The Day the Music Died: Legendary Recording Studio Built By Buck to Close

By Shellie Branco, The Bakersfield Californian

Mar. 15–You’re not going to get rich running a recording studio in these parts.

That’s advice Buck Owens passed on to Rick Davis, who took over the star’s legendary Oildale recording studio in 1992.

Davis, father of Korn lead singer Jonathan Davis, didn’t do it for the money. He did it for the love of music.

But love doesn’t pay the bills, a theme echoed in the Bakersfield music community lately.

The studio that once heard the sounds of Owens, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam, and Willie Nelson is shutting down.

After 20 years, Davis’ Fat Tracks, which subleases the space to Pig Studio, will in effect shut down April 1. Equipment will be liquidated and new clients will no longer be accepted. The studio will finish existing projects by the end of next month, then close its doors.

The news follows an announcement by local music store World Records that it will close March 29, with hopes of reopening in October.

Both appear to be victims of the digital age of music production and consumption: Record on a laptop at home and get your music fix from iTunes. At the same time, a local musician is trying to make a splash with a new concept: the studio-turned-party hall.

Davis is a friend of World Records owner Pat Evans.

“Like I told Pat, ‘You and I both have great day jobs,’” he said. “He’s an attorney, I work for the government. It’s a changing of the guard.”

It’s unknown what will happen to Fat Tracks’ space at the iconic 1213 North Chester Ave. building, which Owens’ empire still owns. There are other tenants at the spot, Davis said.

Mel Owens, CEO of Buck Owens Production Co., was unavailable for comment as of press time Friday afternoon.

Closing Fat Tracks was purely a business decision, said Davis. He gave up control of the studio in May 2005 when he became director of the Kern County Board of Trade.

“Of course, it’s a closing of a chapter in someone’s life, but that chapter closed for me three years ago,” he said.

When asked to guess how Owens might have taken the news, longtime friend and sideman Jim Shaw recalled something his famously unsentimental boss said on more than one occasion: “I’m not in the music business. I’m in the advertising business.”

NEW VENTURES

Nick Forcilo took over the space for Pig Studio. In the next five months he’ll move to New Life Center Church on Stine Road and White Lane, which is building a studio for Christian artists. The Pig Studio name will probably die.

“The studio’s got a lot of vibe to it, if you know what I mean,” he said. “There’s a lot of good spirits in this room, for sure, and that will truly be missed.”

The Iron Outlaws will be the last band to record in the Oildale studio.

The do-it-yourself attitude of the new generation and rising cost of utilities and insurance took their toll, Davis said.

He wouldn’t release the numbers, but the financial drain began 18 months ago — not huge losses, but a slow bleed. It came to the point where it didn’t make sense to stay open.

Buck Owens told Davis successful studios were only a tool to make products that were successful.

“A carpenter doesn’t make much money selling a hammer, but if he uses a hammer to make a piece of furniture, then the furniture is the product that makes the profit.”

The closure raises questions about the viability of an ambitious project nearly ready to open in east downtown.

Former Smokin’ Armadillos guitarist Josh Graham is opening the 10,000-square-foot American Sound Recording Studios at R and 23rd streets. His three studios will cater to everyone from children who want to make CDs to serious recording artists.

“They’ve got a lot of history, so that’s sad to see them go,” Graham said. “I cut my first CD there. I felt they had quality recordings.”

He said he’ll support emerging artists with his professional studio, but his business model and demographic — families — is different.

“We’re not in the recording studio business, we’re in the entertainment business,” he said.

Davis is happy to see his friend’s new project.

“I wish him all the success in the world,” he said.

BUCK’S PLACE

Fat Tracks opened in fall 1988 on Columbus and Haley Streets. Davis closed that location in 1992, making way for a shopping center.

Owens, a Fat Tracks customer, asked Davis to move into his building in Oildale, originally the beloved River Theater.

It was at the North Chester recording studio, in early 1970, that longtime Buckaroo Shaw met the man who would become his employer and musical mentor.

“That’s where I stumbled into meeting Buck. It all happened in that room in February 1970,” said Shaw, recalling the day he came down from his home in Fresno with a friend. Another pianist was trying out for Owens, but it wasn’t clicking. The “Hee Haw” star asked Shaw to play on a song, and the rest is history.

“That studio changed my life,” Shaw said.

Owens built the studio because he was tired of commuting to the Capitol studios in Los Angeles, Shaw recalled. And Owens was burned out on the “four songs in three hours” grind dictated by the record labels. “He wanted to go in there and not have to look at the clock and have fun with the music.”

At the time it was built in the late 1960s the studio was state of the art and charged about $80 an hour, a steep sum even today, Shaw said. Owens and dozens of other performers — including Arlo Guthrie and even Goldie Hawn — recorded albums there, and Shaw played on a lot of those records.

For many years, the Oildale complex bustled with activity, housing the Owens’ empire, which at one time included the KUZZ studios, the business offices, the recording studio, and a television station Owens briefly owned. Owens moved his operation to its current location on Sillect Avenue in 1988.

“There’s nothing going on there, it’s empty,” Owens said of the Oildale building, according to Davis.

So Davis moved his studio north of the river.

“It would be good for up-and-comers to record in and it was convenient for Buck,” he said.

Shaw believes his old boss last recorded at the studio he built about three years ago.

Shaw said he has no idea what will become of the building where so many of the happiest memories of his recording career were born.

“I spent so many hours there. I was in that studio at least 20 to 25 hours a week recording. It was kind of like home.”

IN THE SHADOW OF L.A.

It’s never been smooth sailing for local recording studios.

Davis fought against the attitude that you had to record in Hollywood.

“That’s another challenge for entertainment-related businesses when they’re within a two-hour drive of the entertainment capital of the world,” he said.

A businessman himself, in later years Owens apparently wasn’t as sweet on the studio as his other “baby.”

“What Buck shared with me was that, ‘It had an important part in my career, but my legacy is at the Crystal Palace,’” Davis said. “That is how Buck would want to be remembered. That was his dream.”

THE NEXT GENERATION

Fat Tracks’ mainstay was newcomers. A nascent Korn recorded a third of their self-titled debut album at Fat Tracks back in the mid-90s.

“We had great exposure, but what pays the bills are baby bands, the up-and-comers,” Davis said.

Davis never changed his price of $65 per hour.

“What business has kept the same recording price for 20 years?” he said. “It was about making enough money to have it here, to take care of people who wanted to pursue their dreams. Young artists like my son. He said (he had) a dream and I had a place for him to record.”

But these days, the younger set works with Pro Tools out of a garage studio — it’s cheaper and you can achieve a quality sound, Davis said.

Fat Tracks was a “studio in the middle,” not big enough for major label business, but out of reach for a beginning act.

Shaw remembers the old days, when making a record was “an elite thing to do. It was a big mysterious deal and it lost a lot of its mystery probably.”

In a time when having a song recorded professionally seems out of reach for most people, Shaw understands the allure of do-it-yourself recording equipment — he has a home setup himself. Still, he says there’s a difference between mixing your own record and enlisting the skill and ear of a pro.

“We all have to learn to live in this new world. One of the biggest victims (of the digital age) is the recording industry,” Shaw said. “So many studios have gone under.”

Davis has confidence in Graham’s “American Idol”-inspired business model.

“If anybody can make a business prosper and grow, it’ll be Josh,” he said.

Leslie Ann Jones, a scoring director at George Lucas’s Skywalker Sound and trustee for the San Francisco chapter of The Recording Academy, said surviving recording studios have learned how to deal with dwindling clientele by offering special features in the same vein as American Sound. She called Graham’s approach forward-thinking.

“That’s what we have to do to survive,” she said.

Studios have always tried to look to other ways to make money, she said.

“I mean, studios are small businesses just like any other,” said the Grammy-winning recording engineer. “It doesn’t really matter whether in L.A. or Bakersfield or the Bay Area, you always have to look for creative ways to produce income so you can do what you love, which is make records.”

Davis feels that by no means does this signal the demise of musical innovators in Bakersfield — just look at his son.

“If you ask a 25-year-old and say Bakersfield, they say Korn,” he added.

— Californian editor Jennifer Self contributed to this report.

—–

To see more of The Bakersfield Californian, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bakersfield.com.

Copyright (c) 2008, The Bakersfield Californian

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

NASDAQ-OTCBB:NGTHQ,