Wally Heider

Special thank you to Hyde Street Studios, San Francisco. 415-441-8934 info@hydrestreet.com Hyde Street Studios

The year was 1974, and it was a late night in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Behind an unassuming door at 245 Hyde Street, at the front desk of Wally Heider Recording studios, sat 28-year-old Susie Foot.

A former wild child who had spent her early 20s partying with Jimi Hendrix and the Moody Blues in London before landing in San Francisco, Foot would go on to engineer some of the most acclaimed records of the late ’70s. But she’d only been at the studio a few months, and for now, she was a “gopher.” She ran errands, coiled cables, and looked after the tape vault. After hours, she sat at the studio’s front desk — the only line of defense between thousands of dollars of studio equipment and the notoriously seedy neighborhood — and answered phones.

Susie Foot, outside Wally Heider Studios.

It was on one of these nights that a drunk Grace Slick ambled out of the first-floor recording room, Studio A, where Jefferson Starship was busy recording Dragon Fly. She peered at Foot from across the desk.

“I know who you are. You’re a JAP,” she told Foot matter-of-factly — meaning, of course, the pejorative ‘Jewish-American Princess.’

Recalls Foot, some 42 years later: “I mean, I was raised in a well-off Jewish family in Miami Beach. It seemed like she had somehow recognized my inner self. But then she just said ‘Well, my name’s Grace, and I drink a lot. If you see me passed out on the couch, don’t wake me up, because I’ll probably punch you in the face.’”

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Foot nodded. Stranger things had happened in her short time on the job. It was a small price to pay for being at the center of the most exciting music scene in America.

There’s a handful of rooms in San Francisco whose walls, could they talk, would have no shortage of stories to tell. But none, perhaps, are quite like the acoustically treated walls at 245 Hyde. Those walls would sing. They’d slur. They’d throw nitrous parties with Jerry Garcia. They’d blast records by Neil Young, Herbie Hancock, Santana, the Pointer Sisters, Van Morrison, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — and then Tupac, Digital Underground, Cake and Green Day.

Those walls might very well never shut up.

At a time when the vestiges of Free Love-era San Francisco are all but relegated to museums, the former Wally Heider Recording studios, now known as Hyde Street Studios, feels preciously rare: it’s an artifact of a bygone era, a recording studio credited with helping to birth the famous “San Francisco Sound” — and a studio that’s kept up with a changing industry, quietly thriving where so many others of its generation (Sausalito’s Record Plant, San Francisco’s Automatt) have fallen.

Jerry Garcia at Wally Heider Recording. (Stephen Barncard)

Founded in 1969 by a savvy, eccentric recording engineer and businessman named Wally Heider, what’s generally considered the Bay Area’s first high-tech studio was also one of the first to offer almost complete creative control to the musicians who booked it. All told, the studio played a vital role in establishing San Francisco as a hub for independent recording artists, a musician’s city that could hold its own with — and even offer some advantages over — New York and Los Angeles.

Nearly a half-century later, under the name Hyde Street Studios and the ownership of Michael Ward, it’s also one of a handful of studios from this era still left in the Bay Area. Strolling through the Tenderloin, you could be forgiven for missing it — unless you happen to be looking at the sidewalk, in which case you’ll see a modest commemorative plaque. Past the heavy gray doors, every wall of the two-floor studio — from the hallways to the cozy lounge area where Grace Slick napped to the kitchen — is lined with records that were created here, from Third Eye Blind to George Clinton to David Crosby.

The plaque outside the current Hyde Street Studios.

“The records that came out of this place were absolutely what drew me here,” says studio manager Jack Kertzman, who started out as an intern at Hyde Street in 2011. It’s a rare moment between sessions, and he’s seated in an office chair in Studio A, before its sprawling, vintage Neve console. Beyond the glass, the room most often used for full-band recording features a Hammond B-3 organ and a white Yamaha grand piano rumored to have once belonged to Frank Sinatra.

As an engineer, Kertzman appreciates that the studio’s history means he can offer clients an impressive range of options, from state-of-the-art modern equipment to gear from the ’70s: Hyde Street boasts a functioning live echo chamber, a tape vault, plate and spring reverbs.

Vintage compressors: Hyde Street’s ‘blue stripe’ 1176s and Teletronix LA2

But on a personal level, it was the ’90s-era recordings that first drew Kertzman here.

“I grew up on Green Day and Cake records that were made here. There’s such rich history, even just from the Michael Ward era onward,” says the engineer. “And then I started to dig deeper, and realized that in the early ’70s this was the room where the Grateful Dead recorded American Beauty and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded Deja Vu, all that good stuff from the San Francisco psychedelic scene. Anyone who is a real music fan loves those records too.”

Today, a lone lava lamp perched next to a vintage amplifier is the only explicitly psychedelic object in the room. The casual observer would have no way of knowing, for example, that the isolation booth directly to Kertzman’s right is the location where Eric Burdon, with War, recorded the famous spoken-word vocals for “Spill the Wine” — while high on acid.

“Oh yeah, that was in the first six months of opening in 1969, when Wally was cutting all these deals to get business up from L.A. and New York,” recalls former staff engineer Stephen Barncard, one of the first employees Heider ever hired. “So he made a weekend deal with this old-school producer Jerry Goldstein to produce this new band.”

A Latin-soul outfit led by the Animals’ former lead singer, the band showed up to the session, got comfortable, and got high. “Spill the Wine” became their first big hit.

“With ‘Spill the Wine’ and all the other tunes [on that record], it was live vocals — Burdon was in this tiny booth with the lights out. I didn’t know he was tripping his mind out on LSD,” says Barncard.

Stephen Barncard, early 1970s.

But he had his rap together; there was not one fix, not one edit. That record basically mixed itself. And it was very educational to me about the importance of liveness, which is what that studio encouraged. You don’t put people in little boxes — aside from the vocalist, which was necessary, because they played pretty loud. I imagine for him it must have looked like he was looking down from a tower.”

Ellen Burke at Wally Heider Studios in the early ’70s.

Barncard’s girlfriend at the time, Ellen Burke, also served as his assistant; he says she was actually the first woman to work at Heider’s studio, but she wasn’t on the books. Burke would also meditate in that vocal booth, which added, the engineer believes, to its magic.

“Anyway,” says Barncard. “Jerry got his money’s worth.”

Stephen Barncard owes at least some of his success to the Yellow Pages.

Now 69, the recording engineer and producer is a legend in the industry, known for his work on records by the Grateful Dead, Harry Nilsson, David Crosby, CSN&Y, the Doobie Brothers — the list goes on. But at 22, he was just a hippie DJ from Kansas City with an obsessive interest in home recording techniques. He had been in San Francisco a couple weeks, crashing with friends, when he decided to look up “recording studios” in a phone book. Wally Heider’s was the only one within walking distance.

Jack Kertzman with Stephen Barncard in Studio A. (Joshua Bonnette)

So he walked over and got a tour from then-chief engineer Mel Tanner, whose openness impressed the young engineer. “I had hair down to my shoulders, I was wearing a headband, and here was this professional engineer who’d worked with Bing Crosby, and he treated me with respect,” recalls Barncard. Tanner told him to write Wally Heider a letter, so Barncard did just that.

Months later, by which time he was living in Los Angeles, he got a call from Heider. His interview consisted of running an errand in Heider’s T-bird and coming back with the right change. Two weeks later, he was back in San Francisco, working as an assistant engineer on CSN&Y’s record Deja Vu, making $10 an hour — which, in 1969, was pretty darn good. The following year, he worked on the Dead’s American Beauty. By that time, it was pretty tough to faze him; it wasn’t terribly surprising, for example, when he found himself capturing audio from an impromptu nitrous party Jerry Garcia decided to throw upstairs in Studio C. (These tapes, much to Barncard’s amusement, are currently in a library at UC Santa Cruz, being treated as objects of great educational importance.)

Barncard’s primarily known for his work on records by some of the greats. But he’s also one of the last people who can tell you about Wally Heider, who died in 1989.

“He was this really big, tall guy, and he was fast-talking, though he had a stutter,” recalls Barncard. “He knew how to play ball with the top artists.” His people skills and sense of timing both played key roles in Heider’s success, says the engineer.

“He appeared right when a lot of artists were dissatisfied with the restrictions of the big label studios, which were unionized. You know, [rules like] you can’t touch the console, the echo chambers go off at 5 o’clock. That was the standard up until then, when you had a major label sign you. You went to their studios and followed their orders and made a record with their producers,” says Barncard. “So you have Jefferson Airplane setting up tents and smoking and doing LSD at RCA studios in Los Angeles, and they got a lot of crap for it.”

Wally Heider in 1977. (Jeffrey Husband)

Heider had opened an independent studio in LA with a different atmosphere, one that put the artist in the driver’s seat, to great success; investors soon took notice. After working the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 — in concert footage, he can be seen running onstage to rescue expensive microphones as Pete Townshend and Keith Moon begin to destroy their instruments — he had an eye on San Francisco.

A rate card from Wally Heider Recording, 1970. (Courtesy Russ Gary)

So when 245 Hyde Street, a building that had previously been used by 20th Century Fox for film storage, came up for rent, he jumped. He set up its studio rooms using measurements he’d gotten working with Bill Putnam (“the father of modern recording”) at Hollywood’s United Western Recording, where Brian Wilson made Pet Sounds.

Heider would spend the next 11 years going back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco, his studios shaping the sound of the West Coast.

As far as Susie Foot knows, the roster of female sound engineers in the United States in the early ’70s consists of two people: Herself and Terry Becker, who unsurprisingly became a close friend. (Leslie Ann Jones, now an acclaimed sound engineer at Skywalker Sound, joined them in 1978 with a job at the newly opened Automatt.) It’s an imbalance that, unfortunately, has only slightly improved since the 1970s.

But to hear Foot tell it, she rarely experienced sexism during her time at Wally Heider Studios, where she began as an unpaid intern in 1974 and worked her way up to first engineer by the time the studio closed in 1980. (At the request of new owner Michael Ward, she also returned in Hyde Street Studios’ early days as studio manager; she’s responsible for acquiring that prized Neve console in Studio A.)