

And getting Well, and at the same time, I do give Bill Ham credit, a lot of credit for their success, because he was meaner than a junkyard dog and he could deal with those labels. And and it took We was to do that. And he would what? Get them better deals in the contract? Yeah, for instance, they they released the first album and they said, okay, let's let's uh let's do so. No, no, he said release another single off of that one first before I give you the next one. And they did. That was London Records back then.

SPEAKER_01 45:10

Do you think his thought was it would drive more record sales if they got another one out? Yeah, it would give them more opportunity to be heard and album would stretch out longer on the radio.

SPEAKER_00 45:21

But but Bill Hamm would not let them do interviews.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah, I don't ever remember seeing any old footage about There weren't. There weren't any. He would not let them. He wanted the mystique of these mysterious guys. Right. And they didn't have those long beards back then, no. Right? That was kind of a look that came in the eighties. Right. That's interesting that he didn't the mystique but were they kind of s you know, we we know the documentary, Best Little Band in Texas.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

In the studio, they were just regular guys. In fact, Billy would go back in my office and and do transcendental meditation before he played the lead parts.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

I mean, do you think Bill thought that they were they were more interesting if they were unknown? And the more known they were The more mystique, the better. That was what he said. These guys look normal, you know, and there's better mystique because we don't know them, and their sound makes them sound a little unique. You get to know somebody too well, they they lose the mystique.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

Right. They don't seem as different from you. Right. Like these are ordinary guys. You can control the image that you project out there in advertising and in your your promotion, but once they go live, they discover they're just good old boys. Now, let's be honest about Billy. Billy puts on this air of I'm just a uh poor old blues player, I don't have no money. He's looking at all yeah. I'm from the wrong side of the tracks, and I just do all this kind of natural. Billy's mother was the organist at St. Martin Episcopal Church in Houston. His father had a band. Billy went to was sent to New York and had musical training from some of the best places up there.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

I saw him at the Cowan Center, okay, when after after Dusty had died. Right. And I was struck by how what a guitar player he was. I could not believe that he could play like he played.

SPEAKER_00 47:21

It's not by accident. He knew there's one of the songs, I forget which one it is, that has a modulation that everybody now in the industry calls that a zizzy top modulation. Every girl crazy about a sharp dressed man or something like that. I don't remember which I don't remember which one it is, but um when I my writing partner, Judge Chapin, and I were in Nashville doing some demos, they they said after this verse, guitar solo, let's do a Z Z top modulation. It was that unique that that people refer to it as a Z Z top modulation. Billy was awfully skinny when Well, there were rumors too. Okay. There were rumors going around that he had prostate cancer and that he was really, really sick. And uh I gotta be honest with you, when I when I saw the the uh when I saw the documentary, I didn't even know all that stuff about Frank being on drugs and things.

SPEAKER_02 48:26

Yeah, Frank, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:28

Um I I didn't even know that because I was too busy recording other people, you know, to keep up with that kind of thing. But uh Yeah, there and of course when Billy went to Houston, was sick, was gonna go to a doctor, he told them to for the next three or four gigs, let the tech play bass, because he can do it. He had no idea he was turning that job over him permanently. He had no idea. He was gonna be there for the doctor for two days, maybe three, and be back with them at the they already had airplane tickets to the third gig for him to come back and join them.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

And he just died in the bed. Yeah, because I saw that tech. He was there at the Cowan Center and played Rusty's part. Yeah. Right? He he tried to be a little bit like him, but you know, you can't replicate that sound that he would give and his movements.

SPEAKER_00 49:25

Yeah, well, I I kidding the guys, I said, you know, when they were on they did their tour with who was it? Leonard Skinnard was the opening act. When was this? Oh, it's been about ten years ago. And Skinnard, they you know, they jump off of an amp and do splits and stuff like that. And I said, You guys were smart. Your little dance routine looks like exercise at the old folks' home. You know, you'll be able to do that as long as you can stand up.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

Yeah, I had uh I think I was in law school some between 1990 and 1992, and I saw Billy Gibbons at a sushi place, and we were in Houston. Yeah. Which makes sense now that you're and I looked, and the guy was so skinny, I thought, golly, he's small. Yeah. Uh I didn't know if something was wrong with him, but that's I mean, he's still alive. I think he was vegetarian at the time. I don't know if he still is. All right. Well, maybe that's why he was so skinny. Um Well, after those guys, I mean, you you did how many did you do all the songs on Trace Hombres, or did you just do part of the songs? How does that generally work?

SPEAKER_00 50:30

Well, I did uh everything on Z Z Top's first album, uh Real Grand Mud, Trace Hombres, and then on Fandango, half of it was done in the studio. The other side was done live in New Orleans. Fandango being the last one that I worked on. What year was that that you worked on that last one?

SPEAKER_01 50:50

Oh man, I have ADHD. No, I know I'm trying to frame this for, you know, when they blew up in 1983 with that Eliminator album. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:00

Um Well, I was told by the road manager that the reason Bill Hamm stopped letting him record with me is because he heard me say, Hey Billy, I got some ideas for some stuff. Uh when you're when you're not busy, come on up. And he said, Yeah, I'll give you a call. Gave me his phone number. That is why Bill Hamm stopped recording at my place and took him to Memphis. He didn't want any outside influence. He didn't want anyone else to have any influence. He told me one time, and he told me, he said, Robin, you know, forget that idea. He said, Look, if I didn't keep a close handle on those, Billy Gibbons would be out picking daisies.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Well, Billy did eventually work on other projects in l later in life. Right. And the other two did not. That's right. Um You know, I look at some of the uh sales numbers. It's Lagrange, it looks like they sold 550,000 units, you know, back then. Right.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

I don't know if that's right or not, but well what happened is is they put out the first album, and it it did fairly I don't remember how far it went up the chart, but not much. Then they put out the second album, and it did fairly well, better, but not that well. The third album came out, it went platinum. Well, within a couple of months, the first two went platinum. It kind of just springboarded people's interest.

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Once they found out who they were, they went and grabbed that other stuff. They wanted to listen to what they'd done. Yeah. And then it seems like Z Z Top kind of got a another wave because when I was in college at UT in Austin, people were playing Lagrange. And this was I didn't get there until 1986. Yeah. So it kind of had a life of its own. Um but I wonder, you know, what you thought when you heard the sound from the Eliminator album, you know, the one they did. Oh, I thought it was great.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

It was it was good stuff. Um I thought they did really well there. And then there was a time they were on RCA Victor and they got lost. They wandered off the reservation. After 85, they kind of disappear for a while. They that that stuff they did for RCA, uh, it's like they forgot who they were.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Do you think that's the producer? I mean, you think the producer has the ki that kind of influence on the sound?

SPEAKER_00 53:18

I don't think so. I think the guys were I think they guys looked at the transitions that the Beatles went through and said, we need to go through a transition when in fact all they needed to do is protect the farm. They grouped their crops on because it was a good one. And I have a lot of people today tell me that the first four albums are still the best stuff they did.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

Well, if we if we put this on historical perspective, you know, we have kind of the end of the new wave punk, the beginning of the heavy metal, glam, sunset strip stuff, but Z Z Top does really well in the middle of all that, right? Well, here's the deal.

SPEAKER_00 53:59

As I said on the a documentary when they interviewed me, Z Z Top plays the blues, but they don't sing the blues. They invented a new form of music. They took the blues and turned it into party music. Because if you take the lyrics from Z Z Top's music, you could imagine Chuck Berry or the Beach Boys doing it. I had a kid come in one time and when I was working with Top and said, Robin, I got a song. You have the publishing on it, it's perfect for Z Z Top. I said, Okay, and I put it on and started playing it. Intro was fantastic. The guitar work was just what Billy would do. I'm thinking, hey, I can get a song with Top here. Well, singing started. It was too down, and it only took about one verse, and I stopped it. I said, This is not a Z Z Top song. He said, Are you kidding me? Every guitar that I said, wait a minute, the music is Z Z top. But I said, the lyrics are the down and out blues that you can't name one song they've ever recorded that has low-down blues lyrics. They're all party songs.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

What about other artists? I know that you've worked with other people that that the audience probably's heard of. Tell us about some of those that have come to the studio.

SPEAKER_00 55:18

Some of the most fun I had was recording John Fred and the Playboy band. You talk about some wild characters. They were from down in Baton Rouge, and uh most of them had gone to uh uh LSU School of Music, so they were doing the real musicians. And uh, you know, the hardest thing to find is a drummer. Really? Oh yeah. A timekeeper. Somebody that's got the groove. Uh my studio started with a guy named Levi Garrett, who was one of my high school friends, and he won number one in the nation rudimental drummer in 1957. And when he set a beat, it was solid. Well, Levi went on the road with Mouse in the Traps, and uh the road was not good to him. He he kind of stepped off in the mud here and there. You know, the party, the partying He he decided, and I'm a very wise decision, that he was going to get out of the business. And he disappeared, sold me his drums, and was gone. We didn't even know where to find him. And we started hiring drummers from all around, and we couldn't find anybody. Would you pro provide s uh session musicians? Is that that's where this comes in? Yeah, we would a lot of people say I needed drums, bass, piano. My partner in the production company, Randy Fouts, was an excellent keyboard guy. He did piano and organ. Randy Fouts. Did he used to live over there by Hubbard?

SPEAKER_01 56:45

Yes. You know, I lived on Downing, and there was a Randy Fouts that lived on the corner, and it was kind of mysterious. I never saw him that much, you know, and but that was his name. Yeah, Randy Fouts.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

He was he was different. Randy um Randy dealt with some heavy issues that are personality disorders, and you can't cure those. And uh he had to work very hard to be nice to certain people. And if he respected you and admired you, oh he was just like a child around you. But if not, he he could he could he could be abrasive. But anyway, we we tried drummers in Dallas and Freeport and all around, and finally, one Friday night. You found Levi? No, no. Better than that. One Friday night I'm at Bergfell Park. Rodney Campbell's having these Friday night talent shows. And I'm talking to some people backstage, and all of a sudden, Rodney introduces, ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Troop, Texas. Please welcome the Marauders. And I thought, oh, hey, whatever, you know, I'm talking. All of a sudden they start playing and something's bothering me. And I say, excuse me a minute. So I went, they had those big concrete things on either side. I went back on one of them. I leaned up against it and closed my eyes, took a big breath and relaxed. And within about 15 seconds, I said, Oh my God, he's got the groove. That drummer has got it. And then I said, Lord, please don't let him be visiting from Spokane, Washington. Let him be local. And after it was over, I walked out and introduced myself. His name was Paul Lyme. A 15-year-old kid, about five, four, played the dickens out of those drums. So I asked him, I said, Would you like to play on recording sessions? And he said, Well, yeah, I've never done that. I said, You've got everything you need. He said, Yes, sir, these are my drums. I said, Dunno, we've got a full set of Bloodwick Blue Note set up, tuned, and ready. I said, You've got a metronome in your head, and you know how to stick right on it. We'll teach you everything else. Well, Paul became our staff drummer at 15. Moved to Dallas, became staff drummer up there at most places. We still used him then. Moved to LA and eventually became staff drummer for John Williams for film scores, like Back of the Future. Then he moved to Nashville and he did the Shania Twain project that had seven number one records on it. He's just one of the most three or four fantastic drummers in the world. In fact, of all the people who, if you ask me who's the most successful person I ever worked with, it would be Paul. Because, you know, Tina Turner was successful in her genre. Zizi Top is successful in their genre, as John Fred was and Nat Stuckey in the country genre. But Paul was successful in all genres. He played country, he played rock, he played contemporary Christian, he played movie scores, he played live on the road, he d did country in Nashville. I mean he did it all. And uh uh just a wonderful friend and a wonderful person, but that's that's where that's where the foundation is in music. And with John Fred and the Playboy band, Joe Michelli had a great beat. I mean And John Fred and his his sax player and Andy Bernard were very creative. They studied the Beatles, they believed in what they called AGs, attention getters. And they would drop something in here and there in their songs that was just intended to to get your attention. And uh I never will forget we were recording something and the phone call came and they wanted to talk to Fred, so I told him and he went in on the phone, he came back and pushed the talk back buttons. Hey y'all, y'all, y'all, listen, y'all want to guess what the next single's gonna be for us? And they started guessing. No. Those idiots over there at Paula Records are gonna release Judy in disguise, and they went, Oh no, no, no. Said, well that won't last long. Said it'll last about two weeks and then we can move on. They couldn't hear that it was a smash hit, and it was instant. It knocked the Beatles out of number one worldwide. It was just an infectious thing, and they were fun. They were they were well educated and uh creative and and they played well.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:49

We've talked a lot a lot about session musicians, your studio. We pulled up some old footage from 68 because uh we've seen the board, um, you know, we've seen the mixer, but we we found something that kind of captures what we've been talking about, but we haven't seen it visually. Uh tell us about this.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:07

Well, this is a Southwest FOB group from Dallas. You know, there I've recorded several groups and acts that if they'd been from New York and had management that also managed the huge stars, they'd be big. They would be huge. And this is one of them. Uh another group called the Joe City Band from Dallas. They were like these guys. They had a manager that they were a professional group. They uh they had uh equipment people that would set up their equipment, and they were a well-run group, business-wise and creatively. Is this in your studio? Yes. So I mean this is part of it is that that one there is not well, yes. I'm sorry, that one was. That was an electrodyne board.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:52

The electrodyne would have been the one you did on ZZ Trick. All right. So this fits because that's this is a 68 clip. Right. Um but anyway, we just wanted people on the show to get an idea. You know, when you're working, kind of what it looks like, and this is what we were found, and it it it seems to be a pretty good, you know, piece of video. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:11

Well, we're recording multi-track, so we obviously want to isolate instruments so that when I am mixing and I turn up the guitar, I get nothing but guitar.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:24

If you're gonna be able to get it. All these are playing at the same time, yes. Because you hear about you know, some of my favorite bands, and and I watch behind the music almost every show there is, they'll talk about sometimes the band wasn't getting along. They'd come in and Vince Neal from Motley Crue would sing his tracks, and you know, Mick Mars would play his guitar, and they would never see each other, and then it would be put together like a puzzle and then mixed. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Well, I've done some of that. But you're doing it with all of the musicians playing at once in that video.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:55

Well, sometimes we do. Um one of the sessions I've got coming up, uh, I'm gonna do um bass, drums, guitar, and keyboard. And the singer is gonna s sit in the control room and just sing through a through a handheld mic, just so they'll know where they are. Do they play better?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:15

Oh, they have to ha they should have the singer, absolutely. But when you're when you've got these guys playing at the same time and you're kind of focused on maybe just the bass or the guitar, is that how you record? They they play better when there's more of them at one time. That's what I was getting at. For you to get the best guitar piece, it's better for the rest of them, you know, the drums, the bass to be going on at the same time. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:38

In Nashville, they have a term called stunt vocal. And let's say a group is going to record and they use studio musicians, but the lead singer has got to be someplace else. Well, they'll bring somebody in who can sing it just like him, so that when the musicians are playing, they know what he's singing and what what's going on so they can react. If you record all at one time, each musician uh cues off of the other and you get a a more soulful performance. If you don't have a vocal, you don't know what the lyrics are, you don't know what's being said, and you don't what the melody is, uh you're just playing notes.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:22

That's an art to music, you're saying, a nuance that makes it better. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:26

If yeah, I I would I would never want to record without someone singing the song so the musicians could react to the to the singer. Because you can hear that. It's it's a very important part of what they do. It's it's too technical sounding, maybe, without Right. Well, yeah, it it loses the uh uh accountability, the credibility. Because people don't understand. People don't really listen to music. They should feel Of the music. If you're just listening and you're not feeling it, then it's not gonna not gonna go anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:06

Do you think that's what makes us a big hit? Oh, yeah. Is that it it hits something inside people that they feel as opposed to just being a catchy tune?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:15

The other day I I was watching a video of uh um Eric Clapton, Tears in Heaven. Right. So I printed out the lyrics. I'm at home. I go put it on the piano and I start playing the song. I break down crying in the middle.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:33

Because of the music or because of the lyrics? Lyrics. Yeah. The lyrics are powerful, and obviously they're connected to a very sad story with his his child. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:43

So music should be feelings. It it's it's done through sound, but if you look at acting on the screen, sometimes somebody can do something on the screen that will impact you without saying a word.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:59

Right, even without um any any any words, right? Yeah, just they have no lines.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:06

They do. But music, people get confused. They get too worried about notes. And and it's all about the feeling. What how does it make you feel?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:19

Because that's what sells. Robin Hood, you've been uh working that studio for a lot of years. Have you pretty b much been a you know per hour uh type of session studio, or ha have there ever been any producing credits or things that went from there? Royal teams.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:36

I had a few producing credits, nothing that ever bought me a home with a swimming pool. Okay. But um yeah, uh the hourly thing is is still it's viable. You're still doing it today. But I'll say this uh if I were putting in that studio today and buying what's in it, um it would not be a viable operation if I had to be paying payments on all of that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:04

Right. Because the per hour sessions would be tough to meet the payments if you'd borrowed the money from I don't have clients right now that could afford the kind of money it would be.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:12

Right. That's you know, and I'm doing some different things. For the last nine seasons, I've been working on a show that was filmed up here in in Hawkins called Der Germinator. Are you talking about something different? Der Germinator. Der Germinator. Is this a uh foreign film? It's it's a it's a cop show that is the number one show, uh cable show in all of Europe. It stars Manfred Gillow, who was the former chief of police in Hawkins. Are you doing the musical score? No. I'm doing the German overdub dialogue. Are you talking about from from the feelings and the notes and the music and to go totally technical? They send me the edited version of the show. In of course, when he's he's riding with different police departments now, and Colorado and New Mexico, places like that, and helping train young officers and and and just doing what cops do. And of course, he's speaking English when we're over here. So uh to to make it German, they send a script and they send the sc the the the video. He's out in the studio watching the cops the film play by, and he's got numbers that read off. And when that right number comes, I push a button and he records the German script. I take that, put it in a laptop, and I'm streaming the picture, the regular sound, and his German to two producers or three in Germany. They're watching and listening real time, and they talk back into their mic, and they're talking to him in his headphones live, producing him just as though they're sitting there beside me. I mean, that's that's quite a technology advancement.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:06

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean And the latency is almost nothing. Yeah, because it's so fast. Yeah. Well, is that a good paying gig? I mean, and how in the world did they find you for this?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:17

Well Because of Hawkins, the proximity Because of the Hawkins, the f the first email I got was obviously sent to lots of studios, Shreeport and here and Dallas and all around. And as the process went on, I could tell that they were the some of the studios were being eliminated. In fact, I got us I got an email one time that was intended for another studio. And they told them, no, we can't do that. You have to use Session Link Pro or we can't work with you. And uh, because they were trying to use some other uh software to make it happen. So finally comes to the point where I'm the only one left. They said, can you do it? So I call my engineer in and uh got to upgrade Windows, got to upgrade new window, gotta buy a separate graphics card so we can send a different picture out there. And I gave them a time period, I can be ready by a certain date, and they said, okay. So it took us about a month to get that all done. And it was pretty frightening the first few shows, because it's you're depending on the internet to be perfect. It can't have little glitches in it, because if it has a glitch, everything stops and you have to reload and start over.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:31

People probably wonder, like, you know, locally, you think of Miranda Lambert or somebody like that. Has somebody like that ever been through the studio that that started early around here?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:40

Miranda hasn't, but uh uh Casey Musgraves did. Casey Musgraves. I did uh uh an album on her before she really got rolling nationally, and she was yodeling. Yodeling? Yeah. She was part of a group called the Texas Two Bits. And uh they were a two-girl team that yodeled. And uh Is that good, you know, uh training for your voice? Well, uh I don't know if it trains it or tears it up, but you know, it's it's different. Yeah. Uh but I enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:14

It was fun. Um What about Tina Turner? I've heard rumors that you'd worked with her in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. I I I did work with Ike and Tina back when they were together. Oh, w and the Ike and Tina. How was Ike when you saw him?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:29

Well, you may have to bleep this. Uh Ike was as big a as they portrayed him in the movie. Okay. I was wondering that probably bipolar. And drinking and doing drugs on top of being bipolar bipolar. He almost drew back to slap her in the studio, and I grabbed his arm. I said, Sir, not in this studio. We're here to make music. Let's do that. You gave him the old Suzanne Bryan's treatment. And I turned around and I looked at his musicians and they were like, you know, they thought he was gonna pick up a guitar and brain me with it. But he didn't settle down and we went on recording. What did what did y'all do there? I don't remember the name of the songs. It was it was one of those things they played a gig in Longview and then came over here at night and we recorded all night. And uh, you know, it used to be just no big thing to start a session at 10, 11 o'clock at night and go all night.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:33

The movie portrayed Ike as kind of a, you know, w workaholic or like, you know, like he was really crazy. Yeah, okay. Yeah. OCD, I don't know what the word was. You say crazy, but I mean uh probably bipolar. All right. And ultimately, you know, uh that experience. What about Tina though?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:52

Because Tina is loved by everybody. Tina Tina was an angel. I I I was so happy when she got away. When she got away. Um and she was signed by Atlantic. And I remember um President of Atlantic, I was talking to him, and he said, you know, when we signed Tina Turner, everybody was around the conference table. We were all so happy, and everything was gonna go great, and all of a sudden, somebody asked her, Tina, you and Ike uh ever do any recording? Uh whatever happened to you? She said, Oh yeah, Ike didn't trust the labels. So he would do, we would record some songs here, some songs there, and he'd get ten songs together, then you'd go and sell them to somebody outright. No royalties, no nothing. Just sell them. Just to get the money? And they looked at each other and said, Wait a minute, how many of these did you guys do? She said, Oh, I think we did three or maybe four. And they said, Nobody in this room says a word about us signing Tina Turner. It will not be discussed. Tina, you go into my house out on Long Island and you're gonna hang out and you're not gonna use the phone. Turned to his attorneys and said, Get on the road and find out who's got those albums and buy them back before we release anything on Tina.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:16

Did they? Yeah. Because it was gonna be like you told me earlier with Z Z Top. Once they went boom, everybody was gonna hunt the originals. That's right. And so the record label knew that that was gonna make a lot of money if they owned the rights to that. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:32

So they went out and bought that stuff up before before they announced that they had signed Tina.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:40

And Ike and Tina were broken up, so the people thought, well, it might not be worth that much. There you go. I mean, that was a good move on their part, wasn't it? Well, you you know, if it would have been suicide to do anything else.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

I mean, Tina I mean, she really blew up. Yeah. Well, Tina was uh she was a freak. She was so talented and so strong, and in not only as a person, but vocally, she had an incredibly strong voice. She could get up on that stage and go all night. And then the next night, all night. And there's just not many singers that can do that. You know, these opera singers, they'll practice and everything. They'll go, they'll do an opera and then they'll rest for a week. But I mean, it was a grind on that bus getting off. And we went over to see them over in Lone View the night before they recorded. And Ike got mad at the bass player in the middle of a song, fired him, ran him off the stage, told him to go to the bus and get your stuff and get off my bus. And that was that was Ike's bass he was playing, so Ike put his guitar down. He played bass the rest of the night. I guess Ike Ike was he a good musician? Or he He was a musician. He was okay. Um I I'm not saying he was great, but he was sufficient. He was no prince, was he? No. You know Prince? No, but but play every instrument. Yeah. No, I uh not to my knowledge. Uh you know, all I know is what I saw that night and and in the session. But but he had a temper that was like stepping on a landmine.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:13

I mean, that shows in the movie for sure. Yeah. What about uh Tina? Uh was she called Tina uh in the inner circle, or was she called, you know, Ida May or Adam T. No, Tina. You know, like her It was Tina. I mean, like when you talked to her, you called her Tina. Oh, yeah. Everybody else, the band members called her Tina. Right. All right. So she had adopted that name, I think, that Ike might have given her, right? I think so. Because she had an old Southern type name I remember that you hear about in the movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:43

I don't even remember what it was, but but you know, I mean Tina Turner is so easy to say, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:48

Yeah, I mean it's a great stage name. Did you ever hear from her uh, you know, after those sessions in any way? No. I know I never heard back from her. Because she was in Dallas in the movie when she got away from I Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:01

Well, I I we heard about that uh through the music Grapevine, that she had just escaped, so to speak. And we were all just ecstatic because uh he treated her like dirt.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:18

Yeah, that's what it looked like. Um and I saw him on Johnny Carson one time later on, and I just thought he looked, you know, his attitude seemed to be disconnected from modern society in a way. Bipore. Yeah. Uh you said uh a music grapevine. I mean, down in Tyler, Texas, I mean, do you get information? Do you hear about things that are kind of a part of the industry that things are happening?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:46

I don't hear as much as I should because I'm so busy recording. Uh somebody asks me from time to time, hey Dave, have you heard so-and-so? I said, Did it come out of my speakers? If it came out of my speakers, I heard it. Other than that, maybe not, because it's like dr one bass player knows about another bass player, but he never gets to spend time with him because they're off in different bands going different places. And so um, you know, I've got a lot of wonderful friends in Nashville, and we talk, and I I'm, you know, I stay in tune with what's going on there. I used to have buddies in the middle of it in LA, but uh they've all retired.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:27

Um Would you ever talk to people that, you know, ran these labels back in the day? And, you know, would they ever have any reason or would they ever fish out whether uh some of their artists could come down here privately and record, things like that ever happen?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:42

Well, as I look back at my career, somebody asked me the other day, if you could do it over again, what would you do differently? The answer to that is that I would take some of the time I was using on creative and spend more time in developing relationships with the labels. Uh I should have followed up with Jerry Wexler more, gone to New York, taken him to lunch, you know, continued that. But when you're so busy, uh Chad, I guess I can probably put it in perspective so that people can understand it. As when my father died, we didn't have a dime. All you knew is work. We had a brand new studio, and I'm writing a book. Right now? And the name of that book will be Life Boat.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:34

And when is that anticipated to come out?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:36

Boy, that's a good question. I have ADHD. There's so much to do right now. Business is good. Do you have a uh help as a do you have a co-writer? No, I'm j I'm using software where I just put on a headphone and just dictate. And then someone or or you will clean it up. I'm going to hire somebody to come in and clean it up. Yeah. Yeah. But um if I had it to do over again, I would spend more time developing. But but I was so busy. I mean, when when you're booked up, you know, I mean, when I leave here, I've got to go email five musicians and get them lined up. Here are the dates that I'd like to have you. Pick the dates that you can show up, find out what date all five of those can make it, book it, get the artist, you know. It's um Do you have any help with your business like that? Yeah, I've got a guy, uh his name's Bobby Clare. Uh he resides at the studio, so he takes care of things. He lives there. Yes. And uh, you know, he he is a drummer and a singer and uh uh knows a lot about music. He acts as a session player as well. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. But but mainly he's just somebody to help me uh get things done. Uh he's also remodeling the outside of the studio. I mean, we've got uh I've I've had health issues that kept me in bed way too long, including COVID and the rest of them. And so we're doing a complete remodel of the studio, replacing rotten wood and replacing windows and bringing it up to what it what it should be.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:17

And you're doing this because I guess your intention is uh to continue in this line of work.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:23

Right? I mean, you're I mean, some people say, you know, jokingly, I'm just gonna work till I die because I don't know what I would do if I wasn't working. I mean, that sounds like your mindset. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:33

Well, if I worked at a foundry, I would probably look forward to the day I retired. Uh or uh if I was an accountant, I would look forward to retiring. But if I if I shut everything down and retired today, tomorrow morning I'd get up and go sit down at the piano and start doing something musical. You love to create I've read you know There are times when you as a songwriter, you work on a song until you reach the point that the song starts writing itself. It gains its own momentum. It'll wake you up in the middle of the night with another line, it'll it'll it'll hit you at a stoplight with a certain lyric that you need. Yeah, I call it it starts writing itself. It's pulling you along.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:21

I love that. You know, you have said and I have read about you, music is an expression of life. That quote is attributed to you. Yeah, and it is. It sounds like you feel that way. I do.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:33

Uh I'm I I have probably the most eclectic taste in music you've ever met. Because I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and under Paul Grubb, who was our choir director for twenty-three years, he spoiled me. I'm spoiled rotten when it comes to Anglican music. Uh we only sang the very best of the best. And so I'm I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to my music.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:01

And you I am you are in the church choir at to this day at Christchurch. Yes. And you have been in that choir since back probably last Sunday or the one before, yeah. Because I mean, man marked 72 years as a member of the choir. I mean, that's pretty remarkable. Well I mean, most people aren't 72 and that are watching this show, and you will have been in the choir. Um and you said also Anglican pieces f feel, you know, close to God.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:33

I am going to spend some money here shortly on somebody to go into my ancestry and find something for me. Because when I hear the sound of an organ in a choir in a cathedral, it hits me like a tsunami. Somewhere in my genetic memory, you feel like someone in my past has been involved in that because um it it's so powerful. It is one of the most powerful feelings I can have. Sometimes in a choir, I get choked up and I can't sing.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:09

Tell people what you know Anglican music is that don't have an understanding of what that means.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:14

Well, that's it it started with the Church of England, and and back then it was Lutheran and and Church of England and the Catholic Church. Um it's classical. It's Bach, it's Beethoven, it's Handel, it's uh Mendelssohn, it's Vitor, um it's it's the the Renaissance music? Yeah, it's just it's and and there's some a lot of uh Baroque in there. Uh I've written an anthem and I'm working on the accompaniment now.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:48

It's Baroque. Um I mean, right now, for for people to understand how much you love music and how much it how it makes you feel. You're writing an anthem, not for anybody, but just because you want to create?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:01

Yeah, it's a it's a hymn that means a lot to me. And uh I love the lyrics, and so I took those lyrics and and I'm creating an anthem out of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:15

And that will be will you put it together in in your studio kind of like with session players, and or will you I will get a the first thing I will do is get a Baroque orchestra together, probably in Dallas, and record the track, and then get some really good singers and stack them on there until we have a choir. Well, when you think about church music, maybe not so much today, because there's a lot of instruments been added to, you know, praise and worship type services, but in the past, you know, when I was a kid, it was basically just an organ and the choir, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:53

Well, it it is pretty much for us at Christchurch. But uh when I refer to my eclectic taste, if you said to me, You're not gonna go to Christ Church this week, you're gonna go someplace else and go to church and get different kind of music, I just might go across the street from John Tyler. I can't remember the name of that black church. Church of the Nazarene? No. It's the black church over there where Broderick McGee uh played organ, might still, but it's it's totally different from Anglican, but it is beautiful. It is soulful, it is credible, it's moving. Once again, it's not how it sounds. It's what it does to you.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:40

How it makes you feel. Right. You know, I've seen you in the a little I think I saw you in that documentary or referenced. Have you ever been in uh any other documentaries or any other films or anything in all these years you've been in music?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:54

Some little stuff, but nothing is as prominent as the Z Top documentary.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:00

I mean, when you say little stuff, I mean, um I know you're working on this thing out at Hawkins, but is there anything, you know, that you I mean, I don't know, opportunities for people?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:10

As a matter of fact, when when uh if I wanted to put together a history of the studio, I was telling uh a guy that I work with all the time on video, Alan Morris, that if if if I had been in New York, those major record labels would always have a photographer. They would always have a video guy and shooting video or film back then. But a lot of times down here we didn't. Nobody took any I I mean, I I would give anything of some some video of the Z Z top sessions of the of the John Fred and the Playboy Band and Joe Stampy and the Uniques. Nat Stuckey, I mean, here's the guy we did the original. Well, has anybody here seen Sweet Thing? An instant hit, and then he wrote Papa Top again. Uh just incredibly talented people. But the label he was on, which was uh Paula out of Freeport, owned by Stan's Record Shop, uh, they didn't send a photographer or someone to film or video. They weren't thinking that far ahead, were they? Aaron Powell No, well, they they just didn't think like the big boys do.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:16

And it costs money. Well, I mean, you know, the record companies were probably more likely to spend money because if the artist was successful, they were going to get that back as an expense. Yeah. I mean That's right. Well, they they were just they were just set up more professionally. What about, you know, you're on the East Texas Unfiltered Podcast. Has have you has anybody ever reached out to you to be on a podcast to kind of talk about your story before?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:43

Yeah. Jason Wright called me, and I've I've done a a podcast with him. And uh as a matter of fact, you just reminded me there's a group from Dallas that wanted me to fill out an article that I have that they want to run, and I haven't done that yet. Well busy. Yeah, I mean, you are in your eighties. Yeah. Um 86. Next month, 87. And you're making what was your birthday? April 30th. Of this year.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:15

It will be April 30th. I'll be 87. All right. So I wonder what day that is. If that's a Thursday, the day we release these podcasts, we may have to release that on April 30th as a birthday present. That would be cool. Um whoever watches this, uh, just like it streak uh uh it strikes me, uh your mind is amazingly sharp. In contrast to a lot of people in society at this age, what do you attribute that to?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:41

I feel well, I feel blessed because I have died on the operating table once, and then I reacted badly to a painkiller and ended up back in ICU with what they call post surgical delirium, which is can kill you, but thank God it didn't. So I feel blessed to to my wife we watch Wheel of Fortune, and she just keeps saying, Robin. Or do you beat her h on the on the game? It's not about beating her. I want to beat everybody on the show. And I do usually. But I'm I'm just blessed. It's like my eyes have been terrible. I've I had glasses starting at two years. But your ears have always been good. My ears I can hear from all the way to the bottom up to almost 11,000 cycles. And for my age, why? I mean, why is it that way? I don't know. It's uh I I just have to thank God. It's a blessing.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:44

My parents always told me to quit listening to that loud music, otherwise I'd go deaf. What happened with you?

SPEAKER_00 1:31:50

Well, I don't listen that loud. Back when I had the big, big speakers in the control room, I get ready to do a playback, I'd go in the other room. I could hear better in the other room. And I I never played in a band that was that loud. These bands today, when I go to a concert and I've stopped going to most of them. Earplugs? Well, yeah. Plus it makes me wish the subwoofer had never been invented. You're talking about the boon, boom, boom, boom, shakes your chest.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:17

I mean, you can hear you know, a car can be driving outside my office, and it I think it's shaking my windows. It is, absolutely. Is that a uh vibrational frequency?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:27

How does that happen? Yeah, it's a subwoofer. It's it's the low down below a hundred cycles down there. And I have years ago, Ronnie Brown had stereo video center. We've got Dennis over there now. Yeah, I judged, I judged a uh contest they had called the for the blasters. It's these guys that install these big sound systems in their cars. There are three judges. The first judge is an installer. He looks at your unit and judges how well you installed it. The second guy is just a guy sitting there with a shooter's muffs on and an SPL meter. Let's see how loud it'll go. And if you get your score from him, then it comes to me and I put a C D in and I tune it the way I like it, and I see how it sounds. Well, if you didn't blow out a speaker in step number two, you sound pretty good. But I noticed some of these guys' hands are shaking that were running these cars. And I found out later that's called uh shell shock. Like they have permanently damaged their central nervous system.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:38

You know, like veterans from World War II, they would come back and they'd say, Oh, they were, you know, that old story about General Patton slapping that soldier because he had shell shock and he was saying, like, hey man, you know, get up and you're fine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:52

So you you're saying that's a real thing for it is a real disease and it is caused by sustained or extremely loud sounds, and there's people walking around today. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:04

Let me see. Oh, wait a minute. I I I had something to do. And these were these were like twenty nineteen, twenty, twenty-one-year-old kids. Well, maybe their development of their bodies at an early age with that had something to do, right? Just like smoking or whatever, when you do something earlier, it may cause you longer-term damage. Yeah. I want to give credit to my mother. Well, it sounds like she was somebody who was influential.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:27

Well, she was president of the Ozalea Garden Club, pr president of the uh Tyler Council of Garden Clubs, president of the All Saints Guild at Church, president of the women of the church, uh chairman of a Rose Show about four years in a row. She had a gavel in her, and then she had that TV show, Gardening with Mrs. B. But in the meantime, she helped me run that studio. She booked sessions, she helped clean up the studio, she she would uh answer the phone and and and help in that way, and she was keeping the books at the time. So uh it was a it was a beautiful partnership. And I think my father realized before he passed that putting that studio in would give me the opportunity to take care of myself and my mother and sometimes my sister.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:22

Because he saw you were able to make money before he died, didn't he? Yes, he did. He saw that he saw that it was going to be a thriving business. And like we talked about before the show, I mean, it's it's not really work if you love it, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:37

Well, like I said, if I think if I retire tomorrow, the first next thing I'd do the day after that, sit down at a piano and start writing a song, probably, or learning some good song I've heard.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:48

You know, you have seen sixty plus years of the music business, or maybe seventy. Yeah. The equipment, the technology has changed so dramatically from, you know, you don't even have a mixer, right? You're trying to Oh yeah, I do. No, I mean you didn't. When you first No, no, no, I didn't. You didn't. And then you've seen the little ones, you've seen the bigger ones that we've shown. Yeah. The the dynamics, you know, there's this evolution in equipment and and the way that songs are actually recorded in your lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:21

Well, my studio is a paradox because out in the studio, there's a lot of vintage microphones from the 60s. And you think that adds to the sound? Oh, absolutely. For instance, I have Neumann U-67s. I think I paid$500 for them in the 60s. Today, you can buy a brand new one for$7,000, but it's not as good as the old ones because the capsule is not as good as the old capsule. I've got a uh I've got an AKG C12 that they only made 2,000 of them. There may be only 800 of them left in the world. Um and between those and the mic preamps is where I make my sound. And then it goes into the computer and I can play all kinds of tricks. So, you know, I I try to be as advanced as possible in the control room with the computer, but you can tell the difference in in a great microphone. I've had people come in, strap on the headphones that have never been in a real studio, and I put that mic up there, and they just start talking, go, oh, oh, check, check, oh, and they're just amazed at the difference. Because if all you've ever heard is, you know, some little sure mic on a stage, you have no idea what your voice really sounds like.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:41

What about amplifiers? You know, I, of course, grew up in, you know, in the 80s. I mean, that's I loved the music growing up, uh, the sunset strip, you know. Exactly. And I remember, you know, I read Motley Crue's books, Guns N' Roses, and Slash one time said, he said, I made the first album, uh Appetite for Destruction with a certain amp, and I got rid of it and never could get that sound back out of the guitar again. I mean, what is that he's talking about?

SPEAKER_00 1:38:12

Well, first of all, all those old amps were tube amps. They were totally tube, not a transistor in them. Uh some of the well, all the amps I have in the studio right now are vintage tube amps. They're they're I have an old baseman that has 14-inch speakers, ratty place where m a rabbit's cat scratched it. Um it's from the old 50s, and then I've got a couple of uh fender uh baseman, uh twin reverb, uh there's just different sounds c that uh that come out of the different part of it is the size of the speaker. And where you put the microphone? You put it in the middle or the side.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:01

I've heard of you putting microphones out in the hallway and stretching them out in different places to try to get a different sound.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:09

That's what I was doing when I was trying to get a something different for top. And it never never did it. I I opened the the door of the drum booth and put a mic out there and had one up in the ceiling, and I did everything I could before I finally sent Bill Ham to Country Taverns.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:29

What about awards? I mean, are are there awards for people like you that run these local smaller studios?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:35

I mean, it's well there the you know, if you if you record uh you get a platinum album or a gold album. I've I got a gold album for uh Bullfrogs and Butterflies by that group with Agape Force called Candle. Gold album means how many units sold? I think that's I forget how many.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:54

Is it five hundred thousand?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:55

I think so, yeah. And then uh uh a platinum album. Platinum is a million million. Yeah. And so I've got platinum albums on Z Z Top and gold albums. Uh I've got stuff from like John Fred and the Playboy band, the uh Judy in Disguise and the Five Americans, and um you know that's that's basically what you what you get. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:17

Mouse in the Traps. Was that more of a local uh just took an entertainment band that was around here, or what was that?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:24

That they were one of those that just teetered on really making it big time. They had two or three what I would call radio hits, enough that that they could book. They had a they had a place started San Antonio to Austin, through Shreveport, up through Little Rock, on up to Cincinnati and up in there in Louisville, that they could go back and forth that some reason that's just where the radio airplay was. But again, they never were able to sell the big records. Why do you think that was?

SPEAKER_01 1:40:58

Who knows? I mean, those guys kept going. Here's here's something, you know, later and the and the only band member I'd ever heard of independently was Bugs Henderson. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:09

I mean Well Bugs was was very talented. I somebody asked me, interviewed me about my studio and asked me about Bugs, and my comment was he married his guitar at an early age. He was a good player. And he was true to her to the end.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:26

Uh well, the studio it it goes on and on. And people do you have people reach out to you that, you know, new new clients, people that just want to record some music?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:38

Yes, I've I've had people still do that they've never recorded anything, but they've they've written some songs and they just want to come in and mostly they want to preserve it for their kids, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:51

I mean, do people come in with only lyrics sometimes and ask you with the session players to put some music to it? Not usually.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:58

I mean, I didn't know I had I had one woman one time come in with three sets of lyrics, and she's I read them over and she said, Well, uh uh do you think I'm a good songwriter? And I said, Well, you're not a songwriter, you're a poet. But secondly, that's uh in her case, it was one story, just three different verses.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:18

But uh, you know, um you know, I was just curious, the people that would frequent the uh frequently book time at your studio, you know, what that demographic who are they speaking?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:29

It's normally established bands and artists or or singer-songwriters. If a singer-songwriter's got some songs and they want to uh cut a good demo on them uh to send them to their publisher or just to the band that they'll they'll come in. Well sometimes that's just an acoustic guitar and the singer.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:47

I I guess I talked about the evolving technology with the equipment, but I'm probably about to change the look on your face. Go. And not for the good. AI has come to the music industry in all different directions now, hasn't it? Yes. I mean, it can write a song, it can come up with the arrangement, it can play all the pieces. That's right. Have you have you investigated or looked into this?

SPEAKER_00 1:43:14

I have not dabbled into it in that respect. Now I have used AI for something that I think is amazing and wonderful. That is, I recorded a guy and I wanted to tune the vocal because he sat a few notes that he was not quite on pitch, but he was playing acoustic guitar at the same time. So that I couldn't tune the vocal track and leave the other one like it was. So I had to run those guitar tracks through AI and remove the vocal, and it did it. Well, I was amazed.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:51

I mean, you can teach an old dog new trip. Oh, listen, I'm I need all the new tricks I can get, I'll tell you. Well, you know, I've enjoyed this tremendously. I think you're a to uh just a hugely interesting person, you know, from our city, Tyler, Texas, obviously East Texas. You've had a big impact. Um, I'm just happy we've got a much fuller, you know, version of your life and who you are. And I want to thank you for being here today.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:16

It was a pleasure meeting you and being able to do this, and I appreciate what you're doing for East Texas.