Chapter 1 — The Building and the Founders

Long before it was a recording studio, the low-slung building at 2200 Bridgeway in Sausalito was a contractor's office. During World War II, Marinship — the shipyard that occupied the waterfront below the Marin hills — needed administrative space. The building they put up was functional, utilitarian, and unremarkable: a former office suite clad in diagonal redwood siding on an industrial spit of land near the harbor, ten minutes by ferry from San Francisco.

It might have stayed unremarkable. Instead, in 1972, two men with a very different vision drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and looked at it.

Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone had already changed the music industry once. In 1968, they opened the first Record Plant in New York City at 321 West 44th Street — and it was unlike any studio anyone had ever seen. Before the Record Plant, recording studios looked like laboratories: white walls, hard wood floors, fluorescent lighting, folding chairs, bad coffee. Kellgren, who had built his reputation engineering records for Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, believed that environment shaped sound, and that musicians who were comfortable, fed, and inspired made better records.

So the Record Plant became a living room. A luxurious, slightly deranged living room. The New York studio had the feel of a private club — warm lighting, couches, a staff that treated artists like guests. Stone would later say of his partner: "He single-handedly was responsible for changing studios from what they were — fluorescent lights, white walls and hardwood floors — to the living rooms that they are today."

The formula worked. The Los Angeles branch followed in 1969. By 1972, Kellgren and Stone were ready for a third location — a northern California outpost, far from the pressures of the industry centers, somewhere artists could disappear and work.

The building on Marinship Way suited them. The legal entity they formed was named Sausalito Music Factory. The brand on the door would be the Record Plant.