page_title: Record Plant
section_title: Sausalito
hierarchical_section_title: Record Plant / Sausalito
caption_attribution_description: English: Bob Welch &amp; Jimmy Robinson at the Record Plant in Sausalito Record Plant
context_page_description: The Record Plant is a recording studio established in New York City in 1968 and currently operating in Los Angeles, California. Known for innovations in the recording artists' workspace, it has produced highly influential albums, including Blondie's Parallel Lines, Metallica's Load and Reload, The Eagles' Hotel California, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, and Kanye West's The College Dropout. More recent albums with songs recorded at Record Plant include Lady Gaga's ARTPOP, Justin Bieber's Purpose, Beyoncé's Lemonade, and Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next.
  The studio was founded in 1968 in New York City by Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone, who opened a Los Angeles branch the following year and a Sausalito, California, location in 1972. During the 1980s, they sold the New York and Sausalito studios; the former closed in 1987, the latter in 2008. The Los Angeles studio, which remains in operation, was purchased in December 2016 by songwriter/producer Philip Lawrence.
context_section_description: On October 28, 1972, Kellgren and Stone opened the Northern California location in Sausalito, throwing a Halloween party to celebrate Studio A going online. Ginger Mews, ex-manager of Wally Heider Studios, was named studio manager of Sausalito Music Factory, doing business as Record Plant, and construction continued on the similarly equipped Studio B with completion expected in February 1973. The 10,700-square-foot (990 m²) building was a former office suite covered with diagonal redwood siding in an industrial park near Sausalito's harbor facilities.
  Kellgren worked with Hidley to design Studio A and Studio B to have the same size and the same "dead" acoustics and both were fitted with Hidley-designed Westlake monitors. Studio A was decorated with a sunburst pattern on the wall and white fabric draped from the ceiling. Studio B was more vibrant to the eye, having many multi-colored fabric layers on the ceiling and swirls of color on the walls. Kellgren and Stone sent party invitations out on slabs of redwood; among the guests were John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who both showed up dressed as trees.
  The first recording was under producer Al Schmitt, who brought in Mike Finnigan and Jerry Wood as Finnigan & Wood, recording the album Crazed Hipsters. When Studio B went online, engineer Tom Flye went to California from New York and ran the room; his first customer was New Riders of the Purple Sage, who recorded The Adventures of Panama Red. Flye also helped Sly and the Family Stone make their album Fresh.
  The expansion into Sausalito was the result of drummer Buddy Miles and radio pioneer Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue asking Kellgren and Stone to put a studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. The intention was to have a getaway studio far from the pressures of the big city music industry. Miles and Donahue promised that their recording business would go to the new studio and that it would be promoted with a live radio show. "Live From the Plant", the resulting radio show, was broadcast on Donahue's album-oriented rock station KSAN from time to time over the next two years, primarily on Sunday nights, and featured various artists such as the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, the Tubes, Peter Frampton, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Pablo Cruise, Rory Gallagher, the Marshall Tucker Band, Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt, Link Wray, Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac.
  KSAN, known as "Jive 95", was the most popular radio station for Bay Area listeners from 18–34 years old and the Record Plant broadcasts were widely heard. Donahue died in April 1975 after which fewer concerts were broadcast. A notable later radio show was by Nils Lofgren and his band with a guest appearance by Al Kooper; they performed at the Record Plant's Halloween party in 1975.
  The Record Plant in Sausalito soon became known as one of the top four recording studios in the San Francisco Bay Area, the other three being the CBS/Automatt (now defunct), Wally Heider Studios (now Hyde Street Studios) and Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. In the first year, the studio worked on projects by Buddy Miles, the Grateful Dead (who booked the whole building in August 1973 to record Wake of the Flood), and on Gregg Allman's first solo album, Laid Back.
  The quirkiness of the studio extended in many directions. For transporting musicians, Stone owned a limousine with the custom license plate DEDUCT, while Kellgren kept a purple Rolls-Royce displaying GREED on the license plate. As in Los Angeles, the studio contained a jacuzzi, but Sausalito's conference room had a waterbed floor. For the musicians' meals, there were chefs ready to cook organic food; for their sleeping quarters, there were two guesthouses next to each other five minutes away in Mill Valley. In back, there was a basketball hoop and in the nearby harbor, a speedboat was kept ready.
  The studio obtained industrial-grade nitrous oxide—pure, not mixed with oxygen as it is for dental anesthesia—from a local chemical supply company under the pretext that the gas was critical to the recording process, and fresh tanks were delivered weekly. Gas masks h
caption: Guitarist Bob Welch and producer Jimmy Robinson at the Record Plant in 1979.
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