a brief history - Fantasy Studios

A BRIEF HISTORY
It’s the summer of 1968.
Saul Zaentz and his partners had just acquired Fantasy Records the year before from Max and
Sol Weiss, the label’s original owners.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, after several years of name changes and failed singles, had just
released their first Fantasy album, which contained the band’s breakthrough record “Susie Q.”
And Jim Stern was working as Fantasy’s staff R&B drummer at the label’s 30th and Peralta
headquarters in Oakland.
“We had a room in the back,” says Stern, “with an eight-track tape recorder but no console.”
There, he played on records made by staff producers Ray Shanklin (vocalist Lenny Williams) and Jesse
Osborne (singer/guitarist Alice Stuart).
Stern also had an electronics degree and had already done some audio work with Dan Healy
and the Grateful Dead when Zaentz hired him as Fantasy’s first (and at the time only) engineer.
The extraordinary success of Creedence in the late ’60s led to Fantasy’s expansion on several
fronts, including the construction of a new two-story building at the corner of Tenth and Parker in
Berkeley. Containing three recording studios (A, B, and C) and a mastering room as well as offices and
a spacious warehouse, the facility opened in February 1971. (Studio C, with a separate entrance, was
built expressly for Creedence.) Zaentz tapped Stern to run the studio operations.
As chief engineer, Stern built and equipped the studios, rebuilt a couple of the echo chambers,
created the second-floor tape vault, and—for nearly a decade—hired and trained staff. “I hired
musicians,” he says, “and had them go to school to learn electronics, then they learned audio on the
job. I hired the first black engineer in the Bay Area [Steve Williams], out of radio, and the first woman
engineer [Nyya Lark]. A couple of good people came from the Fantasy warehouse; I gave them the
FAN TASY STUDIOS AT ZAENTZ MEDIA CENTER
2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 . 510 486 2038 . www.fantasystudios.com
basic electricity and electronics books to study, and that’s how Jackson Schwartz and Phil Kaffel came
in.”
Following Fantasy Records’ purchase of the Prestige and Riverside catalogs in 1971 and ’72
respectively, the company’s recording activities increased exponentially. In the fall of 1972, Riverside’s
co-founder and chief producer Orrin Keepnews was hired as Director of Jazz A&R, responsible for
implementing Fantasy’s large-scale plans for jazz recording. The in-house studios figured prominently in
those plans.
“It turned out that I was still spending most of my working hours, day and night, in one recording
studio or another,” says Keepnews. The Fantasy job required the New York native to relocate to
Berkeley, “but now getting to my favorite studios no longer involved a hectic taxi or bus ride through
Manhattan. Instead it just called for a short walk down an office corridor.”
During the 1970s, Keepnews oversaw a jazz recording program that rivaled any in the
industry—and virtually all of the recording, mixing, and mastering took place on the premises of Tenth
and Parker. Since Fantasy artist agreements offered free studio time, says Stern, “All three studios were
always cooking. Very seldom did I have a studio down, because everybody wanted in. We were very
busy. We did a lot of records.”
Stern himself produced sessions by Fantasy artists including Country Joe McDonald, Cal Tjader,
Bola Sete, and Frank Hayhurst. Among the other producers who worked at Fantasy during this period
were Harvey Fuqua (Sylvester), Hank Cosby (Rance Allen, the Originals), Helen Keane (Bill Evans),
Donald Byrd (the Blackbyrds), Gene and Billy Page (Stanley Turrentine), Larry and Fonce Mizell (Johnny
“Hammond” Smith”), David Axelrod (Cannonball Adderley, Hampton Hawes), Billy Cobham (Pete and
Sheila Escovedo), Wayne Henderson (Pleasure, Side Effect), and Ed Michel (who reactivated the
Galaxy imprint with Art Pepper and Red Garland, to name just two).
Some of the other jazz artists who passed through Fantasy in the 1970s were Sonny Rollins,
FAN TASY STUDIOS AT ZAENTZ MEDIA CENTER
2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 . 510 486 2038 . www.fantasystudios.com
McCoy Tyner, and Ron Carter, who each recorded as leaders in addition to recording and touring as
the Milestone Jazzstars; Bill Evans and Tony Bennett; Joe Williams, Gary Bartz, Hank Jones, Patrice Rushen,
Tommy Flanagan, Flora Purim, Gene Ammons, Nat Adderley, Johnny Griffin, Woody Herman, and
Dewey Redman.
“We were the cutting-edge studio in the Bay Area,” says Stern. “We used Studio A for the film
stuff in the early days, before the film center was built. I had a movable mixing console; we did live
recording [i.e., with a live audience in the studio, as for Cannonball Adderley’s Inside Straight], big string
dates [McCoy Tyner’s Fly with the Wind], and big parties [for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest] . . . ”
The immense success achieved by Cuckoo’s Nest, which was produced by Saul Zaentz (with
Michael Douglas), prompted another round of expansion in both the film and recording spheres. Plans
for a new seven-story structure, to adjoin the existing building at Tenth and Parker, got underway in the
late ‘70s.
The new facility would house the Saul Zaentz Film Center, envisioned to be a major
post-production hub, and would also include a fourth recording studio, the state-of-the-art Studio D.
The Film Center came online in 1980, with Studio D following later that year. For the first time in
its existence, Fantasy Studios was open to the public.
Roy Segal, the legendary CBS Studios engineer, had joined the Fantasy staff shortly before the
new facility opened, replacing Jim Stern. In 1982 he hired Nina Bombardier, a veteran of the Record
Plant and Wally Heider Recording, as studio manager.
“When you looked at D, it was drop-dead gorgeous. Then you looked at the other rooms,”
Bombardier recalls. “We needed to modernize those rooms to 1980s standards, and we did just that—A
came first, then C, then B in 1985.”
Once that modernization had been completed, “things were on a more even keel, which
allowed the studios to sell themselves. We had a lot of variety; it was a pretty happening place,” says
Bombardier. “We had the tape copy room and mastering [with George Horn]. We were the first studio,
FAN TASY STUDIOS AT ZAENTZ MEDIA CENTER
2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 . 510 486 2038 . www.fantasystudios.com
I’m sure, in a very wide area to get into digital technology and to clean up tapes, which enabled the
record company to release far more material than they’d thought possible.
“Through the ’80s and ’90s, we attracted people from all over the world—bands from Europe,
Japan, South America. We had a huge notoriety. As genres of music came and went, that’s the kind of
music we were doing. In any given year, we had rock ‘’n’ roll, thrash, heavy metal, punk,
alternative—you name it—we were there.”
During the 20-plus years of Bombardier’s management, Fantasy Studios developed an
exceptionally diverse clientele that included Green Day, Robert Cray, Joe Satriani, Chris Isaak, Sammy
Hagar, Tesla, Journey, Santana, En Vogue, Bobby McFerrin, Aerosmith, the Counting Crows, Jeffrey
Osborne, and countless others.
Foley and ADR work started in the 1980s, and “we built that Foley stage [in A] so the film center
could offer an entire post-production package. The sound supervisor could simply pop down after
lunch and sit with the crew, observe, make changes.
“As the film department’s technology advanced, we’d have to update our technology to
meet theirs. The mid-’90s was when digital technology really took off and things started changing for
everyone. With ProTools, musicians had the opportunity to do more on their own.”
Even so, Santana recorded their multi-platinum “comeback” disc Supernatural in 1998 and ’99
at Fantasy, and in 2000 Fantasy Studios was named Billboard magazine’s #1 Recording Studio in
America.
In late 2004, Saul Zaentz and his partners sold the Fantasy label and all the studio equipment to
Concord Records (later known as the Concord Music Group) who became a tenant in the building. In
January 2007, the building, including the studios, was sold to Wareham Development, a local real
estate developer and property manager with a large portfolio of nearby properties and a reputation
for making long-term investments in the properties they develop. At the end of 2007, Concord Music
FAN TASY STUDIOS AT ZAENTZ MEDIA CENTER
2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 . 510 486 2038 . www.fantasystudios.com
Group consolidated their operations in Beverly Hills. Recognizing the significance of the studios and
being huge music fans themselves, Wareham’s principals negotiated with Concord to purchase all of
the studio recording equipment and obtained a long-term license to the Fantasy Studios name.
Wareham committed to making what is now called the Zaentz Media Center into a world-class
media center and was already involved in major renovations to the building; the studios have likewise
undergone a major overhaul. Producer Jeffrey Wood, a 25-year industry veteran, has come on board
as the facility’s new studio director.
Under Wood’s direction, Fantasy Studios continues to flourish. In the first half of 2008 alone, the
studios have hosted a diverse clientele that includes Camper Van Beethoven, Allen Toussaint,
Trombone Shorty, Joe Henry, Joe Lovano, Dave Douglas, Danny Glover, Henry Kaiser, Academy Award
winner Steven Okazaki, Music for Animals, Audrye Sessions, Bill Frisell and many more.
Orrin Keepnews, who left Fantasy’s employ in the early ’80s, has continued to work in the studios
and has probably logged more time there than any single producer. “I still can put Fantasy Studio A on
the short list of my favorite working places,” he says, “and at least a half-dozen of the best recording
engineers in my life have been part of that working environment.”
“There’s nothing that compares to a professional studio,” says studio director, Wood. “The fact
is, the rooms matter, as does the staff’s experience—their engineering and technical expertise – and
the overall customer service. Then, there are the intangibles—the vibe and the creativity spawned by
being in a place with such a rich history. These are things that only we can offer.”
7/08
FAN TASY STUDIOS AT ZAENTZ MEDIA CENTER
2600 Tenth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 . 510 486 2038 . www.fantasystudios.com