A History of 2200 Bridgeway, Sausalito

Chapter 3 — The Golden Era, 1973 to 1979

Sly Stone, Bob Marley, Fleetwood Mac, and the KSAN broadcasts that invented live studio radio.

By Tom Proctor

In its first year, the studio worked with Buddy Miles, the Grateful Dead, Gregg Allman, and Sly Stone. The Dead booked the entire building in August 1973 to record Wake of the Flood. Allman recorded Laid Back, his first solo album, in those same walls. Sly Stone, whose Fresh had been partially recorded there the year before, essentially moved in — commissioning the sunken Pit studio and occupying a small adjacent room that the staff furnished with a bed for the weeks at a stretch that he refused to leave. He wanted the doorknobs moved up a foot from their standard height throughout his section of the building. The staff eventually complied.

Sly and the Family Stone poster hanging in the studio — band portrait above a tinted Sly Stone photo. — A Sly and the Family Stone poster on the studio wall — a quiet reminder of the months Sly essentially lived in the building.Photo by Tom Proctor

A photograph of Rick James at a piano, mounted on the wooden door to his former conference-room living quarters at the studio. — A photo of Rick James still hangs on the door of his former pad — the waterbed room where he lived during his Sausalito sessions.

What gave the Record Plant Sausalito its particular mystique beyond its amenities was radio. In 1973, KSAN — San Francisco's freewheeling freeform rock station — partnered with the studio for a series of live broadcasts called Live From The Record Plant. Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue, the legendary DJ and station manager who had invented freeform radio in San Francisco, coordinated the broadcasts with his wife Raechel, who handled the logistics of getting a live studio signal onto the air. Neither a live FM broadcast from a recording studio nor the technical infrastructure to sustain one at scale had existed before. The three of them — Donahue, Stone, and Kellgren — built it as they went.

Tom 'Big Daddy' Donahue at a broadcast console, circa late 1960s — pioneer of free-form FM radio. — Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue — a giant in physical stature and in influence on rock radio, one of the originators of the free-form album format known in its early days as progressive or underground radio.

KSAN launched the series with a 72-hour broadcast marathon in June 1973. The event was a comprehensive showcase of the Bay Area's emerging music scene — a continuous radio event that kept the studio and station in broadcast mode around the clock. According to Raechel Donahue's notebook, the marathon featured 24 artists performing live from the studio: Rowan Bros., Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, Banana & Brunch, Ducks, Earthquake, Ruben & the Jets, Old & in the Way, Ronnie Montrose, Jesse Young, Joy of Cooking, Sha Na Na, Chambers Bros, Copperhead, Pointer Sisters, Malo, Blue Gravy, Mike Bloomfield, Mark Naftalin, Elvin Bishop, Doug Sahm, Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, David Blue, and Eric Anderson.

The first broadcast to feature a major international artist came a few months later, when Bob Marley and The Wailers performed in October 1973 — part of that performance was later released on the Talkin' Blues CD. But the 72-hour marathon established what the Tom Donahue series would become: a direct pipeline from the Record Plant's live room to Bay Area radio listeners, no editing, no delay. Listen to one of the surviving KSAN broadcasts on YouTube →

A complete list of KSAN broadcasts and live events from the studio can be found in Chapter 8 — Record Plant Artists, A Selected Timeline.

Later the live broadcast was adopted by San Francisco's KFOG and featured Nils Lofgren, Warren Zevon, Government Mule, Boz Scaggs, Cowboy Junkies, Little Feat, and David Crosby with Shawn Colvin. David Crosby and Shawn Colvin — Live at the Record Plant, May 28, 1993 (KFOG FM Broadcast) →

In February 1976, Fleetwood Mac arrived. Engineers Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut brought the band to begin tracking what would become Rumours. The sessions logged more than 3,000 hours at the Plant, though the album was largely completed in Los Angeles later that year. The Sausalito sessions were legendary for reasons that had nothing to do with music. Both couples in the band — Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, Christine and John McVie — were breaking up simultaneously. In a room adjacent to the Pit, Nicks sat at a piano and wrote "Dreams." She walked into Studio B and recorded the vocal in a single take.

Grateful Dead — Wake of the Flood album cover, recorded at Record Plant Sausalito in August 1973. — Grateful Dead, *Wake of the Flood* (1973) — tracked at Record Plant Sausalito.

Signed Fleetwood Mac Rumours album cover — recorded at Record Plant Sausalito Studio B in 1976. — Fleetwood Mac, *Rumours* (1977) — band-signed cover. Tracked in Studio B.

Hand-painted Studio B sign — white block 'B' with red script 'Studio' mounted on a gold wall. — The Studio B sign — same room where *Rumours* was tracked.

Rumours was released in 1977 and won the Grammy for Best Album. It has been certified platinum nineteen times.

Also in 1975–76: Stevie Wonder worked on Songs in the Key of Life in the studio complex. In 1978, a 19-year-old Prince arrived from Minneapolis and booked three months. Drawn by the records Sly Stone, Chaka Khan, and Carlos Santana had made here, he recorded his debut album For You alone — singing every vocal and playing every instrument.

By the end of the decade, the list of artists who had recorded or broadcast from 2200 Bridgeway included the Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Sly Stone, Van Morrison, Joe Walsh, Tom Petty, Tower of Power, Jefferson Starship, the Doobie Brothers, Pablo Cruise, Linda Ronstadt, and Bonnie Raitt.