Sonic Temples

The resurgence of Memphis’ classic recording studios.

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Since 2018, a singular nocturnal vision has greeted anyone looking out over the Mississippi River from Memphis: The arches and spans of the Hernando de Soto Bridge come to life with choreographed light. Among the programmed, dancing flashes, the rows of vertical cables supporting the roadway of the giant M are sometimes lit sequentially from bottom to top in an ever-bouncing pattern, the green in the lower portions rising to red in the upper third. It looks exactly like the audio meters of a recording console, pulsing to an unheard music, peaking in red when the beat gets hot.

It’s an appropriate metaphor for what’s happening on real production consoles all over the city these days. A local industry that many thought peaked half a century ago is now pulsing red once more more. The comeback has been built largely on the way contemporary producers honor the classic approach to recording — one that made this city a music-business capital from the 1950s until the mid-1970s.

Many other studios are also making a mark — a highly polished, bright and shiny, musical mark — with spaces that are decidedly not “vintage,” from IMAKEMADBEATS’ home studio to Made In Memphis Entertainment’s state-of-the-art, almost futuristic multiroom facility.

Once upon a time, Memphis was synonymous with recording. Beginning in 1950 with Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service (where Sun Records was based), and followed by Royal Studios (one of the oldest continuously operated spaces of its kind in the world), then Phillips Recording, Stax Records, American Sound Studio, and Ardent Studios, the Bluff City was the place to make records. And now, as Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell, current co-owner of Royal Studios, recently noted, “It’s shifting back to the way it used to be, when we were a recording destination.”

This is no small feat in an age when, thanks to quantum leaps in digital technology, setting up a home recording studio is both viable and affordable. And certainly many of the more recent hits Memphis is now known for were created on home rigs. Before rising to their current level of celebrity, Three 6 Mafia could build masterful tracks in bedrooms, combining samples and drum machines completely “in the box,” i.e., on the computer screen. A microphone might only come into play when a vocalist entered the room. To this day, DJ Squeeky, the architect behind decades of hits by 8Ball & MJG, Young Dolph, and others, works from a small, nondescript office space in the suburbs.

Many other studios are also making a mark — a highly polished, bright and shiny, musical mark — with spaces that are decidedly not “vintage,” from IMAKEMADBEATS’ home studio to Made In Memphis Entertainment’s state-of-the-art, almost futuristic multiroom facility.

But lately, something else is at play. Perhaps as a reaction to the highly controlled sounds of mostly virtual production, recording artists and engineers have taken a renewed interest in the basics, where live bands set up in large, finely sculpted rooms, sometimes recording to that ancient throwback, reel-to-reel tape. In designing new studios, local engineers now strive to emulate the classic spaces of yore.

Scott Bomar learned the ropes of recording in such spaces, working as either an artist or an engineer at Sam Phillips Recording Studio (often with the great Roland Janes), as well as at Ardent and Royal, before establishing his own Electraphonic Recording. He now creates soul and rock records and film scores that sound like they could have been made decades ago. His words echo Mitchell’s feeling that Memphis is once again a recording destination.

“More and more people are starting to move here from other places.” he says. “It seems like Memphis is one of the last affordable music cities in America to live in. People have gotten outpriced in Nashville, New York, and L.A. Plus, there are a lot of magical spaces in Memphis. Sam Phillips, Royal, Ardent. It’s hard to record something in any of those rooms and not get what you’re looking for. They’re just magical.”

Terry Manning suggests the same. He’s been involved in engineering and producing records since the ’60s, when he helped put the then-unknown Ardent Studios on the map as a second studio for Stax recording artists, among others (read the story of how he mixed Led Zeppelin III there in our November 2020 issue). Lately, Ardent is often celebrated as the birthplace of a little band called Big Star.

“It makes everything so much easier to have a good recording space,” Manning says. “You have to know a lot more to do well in a smaller space, or with samples. Analog tapes and the big consoles with tubes and transformers and outboard gear, and large spaces, all help ameliorate things. It helps cover up any deficiencies. In a big studio, the good sound almost came out on its own, with the great equipment and the big rooms and the great players. You didn’t have to do as much. They did it for you.”

Walking into any of the smaller, classic studios, one can hear what he means. Clap your hands, or play a chord, and you’ll hear a certain “live” quality, yet without the barrage of echoes that make anything recorded in your living room sound clamorous. Balancing a room’s “live” and “dead,” or echo-less, qualities is a tricky thing. In 1949, when the young Sam Phillips first rented the space that became Memphis Recording Service, he painstakingly sculpted that balance, laying in a linoleum floor tempered with acoustic ceiling tiles hung in a distinctive V pattern of his own design (which he used again when designing the larger Phillips Recording in 1960). As quoted in Peter Guralnick’s biography, Phillips said he strived for a room “where it would sound real — R-E-A-L — when it went into the microphone.”

As Boo Mitchell relates, “A lot of people know about Royal, but once they come there, it changes the game.”

Many of the renowned spaces in Memphis have struck such a balance. Both Royal and Stax (the latter a museum now) were repurposed from old cinemas, and the sloping floors where moviegoers sat lend a unique sound to both. As Boo Mitchell notes of Royal, “It is not textbook studio design. Because it’s on a slope, the ceiling’s lower in the front part and gets taller as you go back. That sloping floor gives it a cooler sonic characteristic. The drums are usually set up in the shortest part of the room and the other instruments are further back, so the drums always have that tight quality. The drum sound is very distinct at Royal.”

Such live-ness can pay off when recording a group playing all at once in the room. Local artists John Paul Keith and Don Bryant, who have both recorded vintage-sounding LPs at Electraphonic, have parlayed such an approach into that elusive quality of “sounding like a record.” As Bomar puts it, “That’s what you’re going for. I’ll be talking to all my other engineer buddies about a specific piece of gear, trying to describe it, but then you’ll go, ‘You know, man, it just makes it sound like a record.’”

In fact, it’s a sound quality that producers have been chasing for decades. As outlined in a new book, It Ain’t Retro: Daptone Records & The 21st-Century Soul Revolution, by Jessica Lipsky (Jawbone Press), a growing preference for the warmth and immediacy of old records led the founders of Brooklyn’s Daptone Records to suss out how to make those sounds themselves. Most famous for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the label pioneered a resurgence in studio techniques that, in Memphis at least, never really went away.

That partly explains how producer Mark Ronson ended up at Royal. Having worked with Daptone in crafting Amy Winehouse’s most classic-sounding singles (e.g., “Back to Black”), he was well-versed in tracks that “sounded like a record.” But, as Mitchell relates, “A lot of people know about Royal, but once they come there, it changes the game. Mark and [co-producer] Jeff Bhasker [were trying] to find the next great soul singer. And when they stopped in Memphis, and actually came into Royal, they just freaked out about Pop’s MCI console, which is another one of those magical pieces of gear.”

“Pop” would be Boo’s grandfather and recording mentor, the late Willie Mitchell, who raised him as a son. He made Royal what it is, crafting hundreds of hits for the likes of Al Green and Anne Peebles in the 1960s and ’70s. As showcased in an exhibit devoted to Royal at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Mississippi (running until September 5th), much vintage gear dating back to the ’40s or ’50s is still in use at the studio today, such as the microphone into which Al Green sang all his hits. “All of that stuff was handmade back in the day,” says Mitchell. “Like Mic #9. That mic would have been made in the late ’40s. It’s an RCA 77 DX ribbon mic.”

In the end, Ronson, Bhasker, Mitchell, and singer Bruno Mars made the most of Royal when they recorded the formidable “Uptown Funk” there, among other tracks. Named Record of the Year at the 2016 Grammy Awards, it certainly showed the staying power of “sounding like a record.”

In a sense, the success of “Uptown Funk” marked a turning point in the world’s renewed and still-rising interest in Memphis studios. Yet Ardent Studios only continued to grow and flourish through any fallow periods others may have felt. The little studio, started in the teenaged John Fry’s parents’ garage, became a major player in the 60s, and only became more major in the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond — racking up more than 70 gold and platinum records.

When I discovered it, Ardent felt like some audio utopian’s space station, with its parquet floors, automated mixing boards with “flying faders,” and an inner courtyard garden. Manning, who helped design the 1972 building with Fry, Rick Ireland, and Welton Jetton, attributes the extensive use of wood to “John and Welton, more than anyone. And wood does have a sound. It sounds warmer, if you would, than concrete. It’s live but not overly live.”

“There are a lot of magical spaces in Memphis. Sam Phillips, Royal, Ardent. It’s hard to record something in any of those rooms and not get what you’re looking for. They’re just magical.” — Scott Bomar

Ardent was the first Memphis studio I encountered, but it soon led me to others. In 1988, a friend who worked there (and had just engineered R.E.M.’s Green) invited me over to record some tracks and introduced me to another visitor that day: Doug Easley. Soon after that, his own Easley-McCain studio, started in partnership with Davis McCain in the early 1990s, would, along with Ardent, become a key linchpin in the Memphis recording tradition, bridging the heyday of 50 years ago with this century. Using a structure built in 1967, their studio was the first in Memphis built from the ground up, with a large, high-ceilinged tracking room, floors floating on springs, and precisely calibrated echo chambers. Originally dubbed “American East” by Chips Moman of the now-defunct American Sound Studios (hitmakers for the likes of Neil Diamond and the Box Tops), it had fallen into disuse until Easley-McCain set up shop. (The facility operates today as American Recording Studio, run by David Gicking and Brad Dunn).

It’s been 20 years since the Detroit band The White Stripes recorded their platinum album White Blood Cells at Easley-McCain Recording, and its success may have marked the studio’s zenith. That album, though, was just the capstone of years of indie bands working there, including Pavement, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Cat Power, and Guided By Voices, not to mention many renowned local groups. Still, for Doug Easley, the appeal of his studio at the time remains a mystery.

“We just tried to capture what they did. They called it lo-fi. I don’t know why. It made no sense. It still doesn’t. I think we just passed a certain cool test. It was when the big boys didn’t acknowledge us so much. We weren’t legit — because this music wasn’t legit. Memphis was that far behind. We got opened up to that stuff through the Memphis underground scene, like Tav Falco and Alex Chilton and Jim Dickinson. And that planted the seeds for me to exist. It wasn’t mainstream. In Memphis, we weren’t important.”

It was a far cry from “Uptown Funk,” but certain threads connect Easley-McCain with Royal, Phillips, Ardent, Sun, and others: a reliance on the tracking space itself, inviting full bands to play live in the room; a respect for the chemistry between those musicians; and an openness to equipment that many once considered obsolete in the march of technological progress.

Easley-McCain carries on today as part of the New School Media complex, and the space they once occupied is now called American again, but their most lasting impact may have been on the musicians, producers, and engineers who once made records there (myself included). Scott Bomar may be the best example, as he reflects on launching his early band, Impala.

“Definitely Impala started me on a quest for getting certain sounds,” he says. “When we’d record, we were trying to capture these sounds we heard on these ’50s and ’60s records. We would go to Phillips to make a record, then go to Easley-McCain to make a record, back and forth.”

Such a legacy is informing new studios being built in the city today. Toby Vest counts Easley-McCain as a major inspiration for starting High/Low Recording in 2014, which he and co-owner Pete Matthews have recently moved into a freshly renovated, customized building on Lamar Avenue. “Easley-McCain was the first place I ever worked,” says Vest, “and it was a huge influence on me. When I walked in there, I felt like, ‘This is my place.’ Around every corner there was a little box with stuff in it. Like, ‘What’s underneath this lamp? Oh! It’s a timpani.’ I loved that aspect of it. It felt like everything was up for grabs. There were no rules. So I was going for that old Easley-McCain feel. We have a lot of toys.”

For Boo Mitchell, that’s the true secret of the Memphis sound: “Memphis has such a powerful spirit that, if you come here and make a whole record, you’ve captured some of that. It affects you.”

Working with a smaller space than, say, Phillips, High/Low is necessarily modeled chiefly on rooms like the Memphis Recording Service, still functioning as Sun Studio in the evenings when the tourists have cleared out. And they’re not the only ones who’ve learned from the house that Sam built. Matt Ross-Spang started at Sun as a teenager, then worked his way to becoming a freelance engineer and producer, primarily based out of Phillips but working at Ardent as well. Having earned a couple of Grammys along the way, he’s now designed his own studio in Crosstown Concourse, called Southern Grooves, drawing inspiration from all three of those older studios. As Ross-Spang puts it, “I kinda stole from all my Memphis heroes.”

Yet another newcomer on the studio scene is Memphis Magnetic Recording, founded by producer/engineer Scott McEwen, formerly based in Nashville, and studio designer Bob Suffolk. Suffolk has decades of experience, cutting his teeth on studio design in the ’80s while renovating Trident Studios in London. Having seen and heard such rooms, he’s committed to keeping the qualities of a well-designed recording space alive. “Our studio is brand-spanking new,” he says, “although it’s done in what I call a purpose-built vintage style.”

McEwen, for his part, is another Easley-McCain fan who made good. “I love Doug Easley’s work,” he says. “I used to live with Mark Ibold, the bass player for Pavement. So I was listening to the records Doug and Davis McCain were making, and I realized Sonic Youth and Jon Spencer and all these guys were going to Memphis. I loved Doug’s work from afar. I feel like he put Memphis back on the map, for my generation.”

Ultimately, it may well be that the city’s sense of community and continuity itself has played the most critical role in today’s recording renaissance. Recalling recent sessions for Scott Bomar’s soundtrack to Dolemite Is My Name, steeped in the sounds of the ’70s, Mitchell notes how much it was in keeping with the old ways of making records.

“It was a truly Memphis-centric project,” he says, “because you had Scott Bomar from Electraphonic, Kevin Houston, me, and we used Matt Ross-Spang’s microphones. So it was a bunch of cool Memphis engineers coming together to make this thing happen. It’s just like it was when my dad was doing stuff in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d go to American and play on records, go to Stax and play on records. Everybody rotated, you know?”

For Mitchell, that’s the true secret of the Memphis sound: “Memphis has such a powerful spirit that, if you come here and make a whole record, you’ve captured some of that. It affects you.”