to my parent’s housekeeper I grew up listening to black music on WDIA here and WLAC in Nashville. I met John Fry and we both had a passion for radio and music and became best friends. John took naturally to electronics. We had two Gates turntables, an Altec console, and an Ampex reel-to-reel.’ In the late 1950s and early 1960s it wasn’t possible to just phone up a supplier and get a piece of studio equipment delivered. Fry would buy the parts and fabricate his own studio equipment with a soldering iron in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. This brand-new equipment was soon put to use with a string of local acts coming by.
Fry also decided to issue records on his own Ardent label, with two singles both by Freddie Cadell & The Twirls, ‘At The Rock House’ and ‘Joy Ride’. ‘By sixteen, we had a record charted on the Top Forty station, WHBQ,’ says King. ‘It was an instrumental, ‘The Hucklebuck’, by the Ole Miss Downbeats, a group that toured extensively around the mid-South and had quite a following. ’ The initial lifespan of the Ardent label ran from 1959 to 1965 and issued six singles. As well as Cadell’s and Ole Miss Downbeats’ efforts (a second single, ‘Geraldine’, followed), they issued singles by the Shades, ‘Moonlight Sonata’, and finally two songs written by future Big Star producer Jim Dickinson for Lawson and Four More, ‘If You Want Me You Can Find Me’ / ‘Back For More’ in 1965.
In 1966 Fry’s parents sold the house on Grand View to Memphis State University and, at twenty-one, he had to decide what he was going to do with his recording studio. There were some new shop-front buildings being constructed at 1457 National Avenue and Fry chose to go for it and set up a commercial studio. ‘It was an empty space with no walls and we could go in and partition it off as we liked,’ explained Fry. ‘We leased that and split it into a control room, a small reception area, an office and a rather large studio, close to forty feet by forty, then there was a shop, a storage area, the restrooms and so on.’ At the time Fry was setting up the new premises, Fred Smith set off to college at Yale. ‘In one of his business classes he wrote the now-famous paper for an overnight freight-delivery scheme,’ laughs Fry. ‘His professor gave him a “C” and said there was no demand for such a service. Of course he went on to found Federal Express, but that didn’t really start until the early 1970s.’
When it came to fitting out the new Ardent Studio, Fry decided he would now have to buy some equipment in, and not just make it all himself. ‘We were really lucky,’ recalls Fry, ‘because as we were building and we were constructing the walls I ran into a guy who had started building consoles. He’d been an engineer at WDIA. He came by one day and had been engaged to build the first decent console that Stax ever had. I was really impressed and it changed our plans. We were going to buy this stuff from his company Auditronics to put our console in as well.’ Stax and Ardent studios ended up having similar equipment in their respective studios.
As Stax grew to the point that they were trying to put out more records than they had the capacity to record, overdub, mix and master, they started sending work across town to Ardent. Fry’s attention to detail and insistence on doing everything the ‘right’ way has led to him being likened more to a bank manager than a studio owner. (He dresses conservatively and sounds not unlike the late Jimmy Stewart.) Sometimes engineers and producers would come over from Stax, but sometimes they would leave it to the Ardent staff to carry out the necessary work. ‘We were still a bunch of kids,’ says Fry. ‘It still amazes me that they would let this bunch of kids fool around with their records. It was a great opportunity to go in a very short space of time from working in a garage studio to working on actual hit records that played on the radio.’
The other big customer for Ardent was a radio jingle company. While some engineers and producers would turn their noses up at recording radio jingles when they had the chance to work on some of the hottest singles in the country, Fry ‘enjoyed doing the jingle work and got a lot out of it. I credit that as being a free education because they would use all kinds of instrumentation that people wouldn’t customarily use on pop records. They would record music for all formats, for R&B, for Top Forty, for country and they would use orchestral arrangements.’ The arrangers who made these jingles were brilliant musicians in their own right who were bored to death by doing jingles. So they would experiment and try ever more outrageous things. ‘The result was that I got to record all of this stuff,’ says Fry, ‘and sometimes we’d have forty pieces playing at the same time and I’d have to try and record it on a four-track machine and leave one track open for overdubs. You can call it an education or a baptism of fire, you either learn it pretty fast or you just don’t get it. Nobody was doing anything like that.’
Today, Ardent is one of the most respected studios in the South. One of the things that helped make its reputation is the fact that Fry didn’t expect the people who worked at Ardent to be able to build all of the equipment as he could, but he did expect them to understand it. ‘Our equipment was very well maintained,’ he explained. ‘We followed the correct procedures for aligning tape machines, which most studios in this part of the country would not have done, so we were able to get a certain consistency. Even today too many engineers don’t have the fundamental understanding of how things work, they just press buttons. It’s very hard to be successful when you don’t understand what’s going on. To me, without the fundamental knowledge it’s just a kind of black magic as to how the signal gets on the tape.’
The word soon got around that Ardent was the place to go if you wanted a tape that sounded as though it had had a million dollars spent on it. The unassuming one-storey building, across the road from a supermarket, was a deceptive cover for the work that was busily going on behind its glass doors. As Ardent was becoming established, Fry rented out a small office building next door. Later this would be home to Ardent’s small promotional department. Fry also started taking on more staff, one of whom was Terry Manning from Lawson and Four More.
Manning was born in Oklahoma, which he describes as ‘a ranch north of Dallas’, and spent his earlier years in El Paso, Texas with his parents and two brothers. His father was a church minister and so the family would move between churches every couple of years.
It was while living in Brady, Texas, that Manning’s father had a morning inspirational radio show and Terry would attend the studio with his father as often as possible.
From an early age he had been enthralled by the microphones and equipment. ‘My parents would send me to bed and I thought that they thought that I was going to bed,’ he laughs. ‘But years later they told me they knew what I was doing. I would sneak a radio under my pillow and put my ear to the pillow and turn it down as low as possible so no one would know that I was listening to rock music – to Elvis or whatever was on at the time. I was fascinated by all of it and I was into the music and the fact that someone elsewhere could hear what you were thinking or feeling or playing.’
Manning’s mother tried to get him to take piano lessons but he preferred playing sports instead of the formality of practising his scales. ‘By the time I was eleven or twelve my mother decided to buy me a guitar to keep my interest in music going,’ he says. ‘I really liked it and I started learning chords and tried to play along with the radio. I found some other guys in the neighbourhood that had some instruments and we tried to put together some crude bands.’13
A friend of Manning’s in El Paso was Bobby Fuller. Fuller had just recorded a song in his home studio called ‘I Fought The Law’ which was to go on to international success. ‘Nobody had a home studio like his. He had a real echo chamber and a quarterinch tape deck, some good microphones. So he recorded this local version of “I Fought The Law” and being the businessman he was, he had his own record label and I was quite envious of all of this, not in a bad way, I thought it was awesome what he was doing. At about the same time it hadn’t gone as far as he wanted and I wanted to go further. He’d been to Nashville but it hadn’t worked out and he said, “It’s got to be California.” The Beach Boys were just coming out and the California music scene was really big and he said, “That’s the place, I’m going to California.” I had just discovered Memphis music. I got some records by the Mar-Keys and Rufus Thomas, so I said to him, “What about Memphis?” and he said, “Nah, too close to Nashville. I’ve tried there.”’
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