SIXTIES

Almost three years of commuting to New York City would soon come to an end however, when Ed and JoAnne purchased an Electrical Store on West Davison, one of Detroit's main thoroughfares.

The building was also within walking distance of JoAnne's home on Buena Vista.

Built in 1949, the premises measured 6597 square feet and consisted of a ground floor, upper floor and garage.

Buying premises was straightforward enough, converting them into a studio was another story.

JoAnne, "Ed, because of visiting Berry and doing some other research, had uncovered that one of the vital ingredients of a recording was an echo chamber. It apparently gave you the sound that you wanted. However, we didn't know what sound we wanted, we just knew that we didn't want the Motown Sound.

We just didn't know how complex the design and building of a studio could be. I knew of a guy who had a store on Woodward which sold records and musical equipment. I can't recall his name but he had a real verve for music, he loved music.

So we invited him to view our new premises.

He immediately directed us to a friend of his in Cleveland by the name of Ken Hamman.

JoAnne, "We were of course still travelling to New York City to get arrangements done, so now that we had the premises in place and a source for the equipment, it was now time for us to check out some studios in the hope of finding someone to oversee the installation.

We went over to Bell Sound on West 54th Street, but it was booked solid. Someone suggested that we use Yellow Pages to call a couple of studios. One of them was Mirasound.

The owner, Mr Bob Goldman, said he would get in touch with an engineer and see if he could come down and do a session for us and offer some advice.

The following day we met up with Mr Bob d'Orleans who apparently worked at Mirasound in his spare time. His main job was at Bell Sound, but we had never come across him there.

It was obvious from the session that he was extremely talented, and when we heard that he had built the Mirasound Studio, we knew that we had found our man."

Bob recalled those days fondly. "New York City was the place to be back then as L.A. was still low key. Sessions were happening all over the place with people running here and there.

Most sessions would be in three hourly blocks; say from 10am to 1pm, 2pm to 5pm and 7pm to 10pm. So musicians could be working at Bell Sound in the morning, RCA in the afternoon and CBS in the evening. The pressure was on however because nobody wanted to pay overtime!

In the late fifties I was working with the likes of Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka and Bobby Rydell at Bell Sound. So many artists and sessions, it was ridiculous.

Someone used to bring in Black artists in the early hours. I vividly recall engineering Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City" at 4am! He wanted three minutes on his song but I told him I was beat and that we would have to fade out on two and half minutes.

I think it paid off!"

Continued