Record Plant - Sausalito

Sausalito

On October 28, 1972, Kellgren and Stone opened the Northern California location in Sausalito, throwing a Halloween party to celebrate Studio A going on line. Ginger Mews, ex-manager of Wally Heider Studios, was named studio manager of Sausalito Music Factory, doing business as Record Plant, and construction continued on the similarly equipped Studio B with completion expected in February 1973. The 10,700-square-foot (990 m2) building was a former office suite covered with diagonal redwood siding in an industrial park near Sausalito's harbor facilities. Kellgren worked with Hidley to design Studio A and Studio B to have the same size and the same "dead" acoustics, and both were fitted with Hidley-designed Westlake monitors. Studio A was decorated with a sunburst pattern on the wall and white fabric draped from the ceiling. Studio B was more vibrant to the eye, having multi-colored fabric layers on the ceiling and swirls of color on the walls. Kellgren and Stone sent party invitations out on slabs of redwood, and among the guests were John Lennon and Yoko Ono who both showed up dressed as trees. The first recording on the books was under producer Al Schmitt who brought in Mike Finnigan and Jerry Wood as Finnigan & Wood, recording the album Crazed Hipsters. When Studio B went online, engineer Tom Flye came out to California from New York and ran the room; his first customer was New Riders of the Purple Sage who recorded The Adventures of Panama Red. Following that, Flye helped Sly and the Family Stone make their album Fresh.

The expansion into Sausalito was the result of drummer Buddy Miles and radio pioneer Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue asking Kellgren and Stone to put a studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. The intention was to have a getaway studio, far from the pressures of the big city music industry. Miles and Donahue promised that their recording business would go to the new studio and that it would be promoted with a live radio show. "Live From The Plant" was the resulting radio show; it was broadcast on Donahue's album-oriented rock station KSAN (FM) from time to time over the next two years, primarily on Sunday nights, and it featured various artists such as the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, The Tubes, Peter Frampton, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Pablo Cruise, Rory Gallagher, The Marshall Tucker Band, Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt, Link Wray, Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac. KSAN, known as "Jive 95", was the most popular radio station for Bay Area listeners from 18 to 34 years old, and the Record Plant broadcasts were widely heard. Donahue died in April 1975 after which fewer concerts were broadcast. A notable later radio show was by Nils Lofgren and his band, with a guest appearance by Al Kooper; they performed at the Record Plant's Halloween party in 1975.

The Record Plant in Sausalito soon became known as one of the top four recording studios in the San Francisco Bay Area, the other three being the CBS/Automatt (now defunct), Wally Heider Studios (now Hyde Street Studios) and Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. In the first year, the studio worked on projects by Buddy Miles, the Grateful Dead (who booked the whole building in August 1973 to record Wake of the Flood), and on Greg Allman's first solo album, Laid Back.

The quirkiness of the studio extended in many directions: For transporting musicians, Stone owned a limousine with the custom license plate, while Kellgren kept a purple Rolls-Royce displaying on the license plate. As in Los Angeles, the studio contained a jacuzzi, but Sausalito's conference room had a waterbed floor. For the musicians' meals, there were chefs ready to cook organic food, and for their sleeping quarters there were two guesthouses next to each other, five minutes away in Mill Valley. In back there was a basketball hoop, and in the nearby harbor a speedboat was kept ready. The studio obtained industrial-grade nitrous oxide—pure, not mixed with oxygen as it is for dental anesthesia—from a local chemical supply company under the pretext that the gas was critical to the recording process, and fresh tanks were delivered weekly. Gas masks hung from the ceiling for those who wished to get intoxicated on "laughing gas"; the Grateful Dead and their engineer Dan Healy reportedly made use of this feature. Al Kooper wrote that during the few days that he was helping Lofgren lay down tracks for Cry Tough, Kooper was so taken with the novel drug experience that he wheeled one of the tanks around and kept it next to him for refreshment between takes. He breathed in so much of it that acid collected in his stomach, aggravating his ulcers, and for a few days he was too sick to work. Kooper said that the studio's fun with nitrous oxide was stopped forever when a friend of Kellgren's was found dead from asphyxia under one of the tanks, the tube still in his mouth.