Hip hop thumped the asphalt of a dispensary parking lot in midtown Phoenix, almost shaking promotional tents set up by many of Arizona’s marijuana brands.
“Cannabis has never been far from music. Those two things go hand in hand,” said Aaron Dubois, vice president of marketing for Story Cannabis, which is in the midst of a grand reopening of a space once known as Audio Recorders. “You could throw a rock and hit a dozen dispensaries around here. None of them have the heritage this building has.”
Phoenix has a reputation — fair or not — of a boom town where old buildings — historical or not — often get demolished. Hit songs were recorded in midtown decades before hip hop swept the globe. In the 1960s, that success led to construction of what was once the top studio between Dallas and LA.
Weed may have been around then too, said John Dixon, Arizona’s unofficial music historian. “I don't know. They might have been a little there. I think it was more probably in those days bennies, speed pills and stuff and alcohol," Dixon said.
The post-war 1940s saw the launch of Ramsey’s Recording Studio in Phoenix. It didn’t take long before square dance-records and commercials were being made there.
Another early money-maker was setting people’s poems to music.
“A lot of people would just kind of come in the front door, ‘Hey, I want to make a record.’ They take them in. They do it. They'd cut a couple acetates,” Dixon said
In the '50s, the studio recorded two hits. First was Sanford Clark’s "The Fool," which sold 700,000 copies. The second hit, recorded the same year the studio name became Audio Recorders, was Duane Eddy’s "Rebel Rouser," which Dixon calls the twang heard round the world.
“It was huge here. It was huge in England. It was huge in Australia. They had this international hit here in 1958 that all these local guys had created in that little studio,” Dixon said.
This was just down the street from the building that is now the marijuana dispensary. Dixon calls those years the golden age of Audio Recorders.
“They were successful across the street in the new big building, but this was what got them there,” Dixon said.
The move came in 1964 to a studio big enough to record the Phoenix Symphony.
Having been stocked with the best equipment available drew big names, like Waylon Jennings, and the Spiders, which became Alice Cooper.
The business evolved over decades into selling cameras and video equipment. The studio was sold in the early '90s. Dixon said it’s had several incarnations since, including video game development.
“Phoenix is so big about knocking … ‘OK, goodbye. It's old. We don't need it.’ Boom, it's gone,” he said.
Back inside the weed shop, the grand opening was in full swing. Dubois, the marketer for Story Cannabis, says history disappears if nobody pays attention, and he’s searching for a way to pay tribute to the past.
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