The first time I entered a recording studio was in 1983 and I had no business being there. Neither of the two songs we recorded was worth sharing with anyone. At 27, I had never stepped onto a stage in my life. There couldn’t have been more than a handful of decent songs that I’d written up to that point. My experience consisted of playing music by myself and occasionally with friends.
None of these things came to mind when contemplating the project. My only concern was finding a decent sound studio. At the time, recording hadn’t yet become something commonly done by complete amateurs. Very few people owned computers and the home digital recording set-ups that so many half-baked musicians have today were non-existent. You had to find an actual business that did this kind of thing. The only one I knew of was a place downtown called the 13th Floor Studio. It sat atop a huge old building that housed artists’ work spaces and storage areas. The owner was a guy named Danny Goldfarb. As with most regional sound studios, much of their money came from doing commercials, but the 13th Floor, as it was known, also did Funk and R&B recording on a regular basis.
When I called the studio, Danny Goldfarb answered. He sounded annoyed and he ended the conversation abruptly. I called back and a woman, who turned out to be Danny’s wife, answered. I asked about booking time. She said Danny would contact me in a few minutes. Immediately after hanging up, the phone rings and someone from the studio is on the line but it’s neither Danny nor his wife. He introduces himself as Jerry Studs and tells me that he is a recording engineer and can arrange the session. Jerry came off as an insincere, fast-talking hustler. His voice had the inflections of an old-school voice-over artist. After a conversation that went on much longer than necessary, I booked the session for about a month from that day.
Both of the songs I wanted to record needed accompaniment. One was a slow ballad and the other was a fast Rock & Roll number. I called on a couple of friends to help out; a drummer and a bass player. The piano player we used was a friend of the drummer. We got together and rehearsed the songs a handful of times before the session. Like myself, I don’t believe any of the other players had ever walked into a recording studio.
The day of the session arrived and things didn’t go as badly as I thought they would. We did a few takes of the songs and each one went fairly well. Jerry Studs knew what he was doing in a technical sense but he was one of those engineers that feels compelled to also act as a producer. He constantly interjected his opinions on how something ought to be played or what kind of “sound” he thought we should have. To his credit, I believe that any advice offered might have been warranted in our case. I booked a second session to overdub the piano, lead guitar and vocal tracks. Jerry was even more the producer the second time around. I did my best to get through it.
The outcome of these sessions was one 7-inch single entitled Bad Kid. I decided to only release the ballad. The A side had the song with the vocal track and the B side was a dub version; meaning, without the vocal track. I saved the Rock number, entitled Thirty Dollar Wedding, and released it much later as another 7-inch with The Last Time I Saw Richard (a play on the Joni Mitchell song of the same name) on the B side. The bride illustration that I did for the cover of the second single took over a year to complete. I also had T-shirts printed up with the illustration on the front. As it happened, some of these T-shirts were stolen out of my car one day when I was working downtown. A few months later, while watching a story on the news about an undercover narcotics investigation, I noticed that one of the alleged drug dealers was wearing my bride T-shirt.
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| Bad Kid | Thirty Dollar Wedding |
I ran into Jerry Studs only a couple of other times after the recording. Once was at the Greyhound station where he was dropping off his feeble old mother. Jerry told me she was catching a bus bound for Philadelphia. A few years later, I saw him when walking to my car after having a drink or two at a downtown bar called Tina’s. He graciously invited me up to his apartment, which happened to be on the street where my car was parked. I accepted the invitation and while there, he served me a bowl of very tasty gumbo that he had just made. His record producer hustle was turned off and this made him a much more pleasant person to be around. The last I heard of Jerry, he had gotten divorced and his ex-wife was seeking a restraining order against him.
The 13th Floor Studio met its demise not long after my sessions. A massive fire destroyed not only the studio but also most of the artists’ spaces on the lower floors. The building was eventually demolished. Years later, while recording my Welcome Love CD, I was talking with a couple of the sound engineers during a break. We somehow got on the subject of Danny Goldfarb and the 13th Floor Studio. One of the engineers told me that he heard the fire was deliberately set. Apparently, Danny started losing money on the operation and had the place torched.
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© 2013 by Maurice Mattei
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