Harvey Kubernik sent us this interesting piece on Eddie Cochran to share …
Eddie Cochran at Gold Star Studio
By Harvey Kubernik © Copyright 2022
A 1957 photo of American singers Little Richard, Alis Lesley and Eddie Cochran in Australia grace the cover of Bob Dylan’s next book The Philosophy of Modern Song that will be published by Simon & Schuster in November, 2022. Both Bob Dylan and Eddie Cochran recorded at the landmark Gold Star Recording Studios in Hollywood, California.
Paul McCartney, as a 15 year-old, performed a version of Cochran’s record “Twenty Flight Rock” as the first song when he auditioned for John Lennon on July 6, 1957, in Liverpool, England.
Time to examine Gold Star’s audio legacy and Eddie Cochran.
There it sat, another anonymous cinder block facade in the working class section of Hollywood, far off the map of celebrity homes. But discerning eyes and ears knew that, behind this unprepossessing veneer, there lurked an authentic powerhouse of star-making capacity. This was Gold Star Studios, ground zero for transforming the fervid imaginings of pop music’s visionaries into three intoxicating minutes of backbeat and hum.
Like Merlin’s apprentices, Gold Star co-owners and engineers Stan Ross, Dave Gold, and Larry Levine presided over this exercise in alchemy, where inspiration and perspiration produced hit after hit. Their clients included Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, Jack Nitzsche, Phil Spector, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sonny and Cher, Cher as a solo artist, Buffalo Springfield, Charles Wright, Ike & Tina Turner, Stewart Levine, Hugh Masekela, Gloria Jones, the Righteous Brothers, Chan Romero, Brian Wilson with the Beach Boys, Iron Butterfly, the Cake, Harry Nilsson, Arthur Lee, Jimi Hendrix, Dr. John, the Chipmunks, Chris Montez, H.B. Barnum, Buffalo Springfield, Dick Dale, Bobby Darin, Johnny Burnette, Dorsey Burnette, Bob Dylan, Clydie King, record producers Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, Thee Midniters, Boris Karloff, Harold Batiste, Ronnie Spector, Darlene Love, Donna Loren, the Sunrays, Mark Guerrero, the Murmaids, Jackie DeShannon, the Ramones, Concrete Blonde, the Watts 103rd Street Band, Shel Talmy, Led Zeppelin, Duane Eddy, Kim Fowley, Marlon Brando, the Band, the Seeds, the Monkees, the MFQ, and the Turtles.
“Gold Star felt and sounded different from any other Los Angeles studio,” explained Howard Kaylan, Turtles’ co-founder, to me in a 2013 dialogue. “You could literally smell the tubes inside the mixing board as they heated up. There was a richness to the sound that Western and United, our usual studios, never had. Those two rooms sounded clean, while Gold Star felt fat and funky. Perhaps we were all reading too much of the Spector legacy into the room, but I don’t think so. Our recordings from Gold Star always just sounded better to me. I miss that room.”
Stan Herbert Ross was born in Brooklyn in 1929. At age fifteen, he moved with his parents to Los Angeles, where his father worked as an electrician in Hollywood. He enrolled at Fairfax High in 1946 and began writing a music column in the Fairfax Colonial Gazette called “Musical Downbeat.”
As a teenager, Ross worked at Electro-Vox for four years and studied recording from a pioneer of modern disc recording, Bert B. Gottschalk. Ross made one hit record there: “The Deck of Cards” by T. Texas Tyler. Following this apprenticeship, Ross was ready to set up his own shop.
In a 2000 interview with me, portions of which were published in my 2014 book Turn Up The Radio! Pop, Rock and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972, Ross described the history and mystery of the Gold Star atmosphere. “Gold Star used to be a dentist’s office,” he said. “We started pulling teeth a different way.” Built in 1950, Gold Star endured at 6252 Santa Monica Boulevard until a fire destroyed the property in 1984. Upon closing that year, the property became a mini-mall.
“Gold Star was built for the songwriters,” Ross said. “They were fun, wonderful people to be around — Jimmy Van Heusen, Jimmy McHugh, Frank Loesser, Don Robertson, Sonny Burke.”
Johnny Crawford’s “Cindy’s Birthday,” Dobie Gray’s “The In Crowd,” and Chris Montez’s “Call Me” were Gold Star creations. Global music cult hero Scott Engel (later Scott Walker) first cut his teeth at Gold Star doing a variety of menial tasks while attending Los Angeles High School and playing bass with the favorite band on campus, the Routers. Phil Spector produced his 1958 - 1966 sessions inside Gold Star. Brian Wilson was a regular Gold Star visitor. In that room, he produced the Beach Boys’ “Do You Wanna Dance,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the original version of “Heroes and Villains,” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” which featured the first usage of a theremin on a pop recording. A tiny portion of the first session of “Good Vibrations” was also tracked at the studio.
Stan Ross was behind the console for Jewel Akens’ “The Birds and The Bees,” the first use of chorused guitar and was a favorite 45 rpm of Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, which provided the sound of a guitar plugged through a Leslie speaker, giving it an organ-like effect. Cream’s “Badge,” and the Beatles’ “Let It Be” later fused the string-to-Leslie air-pumped speaker innovation. Kit Lambert mixed and mastered the Who’s “Call Me Lightning” and “I Can See For Miles” in the facility. Jody Reynolds’ “Endless Sleep,” one of Bob Dylan’s all-time favorite records, and “Jungle Hop” by Don & Dewey were waxed at Gold Star.
"We used Studio A. Eddie Cochran used our Studio B, down the stairs by the parking lot,” recalled Stan Ross. “I cut ‘Tequila’ there, by the Champs. I did a whole lot of Eddie Cochran’s records, including “Summertime Blues,” “Twenty Flight Rock,” and “C’mon Everybody.” The vocal of Ritchie Valens’s “Donna” was recorded at Gold Star. The backing track was done up the street at Bob Keane’s studio. [He] owned Del-Fi Records.
“[The studio’s echo chamber] gave it the Wall of Sound feel. Dave [Gold] built the equipment and the echo chamber. We had so much fun with that echo chamber; it never sounded the same way twice.
“Gold Star brought a feeling, an emotional feeling. Gold Star was not a dead studio, but a live studio. The room was thirty by forty feet. It was all tube microphones. We kept tubes on longer than anyone else, because we understood that when a kick drum kicks into a tube, it’s not going to distort. A tube can expand. The microphones with tubes were better than the ones without the tubes, because if you don’t have a tube and you hit it heavy, suddenly it breaks up. But when you have a tube, it’s warm and emotional. It gets bigger and it expands. It allows for impulse. We didn’t use pop filters and wind screens — we got mouth noises. Isn’t that life?"
No story on Gold Star would be complete without citing resident recording engineer Larry Levine. Levine joined Gold Star in 1952 and engineered albums for Eddie Cochran, the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher and Dr. John. Levine won a Grammy in 1965 for his work on “A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He reunited with Spector in the late 70s, working on albums by Leonard Cohen and The Ramones. Levine engineered The Ramones’ End Of The Century with Boris Menart and assisted by Bruce Gold.
“I used to have a theory, and I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but part of the reason we took so long in actually recording the songs was that Phil needed to tire out the musicians, or they got to the point where they were tired enough so they weren’t playing as individuals,” he underlined in a 2002 interview we collaborated on that appears in the liner notes I wrote for the 2002 expanded CD edition of End of the Century.
“But they would meld into the sound more that Phil had in his head. Good musicians start out and play as individuals and strive to play what Phil wants. As far as the room sound and the drum sound went, because the rooms were small, with low ceilings, the drum sound, unlike other studios with isolation, your drums sounded the way you wanted them to sound. They would change accordingly to whatever leakage was involved.
“As a matter of fact,” Levine continued, “Phil once said to me the bane of his recording existence was the drum sound. A lot of people attribute to echo to what Phil was doing. The echo enhanced the melding of ‘the wall of sound,’ but it didn’t create it. Within the room itself, all of this was happening and the echo was glue that kept it together.”
Herb Alpert later recruited Levine as chief engineer to design A&M Records’ Studio B, modeled after Dave Gold’s “compact” studio blueprints, developed and first installed at Gold Star.
Before he managed Van Halen for the first five years of their career, music business veteran and agent Marshall Berle, who signed the Beach Boys to the William Morris Agency in 1962, attended Fairfax High School with fellow classmate Phil Spector and encountered Eddie Cochran at Gold Star one afternoon in 1960. “I met Eddie at Gold Star just before he died,” marveled Berle in a 2014 conversation we had. “In those days, instead of using a drum, he sometimes utilized a cardboard box or suitcase. He’s in
“Eddie Cochran. A great one for sure,” volunteered Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats in a 2022 email. “We always say Eddie is the greatest rock star ever!”
During 2014, I interviewed record producer, songwriter and former deejay on the Little Steven Underground Garage SiriusXM channel Kim Fowley about Eddie Cochran and Gold Star.
“I went to Gold Star my first day in Hollywood, on February 3, 1959. It was the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in an airplane crash in Iowa. I took it upon myself to take their place. I thought that they had passed the baton on to me from beyond. I thought it was my turn to take over.
“I met the legendary rockabilly cats Johnny and Dorsey Burnette in 1959. It was during that day in Hollywood at Gold Star, around a Champs recording session I was covering for Dig magazine. I was their campus correspondent and [was] invited to have lunch with Dorsey and Johnny, who were in to play on a long-forgotten B-side of a Champs single. Dave Burgess was the producer, who later produced Jerry Fuller. The Burnette Trio were a band. In those days, pre-Beatles, you didn’t sing and play at the same time and write. There was a songwriter, the musicians, and there were the singers. Three different components who performed on the record.
“So, Gold Star got me going. A year later, I was number one in the world. I produced ‘Nut Rocker’ in 1960 under the name B. Bumble and the Stingers on Transworld Records. I wasn’t allowed to be in the room at the session, so I took a walk. René Hall was on guitar and bass, Al Hazan on piano, and Jesse Sailes was the drummer. I was just the publisher and the writer. I was 22 years old. I had a partnership with Gary Paxton. He was a hillbilly genius who worked with a Hollywood child. One hustler and conceptualist. One musical and vocal guy. We did well, did work together, and we quit. We were both damaged goods, but interesting people in terms of what our product was.
“I then met Eddie Cochran and songwriters Sharon Sheeley, Jackie DeShannon and Eddie's record producer and co-writer, Jerry Capehart.
“I scored in 1960 with the Hollywood Argyles’ ‘Alley-Oop’ on Lute Records. [They] were the white Coasters, with a black backing group that no one ever saw. Gary Paxton did the lead vocal, Sandy Nelson did the caveman yell, and a girl who was tall with red hair, who was dating Gary, was the high voice on the record. I was co-publisher and co-producer. Bill Parr was the engineer. “We did ‘Alley-Oop’ at American Recording Studio. The session recording had keyboardist Gaynel Hodge, a member of the Hollywood Flames who sang with the Platters and co-wrote ‘Earth Angel’ for the Penguins, as well as Harper Cosby, who was on Johnny Otis’s ‘Willie and the Hand Jive,’ [and] drummers Sandy Nelson and Ronnie Selico, who worked with the Olympics and is heard on ‘Big Boy Pete.’ Ronnie was also on the Marathons’ ‘Peanut Butter.’ He later went with Ray Charles and Shuggie Otis, and is on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats album.
“I learned that you had to have black people with white people on my sessions to get the groove. We then marched into Gold Star, [which] had mastering facilities, and Stan Ross mastered the record. Stan proclaimed it was going to be a number-one record. He was right.
“As a visitor to Gold Star, it was the epicenter of teenage rock ’n’ roll recording culture in 1959. If you were in Memphis, Tennessee, you would knock on the door of Sun Records. If you were in Detroit, Michigan, you would knock on the door at Motown. But in 1959, I went to Gold Star. ‘Here I am. Let’s see if I get accepted.’ If you got accepted, you were off and running. You start at the top, and I did. So, I will always be grateful.
“If a kid had a hundred dollars, he could cut a hit record at Gold Star if he saved it or got his friends and family to pitch in with band members. I later worked with their engineer, Doc Siegel, as well. You could go in there and not get intimidated, and you had equal footing with the legendary guys. I saw Eddie Cochran work at Gold Star. He invited me in to watch, listen, and learn,” Kim revealed.
“I also attended Eddie’s session for ‘Sittin’ in the Balcony’ that came out on Liberty. In 1960, I was throwing shows on Sunset Blvd. for teenagers at Jimmy Maddin’s venue, The Summit, later The Red Velvet. At night, deejays Frosty Harris and Jimmy O’Neill, who were on KRLA, would come down. I was the last guy to book Eddie Cochran in America before he died. He came out and did ‘Three Steps to Heaven.’ He died three weeks later in England.
“Go ask Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend about Eddie Cochran,” instructed Fowley. “I already have,” I responded.
“Their bands have done Eddie’s tunes on stage,” Kim underscored. “His catalogue has been covered by the Rolling Stones, the Move, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Led Zeppelin, Blue Cheer, Sex Pistols, the Stray Cats and Lemmy Kilmister. The Who cut ‘Summertime Blues.’”
