[Vintage-Audio] Les Paul, more than just guitars

[Robert Nickels]

I thought this article would be of interest to those here, since it 
recognizes the audio contributions of the great Les Paul, and actually 
gets the details right!

73, Bob W9RAN


By Ed McMenamin
Pekin Daily Times
Tue Aug 18, 2009, 01:10 PM CDT
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PEKIN, Ill. -

When Pekin resident Jerry Milam built his first recording studio in the 
early 1960s, he had just a few tracks to record, mix and combine all the 
layers of instrumentation that would go into the eventual record.

“That was biggest downside before Les Paul developed the eight-track,” 
he said. “Jumping tapes back and forth between machines, where you’d 
record a couple tracks, mix them to another machine, add another track, 
mix it back to another machine. There’s a lot of deterioration of the 
fidelity, and there was a lot of increase in noise.

“So when he invented the in-line eight-track, it eliminated a lot of 
those problems because you didn’t have to bounce around from machine to 
machine.”

For Milam, and others who never met Paul but began tinkering with 
reel-to-reel tape recorders during rock ‘n’ roll’s nascent years, Paul 
was more than just the namesake of the famous Gibson solid-body guitar.

Paul, who died Thursday at age 94, changed the design of recorders to 
allow musicians to play along with a previously recorded track, both of 
which were mixed together on to a new track. After the first Ampex 
8-track, Milam said, the number of tracks, and therefore number of 
avenues for record experimentation, was unlimited.

“Les Paul, he was the man,” Milam said. “He’s the guy who got that whole 
multitrack thing in gear.

"You can kind of look at it like a highway. If you have one-lane 
highway, you have to put everything into one vehicle. If you have an 
eight-lane highway, you can split it up and do a lot more with it.”

Milam built his first studio, Golden Voice, in South Pekin in the early 
‘60s after seeing the studio of Richard Pryor’s manager in Peoria.

“I did some recordings for him and I took photos of Richard Pryor when 
he first started, ‘cause I was a photographer at the time too,” he said. 
“The tape machines were two tracks, three tracks and four tracks. That 
was about all you could get in the recorders. You pretty much had to 
build your own recording console, which I did, out of components. It was 
pretty crude, but everyone else was pretty much in the same boat.”

Milam eventually made contact with Irving Azoff, then a talent manager 
in Champaign, who went on to become chief executive officer of MCA 
Records and more recently CEO of Ticketmaster.

“They started bringing groups up to do demos,” he said. “He was trying 
to get record contracts for his bands, that was his main goal. So we 
worked out a deal. I gave him good rates and credit hours to bring 
groups up. Groups like REO (Speedwagon).

“He might take a guitarist out of one group and stick it in a another 
group in the studio and try different combinations. (Azoff) would come 
up here for days upon days, just experimenting with this groups and that 
group. Putting splinter groups together, and that created quite a bit of 
interest in the industry.”

Milam said his studio went on to produce four gold albums, recording Dan 
Fogleberg, Head East and Heartsfield, among others.

“We helped a lot of people get record contracts too,” he said, “‘cause I 
had a lot of contacts in the record industry at the time. Back then, the 
record industry wasn’t near anything what it is today.

"There were hardly any major record companies back in the ‘60s. I could 
get on the telephone and call RCA and talk to them directly. Because it 
was such a small splinter industry. At that time you didn’t have to go 
through all the levels to someone. You could just go knock on a record 
company’s door and they’d say ‘Hey, how are you doing?”

Milam eventually sold his studio to two employees in the 1970s.

“They ran it for a time, and then there was an arson fire and it 
burned,” he said. “Some guy was setting all kinds of fires around South 
Pekin one night, and the studio was one of them. They caught him a 
couple weeks later in Milwaukee; he burned down a ... store and a bunch 
of other stuff. He was at the fire that night directing traffic like a 
hero. Apparently he was a pyro that liked the excitement of being a hero.

“The sad thing was, when he burnt the studio down, they burned up a lot 
of original tapes. Most of the groups would take their masters or a copy 
of their masters, but some of them didn’t. We had hundreds of reels of 
tape in that place of bands that recorded all over the country. Those 
tapes all got lost. We had calls for years from all over the world — 
England — everywhere you could imagine. Collectors saying, ‘I’ll pay 
anything for a recording of so and so group.’

“There’s a real big underground movement of collectors that like bands 
that not necessarily made it to the top, but groups that were local in 
the Midwest. Man, these guys just die for these recordings. They look 
everywhere for the records and any tapes they can get a hold of, and 
it’s just worldwide. I’m so amazed.”

After selling Golden Voice, Milam went on to a successful career selling 
audio components and building custom studios for artists and music 
industry businesses, eventually linking up with Chet Atkins, who 
recommended his work to others in the industry.

“I got into the business right in the tube generation,” Milam said. “I 
went through tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors, 
went through that whole phase. I was in it through that whole swing, 
which was kind of cool. We started with two tracks and ended up with 
double 24-track synced together.”