What brought you to Nashville?
I was in the service. I got drafted from Atlanta, Georgia, in December 1961. Jerry Reed and I were real close friends, along with Joe South. I'd worked on the road with Joe back in the '50s. Ray Stevens was another guy who was from Atlanta, as well as Freddy Weller, Pete Drake, and Tommy Roe. When it got time for me to get out of the service, Jerry said, "I want you to move to Nashville and work with me playing guitar." Both of us are thumbpickers. We went on the road for six or eight months. He decided he wanted to get off the road so he could work more on his picking, instrumentals, and writing songs. Jerry had success right before I moved up. He wrote "That's All You Gotta Do," for Brenda Lee [in 1960]. He'd written "Bottom of the Bottle," for Porter Wagoner, which was a number one record. "If the Good Lord's Willing and the Creek Don't Rise" was a big record [for Johnny Cash]. He'd had a lot of writing success. The Brenda Lee song really inspired him when he got that first check; it's enough to inspire anybody! He really felt bad about leaving me, not having any job, and he said, "Why don't you go around to some of these places and tell them you play guitar? Ask if you can play guitar on their demos." So I visited around. Tony Moon, one of the guys I visited, had played guitar in Brenda Lee's band. I asked him and he said, "No, I have a guitar player. I need a bass player." I said, "I've got a bass." I started playing upright bass on all of his demos. I eventually moved around to acoustic guitar. He cut a demo with [songwriter] Allen Reynolds, "Five O'Clock World." We demoed it over at RCA Studio B. I did a unique sounding intro on 12-string [guitar]. The Vogues tried to re-cut it up in Pennsylvania, but couldn't get anywhere near that sound. They wanted to know if they could use the [demo] track, so they used the track and paid us master scale for it. That was a huge hit for them in pop and country. People started to use me. Then Tony Moon was playing a song he had demoed that Johnny MacRae's wife, Marge Barton, wrote called "What Color (Is a Man)." [Producer] Billy Sherrill had his office next to Tony, and said, "If you can get me the guy who played on that demo, I'll cut that song this afternoon with Bobby Vinton." He called me and I borrowed [songwriter] Marijohn Wilkins' old gut string guitar and walked over to the studio. They played the demo and everybody grabbed their guitars and tried to play the lick. Nobody could do it – it's a complicated little thing. Billy came out of the control room and said, "This guy Chip Young's going to play on the record. He played on the demo." [Session guitarist] Grady Martin's sitting in his big green chair. He was a bear of a guy, and had that big old guitar laying on his belly. He said, "You played that?" I said, "Yes sir." He said, "Let me hear you." I picked up my guitar and started playing. He said, "No, over here." He made me walk over and pull up a chair right between his legs and play it for him. I was playing it, and he was looking at my fingers and looking at my eyes. He said, "That's great." We were the best of friends from then on. He used me on all kinds of sessions.
Did you record with Jerry Reed during that time period?
Yeah, I played on a lot of his sessions. I played electric rhythm, acoustic, or whatever they wanted.
After playing on all these sessions, how did you move into the studio owner world?
Well, playing on all the sessions, I could hear that the sounds could be better. The drummers always complained about the foot not sounding like a bass drum, the bass not sounding like a bass, and that acoustic guitar didn't sound like an acoustic guitar. They couldn't get things sounding exactly right. I had engineered in Atlanta before.
What studio was that?
Bill Lowery's studio; NRC [National Recording Corporation] down there. After I came up here, I thought, "I know how to make that sound better than what they're getting here." Not to make them look bad, but maybe to help teach. I'm not the type of person to make somebody look bad. I wanted Nashville to have a better reputation. L.A. thought their records were better than ours. We built my first studio called Young 'Un Sound in Murfreesboro, about 30 miles south of Nashville. I got Fred Cameron [to build my console], who turned out to be a genius. It was the first console you could solo "wet" and "in place."
So the panning and the reverb followed the solo?
Right. Others couldn't figure out how it was done, and they dogged us until we finally told them how it was done. It was a real unique console. We had it fixed where just about every point on the console was patchable.
Did you have headphones and iso booths?
Yeah. The piano was in a little booth. I built a booth over it so that nothing stuck out but the keyboard. The drums were in a booth, the vocals in a booth, and the acoustic guitar was in a little fenced-in place with some plexiglass. I used a drop-in Sennheiser mic for the acoustic, and it worked well. I know a lot of people didn't like those drop-in mics, but I could make it sound pretty good. Being an acoustic player, I remembered what it was supposed to sound like.
Would the Nashville session players drive out there to do the recording in the morning and then drive back, or did they camp out there?
We did mostly 10 a.m. sessions out there, because I felt that 10 a.m. sessions the pickers were more refreshed. They would give you their best at 10 a.m. more than they would at 2 or 6 p.m. We did do some 10 p.m. sessions, but they were very forgettable. Delbert McClinton would say, "Why are we cutting at 10 in the morning? I'm hardly awake." I said, "You'll sound better at 10 in the morning." Once he started singing, he said, "Man, yeah. You're right." We only fixed a couple of lines on Delbert's first three albums that I did. Joe Ely was the same way. Johnny Mathis we cut at 10 a.m. He said, "Sure is early for me." It's an hour drive down there from Nashville.
Where did you record Billy Swan's "I Can Help"?
I did Billy Swan in Murfreesboro. I did some other records with Billy Swan later on at the other place.
But 'I Can Help' was cut in Murfreesboro?
It was cut in Murfreesboro.
Did you have the feeling it would be a crossover worldwide hit?
No, we didn't.
What year was that, mid-70s?
'74.
I remember hearing that song when I was a kid and thinking it was George Harrison.
Yeah, a lot of people thought that was George Harrison.
That was a huge song
Yeah. I think he sold 6 or 7 million records; something like that. Reggie Young did the guitar intro. Billy didn't like the turnaround – he made me take it off. He wrote it as a rhythm and blues song, but I didn't know that. When he ran it down, I said, "I've got an idea for the turnaround on this." I told Reggie, "Don't play anything on the turnaround; leave it open." The intro came by accident. Everybody else was out by the pool having a smoke or something, and Reggie was in the studio playing that little lick, just warming up. I said, "That lick would make a great intro for this song we're getting ready to do." He said, "I'm just warming my fingers up." He played it for Billy and everybody loved it. Django Reinhardt is where it [the inspiration] came from. It worked perfect. Billy's organ had that old skating rink sound to it.
How many years did you have that studio going?
Eight or ten years. I sold the place in Murfreesboro, and then I bought the old Monument Studio down on 17th Avenue in Nashville [see Fred Foster Tape Op #118]. They hadn't really done any changes to it. It had an old Flickinger console; a good console but very hard to get around on. If you're making records, you need to move from one place to the other pretty quick sometimes. Musicians are usually antsy people, as you well know.
You brought in a Sphere console.
Yeah, I ordered a Sphere. It took about three months for it to finally get here. In the meantime, I took my old tube console from Murfreesboro and brought it in.
You had a specialized booth for the drums that was unique.
We built a drum booth. When I first bought the studio, I wanted to make it where I could not have any leakage on anything; to be able to fix parts. Everything was moving that way. I knew if I didn't, I'd be stuck in a rut. We tried to make it where we could open the windows up and have live and leakage if we wanted, or we could close them down and have complete separation. We put garage door openers on the windows to raise and lower them.
So the drummer could talk to everybody?
Yeah; we could converse back and forth.
Did the drummer have the switch, or did you have the switch?
He had the switch in the booth, and it worked great.
How did you get involved with working with Elvis Presley?
Through Scotty Moore, Elvis's original guitar player down in Memphis. He told Elvis one day, 'We've got this kid here in Nashville we need to use on these records. He plays parts that nobody else plays.' Elvis said, 'Get him!' So the next session, they called me and asked if I could do it.
Where was the session at?
RCA Studio B. I was blown away getting to work with Elvis. Then the next thing we did was a movie soundtrack out in L.A. We went to MGM or Universal, I've forgotten which one it was now. I remember I was driving the car with all the musicians with me. It's a movie lot, so all the buildings are really close together. I swerved around the corner and Rock Hudson stepped out of one of the doorways and jumped back in. I almost hit him. Scared me to death!
What were some of the big songs you worked on with Elvis?
