Record Plant
The Record Plant was a recording studio established in New York City in 1968 and last operating in Los Angeles, California. Known for innovations in the recording artists' workspace, it produced highly influential albums, including the New York Dolls' New York Dolls, Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run, Blondie's Parallel Lines, Metallica's Load and Reload, the Eagles' Hotel California, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Hanoi Rocks' Two Steps from the Move, Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, and Kanye West's The College Dropout. More recent albums with songs recorded at Record Plant include Lady Gaga's ARTPOP, D'Angelo's Black Messiah, Justin Bieber's Purpose, Beyoncé's Lemonade, and Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next.
The studio was founded in 1968 in New York City by Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone, who opened a Los Angeles branch the following year and a Sausalito, California, location in 1972. During the 1980s, Stone sold the New York and Sausalito studios; the former closed in 1987, the latter in 2008. The Los Angeles studio closed its doors in 2024. As of 2024, the Sausalito recording site operates as "2200 Studios".
The Record Plant in New York was the first studio to give recording artists a comfortable, casual environment rather than the clinical setting that was normal practice through the 1960s. Kellgren and Stone brought this same vision to their Los Angeles and Sausalito properties, adding a Jacuzzi and billiard table. Stone later said of Kellgren, "He single-handedly was responsible for changing studios from what they were—fluorescent lights, white walls and hardwood floors—to the living rooms that they are today." The Los Angeles location later added VIP lounges.
New York
In 1967, Gary Kellgren was a recording engineer working at several New York City studios, including Mayfair Studios on 701 Seventh Avenue at the edge of Times Square, a drab upstairs office, a single room which held the only professional 8-track recording system in New York. There, Kellgren worked with artists such as the Velvet Underground, who recorded "Sunday Morning" in November 1966; Frank Zappa; and Jimi Hendrix, engineering their recordings and also sweeping the floors. In late 1967, Chris Stone was introduced to Kellgren because Kellgren's wife, Marta, was seven months pregnant and scared of the upcoming birth and Stone's wife, Gloria, had just given birth. Mutual friends thought that the two couples could talk about being parents and ease Marta's worry.Though they were "diametrically opposed" in nature, the two quickly became friends. Seeing him at work, Stone determined that Kellgren was not making full use of his genius for making recordings. Stone noticed that the small studio was charging its clients $5,000 per week, but Kellgren was making $200 per week. Stone suggested Kellgren ask for a raise and soon he was making $1,000 per week.
Stone held an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and was employed as the national sales representative of Revlon cosmetics. Stone convinced Kellgren that the two of them, with $100,000 borrowed from Johanna C.C. "Ancky" Revson Johnson, could start a new recording studio with a better atmosphere for creativity. Johnson was a former model and the second wife of Revlon founder Charles Revson.
In early 1968, Kellgren and Stone began building a new studio at 321 West 44th Street, creating a living room type of environment for the musicians. It initially used an unusual and innovative 12-track machine built by Scully Recording Instruments and opened on March 13, 1968. As the studio was nearing completion, record producer Tom Wilson persuaded Hendrix producer Chas Chandler to book the Record Plant from April 18 to early July 1968 for the recording of the album Electric Ladyland. In early April, just prior to the start of the Hendrix session, the band Soft Machine spent four days recording The Soft Machine, their debut album produced by Wilson and Chandler with Kellgren engineering. When the Jimi Hendrix Experience arrived at the studio, Kellgren engineered the first few dates until Eddie Kramer, the band's familiar engineer, flew in from London. During the production of Electric Ladyland the studio added a new 16-track machine.
In 1969, Kellgren and Stone sold the New York operation to TeleVision Communications, a cable television company that was broadening its portfolio. The purpose of the sale was to gain cash for expansion into Los Angeles with a second studio.
The next big mixing assignment that the studio accepted was to mix the tracks recorded at the Woodstock Festival. These took more than a month to sort out in the studio, as recording conditions had been primitive and some tracks contained both voice and instruments, preventing separate processing for each.
In 1970, Studio A became the first recording studio designed for mixing quadraphonic sound.
On August 1, 1971, the studio made its first remote recordings at The Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden.
During the 1970s, house engineers Shelly Yakus and Roy Cicala also gave many local bands their start by donating session time and materials, engineering and producing their demo tapes.
In January 1972, Warner Communications bought the facility from TVC. Head engineer Cicala bought it from Warner.
In April 1973, the New York Dolls recorded their debut album there, produced by Todd Rundgren.
In late 1973, Aerosmith began recording Get Your Wings, their second album. Bob Ezrin, known for producing hits for Alice Cooper, was put in charge, but engineer Jack Douglas put so much into the project that he was called the sixth member of the band. The song "Lord of the Thighs" was written and recorded inside the Record Plant's Studio C during an all-night session after the band realized they needed one more song for the album. When Aerosmith returned to the Record Plant in early 1975 to record Toys in the Attic, they named Douglas as sole producer.
The song "Walk This Way" was written after Douglas and the band, without Steven Tyler, went out to see the film Young Frankenstein and were struck by a humorous line spoken by Marty Feldman playing a hunchback. They returned to the studio to tell Tyler what the song's title must be, and Tyler wrote the words on the walls of the stairwell at the Record Plant. For the recording of Draw the Line in 1977, Douglas brought a truckload of Record Plant remote recording equipment to the Cenacle, a 300-room former convent in Armonk, New York.
In 1978, David Hewitt and crew of John Venable, Phil Gitomer, Robert "Kooster" McAllister and Dave "DB" Brown built the Black Truck, a state of the art mobile studio. They recorded everyone from Aretha Franklin to Frank Zappa, also expanding the Record Plant's client list in live radio, television and films. Among these recorded performances were the first live MTV concert, the Tony Awards, the Grammy Awards, Live from the Met Opera and the films Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together, Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, No Nukes and Queen Rock Montreal.
John Lennon was recording "Walking on Thin Ice" at the Record Plant on December 8, 1980, the day he was shot and killed. Willie Nile was also recording Golden Down at the Record Plant the night Lennon was killed.
American pop singer Cyndi Lauper recorded her debut studio album She's So Unusual, one of the most iconic pop albums of the 1980s, at the Record Plant between December 1, 1982, and June 30, 1983.
In 1987, the New York studio was sold to George Martin and closed soon afterward.
Los Angeles
Seeing the early success of the New York studio, Kellgren and Stone decided to move to the West Coast and open another studio in Los Angeles. To design the studio, they contracted with Tom Hidley, who had built TTG Studios in 1965 and was becoming known in L.A. for answering the high-decibel needs of rock music. Hidley was brought on board as the "third musketeer", according to Stone. One of the first employees of this studio was Chris Stone's nephew, Mike D. Stone, who would also work as a recording engineer.On December 4, 1969, the new studio opened its doors on 8456 West Third Street near La Cienega Boulevard. Sometimes known as "Record Plant West", the new studio held a 16-track recorder, larger than the 12-track system in New York, and studio time was 20 to 25 percent less expensive than typical studios in New York. In 1970, to stay innovative and retain the prestige of an industry leader, the Record Plant installed a 24-track tape recorder. It was a very large machine assembled by Hidley at the cost of $42,000, but in the next three years it was used on only a few sessions.
Stone and Kellgren had profited enough to buy back their studio from Warner Communications and expand into Sausalito. They expanded with remote recording dates in 1973, including performances by Alice Cooper, Vikki Carr, Sly Stone, Todd Rundgren, Joe Walsh and Rod Stewart. At the same time, the studio worked on projects by the Gap Band for Shelter Records; Mary McCreary, a singer being produced by her husband Leon Russell; and the Partridge Family, in production for Bell Records under producer Wes Farrell.
Jim Keltner Fan Club
In March 1973, when a third studio—Studio C—was installed at Third Street, Kellgren initiated a series of Sunday night jam sessions hosted by the Record Plant, featuring well-known studio drummer Jim Keltner, a good friend of Kellgren. The jams were known as the Jim Keltner Fan Club Hour. Famous musicians would show up to play along with Keltner included Pete Townshend, Ronnie Wood, Billy Preston, Mick Jagger and George Harrison. Harrison jokingly referred to the sessions on the back cover of his album Living in the Material World. As a jab at Paul McCartney's self-promotion on the back of the album Red Rose Speedway, where it said "for more information on the Wings' Fun Club send a stamped self-addressed envelope...", Harrison wrote on his own album regarding the "Jim Keltner Fun Club", "send a stamped undressed elephant..."Keyboardist William "Smitty" Smith said that there were regular jam sessions of musicians at Clover Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard near Vine Street in Hollywood, but that the increasing number of musicians outgrew the place and the group moved to the Record Plant for more space. Smith was a regular at the Studio C jams, but one Sunday he could not make it and he sent his friend, David Foster, to play keyboards. Foster was so well received by other musicians that he and three others—Paul Stallworth on bass, Danny Kortchmar on guitar and Keltner on drums—formed the band Attitudes.
One of the Keltner jam sessions in late December 1973 became known later as "Too Many Cooks". Under the leadership of John Lennon, an all-star lineup performed an extended version of the blues song "Too Many Cooks ", with Mick Jagger on lead vocals, Keltner on drums, Kortchmar and Jesse Ed Davis on guitars, Al Kooper on keyboards, Bobby Keys playing tenor saxophone, Trevor Lawrence on baritone saxophone, Jack Bruce on bass and Harry Nilsson singing background vocals.
Jagger was uncomfortable stretching to reach the top of his vocal range and he grew unhappy with the progress being made on the song. Journalist Lucian Truscott IV wrote in 1977 that Kellgren told Jagger to "sit on it", ending the complaints. After Lennon's personal assistant and lover, May Pang, brought the master tapes to light, the track "Too Many Cooks" was released in 2007 on Mick Jagger's album Very Best Of.... Musician and journalist Steven Van Zandt described Jagger's vocals as "ragged but still in control" and the song as "amazing", with "a painful soulfulness hits you and stays with you".
In March 1974, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Jim Keltner Fan Club Hour jam series, Ringo Starr and Moose Johnson joined Keltner on drums; Lennon, Marc Benno and Davis played guitar, Ric Grech played bass, Keys played sax, Gene Clark vocalized, Joe Vitale played flute and Mal Evans supported the large group on percussion. Keltner was working on a solo project by Jack Bruce, formerly of Cream, laying down tracks for Out of the Storm under the direction of engineer and producer Andy Johns; Steve Hunter played guitar.
Also in the building was Stevie Wonder, shaping the mixes for Fulfillingness' First Finale, using Studio B, which was built specifically for him. Jack Bruce first met drummer Bruce Gary when he showed up at one of the jams hoping to play. Bruce described Gary as a "wannabe drummer", but befriended him and hired him when they were both back in England.
At Burbank Studios on March 28, 1974, a few weeks after the anniversary jam, some of those celebrating at the Record Plant came together again for another jam, also called "the Jim Keltner Fan Club Hour", though it was not hosted or organized by Kellgren, nor was Keltner in attendance. Lennon played with Keys, Davis and Wonder, among others, and McCartney joined in part way through. The raw recordings with their uneven performances were issued as a bootleg album called A Toot and a Snore in '74, the final time that Lennon played with McCartney.