I had a great visit at Sam Phillips Recording Service this morning with my friend Scott Bomar, who runs the place now. This is Sam Phillips’s second recording studio, at 639 Madison, just down the street and around the corner from Sun Records (I’ll get over to Sun Studios at some point this week). Sam built this place in 1959, sparing no expense in the mid-century modern design and the finest equipment money could buy at the time. The studio opened in 1960, just as Sun Records’ hits were running out, but some amazing records were cut here. “Lonely Weekends” by Charlie Rich, “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, “Songs the Lord Taught Us” by the Cramps, and many more.
For many years the studio was run by Roland Janes, who was the original Sun Records guitarist heard on so many classic recordings by Jerry Lee Lewis, Billy Lee Riley, Hayden Thompson, and others. I first met Roland here (humorous story in one of the videos in this post) and became good friends with him until he passed. Matt Ross-Sprang ran the studio for a few years after Roland, and now Scott Bomar is at the helm (the studio is still owned by the Phillips family).
The studio remains in remarkably original condition. It’s a real time trip. It feels like an unchanged 1960s studio, but with all kinds of top-shelf gear in the main recording room, Scott’s mixing room, and Jeff Powell’s vinyl mastering room.
If you know about this studio, then you know that Sam built two stories of playrooms and offices upstairs. No photos were allowed past the second floor, so unfortunately, I can’t show you photos of Sam’s office (a mid-century modern masterpiece) or the artists’ lounge (also a masterpiece, with cigarette burns in the Formica bar supposedly made by either Charlie Rich or Johnny Cash). But Scott was kind enough to let me see up there today. I hadn’t been there since Roland let me look upstairs twenty-something years ago. It is mind-blowing, and even more so that it has been perfectly preserved for so many years.
Scott has done tons of cool and interesting stuff, from playing in the Estrus band Impala back in the 1990s to doing soundtrack work for projects like Hustle and Flow, Black Snake Moan, Song Sung Blue, and many others. Hit him up if you’d like to record at Phillips Recording Service!
See many more photos and a couple of videos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
