Miami Herald article Posted on Sat, Dec. 29, 2007
50 golden years for Criteria Recording Studios
BY JORDAN LEVIN
It’s just east of a nondescript section of West Dixie Highway in North Miami, past a Salvation Army store, a Nicaraguan cafeteria, a strip joint, halfway down a block of small houses fronted by chain-link fences.
There’s a security guard and gate, but otherwise nothing special about the two-story white concrete building except a sign: “The Hit Factory Criteria Recording Studios.'’
But much of the soundtrack of your life was recorded here.
James Brown whooped I Feel Good here. Eric Clapton and Duane Allman clashed guitars on Layla and Other Love Songs, one of rock’s greatest records. Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul, proclaimed that she was Young, Gifted and Black. Fleetwood Mac let loose Rumours here. Bob Marley smoked up an Uprising here. It’s where Gloria Estefan Let It Loose and Britney Did It Again.
All these and many, many more Zeitgeist-shaping records were made in whole or significant part at Criteria Recording Studios, which starts its 50th year in 2008.
‘’It’s hallowed ground,'’ says Desmond Child, co-songwriter and producer of Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca, among other hits. “Criteria is like the Vatican of recording studios.'’
‘’It’s like a monument,'’ says engineer Thom Russo, who has worked on albums for Latin stars Juanes, Maná and Alejandro Sanz. “When you really get a grasp of what has gone on in those hallways, it’s unbelievable. You’re talking about a place like Abbey Road, where for decades nothing but the music that has shaped the culture has come out of there.'’
Although Criteria’s real culture-shaking days were 30 years ago, their historic power echoes into the present — drawing hit makers who keep the studio a bustling enterprise, which was bought in 1999 by New York’s The Hit Factory, itself an iconic studio.
‘I can’t tell you the number of people who walk into a studio here and say, `Wow, this is where XYZ was recorded,’ whatever their genre and icon is,'’ says general manager and vice president Trevor Fletcher, 42, who has been at Criteria since his mother, a receptionist at the studio, began to bring him in when he was 5. He remembers getting kicked out of the lounge when his pinball playing accidentally got onto a Bee Gees recording, and walking in on an imposing Bob Marley smoking a joint that, to the intimidated young boy, looked “as big as my leg.'’
Launched in 1958 by jazz lover Mack Emerman, Criteria has achieved success that is largely the product of location, luck, and being the only game in town. Although James Brown recorded some of his biggest hits there in the mid-’60s, as did pioneering Miami label TK Records, it was the arrival of Atlantic Records and its roster of soul and R&B greats that put Criteria on the map.
UNIQUELY MIAMI
In the late 1960s, Atlantic co-founder and producer Jerry Wexler got a winter home in Miami, followed by legendary Atlantic producer Tom Dowd. They turned Criteria into ‘’Atlantic South,'’ recording Aretha, Wilson Pickett and other greats. That brought in other artists, who discovered that Miami, with its beaches, winter warmth, party opportunities, and distance from prying New York or L.A. record executives, was a great city in which to make an album. And Criteria, with its size, trend-setting equipment and talented staff, was the place to do it.
‘’I brought Aretha there, I brought Wilson Pickett there,'’ says Wexler, 90, from his home in Sarasota. “Until that time, there had been very little recording with marquee players. But after I started bringing down people of name value, of real consequence, the trickle became a flow and it became a very important studio.'’
As its clientele and hit list grew, Criteria accumulated in-house engineers, musicians and other top creative and technical talent. The 1970s, with stellar musicians filling the studios day and night, were a tremendously fertile time.
Members of the Eagles (who recorded the quintessential California rock album Hotel California at Criteria) would play guitar for an Andy Gibb record. You could get the horn section from Chicago to drop in for a guest session. The Bee Gees, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Bob Seger played basketball in the parking lot. Duane Allman would hang out on the couch in the lobby, playing blues on an old guitar. People exchanged licks and ideas in a casual way that is hard to imagine in today’s hypercompetitive chart- and cost-conscious music world.
‘’It was a creative period when creativity was respected,'’ says Albhy Galuten, a musician, producer and songwriter who started as Dowd’s assistant in 1970 and went on to produce some of the Bee Gees’ biggest hits, including Saturday Night Fever. Galuten played piano on Clapton’s Layla album (although not the famed title track) and synthesizer for Peter Tosh’s Legalize It. After fellow producer Alex Atkins, who was working with the then-new genre of reggae, turned Galuten on to Bob Marley, Galuten played I Shot the Sheriff for Clapton — who went on to record it.
‘’You had this cross-pollination — all the engineers would work on each other’s records, but the artists would work on each other’s records, too,'’ Galuten says. “It was a pretty magic time.'’
It was an era when talent and spontaneity, not technology, ruled the recording process.
Steve Alaimo, a songwriter, producer and co-founder of Miami’s TK Records — which released Betty Wright, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, and other R&B and disco hits — remembers working with James Brown, who, instead of writing down music, would shout it out.
‘He’d go to the horn player and go, `Huh! Uh-huh!’ and then he’d go to the guitarist, and so on,'’ Alaimo says. “Of course, they’d been playing with him for years, so they knew what to do.'’
When Aretha Franklin made Young, Gifted and Black in 1971, Galuten says, she would play the piano as Atlantic arranger Arif Mardin raced to jot down chords, make copies, then put them in front of the musicians, who would take off. Often they would record the song in a single take, with Aretha wowing them all. ‘’She was astounding,'’ Galuten says reverently.
TRIAL AND ERROR
‘’The way recordings used to be made, you’d woodshed an idea, try this, do that, until we got what we liked,'’ says Howard Albert, who with his brother Ron was an in-house engineer at Criteria from the mid-’60s to the early ’80s. Albert remembers a Rolling Stones session when Mick Jagger — ‘’He’d hop around like a bunny,'’ Albert says — turned to the booth and said, ‘’The horns sound really good. Can you make them sound bad?'’ He wanted this loose, crappy garage-band sound.'’
People were loose enough to have fun — or get volatile. There was the heavy-metal band that filled a sex doll with helium, signed her and set her free. She landed somewhere in North Florida. There was the time Dowd had to drag a singer out of that nearby strip club. Once, Sam the Sham — who recorded Wooly Bully — put a gun to Ron Albert’s head after the engineer asked for another take. ‘He said, `Who are you to tell me what to do!’ ‘’ Albert says. “Dowd ran into the studio, grabbed the gun, and told him to get out.'’
Even now, some of that spirit endures. Fletcher was in his office a few years ago when a din outside sent him into the parking lot. There he found Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk, sitting in his vintage Cadillac convertible, cables and microphones trailing from the open hood. ‘I said, `Iggy, what the hell are you doing?’ ‘’ Fletcher says. ‘And he says, `I’m doing horn overdubs!’ ‘’
Changes in the culture and the music industry brought Criteria’s glory days of the 1970s to an end. A downturn in the record business in the early 1980s hit as Emerman had expanded to five studios. Atlantic was no longer bringing in artists. Successful former clients like Gloria Estefan, the Bee Gees and Eagles producer Bill Szymczk, who wanted more recording time and control for less money, built their own studios.
In 1988, Emerman sold Criteria to Hap Levy, a real-estate developer, who put his son Joel in charge. Although the studio got a boost when Bob Dylan recorded Time Out of Mind there in 1994 — Criteria’s first Album of the Year Grammy winner since 1978 — and found a new set of star clients with the rise of the Latin music industry in Miami and acts like R.E.M. and Collective Soul, the studio’s aura dimmed.
In 1999, Ed Germano and his family, owners of The Hit Factory, bought Criteria and did a major renovation. The studio now works like a superb machine, albeit an impersonal one compared to its funky early days.
‘’You don’t have to think about what you need, it’s all in the right place,'’ says Eric Schilling, a multi-Grammy-winning engineer who has worked at Criteria since the late 1970s.
As Miami has become a hip-hop hangout, Criteria has become a favorite with top producers like Timbaland and Scott Storch, while Latin stars use it on a regular basis. Maná recorded their 2006 hit, Amar Es Combatir, there, while Juanes’ just-released La Vida . . . Es un Ratico was mixed at Criteria. On a recent visit, Missy Elliot, Jose Feliciano and Britney Spears were all working on something there.
That doesn’t mean artists are physically present. The days of fluid creative flow, of jamming in the lobby or dropping in on a friend’s session, are as outdated as the antique wax music cylinder on Fletcher’s desk. Working on an album today often means a single engineer sitting in a studio manipulating music on a console — perhaps a whole song, perhaps a tiny section of one, that he got by e-mail for an artist he may never see or talk with.
For those who were there for the early days, no amount of current hits can make Criteria today more than a collection of well-equipped rooms. The magic ‘’had to do with the place and the people,'’ says Howard Albert. “At the beginning, it was like family.'’
Even Fletcher, who keeps Criteria humming, has some nostalgia for the world he witnessed as a child. During the Hit Factory renovation, he rescued envelopes of old photos from the trash. ‘’People are not necessarily in touch with their musical history,'’ he says.
“In 2007, it’s sing it one time, I’m going to dinner, fix it and let me know how it comes out. So someone sits there and manipulates the sound, and two hours later, the artist comes back — wow, that sounds really good, I’m really great. Whereas the groundbreaking music, the soundtrack to your life, a lot of that was done with great pains.'’
GOLD AND PLATINUM
But the five decades of gold and platinum records that line Criteria’s walls still reverberate for some — whether practically or creatively. ‘’You never know who you’ll run into here,'’ says Fabian Marasciullo, a top mixer who has worked for Celine Dion and Chris Brown.
In an age when technology and taste allow someone to make a hit record in the bedroom, massively expensive facilities like Criteria are increasingly rare. Yet, for every artist who regards Aretha Franklin and Eric Clapton as music for their grandparents, there are others who still want to tap into Criteria’s collective pop consciousness, to add their take to its long soundtrack of life.
‘’When you’re talking about that vaporous world of creativity, environment becomes a very, very important thing,'’ engineer Russo says. “It’s just nice to know that a lot of very important music happened there. It’s inspirational.'’
‘’The day that place closes, it ends an entire time in musical history,'’ engineer Schilling says. “I loved the Eagles stuff and especially the Tom Dowd stuff. . . . When I was 14, it just sent chills down my spine. To go into the real studio where they did that music and sit behind the same board — it’s just a real thrill.'’
and it's
rise to becoming a world-famous music and recording community, as told
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