Nashville has long been considered the capital of country music. Owen and Harold Bradley helped make that possible when they opened the Bradley Studios in the '50s, in the heart of Music Row. After adding on the Quonset Hut Studio, they ushered in a style of country music that crossed over in the pop markets, with songs like Patsy Cline’s "Crazy," Brenda Lee’s "I’m Sorry," and Bobby Vinton’s "Blue Velvet." When Columbia Records bought the studio in the 1962, the hits continued with artists like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.
I had the opportunity to talk with the current studio manager, Luke Gilfeather, as well as drummer Kenny Malone, bassist and producer Norbert Putnam, and engineer Lou Bradley, to discuss the history of the studios and the Nashville music business in general. Kenny Malone has been a session drummer since the '70s and continues performing and recording today. Norbert Putnam was a member of the original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, as well as the "Nashville A-Team," before switching to producing acts like Joan Baez and Jimmy Buffett. Lou Bradley started working at the old Columbia Studios in the late-’60s until they closed in 1982.
Luke Gilfeather
Studio Manager
How long have you been working here?
I’ve been here just over a year.
I heard that this is the original archway of the Quonset Hut, and that the rest was built around this studio.
Well, there was initially a house on 17th Avenue here. This was a residential area, and two brothers, Owen and Harold Bradley, bought the house in the mid-'50s with the idea of starting to record people here in Nashville. They took the first floor out – so it went straight down into the basement – to give a bigger recording area. They started turning hits out of there almost immediately. They were running out of room, and looking to expand into making short motion pictures, like variety TV shows. They went out and bought an Army Quonset hut for $7800, and attached it to the back of the house. The house then got torn down when Columbia Records came in and built Columbia Studio A around it. That’s why it’s so convoluted getting around in the hallways.
And now Belmont University owns it?
The Mike Curb Family Foundation owns it, and he lets Belmont use it. Mike Curb actually owns a lot of the buildings around Music Row. He owns this one, RCA Studio B, and the Masterfonics building. He’s letting Belmont use this one for, I think, the next 50 years.
What about the gear that’s used here? Is any of it from way back when?
Not here, unfortunately. All the stuff is more modern. There’s nothing from that era. There kinda is, but it came from Bradley’s Barn [Studio] and the RCA complex. The Mike Curb Family Foundation bought a collection of microphones from the Bradley family, and they are all classic.
Like '50s and '60s microphones?
Yep. There’s a pair of Telefunken 251s and four Neumann M 49s. Ten RCA 77s and three RCA 44s came from the RCA studios but are here now. That’s the only thing that really comes close to the era. We really don’t have anything from the Columbia Studios era. Supposedly, the fuzz tone was invented in the Quonset Hut. They were using a tube console, and Glenn Snoddy – who was an engineer here in the early days – noticed that a grid in the console had fused together, and somebody was playing a guitar through that channel. The guitar player wanted to fix it, but the producer told them to wait, and ran the solo through it. Glenn Snoddy reverse engineered it, and found out what happened. He ended up developing [what became] the [Maestro FZ-1] Fuzz- Tone pedal, and sold them the license. It was on the Marty Robbins tune, "Don’t Worry."
That’s interesting! What console are you running for the Quonset Hut?
That’s a 24 channel Neve VR. It doesn’t have automation; that’s been stripped out of there. We use it for teaching inline consoles. That was actually a project from the Belmont maintenance class. They found that thing on the floor of a warehouse just stacked in pieces, and they reversed engineered the metering and some of the center section. There are student signatures on the back from those who helped put it back together. It’s a good teaching tool.
What about this place do you think made the "Nashville Sound?" This is kind of where it started; here and the studio in the original house.
I think it was kind of a concurrent development between the Bradley brothers and the RCA studios across the street. They were trying to compete with rockabilly and rock 'n’ roll music. They had a bunch of country artists signed to these labels, who were selling in the thousands. Roy Orbison and The Everly Brothers were selling close to a million copies. Owen and Harold Bradley – and Chet Atkins across the way – started thinking of ways to attract a broader audience. What they ended up doing was taking the fiddles and the steel guitars and downplaying them. They started using things like grand piano, which had never been used on country records, and background singers and lush string arrangements. I think it was a formula to survive, and it really worked like a charm. What made it come about was this need to survive, and also this handful of players working together in all of these studios called the "Nashville A-Team." They had this formula down in this sound and in this groove.
Was the system set about like it is now, where there three three-hour blocks?
Yes, but unlike today the expectation was that they would have three or four songs done in one of those session blocks. These guys were laying down these tunes that were essentially the first or second takes, then moving on to the next song. Part of what made that possible was another development, that was kind of invented at these studios, called the "Nashville Number System." It was a way of writing the charts without specifying a key. So you can say, "This chart is for whatever key you want it in."
SoifyourkeyisinD,Dwouldbeyour1 chord. Then if you switch the key to E,thenEisnowthe1?
Yes, exactly. That enabled guys to chart tunes very quickly, so they could sit and listen to song once and chart. I’ve seen guys drinking a cup of coffee, carrying on a conversation, and charting the song with their other hand; then they sit down and play it. It was part of the Nashville machine, allowing them to churn out so much music. It still is today, actually.
What about this place would have artists like Bob Dylan decide to come to Nashville?
The story I heard from Charlie McCoy – he’s one of those "Nashville A-Team" playing harmonica, guitar, and singing – was Bob Dylan was recording in New York and some of the Nashville producers were trying to attract him down here. They sent Charlie McCoy up, who was in the groove of playing tunes down sight unseen. He was sent to New York and sat in on a Bob Dylan session, and Bob is looking at him like, "Oh yeah, what’s this?" Then McCoy just rips out an improvised part without looking at the chart, and Dylan was like, "Wow, you guys work pretty fast down there in Nashville." Then McCoy was like, "Yeah, that’s just what we do. We feel the tune out, play through it, and that’s it. We move on to the next tune." Dylan ended up coming down, and worked on Blonde on Blonde in Studio A. It was the way they were able to get more creative, and get results quicker than up in New York at the time. After that, that opened the floodgates of folks coming down here. [See Bob Johnston in Tape Op #80]
What kind of console are they running over in Studio A right now?
That’s an API 2098 – an awesome console. It was over at RCA Studio B and was moved over here. It was onboard a Wally Heider remote truck. It recorded portions of Frampton Comes Alive!, some of U2’s Rattle and Hum, some classic television, and a bunch of Frank Zappa live. The Band’s Last Waltz was recorded on it. Phil Ramone [Tape Op #50] was in RCA B, saw that console through the glass across the room, and said, "I know that console!" He ran up and looked at it and was like, "Yeah man! I recorded Neil Diamond in Central Park!" I went back and found a picture of him sitting at the console. I was like, "How do you remember that console?" I think the track assign buttons are different than other API consoles, with big, lit numbers. The reason was because they would change acts and need to reassign stuff quickly, and those little API buttons just weren’t cutting it.
So this is a classroom now?
Yeah, what’s taught in here, and simultaneously in Studio A, is the [Audio Engineering Technology] Audio 1 course. These are the first classes where they do their own sessions. The only way we do echo in here is tape echo. The only way we do reverb are the two echo chambers above this control room. And then there are two plates up in the [Studio A] machine room that is connected to a central patch. We run both studios side-by-side, and halfway through the semester they switch studios.
Do they understand where they’re standing?
Some of them appreciate it. I try to tell them. To some it doesn’t mean that much, but others will try to seek it out and record whenever they can.
Kenny Malone
Drummer
You came from a jazz background. Is that correct?
Well, I had studied classical when I was a kid, but my first love was jazz. When I heard Dixieland music, I knew I wanted to play drums. I realized it when I was five. I had one drum until I was 15 and could buy my own set. I learned how to get every sound I could out of that one drum.
You do a lot of hand percussion. Was that your start?
I really started hand percussion when I started playing with Don Williams. We were after different sounds, and those sounds found us as a band. I really developed my own style. It’s not the authentic Latin sounds, but I can play it with any kind of music.
Because of your love of jazz, how were you applying that to country sessions?
Jazz, to me, is spontaneous improvising, and it involves more than just me. Jazz can be in any song. Jazz gets a bad name; there’s so much bad jazz out there. It isn’t about how fast you can play; it’s about making it music. With country sessions, this is where I really found that music plays us. You get your conscious mind out of the way, and go with it at the moment. That’s when you can really live the emotions of the lyrics as you are going along.
How do you feel Nashville has changed through the years?
Technology changed. We did the first direct-to-disc albums here to eliminate tape hiss. Digital came in, and we also did the first digital recordings in Nashville. I remember saying that the cymbals sounded like glass. It changed the sound. They have better digital machines now, but back then you couldn’t get the sounds you wanted out of digital machines. Now you go through noise gates, harmonizers, Auto-Tune, and click tracks. I don’t use click tracks; I never will. The band has to feel the time, and you have to play your time according to the lyrics. When you’re playing with a click track, and you hit it right on that "bick," you spend your time chasing where the next "bick" is gonna be. You’re not listening or paying attention to any music. It’s like painting by numbers.
What brought you to Nashville in the first place?
I wanted to play, and I didn’t want to raise my kids in New York, L.A., Chicago, or Miami. Those were the places I thought were happening musically, and I figured Nashville was like a small town. I didn’t know anything about it. They’re tearing down all the old buildings and studios. It’s just a bunch of high rises now. And the music and the recording, a little bit goes on but nothing like it was.
I heard there was a stack of CDs you had played on that you received and you had never heard them.
Yeah for 32 years! And there were Ray Charles tracks.
You had to live in the moment. Record the song, then you’re on to the next song.
Yeah, and you have to forget the last song. That’s why I can’t remember the things I’ve done. It’s been an education.
Norbert Putman
Producer & Bassist
You are from the Muscle Shoals area originally, correct?
Yeah I was in the first rhythm section. As a matter of fact, we didn’t have a name, but when we were written about, they called us the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. This was early 1961. When I was 15 years old I started to play bass in a local rockabilly band, playing Sun Records’ stuff. The reason I was playing was because my father had played acoustic bass in country bands and still had the bass. Some of the kids in my neighborhood remembered seeing it, and they were putting a band together and said, "You have to play bass. No one else has one." So I went to my father, and he said, "Do whatever you want to do, but I never want you to be in the music business. I did that when I was younger and couldn’t succeed at it. There’s drinking, gambling, prostitution, and drugs. There’s nothing conducive for a normal, happy life." Well, that was the first time I really wanted to get out and play! So I joined this band at school, and the guitar player was a guy named Danny Cross. I asked Danny, "What makes you think that overnight I am going to be proficient at this instrument?" And he said, "Well, all of this stuff only has three chords. Surely to god you can find three notes." I was 15 years old – fast forward 13 years later, and I was telling this story to Elvis.
Now were you brought up to play specifically to play with Elvis?
No. What happened was I started in that little rockabilly band, and it warped into an R&B band. I meet a young drummer named Jerry Carrigan, who was putting together a band to play the frat parties at University of Alabama, Ole Miss, and Auburn. Young kids didn’t dance to Presley; they danced to James Brown. So we put together a new band. About that time we met a guy in Florence, Alabama, named Tom Stafford, and Tom’s father owned the corner drug store. Upstairs were some vacant offices. Tom’s father said he could use it if he wanted to. Tom grabbed David Briggs and I as we were coming out of a movie – Tom was also the manager of local theater. Tom said, "I was wondering if you boys would play on some demos for me. I’m starting a publishing company." We asked, "What will you pay us?" He said, "I can’t pay you, but I can get you into the movies for free." And we said, "We’ll do it!" The guys he was signing to his publishing company were awful, and we had been doing it for about a year when Arthur Alexander, a bellhop at the Sheffield Hotel, came in and sang some of his songs. He was a great singer, and we started demoing with him. One day I come up the steps, and there are two guys I had never met before; Billy Sherrill and Rick Hall. About three months later I hear Rick Hall is building a studio, and he’s going to produce Arthur. He wants our band to play on it. He has four mics, a Shure mixer, and a playback speaker that was Rick’s Fender Bassman amp. Arthur came in, and it probably took us like 40 or 50 takes to get the first song. Rick had one good mic, a used [Neumann] U 47. The other three mics were cheapo dynamics. Terry Thompson, the guitar player, and I put our amps together in a V with one Electro-Voice mic in the middle. As we would play, Rick would look at me and [motion up or down], and that’s how we got the balance between the guitar and the bass. Another dynamic was stuffed in the upright piano, and one overhead on the drums. He had two mono Berlant Concertone tape machines. Peanut Montgomery was going to play acoustic guitar, but there was no mic for him. Rick had him stand on a wooden box on the other side of the U 47, which was in omni, and that’s how the first hit record was made, "You Better Move On." There’s a hi-hat sound on that record that we think had more to do with the cheap mic; some mic that didn’t have full range. I remember Rick getting some phone calls from Nashville studios wanting to know how he got the hi-hat sound. I don’t think he had the guts to tell them it was just a $10 microphone. But that’s how Muscle Shoals began. Rick Hall came to Nashville with a tape and ran it past Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, and they said, "This is too pop, too R&B. We don’t have a promotion staff to work those kinds of stations." But he found a disc jockey, Noel Ball, who took the tape to Dot Records. Dot had one big artist; Pat Boone. They made a deal to put out the first Arthur Alexander record, and that was the last time we recorded with Arthur. Noel Ball stole him and brought him to Nashville. But the money Rick got for that first recording he used to build the FAME Studios. I dropped out of college, along with David Briggs, to become the staff band.
How did your dad take that?
[laughs] Well my father had given up music and gotten into the insurance business. His dream was for me get a business degree so we could start an insurance agency. He couldn’t have been more disappointed; it was years before he was proud of what I did.
When did you decide to stay in Nashville?
About ’63 or '64. We had a lot of clients coming down through Felton Jarvis, Elvis’ producer. We had been getting $5 an hour from Rick. One day Felton brought an arranger with him, by the name of Ray Stevens, and they told us we’d be making $20 an hour in Nashville. Felton and Ray both said they would have work for us if we came to Nashville, so before we got here we knew we could make a living. The interesting thing was we were hardly ever hired together [as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section]. Owen Bradley would use me, and Chet Atkins loved Carrigan. Fred Foster from Monument would use three of us.
The "Nashville Sound" is described as more of a pop sound than a country sound, and it was developed at [Bradley Studios] and RCA. What was the inspiration behind that?
Well, there was a bit of collusion between Chet and Owen and the other founding fathers. I don’t think it happens now. All the label guys were having dinner once every six weeks, talking about, "How can we make the city more appealing to the world?" There were pop and big band records being made here, but the Ryman Auditorium brought in the Grand Ole Opry. WSM was a clear-channel, AM station that, on a clear night, broadcasted from Mexico to Canada. Country music people would come up to promote their product [at the Opry]. Someone had the idea for Chet and Owen to start producing the country acts here. It made all the sense in the world; they were coming up for the Opry, "Let’s record them!" That’s how Nashville began as a country center. So you heard these country records, and they had these influences of rock and big band in them.
So it was almost by accident.
Owen Bradley was thinking broadly. I think Owen was making records that he liked. He wasn’t so concerned about whether they got it onstage at the Opry. He wasn’t thinking about Hank Williams’ fans adapting to it. He wanted it to appeal to people who listened to pop, a little country, and a little classical. It was that vision that helped create the Nashville Sound.
When you think Nashville, you think country music. But it sounds like it never was intended for that. It was an approach to make pop music in Nashville so people didn’t go somewhere else.
Country music is not the music that Nashville people listen to, and there’s more country music now than there ever was before. I remember being at the Pink Poodle one night, and a young band was playing called the Allman Joys; it was the Allman Brothers before they were the Allman Brothers. I thought it sounded pretty average until a soldier from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, walks onstage and starts shredding. It was Private Jimi Hendrix.
A lot of the records you produced have like a country twang to them but are geared more towards pop and rock. When did you start making that transition?
Well, I came to [Columbia Studios] one time to play bass in '67 or '68. This guy walks up to me, and he’s shabbily dressed. He says to me, "You’re Putt, right? My name is Kris Kristofferson." He had started working for the maintenance department sweeping floors. I would see him quite a bit, and he eventually convinced me to play on a session for him. I, begrudgingly, show up to this session on a Saturday morning, and when Kris walks in at 9:45 in the morning, he says, "I know you guys work with great singers. I’m not a great singer, and I’m a little paranoid, so I’m gonna have a little something to relax my nerves." He takes a big swig off a pint of something, and he gets his guitar and starts playing the first tune. We got the first one recorded and went to have a listen. David Briggs, who was also on this session, leans over and says, "God, he’s worse than Dylan." But I thought the lyrics were really good! I think we did five songs in two hours. Kris knew that if he hung around the studio long enough, he’d run into Johnny Cash. He met Johnny and got him a tape with the songs on it. He got a lot of cuts with Johnny, and one of his songs was a country standard within a year. I got a call one day to lead a session for Joan Baez. Kris and Joan had been in California writing songs, and he was going to produce a record for her. I hired a band of more rock players, and I came in the first day. Kris is slumped over; I thought, "My god. I think he’s totally inebriated." I walked over and ask, "Kris, you okay?" "No." I said, "Well, we need to get some coffee in you so you can produce this record." He quips back, "I’m not producing the record. I’ve been talking to Joanie, and I think you should do it." We cut 24 sides in five days, and when it came out [Blessed Are...], it was promoted to pop radio. We sold 1.5 million copies, and that’s how I became a producer. I was sent Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffet. I was lucky, but I was looking at some of the older members of the [Nashville] A-Team and thinking, "Do I really want to be playing into my 40s?"
Do you recognize Nashville anymore?
You know when I was driving up from Muscle Shoals way back when, the Life and Casualty tower stood out above the rest. All the other buildings were four floors. I called my wife today and told her, "I’m in this maze of giant buildings!" Nashville is just growing so quickly. The interesting thing is there are no players here playing 600 record dates a year; a top player might play 100. As a kid growing up in Alabama, if I wanted to be part of a really professional record, I needed to go to a great studio with a great engineer. Of course today with a laptop and an interface, a smart, talented kid can produce something that sounds like a major record. So much of film work is done in a room with a great keyboard guy. The thing that us old guys miss is coming together as a cluster of guys and playing this new song that we had just heard; playing off each other’s vibe. I was told by some the great, old producers, "We’re selling emotion." When I stopped working in music, I made friends that hadn’t worked in the music industry. We would listen to records, and I would evaluate the band in comparison with the vocal. All they heard was a great voice. None of them remembered anything about the backing music. See, Owen [Bradley] had it right; he would run a song until the singer got it. Now we have Pro Tools, and they’re doing all of this shit, then have the singer come in after a month of working on the tracks and sing the song four times and then it’s comped. The singer is having to sing to some mix, and they may not be moved emotionally to do anything with it.
Lou Bradley
Engineer
How did you get into recording?
I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, and went to work in radio right out of high school in '57. In 1958, this radio station had a gutted TV station, and I was able to use that space as a recording studio. I wound up in Atlanta after the army, in 1965, and worked at Master Sound Recording Studios. The people we worked on there were acts you never heard of at the time, but would later go on to be big stars, like Mac Davis and Ed Bruce. Then, in '69, Columbia Records hired me, and I worked here until they closed in '82.
Which room did you prefer?
Studio B [the Quonset hut]. It was just a good room; neutral acoustically. They built a room inside a room. Just wood and acoustical tile for walls, and old theater curtains on top. You have problem with the [round] shape of that building wanting to reflect the sound back down, and the curtains defeated that. It wasn’t fancy, but players loved to play in there. If you put a singer on a mic and have them step back, you can really hear it if it’s a bad room. I wasn’t doing anything different from the way they were doing things before I got there. I made tweaks here and there. They talk about the Nashville Sound, but I think it was the Nashville "Way" of making records. You could walk in the back door for a 2 o’clock session with three or four ideas and walk out with three or four hits.
What was it like working at that kind of speed?
It was intense. Many times take one was the take. They would start working it up, and 10 or 15 minutes later you had to roll tape.
Did you find that you had time to make each session unique, or was it pretty set?
Well, I looked at each song as a new game. Every time is a new time. There’s no gimmes. So many times I’d see somebody come in, and on their first record they’re singing like they have nothing to lose. Success comes, and all of a sudden there’s a different animal standing in front of the microphone. Now they have everything to lose.
What kind of gear were you guys working with at that point?
The console that I worked on was built by Eric Porterfield, head of the CBS’s research and development department, and his crew in New York. That console and I arrived on the same day, and my first job was wiring the mic lines in. That console was 24 in and 16 out. If we had an orchestra in here, I’d add a little Ampex mixer sidecar. I did quite a few orchestra dates; 39 or 40 pieces. It was a room full of people. [laughs]
They don’t make records like that anymore. When you think of the classic way of recording – of everybody going down at the same time with limited mics – were you still using the same mentality even with more inputs?
Oh yeah. You’d still go for it. Before that console, I think they had a 12 input setup. Well, we started using more mics on the drums, for one thing. When they were using the 12, they usually only had one rhythm guitar; we always used two. Still you were going for the "record."
Like now, tracks are endless, so it’s overdub after overdub.
Here’s how I’ll describe what’s going on now. We used to record offensively. Everybody in the room was going for it. Now they record so they can replace it all. That’s defensive. I think it influences how you play. We used to make decisions. I started with mono, and you lived with what you had. When multitrack came along people would postpone the moment of decision. Also, absentee producers; people would come and go, because decisions could be made later. But the days of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, they’d do a live vocal. We might do another and use part of it, but they knew those songs. Pro Tools would be put out of business if singers would just learn the melody.
What’s the biggest difference between working now and back then?
Everybody wants to manipulate the sound. They’ve taken it from the player’s side of the glass – thinking they can solve every problem with equipment in the control room. You can’t. When I first came here, someone would either sing and play the song or we’d listen to a demo. Everybody wrote their own chart, and there would be a ten-minute window of the players working it up. Somebody out on the floor might hear it different than somebody else. It might be better so everyone adjusted. Then in the late '70s, the producer started getting with the band leader and wrote the charts to save time. Well, that took away the ten-minute window of each song that, to me, was magic. I noticed stiffness started to come into a lot of the music. That window gave the players a chance to really learn the song and explore.
Stephen co-owns Best Friend Studio in Nashville, TN.
