Martin Porter and David Goggin spent ten years writing Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios. It came out in 2024 on Thames & Hudson. If you care about the building at 2200 Bridgeway, you should own a copy.
The two of them are the right people to have done it. Porter is a veteran of the recording trade press, with decades at Pro Sound News and Guitar Player. Goggin, who writes as Mr. Bonzai, is the photographer and journalist who covered the Record Plant from the inside while it was still running. Together they had access nobody else has had. They worked from the personal archive of co-founder Chris Stone, sat for interviews with hundreds of former staff, producers, and artists, and built the book around oral history rather than secondary research.
What they produced is honest about the studio in a way the music press has never quite managed. The Record Plant was the place that invented the modern recording studio, the place where Electric Ladyland and Rumours and Songs in the Key of Life were tracked, the place where John Lennon spent the last hours of his life. It was also a place run by people, paid for by hits, and shaped by a culture that was permissive in ways that helped some artists and destroyed others. The book holds all of that in the same frame.
For the work we're doing at 2200 Studios, Buzz Me In is the foundational text. We're building a structured archive of every session, broadcast, and artist engagement that took place in the Sausalito building from 1972 forward. The book is one of our primary references, alongside the KQED Unterberger series, the RIAA registry, the wall list still mounted inside the studio, and the surviving KSAN broadcast tapes.
The back cover lists 96 artists who recorded somewhere in the Record Plant system. Aerosmith, Bee Gees, David Bowie, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Hendrix, Bob Marley, Metallica, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa. A roster like that doesn't exist for any other studio in American music history. Many of those artists worked at the Sausalito location specifically. Documenting which sessions happened in this building, and when, and with whom, is the project the book makes possible.
There are gaps the book doesn't try to fill, by design. The story of the building after Chris Stone sold his interest in the late 1980s, the federal seizure period in the 2000s, the closure in 2008, and the reopening as 2200 Studios in 2024 — all of that is outside the book's frame. We've been writing that part of the story on this site, and the work continues. The book gave us a foundation. The rest is ours to build.
If you want to read it, the cleanest options are the Kindle edition through Amazon (ASIN B0FMDW9WF8), the VitalSource electronic edition, or print through Thames & Hudson and any major bookseller. Porter and Goggin also maintain the Record Plant Diaries Facebook page and the recordplantdiaries.com site, which run as ongoing companions to the book and a gathering place for the Record Plant community.
Read it. Then come back and help us fill in the rest.
