Jody Stephens: Inside Ardent and recording Big Star

In Tape Op # 44 we did a feature on Memphis, Tennessee, and its rich music and recording history. We vowed to return to Memphis, especially for Ardent Studios and Terry Manning - key figures in any history of Memphis music recording, along with Jim Dickinson whom we interviewed in #19. This issue has a special spotlight on Ardent, and some of the people and activities that have occurred around that special place. Big Star were a special band, not given much notice in their heyday but going on to become influential all over the world. We talk with Jody Stephens (page 30), their drummer, and The Posies (page 34), who have become latter-day members of this band. Mark Rubel talks with Terry Manning (Page 48), who got his start at Ardent and now runs Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. And to start it all off, we chat with John Fry (next page), the man that started Ardent in his parent’s garage 40 years ago! Hats off to the late Chris Bell and the unpredictable Alex Chilton, the songwriters and driving forces that created and carried on Big Star in the first place - we’d all be nowhere without the great songwriters and musicians of this world!

Memphis, Tennessee, is one the most important cities in the history of recording soul and rock 'n' roll music. Historic venues like Memphis Recording Service, Stax Records, Royal, Sam Phillips Recording Service and many others created history. The "kid' among these studios is John Fry's Ardent Studios, now in its fortieth year. Having never been a musician, John has an unusual slant to the recording process. But according to some folks, he has worn this as an advantage, hearing frequencies and sounds beyond the initial concepts of notes and chords. He's also an intuitive businessman, and ventures into labels, production and publishing have helped keep the business vital. From the Stax "spillover" of Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs and Staple Singers, Big Star's trio of amazing and unsung-in- the-day power pop records, to recent successes with The Raconteurs and Cat Power — Ardent's history and future look pretty amazing.

Alongside Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens is the likable drummer and only other constant member of Memphis' legendary rock band Big Star. Big Star was basically created out of John Fry's generosity towards younger musicians, allowing original members Chris Bell, Andy Hummel and their friends to come in an learn the recording ropes. Since then, Jody's been working at Ardent for several decades now, in various capacities.

Your introduction to Ardent Studios was through Andy Hummel and Chris Bell?

Andy said, "Hey, some of my friends and I are putting a band together. Do you want to come out and jam a little bit?" We got together in Chris Bell's back house that was on his parent's property. Terry Manning was there, maybe Tom Eubanks, and Chris, Andy and myself — maybe Steve Rhea, too. It was loose and everything, but there were all these suggestions of something really creative coming out of it. That led to late night sessions at Ardent.

How did that lead into Ardent?

Chris Bell was friends with John Fry. Chris, Andy and Steve Rhea were getting into the studio in the off hours and I think Steve was getting ready to go to college. He played drums, so they were looking for another drummer. I got introduced to Ardent via Chris and Andy and played in the off hours and really didn't see much of John Fry. It was like Disneyland for somebody into music. I thought what Chris and Andy and Steve were doing was so different from what everybody in Memphis was doing at the time. It's what I was into — very, very British invasion. I've always been fascinated with the whole creative process and how things just spring from people's minds. I felt pretty lucky.

So, Big Star — you go through the era of that — 1975 was the last recording for Big Star's Third?

Yes. I came back to Ardent in January 1987. I was on the fourteen-year program at the University of Memphis. I started in '70 and graduated with a marketing degree in '84. I continued to wait tables for a while and then had a pretty straight gig for a year and then was looking to change jobs. I handed in a resume to a radio station and I called John Fry to let him know that I'd used him as a reference. I hadn't talked to him in a while and he said, "I'll say something nice about you." He rang me up the next day and said, "Hey wait a minute. We're creating a new position here at Ardent — somebody to do the marketing." I managed to wind up with the job and I was ecstatic. My first day in the studio I discovered The Replacements were here — I didn't know who The Replacements were at the time, mind you. I was really lucky because it was the time Joe Hardy was developing as a producer/engineer. John Hampton was developing as a producer/engineer. We had Terry Manning here. We had just exceptionally talented people to work with. Also John Hampton and Keith Sykes, a fairly well known singer-songwriter here, were doing a little artist development themselves and had a guy named John Kilzer. John Kilzer's project became the first that I shopped. I wound up placing it with Geffen, but it open the door to relationships at A&M and some other places. The next project to shop was a band called Tora Tora. I wound up placing them with A&M and again, developing other relationships in shopping this band. Then there was the Eric Gales Band. We had talented producers and engineers and we also had this talent pool that we were drawing artists from. The guys that produced the demos were able to produce the records when the artists got signed.

Yeah, keeping things in-house. At that point, were you a studio manager, did you stick with doing the label type thing?

No, we had a dedicated studio manager at that point. My efforts were focused on the production company and the marketing. The production company helped tremendously with marketing because A&R people don't necessarily want to hear about a studio over and over again. But they were always interested in new artists. Ardent Productions was a potential source of a future signing for them. I'd talk a bit about the artist and the engineer/producer that did the demo, so we gained a lot of exposure for our talent behind the board and to our artists.

Is there still some of that going on here or is the focus more on the label?

My focus is more on developing artists for the label. The last band I actively shopped was Skillet. They are now signed to Atlantic for mainstream marketing and distribution. Some of our producers and engineers develop artists independently and have their own connections with A&R people. Like, Pete Matthews pitched Evanescence to Wind-Up — he did that directly and twenty-three million records later... He didn't get to produce it, but they were nice to him and gave him a royalty.

At this point in time, what do your actual duties entail?

Well, a little bit of everything, although I'm getting away from doing so much scheduling and booking — although I still do that from time to time for clients that we've had for a while. I'm trying to get more involved with A&R and more involved with just marketing the studio. We have a marketing plan that we're trying to implement. There is much less business out there these days then there was fifteen years ago. You've got to look under all the rocks and everything you can to bring things in.

In the local Memphis scene are people that used to use studios going into home recording or smaller places? What do you think the changes are on that front?

There are more options, I guess, of places to record. Many of them are very small studios and in some cases they're home studios. If there's a talent behind the console, and the tools he uses to work with are commensurate with his talent, you can do some pretty creative things. But a lot of people come in and say, "I tried a home studio and didn't feel like I was really making a real record."

There's something to be said by having staff on hand, rooms that sound good — there are headphone systems, a collection of microphones and a person that knows how pick the right one.

We have a whiz kid of a tech here, so things go right. Or, if for some reason something should go wrong, we have someone here that can fix it and get back on track. There is a lot of support coming through a studio like this. There can be that sense of community, where you come to a studio like Ardent — you're not recording in somebody's home — and all of a sudden more resources become available to you. You meet more people. It's an opportunity to network. There are probably four different engineer/producers that are pretty much around the building all the time, so your exposure to them can be another stepping stone.

Is the studio staying consistently busy? It looks busy today.

In the past couple of months we were really busy and we're busy now. We have some things coming up, but it's kind of a little breather time for us, I think.

It seems like it's doing well. Forty years is nothing to laugh at.

No, forty years is a long time and I've been kind of walking these halls since, well, '70 to '75, and then I came back a couple of times to do some recording and then came back in '87. That's nineteen years in this go-around and maybe six years in the early seventies.

The Big Star records were done in this building, weren't they?

They were, yeah. The first album, #1 Record, was started at the old studio on National and then completed in the studio right here at 2000 Madison. Certainly Radio City and the Third album and In Space were done here.

How did that come about — doing the new Big Star album, In Space, and choosing Jeff Powell as a producer?

In 2001 Big Star played in England, and while we were on stage Alex announced to the crowd that Big Star was going to do a new record. We may have thought about it or mentioned it once in passing, but that was our first notification — not much was said after that. Maybe a couple of years go by and Alex started talking about it again and had a plan — his plan was to write and record a song a day and we would do that for fifteen days and then we'd take eleven or twelve of those fifteen songs and take five days to overdub and ten days to mix. With that plan in hand, I then gave some friends a call and wound up doing a deal with Jeff Rougvie and the folks at Ryko. Ryko had picked up licensing the Third album, the Chris Bell record and the live radio show, so that was a good fit. I put a budget together and submitted it. We went through the contracts and there was language about having an A&R person during the recording process. I've got to admit to you, in many cases it can be a good thing, but in our case, given the experience that we all had under our belts, we thought that that would impede the process. We got that language removed. Nobody knew what the recording results were going to be. We were off and running. We did the first seven days in March of 2004. We went off and played South by Southwest and God, that was a good time. Then we came back in April, kind of toward the end, and finished tracking and doing overdubs and maybe mixing at some point after that. I've got to tell you, even after the first week of recording In Space, I didn't know what we had because it was a collection of incomplete ideas. It might not have lyrics or there were just some basic tracks. It really didn't start coming into focus for me until toward the end — until we got into overdubs — that's when it started becoming something special to me. There were some pretty wild and wacky performances and pieces and to some extent. Alex would go out and do a great vocal or he'd do a cool lead on something and Jon [Auer] and Ken [Stringfellow] would get out and do background vocals — and again, these ideas just spring from these people's heads and they're able to implement them, too. Jon and Ken — their background vocals — they would almost nail the first time through and maybe nail it the second time, and they'd go back and do other parts. I've been in sessions where it would've taken hours and they'd do something in fifteen or twenty minutes. Mind blowing.

Well, they've sung together for ages now. Plus, they're such huge Big Star fans to begin with, they just understand how those harmonies were put on those records in the first place.

Yeah, you're right, there's that understanding, but I think they're genetically predisposed — there's a genetic tie in there somehow.

How did Jeff Powell get involved? How did you guys choose him?

Alex suggested Jeff and that was great with me. Jeff is open-minded and comes into a session with a free spirit. I don't know that he has a predisposition about something and certainly his approach to music is not formulaic. Initially it was just as the recording and mix engineer, but he participated in production decisions. So actually, Alex said, "Hey, I'd like to include him as producing the album with the band and give him a royalty."

Hanging out with him personally, he seems like such an agreeable, positive presence to have around, too. That would be a real part of it.

Jeff was wonderful to work with. Adam Hill assisted Jeff and the two of them were like a comedy team at times. They would add levity to some pretty tense or uncomfortable situations, so it was great fun. They kept it moving positively.

The record feels kind of happy. There is a lot of fun stuff on it. There's a release to it or something.

Alex was certainly the director of this record, but we all contributed. Jon Auer and I contributed a couple of songs, Ken and Alex co-wrote together and Jon and Alex co-wrote together. Ken wrote one basically by himself that people contributed to, and Jon the same. Alex wanted to stay away from negative things and make it a positive record. He didn't want it to be dark.

Not do a Big Star's Fourth.

Yeah, so everybody kept that in mind when writing, and it's funny — it's easy to be negative. Some people develop an art of being negative and you start walking down that path, and in some cases it works, but I don't think you can be that Third way very long.

Well, every record was a different lineup.

But I think the atmosphere changed drastically with each album — and then I think the same with In Space. It was all second or third takes. They would run through it on guitars a few times and I'd start playing, and I learned quickly. Actually there are a few performances for me creatively-speaking, that are really cool and I wish I could say that I thought of that — and that particular performance was intentional. I would miss a turn in a song or a change in a song and it's what I would do to compensate to get back to where I should be. That happened a couple of times in "Lady Sweet". It was all pretty spontaneous and there was such a free spirit about things. You can listen to "Love Revolution" and you can hear John Auer's little noodley guitars in there — it must've had a wah wah pedal or something — and then there's a real squatty sounding, distorted little guitar, and then there's Alex's stuff that he's doing. It's a lot of depth and it's a lot of fresh surprises — things you wouldn't see coming.