Ardent Studios originally started off in your parents' garage?
Yeah, growing up I was a huge music fan, although I wasn't a player. I just loved music. I loved the radio. Me and my friends would sit around trying to hear some station that was different, coming from some other place because the big thing here was to listen to WLS in Chicago or listen to WABC or something like that. In '64 listening to WABC when The Beatles were first coming to the United States — it was just electric. It was just amazing. I love music and electronics and technology — we had our own pirate radio station, a low power thing which we had to have. Because we had some equipment we were able to fool around with doing live music recording, so that's kind of how the garage studio started. To be honest about it, it was really kind of an offshoot of the interest in radio, which was really the excuse for acquiring some homemade equipment to start with. The garage studio finally got rolling in '59 or so. The original equipment was really junky and homemade and adapted and cobbled together, but it finally — about '61 to '65 we had a fairly decent Altec valve console and an Ampex stereo machine and Ampex mono machine. While we were still in the garage, it got to a place that was fairly decent. At that point my parents made the decision that they were selling that house and buying another house, and that kind of precipitated me into a career decision. It's like, "Am I just fooling around here or do I really want to do this?"
When you were doing the garage studio, were you charging people for that?
Oh yeah, we did some fee-for-service work. Not as much because I was still going to school and there are supposed to be some laws about running businesses in residential neighborhoods and things like that.
How old were you at this time?
About twenty. I went out and we found a retail store building that had just been built. It was just open space. We rented that and basically built the National Street studio in there, and we got a Scully 4-track machine. With four tracks we thought we'd died and gone to heaven. Little did we realize that — that was '66 when we opened on National — by '68 we had 8-track, by '70, 16-track and I guess '73 or '74 a 24-track.
With that kind of progression happening so fast — was that a financial strain on you to make that happen — to jump from 4-track to 8-track and always having to keep your old deck in case clients bring in older stuff?
Nothing then was as breathtakingly expensive as it is today. Of course you have to look back in relative terms to the dollar and to the era and so on, but it wasn't nearly the cost that it would have been, say, to look at what it took to be state of the art in the early nineties.
Somebody expects you to have an SSL console...
...and probably at that time, a two-hundred-thousand dollar digital multitrack machine or something of that sort. But we were busy. Right from the outset we were as busy as we could be. Right at the time we were building, Stax had literally been two Ampex mixers and some mono and stereo machines and Atlantic was using their studio and had a relationship with them. Tom Dowd was very active and he was telling them, "You've got to upgrade this thing. You've at least got to get a 4-track and you've got to get a decent console." And it so happened that the guy who's building their console was the same one that was building our console. So they had essentially very similar equipment to what we had, which made their people very comfortable going back and forth. They were doing so much recording that there was no way they could do it all. Certainly there was the similarity of equipment, but why they would trust me to do anything? I actually knew what I was doing, but I was twenty-one years old and I looked like I was about sixteen — there was no reason for anybody to believe that I knew anything about what I was doing. That was the one great thing that happened to us. The other great thing that happened to me, I think for my own development as an engineer and a mixer, was the fact that there was a big radio jingle company here and we got a lot of work from them. You say, "Who would want to do that?" That just sounds like horrible stuff to work on and some of it was, but the neat thing about it was that they did all kinds and genres of music and a lot of orchestral recording that I never would have had a chance to do otherwise. I was recording genres, instruments, combinations of instruments that ordinarily I would never have.
Stuff nobody would ask for on a pop record.
Yeah, absolutely. Part of it was because of the arrangers — some were brilliant guys. A lot of the players were really excellent players and they were being driven crazy by doing this jingle stuff, so what they tended to do was come up with ever more bizarre experiments in term of arrangements and combinations of instruments.
They would have fun with it.
Yeah, they would do some pretty outrageous stuff and the suits in the front office didn't know — it just blew right by them. They didn't know that some of the instrumentation they were using [was] somewhat unusual.
What years did that jingle work proliferate for you?
That was mostly '66 through maybe '69 into '70 a little bit. More of it was on the front end because again, the jingle people had some studios. The company initially was called Pepper and was owned by a guy named John Pepper, who also owned WDIA, which was one of the first black format radio stations here, and then there was a guy named Bill Tanner who bought it and it became Tanner. We did one of the first stereo production library services, which was called Tanner Total Sound — they called it the TTS library. Of course to me and all the arrangers, we had another name for that: "Tiny Terrible Songs". You had to be careful who you said that to! It was challenging, but it was fun. They would show up and we would record up to forty pieces simultaneously on the 4-track. We'd have rhythm, woodwinds, brass, strings at the same time.
Mix on the fly?
Yeah. It kind of separates the sheep from the goats. You either figure out how to get it done or you have a nervous breakdown.
In the National Street era were there other engineers working out of your studio?
Yes. Going back to the garage studio, Jim Dickinson was coming in and producing stuff. Guys that were in some of these local bands, like Terry Manning, started to learn how to engineer. When we moved over on to National Street, Terry was really the first engineer other than myself, and then it wasn't long before some other guys were learning how to do that. A guy named Richard Roseborough, who's an excellent drummer, and then when you get over into the Big Star era, then Chris Bell and Andy Hummel start to learn how to do some of that stuff. We just had the one studio, so a lot of times it would be Terry working in the day and I'm doing it at night and vice versa. Some of the Stax producers would engineer some of their sessions, notably Steve Cropper. He wouldn't always, but he actually could and would engineer. The other person who started with the jingle company — most people don't realize — was Jim Gaines. There were a lot of alumni from that thing.
It seems like early on you had kind of a policy — Chris Bell is a great example — of letting people come in on the off hours and mess around and learn something.
It is an extension of the garage ethic, or the family concept or whatever you want to call it. It also has some practical applications. If you think there's a chance that any of these people might make some good music and you want to be in the production company, the record label or the music publishing business, you want some guys that you think can write some good songs and record some good masters. It had another practical advantage as kind of an engineer training mechanism. There's only so much you can show somebody or tell somebody, and then you've got to give them a chance to actually do it. So, if they're in there doing it, not experimenting on your paying clients, but they're experimenting on themselves, that's a little better venue for their experimentation. It's the only way anybody is ever going to learn, because recording schools are great — I'd wish they'd had them in the '60s and made it easier for me to learn in an organized program — but there's only so much hands-on, practical experience that you can get in that kind of a setting.
What kind of rates were you charging in that era? Were there different rates for jingles or albums, music projects?
A typical studio rate in 1966 would probably be something like $50 an hour. I ran into an inflation calculator — you can do it based on monetary inflation or consumer price index or the producer prices. You can input what something cost in 1978 or whatever and figure out what it ought to cost in the current year. I did a horrifying experiment one time. I put in what we were able to charge for studio time in 1978 and converted it into maybe 2002 or 2003 dollars and it turned out that just to stay where we were, we should have been charging something like $280 an hour, and obviously [we were] not.
