LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

working every day. I was the absentee owner. Glenn Lane and Ed Boutwell did the engineering.” Ed Boutwell started recording music in 1956: “I was working for Channel 13 TV and WAPI radio doing production and people would ask us to do a jingle. So we did not know what we were doing, but we did it. We had a lot of fun. I did a lot of jingle recording up there and just commercials … the only recording instruments were at the radio stations.” Shackleford: “The studio was busy all day. We had a little tape duplicating thing. Loop tape thing, we were dubbing some of those and staying pretty busy doing sessions. Basically it was people coming in and asking to do some sessions.” To get into Heart Studios you had to go through the blood bank, full of “riffraff” waiting to sell plasma, and walk upstairs. When you entered the studios you found yourself in a big room with worn carpeting, and glass dividers to isolate the sound as it was recorded. Gary Sizemore and Ken Shackleford would be lounging in the office with cigarettes and coffee, telling stories, while Ed Boutwell would be setting up the microphone and checking the levels on the mixer consol. They often used a single microphone, and only one or two tracks to record on. Re-recording was unknown. Henry Lovoy recalled, “You had to do everything in one take … We just did the whole thing. I don’t know how many cuts we made, I remember that we had to unplug the air conditioner, because it would pick up on the microphones … I remember that the studio was dark and shabby looking. They had some baffles. I was literally squished behind a baffle, singing on this microphone … We were in and out of the studio in two hours. They gave me an acetate copy.” They learned quickly; each recording session was a learning experience. Charlie Colvin: “There were very few professionals here … I can go to Nashville, and I can cut four decent sides in three hours [the industry standard]. It would take me two days to cut four sides here.”

       Birmingham’s Rock ’n’ Roll Recordings

      Strolling into these primitive recording studios came the young men who were the pioneers of rock ’n’ roll in Birmingham: Baker Knight, Sammy Salvo, Dinky Harris, Bobby Mizzell, and Jerry Woodard. Thomas Baker Knight was the first of them. A few trial recordings (called demonstration records or “demos”) made in Reed Studios brought him to the attention of Alan Bubis of the independent Kit label: “He came to see us play and he took us to Nashville to Owen Bradley’s studio, and we cut five or six sides. It was all done awfully fast!” Making “Poor Little Heart” and the upbeat “Bop Boogie to the Blues” “was a good experience but nothing came of that. We came back to Birmingham and he came down again with a microphone that Bradley’s studio had leant him and we went to another studio and recorded ‘Bring My Cadillac Back.’” This was sold to Decca Records, and “it sold forty thousand copies in two weeks.” This was the hit record that all rock musicians dreamed of: “It was my very first professional song and it didn’t take long / before the record was playing on every jukebox in town,” Baker Knight wrote later in a song. “We had a big page ad. In Billboard, but the stations stopped [playing] it because they said it was a commercial for Cadillac!” The next recording sessions were carried out in Decca’s studios in New York City, and the Nightmares released three singles on Decca in 1957. This showed how fast the system could work when it smelled talent.

      Sammy Anselmo had begun singing as a child: “I could do imitations. The whole family would have me do it at parties. They would say, ‘All right, Sammy, go out there and sing.’ Then I would do [Enrico] Caruso. They tried to teach me Italian. I couldn’t understand it. I made up the words as I went along. My father was an opera singer. He used to have an Italian [radio] hour every Sunday in Birmingham. He would broadcast from the back of the hotel … When I was in the army [in the early 1950s], I used to go to the library and listen to opera.” His brother George picked up the story: “Sammy went into the service in Fort Nix, New Jersey. New Jersey was a Yankee town where they were singing country & western. Country & western has a kind of soul sound. Maybe that is what it was with those service boys. I went to visit him while he was on active duty. He was singing at a local club with a boy [Horace Wheat] from Georgia. There had to be three to four hundred people in there. They were standing on a circular stage in the middle of the club singing country & western music. I didn’t know that my brother could sing country & western because he had never sung it before.” Sammy: “I would do Webb Pierce and Jimmy Reed stuff. I would do the harmony and Horace would sing the lead. The club invited us to come in on that Sunday. They wanted us to do a radio show … I got up and I had a smooth voice back then. About two hours later the whole parking lot was full. That was my first professional experience. It was professional, but not professional. We drank all that we wanted and had a good time. We didn’t make any money.”

      When Sammy came back to Birmingham after his stint in the service, he took up singing professionally. His experience shows how important the radio deejays were in the music business: “We were introduced to Joe Rumore. He was a country & western disc jockey. I also met Dan Brennan. I was on Dan’s show first. Horace and I got up and did some country stuff. The next thing you know, Joe told me that he needed a singer with Curly Fagan [Joe’s right-hand man]. I said yeah, I’ll be glad to. So I started singing with Curly. We got more involved with Joe after that.” George: “Joe was a very powerful man in music. If he thought you were good, he gave you a push.” Sammy: “Yeah, he sure did.” George: “Joe was a personal friend of Sammy’s. He was Sicilian also. Joe played a lot of country & western. He played Roy Acuff and Roy Orbison. He didn’t get into that kind of rock stuff. Dan Brennan was playing all the rock stuff. When Sammy was doing country & western — that was just a step into rock ’n’ roll. That was all back in 1956.” Sammy: “It was rockabilly. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is more rockabilly than it is rock ’n’ roll.”

      After playing some gigs and appearing on radio, the next step for any aspiring musician was to cut a record. Sammy: “We wanted to do ‘One Little Baby’ as a rockabilly song. That was the first one. We cut that in Joe Rumore’s basement. He had a studio in his basement. There was recording equipment in Joe Rumore’s basement as nice as RCA’s studios.” George: “Joe Rumore was nice enough to do it. I had hired a studio, out in Irondale [suburb of Birmingham]. This guy really screwed it up. His name was Homer Milam. He had a little old studio at the time — it is out on Highway 78 … This is when I went back up to Nashville with a master tape. RCA would press for other people. I was going into my own distribution.” George had decided to start his own record label. He had the support of Joe Rumore and the example of Sun Records: “I started thinking: what is there to a record company? Just looking at that piece of plastic, I knew it wasn’t worth much. With some machinations behind me, I figured out how to start a company. Up to that time I had never heard anyone doing that … I figured: Well, hell, I’ll start my own company … The name on the label was Mark V Records. I went from Birmingham to Dallas, Texas. I came back through Dallas and went through Little Rock, Memphis, then back to Birmingham. In between here and there I hit every radio station I could see. I used to hand out these small lighters. They looked like miniature Zippos. They said ‘Sammy Salvo’ on the side, with a musical note. They were really cheap. I got about five hundred made. They were really pretty … In 1956 I was only twenty-one years old. I only needed about four hours of sleep and I was driving and talking all of the time. I was on the road for about two weeks. I was using whatever I could to get them to play it and pass it on to everybody. I never told them he was my brother. I was out there selling records and getting them hot. I really learned a lot then.”

      George Anselmo was doing such a good job of pushing Sammy’s record that RCA began to take notice: “Steve Poncio [a record distributor in Houston] heard the record and made me order some more. I called RCA and they shipped ten thousand more. They assumed Sammy had a hit, since he was selling so many records. It was breaking in Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I stayed in Houston for about a week. That darned thing just took off. Within three days it was number 8 on the Top Ten [local radio chart]. When I got back to Birmingham, Steve had called me. They wanted to buy my rights [to Sammy and his record] for ten thousand dollars. They wanted to give Sammy 5 percent and they wanted to give me 10 percent of the sales. They wanted to know where Sammy was. I told them that he had gone to Nashville, because Chet Atkins wanted to sign him up. He signed for RCA that day. I caught him at the Biltmore. He said, ‘Yeah, I signed.’ I said, ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ I was driving

Скачать книгу