Early the following year, the usually calm, cool Atkins lost his temper with an irritating engineer named Bob Ferris and threw a punch at him. “Something set Chet off and he took a swing at Ferris and hit a piece of equipment instead,” Rumble says, picking up the story. “So there he is, his hand is hurting, and Ferris complains to the union, and the union says, ‘Well, look, we’re going to shut this studio down.’ ” So the union forced the facility to close while Ferris trained a replacement. Although the
incident was embarrassing and problematic at the time, Atkin’s swing-and-miss turned out to be fortuitous because, as Rumble points out, “that’s what let Bill Porter come in.” Born and raised in East Nashville, Porter was working as a television cameraman when he made the move to RCA early in 1959. The recording studio was a whole new world for him, but Atkins was his guide. “He said Chet was very helpful in explaining how the equipment worked,” Rumble recalls the engineer
telling him. “In other words, if you wanted particular sounds, this is what you had to do, with the gain, with the recording level, with the limiters, etc.” As it turned out, despite being a novice, Porter was a natural. “He had great ears, and he was a great technical man,” Rumble explains. “Chet said Bill was the best engineer he ever had.” Porter set about improving the sound of the room. With the help of assistant engineer Tommy Strong, he identified the best spots to place vocalists and acoustic instruments, actually putting X’s on the studio floor with tape. Porter also bought some acoustical panels and strung them from the ceiling to break up the sound waves. “The sound difference was phenomenal,” Porter told Rumble. “They didn’t look very good, but they worked.” “They were breaking rules, making their own ways of doing things,” current studio manager Justin Croft says. “RCA actually had like a manual on how to record, and they essentially discarded it and did their own thing. “They were resourceful, and they were creative, and they were just trying to make the best records that could be made with what they had, you know,” he continues. “And I think they did a phenomenal job, obviously.” Obviously. Over the next two decades, a who’s who of country artists cut hit after hit for the label at Studio B, including Snow, Skeeter Davis, Bobby Bare, Dottie West, Porter Wagoner, Dolly Parton, Eddie Arnold, Jim Reeves, Waylon Jennings, and Charlie Pride.
T
he panel discussion includes some touching memories, as well as humorous ones. “It’s great being back here tonight,” Putnam says at one point, “because that bathroom back there — the first session I’m doing with Presley, I remember I went back there ’cause we were starting in about 10 minutes, and I looked in the mirror and said a little prayer: ‘Dear God, don’t let me be the first bass player to ruin a Presley session.’ ” Briggs expressed a similar sentiment recalling his first session with Presley, also at Studio B. “I was scared to death,” the keyboardist says. Burton first worked with Presley in Las Vegas, but like Briggs and Putnam, McCoy first recorded with The King at Studio B. It was on a soundtrack session in February 1965 for the film Harum Scarum. “He had an aura about him,” McCoy tells the audience. “He comes through the door, I was first in line ’cause I was playing acoustic guitar. ... He walked right up to me, he shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you for helping me.’ From that moment on, he had all of us right there (points to his upturned hand), and we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ ” Presley was not the only early rocker who recorded at RCA Studio — both The Everly Brothers, who recorded for Cadence Records, and Roy Orbsion, who recorded for the 86
theeastnashvillian.com November| December 2017