Historic Stax Records Recording Console Restored and Installed at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis
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- Опубліковано 4 січ 2023
- After a more than 40-year journey, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music has obtained the Spectra Sonics mixing console used in Stax Records’ Studio B during its heyday. Memphis music veteran Scott Bomar, now the studio manager at Sam Phillips Recording, has fully restored the console and it is in now use as the main recording board at the legendary studio. Sam Phillips Recording is still operated by the family of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who is credited with first recording African American blues musicians and then discovering Rock and Roll.
Following Stax Records’ forced involuntary bankruptcy in 1976, the Spectra Sonics console was auctioned on the courthouse steps in Memphis in 1977 and was purchased by Barry Shankman and Leonard Lubin, two Memphis music businessmen who bought much of the Stax equipment for their BR Toad recording studio here in the city. The Studio B console eventually found its way to Sound City Recording in Shreveport, Louisiana, a funk and soul recording studio with whom Stax had a relationship. It remained in use there, mainly for local and regional acts, until mothballed to make way for the digital recording craze in the 1990s. It made its way back to the Stax Museum archival collection in early 2018. When it arrived, talks about its eventual home at Phillips between Bomar, Stax Museum Executive Director Jeff Kollath, and Sam Phillips’ son Jerry Phillips ensued.
“I can't think of any other studio where you can record in such an iconic room on such an iconic recording console,” Bomar says. “It’s like a dream come true for me. I really fell in love with the sound of it because it's clean, but it's not too clean. It's got a little bit of a vintage sound, but it's also modern at the same time. That’s the beauty of it. It could be from 1968 or it could be from 2068. It's just totally timeless.”
Once the agreement was worked out and the console was moved to Sam Phillips Recording, Bomar and technicians Ronnie Kittell and Matt Brown spent almost every day for a year restoring it to its original state. That meant taking it apart, cleaning it, locating hard-to-find replacement parts, and other tedious work to restore it to its original condition - not different or with anything added, but with the same sound it would have had when it was new at Stax Records.
When it was located and used at Stax Records in the late 1960s and ‘70s, two of the main artists who “grew up” in Studio B were original Bar-Kays bassist James Alexander and post-1967 reformed Bar-Kays and Stax session drummer Willie Hall of Blues Brothers fame.
They describe Studio B as being up a flight of stairs at Stax, and with a crisper, tighter sound than Studio A. They spent many nights in Studio B as young musicians learning, rehearsing, growing, practicing, and playing on recordings for their own Bar-Kays albums, but also recording with artists such as Isaac Hayes, who cut his four-song 1970 The Isaac Hayes Movement album in Studio B. According to Alexander and Hall, his cover of The Beatles “Something” took a staggering two weeks to arrange.
Sam Phillips’ Sun Records and Stax Records have always shared a colorful history. In fact, Stax Records founder Jim Stewart was so impressed with the music Phillips was recording that he decided to open his fledgling Satellite Records in his wife’s uncle’s Memphis garage in 1957 while maintaining his day job at Union Planters Bank and his part time gigs at night playing fiddle in a country swing band. After moving his operation to an abandoned theater on McLemore Avenue in South Memphis, one of the first million-selling hits recorded there was Booker T. & the M.G.s’ “Green Onions,” which guitarist Steve Cropper has said he took to his friend Scotty Moore at Phillips to master the record on the studio’s Neumann lathe. Stax and Sun both recorded some of the same artists early on, including Rufus Thomas, Little Milton, and various session musicians.
With all of this rich history between the two labels and the console now in use, Phillips’ son Jerry Phillips is excited about the partnership and having both seasoned artists and a new crop record with it.
“I think it's going to be good for Memphis,” he states emphatically. “I think it's going to be good for us. I think it's going to be good for the Stax legacy, the Phillips legacy, and the Sun Legacy. It’s almost like we are starting a new chapter in the recording industry as far as I'm concerned, because it’s putting new blood into my veins to be excited again about recording.”
“To have this happen formally in 2022,” Kollath adds, “is something very special. To have great people like Scott and Jerry working on this is an honor for the Stax Museum. The idea that something that was so integral to Stax Records is now back in our community providing opportunity 50 years later for our artists and young people to make new music is incredibly exciting.”
Great video. Stax an iconic label that is the soundtrack of my life. Thanks for sharing
Very cool, the console is a music history piece. Take care of it.
Funny maybe 35 years ago, here in Louisville, Allen Martin Productions had a board very similar, using Spectra Sonics components, Slidex attenuators, Api Meters. I could have had it for a song. It was huge. I later found it decaying in a shed. A fellow with dreams far exceeding his pockbook, got it, and it just decayed away. I could have cried. I did manage to recover a couple of Scully 280s, which I still have and use. Thanks for this posting! PS> I still have some SS power supplies ,and 700 cards, and they too still sound fantastic.
This is great to see - hope it attracts a whole new generation of music makers and inspires them to make great music.
Savy musicians in Austin know that Memphis is the place to go live, work and play.
When that console was housed st BRToad (owned by Leonard Lubin & Barry Shankman, the first owners from the first auction of the equipment) we recorded there with Alex Chilton, he produced 4 Klitz songs there in December 1978. ( Available on The Klitz, Rocking the Memphis Underground on Monitone). Then in 1979 Jim Dickinson recorded the Klitz for Barbarian records on that same equipment! So that means our DNA is there too! That microphone we used was the same one Otis Redding sang into!🎶
wow, I hope I can be in that room and run some of mine music thru this! what a beauty! I love those routing switches with the warm shining light bulbs in it. looks like a xmas tree to me!
This is so cool, every piece of gear in that room is amazing, I couldn’t imagine getting to work there. Spectra Sonics made some amazing stuff!!!!!
Really cool, dudes! 🤘😜
Ohhhh they like to try
Record companies don’t create music. Musicians do. If they wanted to be playing the music of the 1950s, there’d be nothing stopping them, but artists naturally forge ahead.
The only thing that is missing is the sound of yesterday's music. The record companys of today don't want to revive that music and That's sad.
The talented artists that ARE around (Bruno Mars, Usher, Beyonce) dumb the music down beyond belief almost to novelty-song status.... Bruno has some great TRACKS but the childish lyrics.... where is the next Teddy Pendergrass, Peabo Bryson, Cheryl Lynn etc??
Curious. What does Phillips mean when he says the board has great bottom end to it? Isn't what makes a board quality is the ability to dial into any frequency?
As posted…. Yes. The gear is great. What is lost is the ART of crafting good pop music with harmony, melody, and great musicianship. Musicians that listen well and play dynamically. Plus to get them all in the same room, no distractions (phones), and $$ to pay them along with the recording assistant, engineer, producer, ARRANGER (strings/winds/brass/choir/etc. Oh…. an important factor TAPE. Tape is the medium, it has so much definition that digital cannot reproduce.
People don’t buy music anymore which results in people making cheap music. The “major” artists today are on a total different planet. Their Music? I call it bullshit.
Well fucking said
Agreed, you need more than a laptop to call yourself an engineer or producer, which is all it takes nowadays.
Bet Lil Durk will do it justice.