Company You Keep: Ardent Music
By Andy Pareti
What do Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Isaac Hayes, and B.B. King have in common? Well, apart from being members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they have all at one time made use of the legendary Ardent Studios, Memphis’ own independent success story more than five decades in the making. Founded by a teenage John Fry along with two friends (one of which, Fred Smith, went on to found FedEx), Ardent Music fast became a recording and mixing haven for the greatest names in music. Since the 1960s, pivotal artists such as R.E.M., Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Replacements were compelled to use the studio, while recent clients such as the White Stripes, Cat Power and M.I.A. have proven that the facilities’ allure has only grown with age.
Now 64, Fry looks back on the days when Ardent was pressing 45s in his parents’ garage, when a fortunate connection with Stax Records catapulted the studio’s reputation to new heights, and when a couple of local boys named Alex Chilton and Chris Bell formed a rock band called Big Star and become Ardent’s most interesting success story. Here, he shares some of the experiences – equal parts fate, luck, and savvy – that built Ardent up to become one of those unlikely underdog stories that make you smile.
Soundcheck Magazine: It seems that people who make music go down one of two paths. Either they join a band, or they man the studio. Were you ever in a band, and what made you choose the path of the studio?
John Fry: Well actually, I don’t play. I can’t play, and you wouldn’t want to hear me sing. My initial interest, when I was a teenager, was I got fascinated with broadcasting – radio and TV, and trying to figure out how that technology worked. Then of course, I was a huge music fan. I started to get [some] equipment and tried to build a little pirate radio station. Once we started to get equipment – and you know, you’re talking about simple mixers, mono tape machines, that sort of thing – we’re talking, in the ’50s, we figured out that if we had this equipment, we could also use it to record music. That was the era where a lot of the kids in school were all starting bands, so we had lots of victims to experiment on. We started recording some of these bands and having 45s pressed and tried to sell them local. And in fact, [we] had some fair success. We had some that we sold, in the local area, probably a couple thousand of them. The first Ardent 45 was pressed in 1959, and I would have been 14 going on 15. I had a home studio before anyone knew what a home studio was.
SM: You had it in your garage, right?
JF: Yea, and it wasn’t quite as primitive as it sounds. It was a part of the house that had been a garage, but it had been turned into an enclosed room that was heated. So it wasn’t like we were recording out in the middle of a field. At the time that the home studio came to an end, which was like, 1965 – it was in my parents’ house, and they decided to sell the house – I was at the age then that I needed to make a decision as to whether I wanted to forget about this and go get a grownup job or try to do recording as a profession. I decided to give it a shot, so we went out and rented a store building. It was a brand new building; it had never been occupied, so it was just open space.
SM: Was that the one on National Street?
JF: That’s that one. We worked on that during 1966 and had it operational toward the end of ’66, and that was also when we made the huge leap to multi-track recording with our first 4-track machine. So we got open in the end of ’66, beginning of ’67, and we got a really tremendous break – I don’t think we realized at the time how big it was – but right at that same time, Stax was operating their studios. Stax was being distributed by Atlantic, and it just so happens that they bought a console from the same company that was supplying our consoles. So we had equipment that would be familiar to their producers and their engineers. And they started sending us all of their overflow work just immediately, as soon as we opened. They had so many artists, and they were trying to put out so many records, that they couldn’t possibly do them all in one studio. And during that time, we got to record at one time or another every major Stax artist with the exception of Otis Redding, who of course died in December of ’67.
SM: Who was your first client that made you realize, “This is for real”?
JF: You know, there were so many. One of the first big breakthrough albums in terms of sales was the Isaac Hayes Hot Buttered Soul album. I’ve many times heard [producer and record executive] Al Bell tell the story that all the experts back then told him the most a soul single could sell was 300,000 and the most a soul album could sell was 30,000, and I think Hot Buttered Soul sold about 3 million. That was great.
SM: There seems to be a gap in Ardent’s history between when you moved to the new location in 1966 and when you harbored names such as James Taylor and Led Zeppelin. Did it really happen so quickly? Does being in Memphis give you an automatic advantage?
JF: Well yeah, being in Memphis certainly was a good thing for us because there was a lot going on locally with the – Stax was the big independent company. And it did happen that fast. First there was the Stax break, and then Don Nix, who was one of the Stax writers and producers and one of the Stax artists, he became friends with Leon Russell, and Leon started coming in and bringing a lot of his work to Ardent. You know, all that stuff was raising our profile pretty fast. I always tell everybody that the best advertising you can have is a tiny little credit on the back of an album that sounds good. A lot of it was plain old good luck – the Led Zeppelin connection kind of grew out of The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds would come to Memphis and play shows. And Terry Manning and a bunch of the guys that were on the studio by then got to know Jimmy Page, and that relationship kind of held up. The James Taylor thing, we really didn’t do much on [Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon], the only thing we did were the horns, but they came because they wanted the Memphis horns, and Peter Asher and James Taylor showed up for the horn session.
SM: With all the names that recorded at Ardent, how did Big Star become the one that is synonymous with the studio?
JF: First of all, the fact that that stuff came out in the ’70s was another Stax connection. Al Bell was running Stax by that time, and he decided that he would like to have a rock brand somewhere in that group of labels. We had kind of let Ardent Records become dormant for awhile because we were doing so much studio recording, and [Bell] asked us if we wanted to start Ardent Records back up, and Stax would do the marketing and promotion and distribution, and we could sign whoever we wanted to. And of course, we jumped at the chance. Our first band was a band called Cargo, from Oklahoma, and the second band that we put out was Big Star. I think the reason they are so associated with the studio is because of the fact that [they’ve] had this odd, unlikely story that’s unfolded about the music over decades now. [R.E.M.’s] Mike Mills has the funny line that he said somewhere, “Very few people heard Big Star to begin with, but everyone who did went out and started a band.”
SM: You’ve spoken with great adoration for [Big Star singer/songwriter] Chris Bell. Tell me about Bell as a person and how his passing affected Ardent.
JF: Chris was a really good guy and a really close friend. We had a lot of common interests, and we spent a lot of time together. Of course, Chris left [Big Star] after the first album – he would put himself totally into stuff, and I think, to some degree, it was disappointment about the fact that that hadn’t worked out, and he got kind of despondent about that. He had a tough time for awhile, from which he recovered, and we continued to be friends for the rest of his life, which, unfortunately, didn’t last very long. Chris was 27; he was killed in the early morning on Dec. 27, 1978, and was buried on Dec. 28. It was tough. I mean, of course it was a shock because it was sudden and unexpected, and he was doing great – he was probably in a better frame of mind and a better space the last three years of his life than any other time that I had seen him. You don’t expect to get that call from his dad at 5:30 in the morning that says, “Chris has been in an automobile accident, and he’s dead.” You’re running a music magazine and not a religious magazine, but I will say that Chris had come to have a really solid, adult decision to have faith in Christ, and it was actually because of him that I made the same decision, but not until after his death. I’m convinced because of my faith and because of what I believe that we’ll see him again.
SM: Do you think this newfound faith had a hand in Ardent’s decision to start a Christian rock label in the ’90s?
JF: Yeah, well, that all had something to do with that. It was right after Chris’ death that I became a Christian. It just so happened that one of the first Christian rock bands ever were Memphians – they were called DeGarmo and Key – and they went on to have a very successful career. But in the late ’70s, if you were playing that kind of music, there were a lot of people that said, “Oh, you shouldn’t be doing that.” You know, if you had an electric guitar and a drum, you were the devil. [Laughs] But those guys started recording at the studio, and so we started to have a lot of Christian artists, and by about the mid-’90s we were looking for a way to do more Christian music. So [DeGarmo and Key] actually offered us the opportunity to have what was initially an imprint, and then it became a distributed label.
SM: Ardent has recently gotten back into the secular record label business, signing local rock band Jump Back Jake. Is this going to become a focal point of Ardent or more of a side project?
JF: It’s a little bit of an experiment at this point. We saw so many artists around who, in the current climate, weren’t going to get signed by major labels because the major labels were signing few, if any, artists unless you happened to win American Idol or do something like that. There are a lot of artists that are doing really good, authentic music that don’t have any outlet other than to try to self-release it. We thought, given the conditions that exist now, to take down some of the barriers to entry.
SM: You like to talk about independent success stories. You mentioned specifically Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band that owes a lot to blogs and MySpace. If Ardent, a company built on tradition and a long-standing history, wants to keep up with the digital age of self-promotion, what will it have to change?
JF: We’ve already made some additions to our staff of people that are, really, totally oriented toward all of the new media opportunities. That’s the direction everything is going in. Sometimes I feel kind of funny; I’ll be the oldest guy in the room, and I will be arguing with some of these traditional record folks about, “We’re not going to be able to do it the way we used to do it. That’s not gonna work anymore.” Now, I think there’s a lot that’s good that’s traditional. I don’t think the tradition of trying to have really good music and record it really well is obsolete. That’s one of the problems with the Internet self-release age – there’s a tremendous amount of junk out there, all of this static. I’m encouraged by how many high school students come through the studio on tours, and I ask them to raise their hands if they own a turntable, and a lot of them do.
SM: Vinyl sales have increased in the last couple of years.
JF: Yeah, it went up 87 percent from 2007 to 2008; of course, that is 87 percent of a very small number to begin with. The thing that I hate to see is to have whole generations of people whose best experience in audio has been a set of ear buds or a set of computer speakers. We’ll see about that. I think one of the things our technology has done is it has tended to, by overuse, squeeze a lot of the humanity out of the music.
SM: Do you think there is a sort of legend status that comes with Ardent?
JF: To say yes to a question like that is kind of being immodest in a way, but yeah, I mean, I guess. Depends on how you look at it – this is my 43rd year of having the same job. That either makes me real dumb or real smart. But you know, anybody that manages to have a continuous business in this field for that long, there must be something somewhere that we’re doing right.
