It
is the late sixties. San Francisco is the rock music capital of the country, and
a good place to be young and reckless.
There are few diseases that can’t be cured by a shot of penicillin, you
know your drug dealer on a personal basis and they take pride in their product,
and concert tickets are only three dollars plus you get a cool poster. Hidden away in a neighborhood
haunted by hookers and heroin addicts is a set of brown, unadorned, double
doors that lead into Wally Heider Recording.
It is here that the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills
& Nash, and the Grateful Dead come to make their magic, and I am the first
person they see as they enter.
I am 21 years old and my job is to
book their time in one of three studios, along with the assigned engineer and
equipment. Competition for the most
coveted times and rooms makes it hard to keep these artists always happy, but it
does garner me a lot of perks in the form of free records, concert tickets, and
pot, the smoke from which seeps through every air vent in the place.
It is a nine-to-five job, but nights
are when the big stars arrive, and I find reasons to stay late. When
the heavily-insulated studio doors seal shut and the light above them flashes
red, musical history is about to be made, and I am an enthusiastic witness to
it all: Gregg Rolie’s organ solo on “Black Magic Woman,” Jerry Garcia’s vocal
on “Friend of the Devil,” Tower of Power’s horn section dropping by to lay down
some tracks for The Pointer Sisters.
My position at Heider Recording puts me in
rarefied air with those most others can only admire from a distance and when I
leave the job the door to that world closes behind me, leaving only memories.
Today when one of the tunes from that time comes on the radio, the names, faces, and those hours in smoke-filled studios come rushing
back, though I know that none of them would remember the girl at the front desk
behind those nondescript doors who was the first to greet them.
This
week we lost one of the superstars of that era, Paul Kantner, guitarist and
driving force behind The Jefferson Airplane, later to morph into The Jefferson
Starship. He died at the age of 74,
continuing to play gigs around the City up until just a couple of years
ago. Rock on, Paul.
