Chess Studios: Notes for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Chess dominant position in Chicago over the years ennabled it to select its players from the cream of the Windy Citys freelancing musicians, those whose skills were in demand everywhere. Drummer Al Duncan and bassist Louis Satterfield...

THE ROCK N ROLL scheme of things has offered up any number of delineated "Sounds", those confluences of particularly musical elements that came to be associated with geographical regions or specific labels. The most vividly remembered proponents, understandably enough, are the marquee performers who brought the sound to the public and the producers who often served as masterminds and almost always as the catalytic agents who set the wheels in motion.

But another component in the equation has largely gotten short thrift--the studio environment of session musicians and engineers who play integral behind-the-scene roles in fashioning any given sound. That model particularly holds true during the formative era following World War II formative era when solo singers and vocal groups ruled and self-contained bands were the exception rather than the rule. It has continued in the R&B sphere down to the present day--imagine Motown without Holland-Dozier-Holland or James Jamerson and the Funk Brothers, Stax without Booker T & the MGs and the Memphis Horns...the list could go on endlessly.

And there arent too many "sounds" in the rock n roll pantheon more celebrated than the blues-based one associated with Chess Records. On second thought, better make that sounds--from its inception in 1948 as Aristocrat Records to its mid-70s demise, the Chicago-based company founded by Leonard and Phil Chess mirrored the changing sonic times by recording jump blues, jazz, gospel, Mississippi Delta-rooted Chicago blues, R&B vocal groups, classic rock n roll, comedy and soul.

Chess dominant position in Chicago over the years ennabled it to select its players from the cream of the Windy Citys freelancing musicians, those whose skills were in demand everywhere. Drummer Al Duncan and bassist Louis Satterfield were regulars in the pit band at the Regal Theater in the early 60s. Phil Upchurch was high school buddies with Curtis Mayfield, played on many early Mayfield/Impressions tracks and handled the guitar when the Motown rhythm section of Jamerson and Benny Benjamin rolled into VeeJay to cut ‘Boom Boom’ behind John Lee Hooker. Gene "Daddy G" Barge brought his saxophonic legacy (Gary U.S. Bonds hits, Chuck Willis ‘The Stroll’) from Norfolk, Virginia in 1964 to produce, arrange and perform on releases by Little Milton and Etta James.

But Chess was an evolutionary process that went through five locations and any number of sonic permutations from the time Leonard and Phil Chess opened up Aristocrat Records in a storefront at 71st and Phillips in 1947. By 1950, they had shifted their focus from jump blues to Mississippi Delta-bred blues after Muddy Waters hit with ‘I Cant Be Satisfied’ in 1948, bought out their partners in Aristocrat and changed the label name to Chess, moved to new quarters at 49th and Cottage Grove and enjoyed hits as sonically divergent as Waters ‘Rolling Stone’ and saxophonist Gene Ammons version of ‘My Foolish Heart’.

A key element in the Chess equation arrived in 1951 when Leonard and Phil lured Willie Dixon away from the Big Three Trio with the offer of a staff job. Over the next five years, recording in their on back room or the flagship Chicago studio Universal, Chess cut a string of some 60 R&B chart hits ranging from slick piano men Willie Mabon and Eddie Boyd and R&B vocal group classics like the Moonglows ‘Sincerely’ to the early blues and rock n roll recordings that would establish its reputation as one of the cornerstones of American music and arm the British invasion.

Those artists were icons in the making: Waters, Howlin Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, with Dixon serving as right hand man in the studio. Among the backing musicians: Jimmy Rogers, Robert Jr. Lockwood, David Meyers, Louis Meyers and Luther Tucker (gtrs.), Dixon (bass) Fred Below, Odie Payne, Clifton James and Al Duncan (drums), Little Walter, Big Walter Horton and Sonny Boy (harp), Harold Ashby (tenor), Lafayette Leake (piano).

Not that Chess had placed all its eggs in the Mississippi basket--the label was still recording such smooth, urbane bluesmen as Jimmy Witherspoon and Lowell Fulson as well as branching into gospel (including an album by 14-year old Aretha Franklin) and jazz (Ahmad Jamal). The company also launched its Checker (1952) and Argo (1956) subsidiary labels and established Arc Music, its in-house publishing company, in 1954.

Leonard Chess, by all accounts, was an active participant as producer--the famous ‘Little Village’ interlude captured on Sonny Boy Williamsons Bummer Road album was a not infrequent occurrence at blues sessions over the years. But the rough n tumble verbal interplay was essentially raucocus, light-hearted jive instigated by Chess by design--he was convinced that getting the musicians riled up would yeild measurably better results.

"There are three producers on every session," maintained Malcolm Chisholm, the engineer on many Chess sessions at Universal and at Ter-Mar Studios from 1955-60. "There is a producer in the theatrical sense, who puts together the money and hires the musicians. Theres the producer on the session who says, The tempos wrong, were going to do it a little faster. Theres the producer on a session who says, Okay, thats it, next case.

"Leonard functioned frequently and very well as the theatrical form of producer. He was then perfectly content to let the people on the floor do the job. Will (Dixon) would run em off in a corner somewhere and rehearse them a bit and wed do the session. Will could go out on the floor and do his band work, because he knew I was hearing about what he was hearing--I might do it differently but I wouldnt do it wrongly according to his concept.

"We just continued to churn out this stuff year after year, including some of the most horrible stuff musically to my taste Ive ever run across and some stuff that was absolutely wonderful. There are things like Back In the USA, Im A Man and Mojo that you know are classics when you cut them. You dont know if its going to sell but you know youre doing something useful."

In May, 1957 Chess moved from Cottage Grove to 2120 S. Michigan Avenue, directly across the street from the New Michigan Hotel that had been the center of Al Capones South Side operations and right in the heart of Chicagos Record Row that stretched along Michigan for 15 blocks between Roosevelt Road and 26th Street. The new studio, named Ter-Mar Studios and declared a historical landmark by the city of Chicago last year, sported administrative offices on the first floor, plus a small rehearsal room cum demo studio to complement the main recording facility on the second.

"It was a small room about 15 wide and 25-35 long with a good ceiling," said Ron Malo, the engineer fresh from the Detroit R&B scene who took over from Chisholm at 2120 Michigan early in 1960 and ran Chess for the next 10 years. "It was good for its day because it was live-er. We had to deaden it down when we went to 4-track and 8-track to get more separation. It had angled walls and adjustable louvres in the walls.

"The musicians and singers were ready to perform--when that red light went on, that was money time and they performed. You did a performance and everybody compensated to make that performance sound right. We didnt have earphones and baffles or separators.

"The Billy Stewart Summertime album was cut totally live-no overdubs. Billy Stewart was standing in the middle of the band singing live and conducting the orchestra. I re-mixed the 4-track--just doing the fades and add a little echo--in 45 minutes, an album with 32 minutes of music."

New faces arrived on the scene at 2120--veteran R&B producer Ralph Bass and soul queen Etta James, younger blues players Buddy Guy and Otis Rush and Buddy Guy--and familiar ones like Willie Dixon returned after a brief, late 50s stint with Cobra. But the blues world was changing--the advent of the electric bass era increasingly consigned Dixon to a non-playing studio role. The blues sessions began to draw from a different pool of musicians and even the arrangements on the epochal Wolf/Dixon collaborations or Muddy Waters tracks cut during this period were as likely to feature organ and horns as the traditional piano and harp.

The early 60s success of Etta James pointed Chess in a new direction that became the labels chief focus when Billy Davis severed his ties with Motown and became head of A&R in late 1963/early 1964.

"Billy Davis had come in and organized the creative staff to some degree, whereby the system he put in kinda cloned the system Berry Gordy had," recalled Gene Barge who joined the company in mid-1964 in time to play on Fontella Bass soul smash ‘Rescue Me’. "Billy wanted to go more R&B and Chess prior to that was principally a blues/jazz company. I got there just in time for the R&B turnaround.

"We could do three tunes in three hours if you had everything scripted. I had written everything out and had the rhythm section and background singers well rehearsed so all they had to do was execute. It was not a matter of going into the studio totally unprepared and working premium time at premium rates. When you went up to the main studio A, you just fine tuned."

One outgrowth of Davis philosophy was the hiring of Chess first full-fledged studio band early in 1964, including Maurice White (later replaced by Morris Jennings) on drums, Louis Satterfield on bass, Bryce Robertson and Gerald Sims on guitars, Leonard Caston and Raynard Miner on keyboards. Phil Upchurch would enter the picture in 1967, working on either bass or guitar.

"Those studio musicians were moving like ants up there," recalled Cash McCall, who wrote several big hits for Little Milton and Etta James. "As a songwriter, you went in there with the rhythm section and they would make the demo. Then word would get passed down that maybe Mitty Collier or Little Milton or Etta James was coming in and then you had to hustle to get your song to the artist.

"Most of the time at 2120, the songs would go to Billy Davis because he was the head of A&R and he decided whether your song was any good. There was kind of a hierarchy there and if you were new, you had to really hustle to get one of your songs. It was definitely high competition and if you wore your feelings on your shoulder, it didnt get you too much. Most of the artists that came around Chess werent taking any prisoners because they wanted their records to sound good and wanted them to sell."

McCall was part of a songwriting staff which included Miner, Maurice McCallister from the Radiants’ band, Sonny Thompson, Sugar Pie DeSanto and Shena DeMell hired to crank out hit material. That was one factor which turned Chess towards a more formal operation in the mid-60s but without sacrificing too much of the family nature the operation prided itself on.

The blues were suffering-Chess last Top 10 R&B hit in a strict blues vein came in late 65/early 66 with Koko Taylors ‘Wang Dang Doodle’. Blues recording was withering away, in part a natural function of the attrition caused by the mid-60s deaths of Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James and Little Walter. Mainstays Wolf and Waters were still regularly recorded and other bluesmen passing through the studio occasionally brought the Chess brothers up to the control booth.

Says McCall: "Phil and Leonard never came up to the studios when sessions were going on unless it was a blues session. One story I heard was John Lee Hooker came up there to do a session and they asked him, "Okay, John, whats your next song going to be?"

"Im In The Mood For Love."

"Theyre thinking hes talking about this Frank Sinatra song, "Im in the mood for love/because youre near me," and theyre flabbergasted. But he took it stone blue and put all sorts of grease on it."

But the 2120 studio began attracting a fair amount of success from an unexpected locale as the Brit rockers who cut their teeth on Chess blues artists dutifully trooped to the source. The Stones rolled into town to cut 21 tracks there in two separate sessions in 1964 and 1965 while the Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds touched down to record their groundbreaking ‘Shapes of Things’ single late in 1965. All of which meant next to nothing to the Chess studio players who were busy with their own business for Davis and producer/arranger Charles Stepney or monitoring the success of jazz division heads Richard Evans and Esmond Edwards with Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis.

Chess was sufficiently successful for the label to move its base of operations from 2120 around the corner to 320 E. 21st street late in 1966. The shift to the 6-story warehouse enabled Leonard Chess to consolidate his entire operation--pressing plant, distribution center, recording studios, offices for the staff songwriters and producers, administrative offices--in one locale. The only missing pieces in the puzzle were the radio stations, including his flagship station WVON ...clipped

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But the labels momentum slowed after the company was sold to GRT in 1969 and went rapidly down the tubes when Leonard Chess died of a heart attack later that year at the age of 52. Restrictive corporate policies wreaked havoc with the freewheeling creative ways of the labels salad days and the vast majority of the Chess session players and engineers were long gone by the time label limped to its demise in 1974.

Gene Barge won a Grammy for co-producing Natalie Coles ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and did a European tour with the Rolling Stones. Phil Upchurch relocated to L.A. and played rhythm guitar on most of George Bensons mid-70s pop success and Willie Dixon established himself as a solo artist and continued as a roving blues ambassador. "

Portions of this article were adapted from I Am The Blues: The Willie Dixon Story by Willie Dixon with Don Snowden, available from Da Capo Press.

Thanks to Cash McCall, Ron Malo, Malcolm Chisholm, Willie Dixon, Al Duncan, Louis Satterfield, Phil Upchurch, Gene Barge, Dick LaPalm and others for their help in research.

© Don Snowden, 1987

Written by Don Snowden

Originally published in Rock and Roll Hall of Fame booklet

Date of original publication: 1987