Written by Drew Tewksbury
the music legends and historic shenanigans of Landmark Los Angeles
r e c o r d i n g s t u d i o s m a k e t h e m s o m e o f t h e c i t y ’ s g r e a t e s t l i v i n g m u s e u m s.
Los Angeles is a city of film. From the arched, ochre-
stuccoed gates of Paramount, on Melrose Avenue, in Hollywood, to the
sprawling campus of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, to the expanse
of Universal in the Valley—a studio and amusement park and city unto
itself—the film industry is king. But it wasn’t always like this. The legacy
of another studio city exists in the shadow of these monuments to the
outsize wealth and influence of the silver screen.
This now mostly hidden city was once the heart and the
source of pop music and the culture of pop-idol worship that attended
it. Today the music industry suffers the growing pains of the digital age,
but back in the day the pop hit was about great sessions in great studios,
like United Western Recorders, where The Beach Boys crafted Pet Sounds,
maybe the best pop album of all time; or Gold Star Studios, where Ritchie
Valens changed the face of rock ’n’ roll with “La Bamba,” or The Village
Recorder, where Frank Zappa mutated musical genres. These studios influ-
enced the history of popular culture in a snarl of wires, banks of oversized
knobs, tubes, and miles of tape. These pre-digital artifacts, in many cases,
have been left behind, and though some haven’t been used in years, many
remain operable. A long row of microphones stand in a studio at Capitol
Records where Frank Sinatra loosened a skinny tie and joked with the ses-
sion band. A couch at Sunset Marquis Studios held Aerosmith, and Steely
Dan’s tape machine, lovingly named Simone, lays dormant in The Village’s
equipment room. There’s a mythos and romance around these musicians
who made music with which the world fell in love. But the sounds were
more than the product of great artists’ imaginations—they were the result,
too, of craftsmanship and science.
There is, perhaps, not a more recognizable building in the
Los Angeles cityscape than the 13th-floor cylinder of the Capitol Records
Tower, at the foot of the Hollywood Hills near the intersection of Franklin
and Vine. Completed in 1956 and designed by Welton Becket (whose retro-
futuristic designs include Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome theater and the
UFO-styled Theme Building at LAX), the building resembles a stack of white-
wax forty-fives piled high on a jukebox spindle jutting into the sky. But it was
inside the building that masters were cut for stacks of vinyl for an audience
ravenous for sounds from the “house that Nat built.” Even today, Nat “King”
Cole’s piano waits in Studio B, the curved white white walls leading to it are
lined with photos of Frank Sinatra in recording sessions. Walking past them
is like glimpsing a film reel of Frank; he puts up his collar, looks askance at
the drummer, a cigarette hangs from his lips, as he sits on a leopard-print
chair. And that chair still waits for Frank today, sitting alone by the black
equipment cases with band names stenciled in white upon them.
As a label, Capitol Records put out records from The Beatles
to the Beastie Boys (not to mention MC Hammer). When the English label
EMI took control of the company in 1955, the Capitol Tower was to be the
American equivalent of Abbey Road.
But one of the more remarkable innovations at Capitol isn’t
found in the studios; instead it is down a darkened ladder in the boiler room
and across a hallway leading underneath the parking lot. What you can’t see
in the inky black, you can certainly hear in the eight echo chambers built by
electronics and guitar innovator Les Paul in the 1950s. With ten-inch thick
concrete walls, and twelve-inch-thick ceilings, the spaces create an echo
effect that is the fingerprint of the studio: a distinct sound that the Beatles
employed on the American mixes of their records. The dark chambers are
essentially the lungs of Capitol—deep, hollow expanses where the sound of a
full string section, The Beach Boys, and Sinatra became fuller and warm.
Today when the hatch to the echo chamber is opened, hot, stale,
musky air wafts out, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine the sound waves and
voices, some long dead, bouncing off the cold walls the way they once did.
Sinatra was no stranger to Capitol. In 1953, he signed with
the record company after a lull in his career, and in 1958 he recorded his
melancholic Only the Lonely at the Tower. The album was a departure
from his swinging sound of earlier records like Sounds for Swinging Lov-
ers. Here, he sang of bleak heartache and sadness after his recent divorce
from the love of his life, Ava Gardner. The album went on to a 120-week
stay on the Billboard album chart and the Capitol years proved to be a
jumpstart in Old Blue Eye’s career.
“When Sinatra came into the studio, he’d said, ‘I want to sing
Images corurtesy of Sunset Sound and The Village.
with the band,’” says engineer Ron McMaster, “and they immediately had to
adjust the whole setup. He wanted to stand in front of the band.” For the last
twenty years, McMaster has engineered and, well, mastered albums for art-
ists, and when he’s in the wood-and-craggy-rock-walled Mastering Suite 2 at
Capitol, he looks to be at home. His hands pass instinctively over the large
analog console, sliding faders to the beat of some inaudible symphony. To
me, the black apparatus resembles what the cockpit of a B-29 bomber must
look like. The suite, adorned with vertical wood panels, feels like the knotty-
pine basements or clubrooms where the records, mixed in Hollywood, would
later be played by kids in Wichita or Portland or St. Louis, dancing alone or
lying on their backs examining the centerfold art of an opened album. Sitting
behind the lights and knobs of the large analog console, McMaster enthu-
siastically smiles as he explains, with a faint accent of a fleeting California The Rolling Stones, recording Exile on Main Street, at Sunset Sound, 1972.

Van Halen, in Sunset Sound’s Studio 2 Control Room, 1981.
dream, his role in maintaining the Capitol sound.
“We have guys that will record in Studio B, then mix or
master with me down here, just so they don’t have to leave this build-
ing. So they never have to break the chain. I think about it as I get older.
I’ve done quite a bit of work here and they have a lot of my work in the
library here and I feel like I’m part of the chain.”
McMaster is one of the few in the music industry who can
still cut vinyl by hand. “There’s a subtle feeling to records that you just
can’t get anywhere else,” he says. He began working at Capitol in the
eighties, after first coming to L.A. as a musician. In the sixties, McMaster
played music with a psychedelic garage-rock band, The Public Nuisance,
who toured with The Doors and Buffalo Springfield, and recently were cov-
ered by The White Stripes. They left their home of Sacramento to record
at the legendary Gold Star Recording Studios near Vine and Santa Monica
after a chance meeting with a Cher record.
“We saw Stan Ross’s face on the back of a Sonny and Cher
record we were playing. It was back in the day when they used to type up
little descriptions of the record on the back, and we said, ‘This is where
we got to do our record.’”
Gold Star closed in 1984, almost thirty-four years after the
independent studio first opened its doors in Hollywood. In the 1950s, Gold
Star created a string of hits that are now embedded into the collective
musical consciousness, from “Tequila” and “Summertime Blues” to “I Got
You Babe” and “La Bamba.” Shortly after it closed, the building burned to
the ground, leaving little visual trace of the memories produced within. But
if a record came out of Los Angeles in the fifties or sixties, there was a
good chance that Dave Gold and Stan Ross at Gold Star had something to
do with it. Their stories now keep the studio alive.
With their innovative (and sometimes highly improvised)
recording sessions, Gold and Ross brought in musicians and churned out
stars. Their rough-around-the-edges style and quick production tech-
niques came to define what Ross describes as “the rock-’n’-roll situation.”
This rough edge, coupled with their enthusiasm for experimentation, led
to the development of fuzzed-out guitars and the raucous rhythms of a
prototypical rock music.
Gold Star developed Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba,” a Span-
ish-language song with an irresistible guitar hook, into one of the most
recognizable songs in pop-music history. Rockabilly hero and pre-punker
Eddie Cochran laid down tracks for the reverbed-out drums and howls of
“Summertime Blues,” rendering Elvis tame in comparison, and making The
Cramps and Jon Spencer drool today.
“I always mention Eddie Cochran and Ritchie in the same
breath,” said Ross, in a Brooklyn brogue, “because they passed away pre-
maturely. They were really nice guys and very professional. They never
bothered nobody.” Cochran and Valens died in tragic accidents at 21 and 17,
respectively, leaving their sessions and stories with Gold and Ross as eulo-
gies and a promise to young stars.
Now in their late seventies (“I started making 78s, now I am
78!” says Ross), Gold and Ross still speak about the studio days with crystal
clarity but without nostalgia. Ross jokes with the energy of someone a quarter
his age, and Gold, with his well-thought-out remarks, refers to their clients as
friends. They espouse a genuine love for the building that fostered so much
creativity from hundreds of artists, who crammed their amps and pianos into
the stark-white rooms with bright overhead lights. Big sessions here could
look more like a suave big-band orchestra, with musicians wearing sunglasses
inside and slicked-back hair. After all, it was the age of Elvis. But they never
got ahold of Elvis himself, though “all the guys in Elvis’ band recorded here
because they were friends with our secretary, Tina,” Ross says.
Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” originated, in part, from the
distinctive echo chamber that Gold designed after much experimentation.
“I actually froze a bowl of JELL-O,” he says, “and put a driver on one end
and a pickup on the other, and it didn’t sound good. But the JELL-O was
delicious. I eventually remembered back to when I was a kid that my father
had a shower behind his shop. I remembered that it really had a unique
sound to it, so when we were building our chamber, I used the same kind of
concrete as was in that shower.” Spector’s production of The Ronettes’ “Be
My Baby,” made at Gold Star, opens with dull thuds like a bass drum in an
auditorium, while the keys seamlessly bleed into the swaying chorus; each
were results of Gold Star’s echo chamber as well as Spector’s doubling and
tripling of studio instruments solidifying Gold Star as a titan in the indus-
try and Spector’s reputation for sonic density.
Hundreds of musicians walked through Gold Star’s doors,
from dope-smoking jazz heads to Sonny and Cher, and even an undiscov-
ered Jimi Hendrix, who was playing backup for his reported ladyfriend Rosa
Lee Brooks. Ross and Gold kept in close contact with many of them, even
when they got into trouble.
“I’m getting ready to lock up the studio one night,” says Ross,
“and there was Neil Young all bloodied up, and I says, ‘Neil, what happened?’
and apparently he got into something with the police, so we took him to the
hospital in Hollywood. Now Neil never forgot about this and, later on, he let
Dave master a lot of his later albums.”
As the industry shifted away from producing singles toward
crafting entire albums, Gold Star didn’t have the capacity or accoutrements
for artists to record for long periods of time. “The industry was changing
and the music was changing,” says Gold. “The fun we had in the fifties and
sixties dissolved in the seventies. People would take too long to make an
album and it went from having fun to being more like work.”
The flourishing drug scene also proved to be a challenge
for the more old-fashioned Gold Star, which kept its studio relatively clean.
“Dave and I don’t use drugs. Pall Mall is the only drug I use,” says Ross. “[We]
weren’t goodie goodies, you know,” Gold says. “It just wasn’t our thing.”
“Geordie Hormel and all these rich guys at places like The
Village Recording Studios would supply all this coke and stuff for the guys,
so we definitely lost to this competition,” says Ross. “These guys were get-
ting stoned and it was all paid for by Hormel bacon.”
Jeff Greenberg, CEO of the Village Recorders, says, “Geordie
used to hide drugs in plain sight and tell anyone who could find it that they
could have it. He had a wicked and hilarious sense of humor.”
The eccentric but ingenious Geordie Hormel—one of three
heirs to the Hormel meatpacking fortune—purchased a 1920s Masonic tem-
ple in 1968 and converted it into a space for practicing his own music. But
things didn’t go as planned. “Geordie bought this place,” says Greenberg,
“and his friends in Steely Dan said, ‘Geordie, all the suits keep coming and
checking up on our practices. Can we come over there?’ And that’s how The
Village got started. Money was no object and he built it in a way that you
could never do today.”
Village Recorders is housed in a nondescript, three-story
building in Westwood. Musicians from Frank Zappa to Dr. Dre have recorded
inside its large studio complex, which takes its design cues from its Masonic
past, complete with lit candles, wooden pews, stained glass, and an auditorium
that, in the sixties, was used as a meditation room by the Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation), when he was in town. The audi-
torium features a wrought-iron balcony and chandeliers that hang from the
high ceiling. Fiber-optic lights, more recent additions, peek through the ceil-
ing like sunlight piercing pinholes in a black sheet; labyrinthine passageways
unfold into rooms hiding behind unmarked doors.
On the south-facing exterior wall is a faded mural, called
“Isle of California,” painted by the late Terry Schoonhoven, Victor Hender-
son, and Jim Frazin, in 1972, which depicts a partially destroyed freeway
hanging perilously over an earthquake-ravaged California landscape,
recalling the fantastical sci-fi album covers that were usually better than
the prog-rock LPs they contained.
With its three floors and warren of hallways and studios (and
a rooftop deck that reveals a blue sliver of the Pacific), The Village is like its
namesake, a vertical village of musicians and engineers entering into com-
merce with their skill and craft.
In the early nineties, Greenberg took over The Village, and
with his energetic personality and respect for the space, created what he calls
“a great resurrection” of the studio, which had fallen into disrepair in the late
eighties. He brought back the mystery and the magic.
Fleetwood Mac took extended stays in Studio D, a wing
specifically built for them by Hormel, where one room’s walls are clad in beau-
tiful African Zebrawood. The piano tracks for the soundtrack to zon the Web.
Hosted by Nic Harcourt, the show often brings in live studio guests, who use
the historic Village studio rooms for their performances.
Sometimes, these live performances, like any, can get a little com-
plicated, especially when bands show up with little time for preparation. “We’re
thinking, ‘Where the hell is this band? They’re late,’” Greenberg says. “We’re going
out live and there’s no room for messing up. We don’t know what to expect. Then,
as it turns out, it was The Polyphonic Spree. So here we have like thirty-eight
people in robes getting off a bus, and we pulled it off.”
One of the songs the Spree performed that day, “It’s the
Sun,” was later released on KCRW’s compilation Sounds Eclectic 3: Live.
The Village was also the location of the creation of two of
the most successful rap albums of all time—Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop
Dogg’s Doggystyle. “It’s the second day after I had taken this place over and
we had just started operating again and I get a phone call,” says Greenberg.
“‘Jeff, the police have Snoop and his whole crew at gunpoint on the curb
outside.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so shitty.’ So I drive down, and at the
time I was seeing this uptight woman who was seeing some hip shrink, and I
remember thinking, ‘Shit, this is going to be over quick.’ In the car ride over
she told me, ‘Jeffrey, I’m a Christian woman with Christian values,’ and I was
thinking, ‘Oh great, I’m so screwed.’ So I walk in the lobby and I’m looking up
at Snoop, ’cause he’s really tall, and I say, ‘Snoop, I heard what happened and
I’ve been to the police station and I promise that won’t ever happen again.’
Then Snoop says, ‘Naw, bitch be cool, I like the Village.’ Now [the woman]
was over by the desk and one of Snoop’s associates leans back with a beer
in his hand, and I try to be gracious and I say, ‘I’m really sorry, can I get you
anything?’ So he leans back and points at her and says, ‘Yeah, I want that
bitch.’ That was it for her, I never heard from her again.”
In the way that The Village provided a full spectrum of musi-
cal genres from the late sixties onward, Sunset Sound was responsible for the
albums and catalyzing agent for rock records that broke convention, cracked
minds wide open, and became the soundtrack to the psychedelic sixties. Built
by the wonderfully named Tutti Camarata, the studios opened in 1962 inside
a space that was formerly an auto-repair shop. Camarata was, during the late
fifties, Walt Disney’s director of recording, but ventured out on his own and
recorded sound for movies like 101 Dalmations, Bambi, and The Jungle Book at
his studio during the day.
But the night belonged to rock.
In close proximity to the Whiskey a Go Go and the burgeon-
ing Sunset Strip scene—now a grotesque imitation of itself—Sunset Sound
was ground zero for the cataclysm of psychedelia that The Doors would
drop on L.A. When he wasn’t tracking the gunshot sound that killed Bambi’s
mom, engineer Bruce Bottnick manned the boards for The Doors. Working
closely with Doors keyboardist and sonic alchemist Ray Manzarek, Bottnick
helped to weave The Doors’ circuitous jazzy rhythms and Jim Morrison’s
grisly poetics into the perception-altering cacophony that crystallized them
as rock gods. On The Doors 1966 self-titled album, the raw power of the
band who had stumbled from the stage to the studio was captured mostly
on the first take, in Sunset Sound’s roomy spaces with off-white block walls
and multi-toned wooden acoustical panels.
The Doors and their studio antics have been surrounded in
a haze of rumor, and Craig Hubler, a studio manager for more than 20 years,
insinuates that sometimes the myth can be better than the reality.
“There is that rumor that Jim Morrison once came into the
studio and sprayed a fire extinguisher all over the boards. But I talked to
the people that were here that day and they said it didn’t happen, but no
one can really say for sure,” Hubler said.
Whether the dousing was real or not, it represents only a
tiny portion of the historic visitations by seminal recording artists upon
Sunset Sound’s studios. From Led Zeppelin’s inimitable IV album, to The
Rolling Stones’ amazing Exile on Main Street, and even The Beatles (who
lent a hand on Ringo’s 1972 solo album recorded there), the empty rooms
still thrum with the vibrations of these sessions. You can imagine Jimmy
Page leaning against the chipped white paint of a doorway, practicing the
guitar scales he’d use for “Stairway to Heaven”; Prince, between Purple
Rain sessions, shooting three pointers at the basketball hoop in the court-
yard; Van Halen taking smoke breaks at a worn picnic bench outside.
In the way that layered photo negatives produce a myriad of
images, one on top of the other, Sunset Sound is a layered image compiled
of the experiences, myths, and music of the forever changing Los Angeles
rock scene.
Down the street from Capitol and around the corner from the
faux-saloon façades of Western Avenue, a weather-worn wooden sign above
the door reads “Ocean Way.” Behind this tiny sign, and the mundane blue-
and-white exterior, the some of the greatest albums of the twentieth century
were laid down.
Ocean Way was built on the structure of one of the most
important studios in Hollywood at the time, United Western. In 1957, United
Studios, in L.A., was purchased by Bill Putnam, whose Universal Recording, in
Chicago, was home to Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Quincy Jones. He later
purchased the neighboring Western Studios, creating the expansive United
Western complex. Frank Sinatra used the upstairs space at United Western
as an office for Reprise Records, which he founded in 1960, and he recorded
“Strangers in the Night” and some of this later hits there. Much of the later-
sixties “California sound” came out of a United Western studio as well; The
Mamas & the Papas recorded “California Dreamin’, in one. Brian Wilson and
The Beachboys made the masterpiece Pet Sounds at United Western.
“At that time United Western was one of the hottest studios,” Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams, The Village, 2004.
says Allen Sides, an engineer and producer who owns Ocean Way. “You’d walk
down the halls and The Beach Boys would be here, The Mamas & The Papas
would be there, Frank would be there, and Sammy would be over here, Rich-
ard Burton would be there. It was just an amazing place to walk through.”
Back in the sixties, Sides was a runner and all-purpose assis-
tant at the studio. After purchasing troves of vintage recording gear and
founding Ocean Way studios in a garage in Santa Monica, he took over
United Western in 1985, after a long collaboration with Putnam. Then as
Ocean Way Recording, on Sunset Boulevard, the studio offered a creative
haven for eighties phenoms like Michael Jackson.
Today, Studio B at United Western is strewn with Rhodes
keyboards, mountains of drum kits, rows of guitars, and a snake pit of micro-
phone chords for the current recording sessions of the band Mars Volta. The
instrument-filled room is where Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief album was
recorded, in 2003. The producer Nigel Goodrich has made Ocean Way his
Los Angeles hub and recorded three of Beck’s latest albums there.
In Studio A, which is now a darkened room full of tiki
ephemera, Japanese masks, Persian rugs, a sitar (left there by Stone
Temple Pilots), and even a bar, the drum track for Beat It was laid down,
creating the sonic architecture for the best-selling album of all time and
the King of Pop. Emily Dickinson once wrote that every artist needs “a
room of one’s own,” and although she never had the pleasure of watching
and attempting a moonwalk, Michael seemingly took her words to heart
and made Ocean Way his own.
“Michael was one of the nicest, funniest guys I had ever met,”
says Sides. “We had a suite in the back, where he had all his meetings, and
he’d walk in there and it was an endless train of the most wild people you
could imagine. Michael was at his peak. I never saw anything like it.”
How Jackson gets his studio catered when he records now
can only be speculated upon, but in his days at United Western he ordered a
smorgasbord of the esoteric and the down-home. “Michael would always hire a
[macrobiotic] chef and a soul-food chef and he’d have them going at the same
time,” says Sides, “so you could come over here and get ribs and all this stuff,
then over there it was all macrobiotic. Also, every table looked like a candy
counter at a movie theater. It’d have like Milk Duds and all that. It was just ridic-
ulous. Other well-known musicians had strange requests. According to Jessica,
the secretary at United Western, the producer Rick Rubin once requested an
Ab Roller. Neil Young made tall orders for a specific style of Ray-Bans.
At The Studio at the Sunset Marquis Hotel & Villas, in West
Hollywood, catering to an artist’s needs is much easier: you just order room
service. Housed in an isolated corner of the lavish hotel’s parking garage,
the intimate space offers an alternative to traditional recording studios.
“When an artist comes here, the drinks they like, the food they like, every-
thing that makes them comfortable is here,” says Jed Leiber, the owner. “We
try to personalize each session.”
The Sunset Marquis Hotel has long been a lavish home to musi-
cians on break from touring, holed up to write a hit, or simply to party. “Back
in the day, this was the place where bands had to stay because they couldn’t
afford anything else. That’s changed very much. Now this is where bands
come on their cushy tours. I know Keith Richards was here recently because
he was flying a pirate flag out of his window and blasting Miles Davis.”
Now musical megastars (or mega corporations) like U2, The
Rolling Stones, and Areosmith use the studio as a refuge from the rigors
of touring. In fact, the hotel is creating a new parking garage big enough
for their tour buses.
While staying at the Marquis in the early nineties, Leiber
discovered the recording space during a jam session with his friend and col-
laborator Jeff Beck, the legendary guitarist. “We were playing guitar in a
hotel room, then somebody complained, not knowing that it was Jeff Beck
playing and they should be slipping hundreds under the door,” says Leiber.
“The manager, who was this pretty hip guy, suggested we play in this room
in the garage because it was 3 a.m. So we went to this tiny room downstairs
and found this room where a company used to sell [expensive keyboards
like] Synclaviers, and it was designed by famous acoustician George Augs-
purger. It was this beautifully designed room and it was just sitting there. I
couldn’t believe our good fortune.”
Leiber rented the inconspicuous room from the hotel as a
place to work on film scores, as well as for sessions with musician friends
staying in the hotel. But just as Geordie Hormel’s plans for his Masonic tem-
ple changed, Leiber’s studio became a home away from home for rock stars,
evolving into a semi-commercial studio available to the high-profile musi-
cians staying at the hotel.
The mahogany walls and low lighting in the intimate space,
which Leiber describes as “cozy but a little like a gentlemen’s club,” creates
a relaxed atmosphere where Madonna, Justin Timberlake, and even Ozzy
Osbourne (who, Leiber reports, has some difficulty navigating the hotel’s
many hallways) have produced various recordings. “I built a place that I’d
feel comfortable in as a musician and a writer,” says Leiber. “The mood is
very important and obviously it has to sound nice. And what you hear in the
sweet spot is amazing.”
Though each of these historic and discrete spaces are
still overflowing with music, many sweet spots in L.A. are disappearing.
The proliferation of home studios, digital recording, and even MySpace is
often posited as the death of the music industry’s golden age, though, in
a sense, it represents a return to the heyday of Gold Star, when the mar-
ket for singles was more robust. Many studio owners also lament the way
that modern post-production cleans up recordings, making mediocre musi-
cians into stars. But somewhere, hidden behind the mortar of that former
Masonic temple, the tendrils of wire coiled on Ocean Way’s floor, and the
darkness of Capitol’s echo chambers, there are still fragments of the gui-
tars and the voices that came before, endlessly calling back and forever
reverberating.