Ardent Music is the upstart mainstream record label based out of the legendary Ardent Studios (whose client list includes The White Stripes, The Dead Weather, Cat Power, Smashing Pumpkins, Isaac Hayes and Led Zeppelin, just to name a few).  Ardent Music’s first two signings are Memphis acts Star & Micey and Jump Back Jake.  Its sister label, Ardent Records, is the label that originally launched power-pop pioneers Big Star.

HISTORY

Ardent Records, often shortened to “Ardent,” is a Memphis record label founded by John Fry in 1959. Ardent of the 1960s and 1970s featured pop music acts and was distributed by Stax Records from 1972 until 1975. It is best remembered today for Big Star, whose first two albums, released in 1972 and 1974, helped define the style known as power pop. The label was initially an attempt by the R&B-focused Stax to move into rock music, but distribution problems prevented any releases from succeeding. Big Star became widely known through 80s reissues and the long delayed first release of Big Star III, recorded in 1974.

The label was revived in the 1990s with two divisions: Alternative Mainstream and Contemporary Christian. Former Big Star guitarist Alex Chilton released recordings on the Ardent mainstream division, which also released recordings by bands such as Spot, Jolene, Two Minutes Hate, The Idlewilds, Neighborhood Texture Jam, and Techno-Squid Eats Parliament. The mainstream division of Ardent Records was closed in the mid-1990s.

On April 1, 2008, “Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story” a double-disc set thank-you-friends-album-art was released by Ace Records. The box set chronicles the long history of the Ardent label and studio. The lengthy liner notes by Alec Palao draw upon in-depth interviews with both Fry and Ardent associates Jim Dickinson and Terry Manning. It is a unique insight into a chapter of both Memphis and pop music history.

In 2008, the mainstream label was revived again when the label signed local Memphis artists, Jump Back Jake and Star & Micey. Jump Back Jake released their debut album, Brooklyn Hustle / Memphis Muscle, on December 19, 2008. Star & Micey’s debut album is slated for release Summer 2009.

Courtesy of Ace Records and Alec Palao , Liner notes for “Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story” in their entirety.

National Exterior

They may call Nashville, Tennessee Music City, but that title belongs fairly and squarely to its southeasterly neighbor Memphis. For a century or more, popular music has been the city’s very fabric, but not always in ways one would expect. Steeped in the blues, this was where rock n’ roll was born, the fount of Southern soul, yet a significant minority of East Memphis youth in the late 60s and early 70s appeared, to a man, besotted with the sound of British rock. This was not the mainstream Anglophilia of mid-60s America, but an enthusiasm bordering on obsession, a Southern demi-monde where the Yardbirds and Who reigned supreme, and Ardent Studios was its nexus. The sharply-dressed Brit-pop aesthetic seemed integral to the Ardent modus operandi, adding a certain flash to even its most undemonstrative acts. It was also reflected in the studio’s unerring commitment to technical quality, and the permission to experiment: Ardent was always more Abbey Road than McLemore Avenue.

We all know that, despite the plaudits the studio has earned for its unparalleled proficiency over the past four decades, the story of Ardent Records is, for better or worse, inextricably linked to that of Big Star. This collection sidesteps the myriad outside artists, big and small, who have worked at the studio to unapologetically focus on a decade that what the rest of the world understands as the Ardent sound was honed: well-written, imaginatively performed, melodic yet edgy, sensitively powerful, and always exceptionally well presented, with a crystalline purity that thrills to this day. There is an enthusiasm for this basic format that unites everything presented here, but that’s not to suggest the Ardent sound was ever one-dimensional; it just has the patent on one of pop-rock’s more ageless templates, even if it was never a successful formula on a commercial level for Ardent acts themselves.

Big Star’s career is symptomatic of the Memphis/Ardent paradox. Here was one of the most impeccably maintained recording facilities in the United States, yet its own roster was frequently at odds with the accepted methods of producing records, both technically and artistically. It’s the parallel that can be drawn from Jim Dickinson’s inspired mid-60s follies through to his stewardship of Big Star’s “Third”, or that is suggested by the fervent line Terry Manning walked between expertise and experiment. And ultimately this dichotomy is testament to the far-sightedness and passion of John Fry, who was young enough to identify with the excitement that overtook rock in the mid-60s, yet smart and caring enough to harness it in such a classy and dedicated manner, allied to a magnanimity rarely spotted in that era.

Without going into historical detail, the intellectual tradition in Memphis is like much of the American South, where art and philosophy can butt heads with societal attitudes and prejudices, and in the process create wild extremes. Bucking the prevailing trend was endemic to Ardent, but any raw sentiment was always matched by a liberal-minded expertise. Ultimately, it’s this unique combination of aforethought and gut emotion that makes the Ardent Story so compelling.

Alec Palao, 2008

El Cerrito, California

JOHN FRY: Co-founder and major-domo of Ardent the studio and the label, and its avuncular, enabling constant. Not to mention, one of the most skilled recording engineers of the past fifty years.

“My early interest really was in radio. I grew up listening to music in Memphis, and I started to come of age around the time that rock n’ roll was really hitting. We would listen to [legendary R&B station] WDIA – they had just amazing air personalities – and then started trying to tune in to distant stations, where you’d get a different geographical perspective. Going from listening to radio and being fascinated with the technology led me to building a little transmitter set-up, and then to thinking well, this could also be used to record music. At that time in the late 1950s, there were plenty of people around willing to become experimental victims. We were three teenagers: John King, Fred Smith and myself, and we built a studio in my house on Grandview. There was one room that we had partitioned off, for a little control room, a modern sized studio area and there was this other room sixty or seventy feet away. Somebody had the idea that it was built for my maternal grandmother, so it became “Granny’s sewing room.”

I read everything I could get a hold of, and what little opportunity I had, I observed other studios, but by and large it was trial and error process. We accumulated a fairly nice inventory of equipment: we had an Ampex 354, a stereo machine, and we modified that to put the sync [overdub facility] on it, and we had an Altec 250 issue valve console, which was built for broadcast but there was nothing unsuitable about it for music recording. When we decided that we were gonna start to press our first 45s, we had to have a name for the label, and we liked the sound of Ardent: “hot, fiery, fierce”, OK, that’s not bad! 1960 was the first release, by Freddie Cadell. At first we were only distributed in the local area, and I think we pressed a thousand of each single. We would go in person to the local stations and beg them to play it. The first record by the Ole Miss Downbeats, ‘Geraldine’, did get put into regular rotation by WHBQ and made their chart.

I graduated from high school in 1962, and met a radio consultant, Jerry Scanlon, who had a grant to build a radio station of his own in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. John King and I participated in building, and then programming, that station for the first several years he had it. I was also in school majoring in electronics, but I never did finish, I was too impatient. I really thought we were gonna get into the radio business. We wouldn’t announce [on air] so much as do the production; select the records that were played, set up the news etc. That allowed us a real peak behind the curtain, because we got on the service lists from all the labels, so we heard everything they were sending out. We did keep recording music, but we weren’t finding artists or trying to release.

I remember when the first Beatles single came out on Vee Jay. John and I twigged onto it right away, and wanted to find out more about this stuff coming from England. So we got a foreign subscription to New Musical Express, and discovered that there was this whole new world of groups, and from then on, we were Anglophiles. We found a mail order record service, and once we figured out which artists we liked, we would just set up a standing order. I was not as much a big Stones fan as other people, but the first Who record I ever heard, I thought, this is amazing – the Kinks too. I’d check out local groups – sometimes we’d record them. A lot of the Memphis bands that had been playing soul music just immediately grew extra hair and added all the British songs that they were hearing.

What got us back into issuing records was, a guy named Bobby Fisher who worked at a music store had come across this band and he told me, this guy Jim Dickinson writes songs, maybe he could produce them. So Jim started coming John Fry National Colorover and producing Lawson & Four More. ‘If You Want Me’ was cut at the home studio not long before it was gone, because my parents were gonna sell the house. I had to decide whether just to go with the broadcast route, or go get an adult job. Instead, we found a newly built store building that was simply just open space, about 2000 square feet, at 1457 National Street. We leased that in May 1966, though it took some time to construct new walls. We had already ordered a Scully 4-track, which was actually delivered before all the building work was completed. So at first the carpenters worked in the daytime, and we lashed up something crude and recorded at night.

There was a fellow named Weldon Shatton who sold professional audio equipment. We were in the process of building a console at National, and so I thought, let’s get the input modules from this guy, as he was right here in town. Without realizing it, that was just about the smartest thing we did, because we wound up having very similar equipment to the Stax studio, since Weldon was also supplying them. Stax had a lot of outside work that they needed done, so by 1967 they started sending it to us. Thanks also to Weldon, the jingle company Pepper-Tanner started outsourcing a great deal of work to us too, as we had a considerably larger studio area than they had. Of course, the Stax work was great, because of the producers and musicians and artists. But the good thing about the jingle company was that it allowed me to record a tremendous variety of genres and instrumentation – country, big band, orchestra – that I would never have seen in the ordinary course of business that went on in Memphis.

Terry Manning was the keyboard player in Lawson and the Goatdancers, and he was the first to take an interest in engineering. When we moved to National, Jim Dickinson came along as sort of in-house producer, and he would engineer some. But Terry really became the first engineer other than myself. There were periods of time when it was just work and sleep. Most of the studios around Memphis and the south just literally had no idea about any kind of organized procedure. They wouldn’t even know what an alignment tape was, whereas we kinda figured out back in the garage days, if you wanted any consistent results, you needed to follow some procedure, and you need to align your equipment. In the radio business you were periodically required by the FCC to do what was called “proof of performance”, and the same thing holds in the recording studio.

We recorded a number of artists intending to upstream them to bigger labels, but only placed a few of them: the Honey Jug, the 1st Century. The Honey Jug was done for Hip, which was a kind of pop label that Stax had. My mother had seen an Edison cylinder player at some antique store and she’d bought the thing and a supply of cylinders, so we used that. Jim liked to experiment in the studio. The Bitter Ind may have come to Memphis to play. In the early days, that was usually the way we would encounter somebody from an outside area. The Wallabies too came initially as clients. The main guy had this elaborate, continuous pretence that he was Australian, and would walk around talking in this accent. The Goatdancers had an act where things would build up into a frenzy, and then Terry would fall over on stage pretending to be dead. The feedback was the kind of crazy stuff I’d just take for granted.

I spent almost no time at any other studios in town, because we were usually so busy. After the Box Tops were over, Terry Manning produced an album on Alex Chilton, which at one time I thought Atlantic was going to take. Chris Bell had had some bands around Memphis, and knew Terry. They made tapes, nothing was ever actually issued but some Big Star songs, like ‘My Life Is Right’, started out as tracks from those entities. This earlier stuff like Icewater or Rock City I had little to do with, they were proceeding on their own. It does seem paradoxical that we had all this highly organized structure, and then this other activity that was unstructured, but a lot of that comes from the home studio days. You had all of these people hanging out and interacting, a lot of whom were never likely to know each other under any normal circumstance.

After Terry, Richard Rosebrough picked up engineering, and Chris, Steve Rhea and Andy Hummel. I held little classes to try to get some extra trained engineers, so that Terry and I wouldn’t have to work ourselves to death, as we had been. We would explain the basic physics of sound, because otherwise you can’t really understand how a microphone works, and you’ll always being puzzled as to why you’re not getting good results. From the console, we’d move on to the outboard equipment – what’s compression ratio, what’s attack and release time. I think they were appreciative, and frankly it benefited us. If Big Star wants to overdub until 3 in the morning, that’s fine, but if Chris and Andy know what to do, then I don’t have to stay, when I need to be back early the next morning for a paying customer.

When we were out on National, people were more responsible than you might think. You wouldn’t come in, in the morning, and find the place trashed, and rarely would you see that at Madison. If nothing else, folks wanted to cover their tracks, so as not to lose their privileges! We moved over to Madison in November of 1971, though the next technical development had occurred on National. We had bought a 24-input, 8-output Auditronics console in early 1970 and interestingly enough, Stax got the identical console and put it in their studio A. We thought we had a lot with 4-track lot in 1966, but by early 1968 it was 8-track, and by 1970 it was 16-track. It changed rapidly, and probably for the better, until about 16-track. I think that was my favorite format – enough but not too much. The studio actually moved during the time we started the first Big Star record.

[Stax president] Al Bell was spending a tremendous amount of time with us. He wanted to branch out and have a rock division, and he had the idea that Ardent could be that label. We would do the A&R, sign the artist, do the production and creative side, and Stax would do the marketing, promotion and distribution, so that’s what started Ardent Records back up. Cargoe was the first act, a really good band from Oklahoma, followed immediately by Big Star. Slightly later, the Hot Dogs were all people who had had a lot of experience playing in other bands. Al loved those records. It still remains somewhat of a mystery to me why we could not get those things to sell. We had rave reviews and we had some airplay. One thing was, it was the kind of product that the distributors didn’t expect to get from Stax, and the other was, right after “#1 Record” was released, Stax shifted from independent distribution to Columbia, and you just don’t make a shift like that without missing a beat.

For “#1 Record”, the typical pattern had been that I would do the basic tracks because the band would usually play four-piece, and sometimes I would do the overdubs, or Chris or one of the others would, and then I would mix the album. It was the same for “Radio City”, except I didn’t do all the basics – some of those were midnight recordings by Alex and Richard. There’s something that’s missing from “Radio City”, which is the interplay. When we were mixing “#1 Record”, Chris took a big interest in that, whilst most of the others left. Then on “Radio City”, Alex came to all the mix sessions. “Third” was pretty much the same, except we brought Jim Dickinson back in as a producer to sort of try and control the chaos.

There was no question that we weren’t gonna do another Big Star album, no one ever talked about pulling the plug. It’s always a big disappointment when you work on something, and you have put a lot of energy in it and you know it’s good. I didn’t have any doubt in my mind. We made test pressings of “Third” for the purpose of shopping it, really to avoid carrying tapes around, and make it look a little more like a release. [The mood] was a reflection of the times. Alex and Jody had already been through two albums that had disappointed, and during “Third”s recording, Stax was going out of business, so it’s sort of a picture of Midtown Memphis in 1974. Just two years prior, we had so much energy and promise.

Post-Stax, there were a lot of fears about the record business in Memphis, which fortunately proved to be groundless, as events played out. I didn’t really want to get entirely divorced from the studio or music business, but there was a period of time when I came close to making my primary occupation aviation. I had a commercial pilot’s license and got involved in a flight instruction business, which diverted my interest to some extent until the late 1970s. A lot of times people think I’m being a curmudgeon, but when the 24-track and – heaven help us – 48-track era came in, most recording projects had strayed far from what I was used to. Also, by that time we had a number of really good engineer-producer guys at Ardent, like Joe Hardy and John Hampton.

People often ask me what draws people to Ardent, to Memphis. What draws people to Memphis is intangible: it’s the vibe, people feel for one reason or another their creative energies flow better here than elsewhere. I’m not so superstitious that I believe there’s something in the water or gravity is different here, but if being in a place that people consider to be special actually makes for a better or more creative mood, then in fact it has done something. Obviously people come because they want to work with particular musicians or singers, or producers or engineers. I think the thing people miss, number one, if you want to record ensemble playing, you need a studio. And the other thing people miss by working in isolation is the kind of creative community that grew up around studios in the past. That said, I never would have foreseen the iconic stature of Ardent.

JIM DICKINSON

The storied Memphis maverick whose off-centre antics are as crucial a component of the Ardent story as anything else.

“I had actually been to the original Ardent once with my high school band the Regents, in about 1960, though I didn’t really focus on it. My friend Bobby Fisher called me one night in 1965 and asked, can you write a song like the Kinks? Can you write one in 45 minutes? I asked, what are you gonna do with it? I found this group and I’m gonna record them at John Fry’s. I told him, take me along or you can’t have the song, and that was the beginning.

The first time I heard the Beatles was on Ed Sullivan. I was already so hyped that frankly it was a disappointment. I didn’t hear their charm until I heard the whole album, and there was a cohesion there and some brain power so OK, I get it. The Yardbirds were my favorites, as you can tell from ‘Halfway Down The Stairs’. I saw the Zombies at a Dick Clark package show and was very impressed. I was way into the Kinks. Pretty much everybody went to British stuff right away. At that time, I was playing phony Mar Keys gigs with Packy Axton and I already had long hair, so now I got more gigs.

The second Lawson session was what really started my relationship with Fry, because I brought in some other musicians to play on the track. There are no drums on ‘If You Want Me’, it’s Jimmy Crosthwait beating on a cardboard box with maracas. Charlie Hull on guitar, I’m playing the six string bass, Mike Alexander is playing the real bass. The inspiration [for the song] was ‘Play With Fire’. John had two stereo machines and a six input radio console, and in fact, I brought Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill over to Grandview, and Chips declared, that kid in there’s got better equipment than I do!

I quit working for Chips to work for John, because I figured he would never let me run the board. But John told me early on, Jim, I don’t believe you are emotionally suited to be an engineer. Which was completely true, but I did try. I had observed Chips and Sam Phillips and I thought it was all being an engineer, until John’s partner John King gave me the “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” by Tom Wolfe. I read that and thought oh yeah, Spector, that’s what I want to do! Back then, I thought that you had to write the song, or rewrite the song, arrange the song, play half the instruments, jump up and down and be an asshole. Took me years to figure out that was just being an asshole. Production was a subtler form of the art that that didn’t require as much effort. I started out wanting to play on things, but I learned pretty soon that it changes your relationship to the artist. When you stay in the control room, you’ve got a little more power over the situation.

So we cut the first Lawson single at Granny’s sewing room, and then ‘Batman’ by the Robins, which was a trio featuring my wife Mary Lindsay, Lucia Birch and Carol Johnson. They wore masks and black velvet costumes, played gigs, and we even had a Batmobile; it was hot. The flipside was ‘Batarang’, played by Lawson & Four More, with Lee Baker on lead and myself on home-made 12-string, and credited as The Avengers. Mary was the receptionist at National and she says that the first date that she billed out was June of 1966. ‘Halfway Down The Stairs’ had been cut at Fred Foster’s in Nashville earlier, with me playing the first Gibson fuzztone in the city of Memphis. The engineer told me boy, I think that amp is broke! That was my first real writing period and I was pretty prolific for a while there. I didn’t understand the continuity of what I was gonna do with my life then, but it meant something to me to see these kids participate in a tradition that I felt I had helped start, because my high school band was like the first suburban rock group in Memphis.

Packy had gone to Los Angeles and recorded the Packers [‘Hole In The Wall’] and when he came back to Memphis, he booked the first R&B sessions at Ardent. There’s no doubt that they heard all this at Stax and wondered, it doesn’t sound like it’s being played on rubber bands like our stuff does! Dan Penn came over and said this is great, I can do strings and horns here. And then Al Bell was looking for a place where he record without somebody looking over his shoulder, especially somebody with a gun. Once they heard it, they couldn’t stay away.

After ‘Wooly Bully’ was a hit, crazy people in Memphis had a chance. When anybody came into Ardent, between myself, John and Terry, it was obvious who was going to do the crazy stuff. The Wallabies first showed up in Memphis playing at the Bitter Lemon coffee house. Alex Majors was the leader of the band and Alan Palmore was the singer; the guitar was brilliant but their drummer was terrible, so that’s the Goatdancers playing on ‘White Doors’. ‘Up & Down Children’ is sung by Majors. The 1st Century is the rhythm section from Sam The Sham’s band, after they got back from the Morningstar hippie commune in 1967: they even built a tent in the studio. The lead is a thing that Ray Stinett made himself, he called it “The Door”. Literally, it was a flat hollow core door with pegs sticking out on it, three or four strings that ran in both direction, and played with a soda pop bottle. Don Nix went to the West Coast with a reel of Ardent productions and that was the only thing that got sold. Let me ask you, who in Memphis sounded like that?

The Honey Jug was Ronnie Jordan, managed by disc jockey Johnny Dark, who was smart enough to get me to produce the records. That’s Joe Correro Jr, on drums, and myself playing piano on ‘In 1852 We’. Ronnie only cared about the A-side of that record, a version of ‘For Your Love’, so we didn’t think anyone would pay any attention to ‘In 1852 We’, but Al Bell loved it, he thought it was a hit. Joe Lee of the Goatdancers was a brilliant feedback guitarist. On ‘Patches Of Dust’, the bass is feeding back, in fact everybody is feeding back: the doors to the control room were open so the monitors would feed back! I followed the trends in the trade publications a lot closer then, and I wasn’t pursuing my own stuff in that period. I always wanted to be behind the scenes, and the studio was occupying my whole waking life. I cut an album with The Knowbody Else, the band that became Black Oak Arkansas, in 1968, and that was when I quit Ardent, because I figured that was my ticket. There was a lot of inner turmoil at Ardent and a prevailing negativity, and it was obviously my fault, so I left. No difference of opinion with John, it was just a vibe kinda thing. Terry was coming on, and John cared a lot more about teaching Terry than me how to do things right, because I guess he knew I wouldn’t!

I’d known Chris Bell since he was literally an infant. Those guys were just starting to hang around when I left Ardent. John created another family where that kind of creativity was not only possible, but fostered. I did go back in 1972 with my solo album “Dixie Fried” and John mixed it for me, when I was out of budget and out of my mind. At the time, I didn’t think much of “#1 Record” and “Radio City” – I hear them now, I didn’t hear it then. I’d like to say that they were brilliant but I can’t. In the late 1960s, at a particularly low ebb of my career, I considered becoming a rock journalist. I was fascinated by the Box Tops, so I did this interview with Alex Chilton after it was all over. There was a million selling record for ‘Cry Like A Baby’ on the wall, and the label had peeled off, it was lying in the corner like a dead moth. Surely symbolic to Alex of his career. I don’t think anybody had ever talked to Alex about his artistic vision before, and it must have stuck with him when we started “Third”.

People have accused me of indulging Alex on “Third”, whereas in fact I don’t think I indulged him enough. See, he didn’t have any bad ideas, and we were able to get consistent performances out of him. I’ll never forget the first day. Alex just plugged into this old amp and dimed it, turned everything up the whole way. There’s John in his suit and tie, and he just took the mic in front of the amp and moved it across the room, fifteen feet away, where no-one would have put the microphone in 1974. That’s the sound. It was always Big Star to me, and I think it was to John, but it’s not a record, it is a group of recordings. It’s all about disillusion and decomposition: all the relationships involved were falling apart. It’s East Memphis angst. Maybe I was a little brutal in recording some of it, but the psychodynamic of a record had become important to me by then.

There was no sustained agony in making “Third”, it was brief two and three day periods of time. Just Alex and I, head to head. We kept recording because Stax was going out of business, and we figured we would then own the record, which is what happened, except we couldn’t sell it because nobody wanted it. I went to New York first and then the West Coast with the test pressing, and people shut the door in my face. Alex’s big complaint was that he was excluded from the mix, which he was, as at that point John and he couldn’t really be in the room together. It was important to me as producer that John be involved – he had to do his magic, which he did. It could not have been easy.

Sam Phillips said it over and over: I want something different. Well, so did I. I figured what I personally had to bring to the party was something off the wall. Even then, I really wasn’t interested in any kind of mass appeal, but I always figured that whatever it was, I could always make it a little better. And to this day, if I have a problem with a client, or if it’s me, I take them to Ardent because I know it’s gonna work. I’ve worked with the guys who are supposed to be the real deal, and John Fry is the best by far audio engineer I’ve ever had anything do with. He is a brilliant tracking engineer, and he’s the best mixer. You get to “Third”, where you’ve got cellos and sheer distortion, it’s all the same to John. Because he was completely non-musical, it was just sound. He’s the reason that that record is timeless.”

TERRY MANNING

The multi-credentialed producer-engineer –musician whose lengthy apprenticeship at Ardent formed a major constituent of what is considered the Ardent “sound”.

“I was a relative newcomer to Memphis in 1964, and I was completely infatuated with the British Invasion; I had really latched onto it early. I joined Bobby & The Originals on keyboards at Central High. Bobby Lawson liked to sing things like ‘There’s A Moon Out Tonight’, but I dragged my bandmates, Bill Donati, Joe Lee and Joe Gaston, into the British thing, and Bobby hated that. We all felt a disconnect to some degree with the Memphis area. We had the natural teenage rebellion against authority, and authority at that time locally was R&B and the legacy of Sun. I guess musically our big thing was to be the Yardbirds and the Who, the rocker side of it. A lot of other bands wanted to be, let’s face it, Herman’s Hermits.

From the time I was ten or eleven, I had actually tinkered with recording, because my grandfather had a home studio, where he did radio shows, and my father was also on the radio. So by the time I got to Grandview, I was not unaware of the process and what the equipment did. I would stay for as many hours as possible at the studio, so it was probably by default that when John needed somebody to do something, he said, I’ve seen you hanging around doing this, you do it. John had an air of authority and an air of enlightenment. There was no doubt that he knew what he was doing. But with John, there was also never any barrier; there was always an immediate acceptance if he liked you and you were contributing. And there was no age problem – age is exaggerated when you’re that young.

Those songs on the Lawson & Four More singles were Dickinson and Fry trying to get what we considered a more modern sound. ‘If You Want Me’ had been recorded, and we wanted to change the name because Bobby & The Originals sounded too doo-wop. When Bobby left the band, we became the Goatdancers. The music director at WHBQ, Harry Robinson, was now our manager, and he had to keep finding venues farther and farther away, because we were not universally well received [laughter]. For instance, we got a professional radio cartridge player from John Fry, loaded it up with all these carts of sound effects, and hooked it into the PA. I had a foot switch, and right in the middle of say, ‘Shapes Of Things’ I could add an explosion. So we had all these wacky things going on. I don’t mean that we were hated, but there was larger segment of the adult and youth population that were taken aback at the theatrics and the power of it. They wanted to be entertained, not assaulted.

When Grandview was being sold, John, Jim and I would go to various locations to look until we found the building on National. I was the first employee on the payroll, as engineer or assistant engineer, the one to open things up, file tapes, sweep the floor, in other words, do everything. Mary Lindsay was the receptionist and Jim was, I guess, director of entertainment! I recall National as buzzing fairly quickly, but there must have been a lot of down time because we were soon doing a lot of these things ourselves on our own. That period was a lot of fun. We had no rules, and did whatever we wanted, for better or for worse.

The concept of becoming a producer was starting to get defined in my mind at that point. I would hear a group like the Wallabies and just really enjoy them. Bill Donati and Joe Gaston started to hang out more in the studio. Bill did quite a few drum tracks, for instance, things of mine like ‘Rocks’ and ‘Not At All’. I did the string arrangement on ‘Not At All’ with Edwin Hubbard, a really first class guy. Ed was able to take my ideas, embellish them and translate them onto paper for the players. On ‘Rocks’ I was thinking of Bartok, his syncopated rhythm and pushes, but Pete Townshend was possibly an influence. Both of those songs were from a musical I had written, an allegory of life as I saw it at that age, how lost we all are in the world. Really, it was a vehicle for the songs to fit into a slot.

I had known Steve Rhea early on and we’d make home recordings and hang out and jam to records, and he suggested we go and play with his friend who lived farther out east, Chris Bell. So we jammed in Chris’ back house a few times, and even did a gig or two. Eventually I brought them in when I was working on some of my solo recordings like the “Home Sweet Home” album. I can see Chris walking into National with his Gibson 335, looking at the amps and the equipment with his eyes wide open, just like a kid in a candy store. He knew, just as I did a few years earlier, that this is where he was gonna be. I was doing stuff like ‘Every Shoemaker’, which was just a phrase, a bit of wisdom. The name Badgers was a take-off of the Beatles – everything was a joke to some degree. I had cut a Box Tops song to make good natured fun of Eddie Hinton and Dan Penn, but later I played it for Al Bell, and he didn’t realize I had meant it as a joke, and he told me damn, I like that track. He was thinking that Stax needed all the albums they could get for this big push, so he was like, give me a whole album.

As we had rejected the authoritative feel of the time, Alex Chilton was the same with his production team, namely Dan Penn and Chips Moman. He felt that they were imposing their will on him. He would pitch his songs when they were looking for new material, and with one or two exceptions, they would just reject all of them. I’d be working in sessions with them, and whenever Dan would instruct him to “sing it like this”, Alex would roll his eyes, and he’d look over at me and we’d wink at each other like, we’re the hip young guys. At the time, it was like, we could do so much better. So Alex came to me after one session and said, let’s just do it. That “1970” album did bridge the gap between the Box Tops and Big Star [stylistically].

I totally enjoyed hearing Big Star develop. It was the same thing we had already been doing, i.e. it didn’t start out as, this is an album called “#1 Record” by a group called Big Star. A couple of tracks came from the so-called Rock City sessions, so-called Icewater sessions, and then when Alex came in, his style and input was added to Chris’. Chris was that good [that he was able to influence Chilton], he was a really incredible talent. What really made it all happen was when we got the Ardent label released through Stax. Now we needed actual product.

Cargoe was already a whole group with their own songs. I was proud of their album, and at the time Big Star looked up to Cargoe. They were good musicians and had a lot going for them. The rest of their record, aside from ‘Feel Alright’, I saw as almost rock-jazz excursions, and not at all the same as what Big Star was doing. We took them to Los Angeles, they appeared on TV there and played at the Whiskey. ‘Feel Alright’ actually charted nationally, which never happened for Big Star. Chris Bell took the failure of “#1 Record” the hardest of everybody, because he had put his heart and soul into it and I think he knew he had his life masterpiece and it was totally rejected. Whereas Cargoe took it like most bands would – dammit, didn’t happen, it’s the label, whatever. But they didn’t really continue much longer as a group.

Cargoe was totally sick live, as were the Hot Dogs. That group were somewhat pasted together in the search for another act. Country Funk was their name when they first showed up [with different personnel]. As a joke, I wrote The Hot Dogs on one of the tape boxes and unfortunately, it stuck. I had ‘Let Me Look At The Sun’, and brought it in after I had told them that their songs weren’t good enough. ‘I Walk The Line’ was killer. We went down to Sonic Studios, who were about to close, and cut the band track with [engineer] Roland [Janes] in mono. I just told Roland, do your thing – it’s Jerry Lee Lewis and it’s 1958, go for it. Those high pitched vocals were a mistake though!

By 1973, I had my office over at Stax, but I was still around Ardent all the time. There are parts of “Radio City” that I completely loved, and there were parts that seemed a bit cobbled together, perhaps. And to me, “Third” was not Big Star per se, but it got put in the lexicon as a Big Star album. Obviously the mood is totally different, and the production is completely foreign, especially to the first album. I heard it a little when they were doing it, but didn’t hear the whole thing until years and years later. I think everybody thought this is very interesting, but it’s not going to bring them record success, except maybe Alex, but then he never really wanted that, or said he didn’t.

The overriding thing I learned from John Fry was to make every effort you can to know the real science and physics of sound, so you can capture it the way you want, or control it as needed, or let things shine through. If you just wing it, you may get lucky and yes, going by the book is a bit rigid to some people. But he did impress upon me that I should know where the sound is coming from, what picks up sound waves in the way you want, how to keep from getting distortion and noise, all the basics of solid engineering. He was just a fanatic on doing it right.

Everyone involved in the Ardent scene had a philosophical bent; sometimes more twisted than others, but everyone had a wisdom and an intelligence beyond what they probably should have, as regards where they came from and their age. And everyone tried to instill that into the music. I’m not saying we made the most wonderful art in the world, but we were trying to, and we tried not just with feel, but with thought behind it. Literally, trying to blend all of these elements, and the technical aspect was a very big side of it. Often when you’re creative, that’s ignored, or unknown, or you are naïve about it. For better or for worse, none of it was luck: the technical, the musical, the creative and the philosophical was all considered as we did it.

Prelude: Granny’s sewing room

Ardent the label was established only a short time after John Fry had set up shop in his parents home at 4035 Grandview in the eastern Memphis suburb of Germantown. The first batch of product was by Freddie Cadell, the Shades and the Ole Miss Downbeats, the latter a long-lived Mississippi frat combo whose stock-in-trade were Diddley-ish grooves, with a liberally applied duck-call to help boost the ‘jungle’ vibe. Between 1962 and 1966, the label lay dormant until the arrival of Jim Dickinson, whose prolificacy – not to mention lunacy – engendered the Robins/Avengers “Batman” cash-in and two remarkable Lawson & Four More singles, the second of which was taped in Nashville while the studio searched for a new home.

NATIONAL STREET 1966-1971

Operational by the early summer of 1966, Ardent Mk 2 was a much improved space and, with both Dickinson and the precociously talented Terry Manning on board, soon a hive of activity. This was the facility that some of the quirkiest recordings of mid-late 1960s Memphis emanated from. Jackson, Mississippi misfits the Wallabies wore pajamas on stage, hair the length of the Pretty Things and insisted they were Antipodean: their ‘White Doors’ brims with Ardent-esque pop nous, whereas ‘Up & Down Children’ sports the backwards shriek of feverish experiment. These, along with early Terry Manning items like ‘Rocks’ and other hopefuls like the Severn Bore, were included upon a widely shopped 1967 Ardent demo reel, but the only item that saw the light of the day at the time was ‘Looking Down’ by The 1st Century. Originally known as the Clique, this trio comprising Dave Martin (bass), Jerry Patterson (drums) and Ray Stinett (the “Door”) were turned-on former members of Sam The Sham & The Pharoahs. ‘The Surveyor’ is from their debut session and features the more conventional textures of Ardent’s kit-constructed Zuckerman harpsichord.

Another trio, Jacksonville, Florida’s Bitter Ind passed through Memphis in early 1967 long enough to record a single at Ardent. Guitarist Scott Boyer, bass player David Brown, and drummer – and future Allman Brother – Butch Trucks also recorded as The Tiffany System and 31st Of February. The oddly-plunked viola instantly denotes a Dickinson endeavour, as does the perverse atmosphere of the bizarre ‘In 1852 We’ by Ronnie Jordan and The Honey Jug, the sequel to their Spoonful-ish local hit ‘Warm City Baby’. Jordan was formerly of pre-Box Tops combo Ronnie & The DeVilles. By late 1966, Lawson & Four More had become the Goatdancers, who went on to record a handful of edgy pop-art nuggets including the feedback bacchanal that is Manning’s ‘Patches Of Dust’. Though he had visited the studio as early as December 1966, Memphis legend Sid Selvidge, a former bandmate of Jim’s in the New Beale Street Sheiks, did not have a solo release until 1969 and the excellent long-player ‘Portrait’, produced by Don Nix at Ardent and featuring Nix’s dulcet ‘Miss Eleana’.

As alluded to in the main text, Big Star evolved organically from a cabale of knowing teenage musicians who leaped at opportunities the broadminded Ardent proffered. Prior to arrival, many of them had been working the Memphis high school and teen club circuit in outfits like The Jynx (Chris Bell) and The Strangers (Steve Rhea). The connection of mutual Anglophiles Bell and Rhea at Memphis University School in 1967 begat a new group, Christmas Future. Manning became an occasional member and soon invited them to participate in the solo recordings he was making. These saw release under the nom de disque of The Badgers (the catchy ‘Every Shoemaker’, on the Soul Bird imprint) and upon Terry’s 1969 solo longplayer on Enterprise, “Home Sweet Home”. A crunching take on ‘Guess Things Happen That Way’ from that album was Chris Bell’s debut on vinyl. Elsewhere, Terry contributed keyboards and vocals to Chris’ earliest efforts, such as the tentative ‘Psychedelic Stuff’ (named for a comment on the tape box), or the more fully formed, and frequently stunning, collaborations with Steve attributed to the name Icewater.

Steve Rhea: “Terry moved in up the street from me, I got to know him and found out that he was a musician so we really hit off. We started hanging around Ardent because we heard such great things, and then John realized that he could actually train us, we were responsible. So now we had all this knowledge and naturally we wanted to apply it, to lay down some of our own songs. I wrote ‘All I See Is You’, and played the guitar and drums and sang, I think Chris played bass. The guitar was plugged into a Leslie. I hear more of Terry in ‘Feeling High’. That’s pretty original, and I remember us trying to have a long fade at the end. These tracks were recorded as Icewater. A lot of things we did in that era were kinda tongue in cheek. We were always creating these commentaries on what was going on around us. Chris and I eventually took these tunes to Elektra in New York. The A&R guy sat there and listened to everything, then told us it sounded too much like the Beatles and sent us on our way.”

In this same time period, Manning also worked on a full length, Ardent-funded album by former Box Tops vocalist Alex Chilton. The project featured a diverse range of mostly original material by Chilton, including the outwardly commercial ‘Free Again’ and a pair of sublime ballads in ‘Every Day As We Grow Closer’ and ‘The EMI Song’. Alongside Chilton, Manning and steel player Jeff Newman, the sessions marked the recording debut of a further acolyte, drummer Richard Rosebrough. The untitled project, which was rejected by several labels before it was fully completed, has since become known as “1970”, though in truth the sessions were held the previous year. The versions presented here are the original mono mixes as prepared at the time, and feature different instrumental parts to subsequent releases of this material.

Richard Rosebrough: “Chris Bell and I had been friends since we were fourteen, fifteen years old. He was real excited when he made contact with the Ardent circle. It was just a matter of days before I went over to National myself, and once I got my foot in the door, I kept coming back. I’d always wanted to be a studio drummer. Steve Rhea had packed up and gone to school, and that kinda created an opening for me. They invited me to play on some of Terry’s tracks, and then I played on the Alex Chilton “1970” album, though I knew it as the “Alex mono” album, because those were the only mixes done at the time. I had known Alex when he was in the Box Tops through Bill Cunningham, with whom I had played with in the Jokers.”

Steve Rhea: “When Alex started hanging out at National, he was doing things like ‘Free Again’, which is a hit song. Chris had a tremendous influence on what Alex was doing guitar-wise, but Alex was always the better songwriter of the two, and had all those years of playing in front of a live audience, and I think that came across. I didn’t have a very high confidence level and I think maybe that influenced him to engage Tom Eubanks or Chilton to try and come up with a band that could actually get people’s attention. It was great fun applying what John had taught us, but I didn’t see myself as a rock star down the road, so I chose to go to Dallas to go to college.”

The half-dozen or so Icewater tracks had been stockpiled over a period of a year starting in 1969, whereas those credited to Rock City were envisioned specifically as a group of songs akin to an album. Like the other Ardent after-hour projects in this time period, the participants were drawn from the same incestuous pool who’d worked together in grass roots outfits like the Chessmen and Swingin’ Sensations. Singer and guitarist Tom Eubanks had recently played jobs in an ad-hoc group with Chris Bell, bass player Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens; in other words, the nascent Big Star. Married at a young age and tied to a day job, Eubanks retired any thought of playing music for a living, but was enticed into Ardent by his former bandmate.

Tom Eubanks: “We had never tried writing any songs with any of those bands, but Chris called me one night and inquired if I have any song ideas, because he needed to get his engineering chops together. I don’t know why he thought I might have had any material, but Chris and I always had some sort of unspoken mutual admiration. He mentioned he was planning to work with Alex Chilton, who was gonna be back in six months. I went over to his house and we wrote ‘My Life Is Right’ in like half an hour. When we went in the studio, the songs just happened to come together. A lot of that is just luck and faith, but Chris could bring something to the table that just fit right. Terry Manning got interested and would add little touches to tunes. Jody, once he did his parts, was gone, because he was just like the drummer we knew who was kind enough to come and play for free. It was the first time he’d ever recorded.

“I already had ‘Lovely Lady’ and ‘Think It’s Time To Say Goodbye’, which would have come across as more Kinks, if Chris hadn’t put so much slapback echo on the guitars. Chris played bass on both of these, but a talented bass player named Randy Copeland played on a bunch of the other Rock City tracks. Andy wasn’t on these sessions, only because we didn’t know if anything was gonna come of them, so we just didn’t really impose upon him. But whenever we played live, Andy was the bass player. I thought there was a chance with the Rock City stuff, but it was literally mailed out unsolicited to people like A&M, with just a cover letter saying hey, you wouldn’t want to think about messing with this, would ya?”

MADISON AVENUE 1971-77

Coinciding with the studio’s move from National to plush new facilities at 2000 Madison Avenue in Midtown in November 1971 was the reactivation of the Ardent label for a third time, this time bankrolled by Stax. The 1970s version of the label was slicker and more commercially focused, but still retained the enthusiasm of earlier times, as exemplified by the first release, ‘Feel Alright’ by Cargoe, an indescribably kinetic record that in a perfect world should have been huge. The Tulsa, Oklahoma group – Tommy Richard (guitar), Bill Phillips (keys), Max Wisley (bass), Tim Benton (drums) – showed tremendous promise but the rest of their output lacked the dynamism of their debut single, or the wistful harmony work of its follow-up ‘I Love You Anyway’ (here featured in its unedited album form). Similarly, the Hot Dogs were a competent outfit with flashes of excitement, such as on ‘Let Me Look At The Sun’. The group comprised Greg Reding and Jack Holder on guitars, Bill Rennie on bass, and drummer Fred Prouty: the suspended chording on their high octane non-LP recording of ‘I Walk The Line’ hints at the energy of punk.

Both of these groups were produced fully by Terry Manning, who was to eventually move his focus to Stax, though not before contributing considerably to Big Star’s “#1 Record’. He can be heard on piano on ‘My Life Is Right’ (here featuring Bell’s Gimmer Nicholson-influenced acoustic intro, deleted from the album cut) and on backing vocals on the first single ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me’, the flipside of which featured a unique re-recording of Chilton’s ‘In The Street’, with Bell’s vocals unusually to the fore.

Richard Rosebrough: “The single version of ‘In The Street’ was a real rarity. It was after “#1 Record” was finished and they picked the song to be on the single. This was just one of those well, why don’t we ideas, and so it’s both Jody and I playing, all cut live. Otherwise I wasn’t actually involved in the “#1 Record” sessions, because was busy with my own band Alamo.”

Steve Rhea: “A few months before I graduated, Chris called and said, you really need to come back here, we’ve got some great things going on: a new studio, we got an album coming out, and we need you to help promote it. He talked to John, who offered me $500 a month to go work for Ardent. I was sort of the PR guy in a sense, trying to create some acceptance by sending out these letters and stuff. I was making fifty calls a day to radio stations, and we did get airplay, but we just couldn’t get enough momentum to show up on everybody’s radar screen at the same time.”

Bell was to dramatically depart both Big Star and the Ardent community when it was clear “#1 Record” and its attendant singles were dead in the water. He would spend the remaining five years of his life honing a small but significant group of songs in other studios in Memphis and overseas, returning to Ardent only to record the plaintive ‘You & Your Sister’, which featured Chilton on backing vocals and a superb string arrangement by Bill Cunningham. The remaining trio cut a four-song demo including ‘Back Of A Car’ and Chris’ ‘I Got Kinda Lost’ before themselves temporarily imploding towards the end of 1972. Chilton, with partner-in-crime Rosebrough, used the ensuing hiatus to avail himself of Ardent with a furtive run of loose all-night sessions in early 1973 attributed colloquially to the Dolby Fuckers. ‘Mod Lang’ was later excised from those dates for the second Big Star album “Radio City”, though the alternate mix presented here retains vocals absent in the released version (“John Mitchell” refers to Nixon’s Attorney general at the time, “Craig Benson” to a local lawyer and one-time Ardent artist with The Shades). It’s a nod to the technical abilities of Ardent’s personnel that such midnight madness was worthy of release.

Richard Rosebrough: “Everything that was installed at Madison was put there for a reason, it was all intended to be correct in terms of acoustics. John had a reason for everything that he did and that produced a facility that was really good. The A and B studios were identical in shape but sounded completely different. We puzzled over that for a long time. Those late night sessions with Alex usually took place in B, that was our favorite: warm, in the pocket, feel-good. Most of the vocals on “Radio City” were done with a microphone in the control room. We were all engineering our own recordings by that time, though ‘September Gurls’ is one of the cuts done in the B studio with John Fry, and the best drum sound I’ve ever heard.”

We heartily concur. Despite its disparate nature – assembled from both Dolby Fuckers and new sessions by the regrouped trio of Chilton, Hummel and Stephens – “Radio City” was as remarkable, if less polished, as Big Star’s long playing debut had been. Outtakes from the record include a tremendous alternative reading of ‘She’s A Mover’ with Jody and Andy, and an early band demo of ‘Big Black Car’, which has more in keeping with the inchoate vibe of “Third” than the solo demos like ‘Lovely Day’ that Alex actually provided prior to the commencement of those sessions. Once again, the ageless patina of “Third” is as much tribute to Fry and Ardent’s technical excellence as the enabling skills of producer Dickinson and the willful perversity of the artist. The selections we have used – including Jody’s much-maligned, baroque-tinged ‘For You’ – are the original mixes completed in February 1975 for the ill-fated test pressing.

Richard Rosebrough: “I did a lot of engineering on “Third”. I was one of the privileged few to go through John Fry’s training school. I don’t think Chilton took the class, but we all learned to plug in a microphone and get it up to the console, plug in a compressor or limiter and affect it in some way. In my personal opinion, we were a little heavy with the use of compression, but that’s what makes it sound like Ardent. There was a mantra around this studio that we always clean up after ourselves. Reset the board, put away microphones, etc. Once you’ve done that over and over again, it becomes a second nature. Even if we were smashed. John gave us proper tools and gave us free reign to be creative, and that was a great gift. I think everybody that’s been associated with Ardent is part of the family, it’s a “we”, not a “they” or “I”. Everyone takes that feeling home with them.”

The legendary status of “Third” was made manifest as soon as Jim Dickinson was shown the door by non-plussed A&R types, but it’s safe to assume it was the brighter Beatlesque promise of the Chris Bell era that attracted the next generation, as personified by Henry Loeb’s Power Play label, to Ardent. ‘Blow Yourself Up’, the incendiary 1977 single by Tommy Hoehn, was a landmark in intelligent pop that was totally in sync with the East Memphis bloodline. Significantly, Hoehn was himself a part of the community that surrounded Big Star, and in fact Bell can be heard on the non-LP flipside ‘Love You (All Day Long)’, here featured in an unusual period mix (suitably, this single also features longtime Ardent engineer John Hampton on drums). That same year, The Scruffs debuted their less cerebral yet equally passionate take on a style now termed ‘powerpop’. The inadequacies of that label aside, ‘My Mind’’s impetus was palpably the same that had fueled Lawson & Four More and the Wallabies a decade prior. Plus c’est la meme chose, plus ça change.

Conceived, compiled and annotated by Alec Palao

Archive research by Alec Palao and Adam Hill