Re: [ARSCLIST] Tel-Mar or Ter-Mar? (Was: Malcolm Chisolm )

[Matt Sohn <mahatma57@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is a good book by Rich Cohen called "The Record Men - The Chess 
Brothers and the Birth of Rock & Roll" (Atlas/Norton; isbn 0-393-32750-7) 
that chronicles the history of Chess. Here's a small excerpt:

"...Leonard would move the company from office to office, studio to studio, 
forever working toward self-sufficiency. He was trying to make his 
independent into a major, a goal he nearly reached at 320 East 21st Street, 
the label's last home. It housed the business office, art department, 
recording studio, and pressing plant. In one building, Chess could sign and 
record, press and package and ship its records. But this turned out to be a 
lesson in unintended consequences. With the presses running, a hum went 
through the building and into the studio. You can hear it on the songs cut 
in those years, the building rum­bling like an old school.

In the early years, Chess recorded in a series of makeshift stu­dios. 
Technicians sought to dampen the defects of these rooms (padding walls, 
covering ducts), but it soon became clear that the defects were creating the 
sound the critics found so fresh. You can identify the era of a side by the 
studio where it was cut, the way you can identify a scotch by the keg in 
which it was aged. In the sessions recorded at 4750 South Cottage Grove, 
there is an echo that gives the sides a Rockabilly jump. This came to be 
known as the Chess sound, which the majors spent thousands trying to 
replicate. It was, in fact, the accidental result of a steel pipe that ran 
through the studio. "The [musicians] would put a speaker at one end of the 
pipe and a microphone at the other," said Marshall. "They would feed the 
sound out from the speaker, and it would travel along the pipe, and get 
picked up by the microphone with the echo from the pipe."

But the studio at 2120 South Michigan Avenue is what peo­ple mean when they 
talk about Chess Records.... "


> OK, this totally explains it. I didn't realize they were essentially both 
> Chess studios.
>
>
> > > Chisolm's resume is interesting too, at least to me. I always thought he 
> > > worked at Tel-Mar. It must be that when Chess did sessions there, he 
> > > engineered, but why was Chess doing sessions at Tel-Mar??? There are 
> > > definitely some Chess records with studio credited as Tel-Mar.