Katiana Giacona's Record Plant, Sausalito Studios is the local's book. It runs 128 pages in paperback with a foreword by Rumours producer Ken Caillat, and it began the way most useful histories do — with one person building a binder because nobody else had.
Giacona is a Sausalito Historical Society member and a lifelong local. She was working the front desk at Harmonia, a wellness-oriented social club that occupied half of 2200 Bridgeway, when she opened a closed door at the end of an odd, unused hallway and found the original studios sitting as they'd been left. A maze of intricately crafted, dusty rooms sealed for roughly two decades — a time capsule from the musical heart of 1970s, 80s, and 90s America. She started giving occasional tours to people who wanted to stand inside the building where so many of their favorite records were made, and she began collating every scrap of Plant history she could find into one thick binder. That binder is the seed of this book.
The book itself is more scrapbook than monograph, and that's the point. Giacona pairs a curated collection of vinyl and CD covers from the Plant's discography with historical photographs, documents, and firsthand recollections from former receptionists, managers, engineers, producers, and staff. Two interviews carry most of the narrative weight: Arne Frager, the producer and engineer who owned the Plant Studios from 1993 through the 2008 closure, and Ken Caillat, who produced Fleetwood Mac's Rumours in Studio B in 1976 — an album routinely counted among the greatest rock records ever made.
What the book covers
The Sausalito Record Plant opened in 1972, the third room in a system that started in New York in 1968 and expanded to Los Angeles in 1969. Chris Stone and Gary Kellgren built it as an "artist living room" — a resort studio just across the Golden Gate Bridge from the San Francisco scene, with nautical-inspired interiors, complex and at times psychedelically patterned wood paneling, and a groovy aesthetic that drew a client list disproportionate to any other studio of the era: Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Jefferson Airplane, Rick James, Prince, Santana, Linda Ronstadt, Van Morrison, Tom Petty, Sammy Hagar, Journey, Metallica, Huey Lewis and the News, Dave Matthews Band, Carrie Underwood — a partial list, and still absurd.
Giacona's framing is that the Plant is a "previously forgotten temple of popular music," and the book is an entrance back into it. She's not trying to write the definitive technical history of the studio system — for that, see Martin Porter and David Goggin's Buzz Me In. She's telling the Sausalito-specific story from inside the building, using the artifacts she found on the walls and in the boxes and from the people who worked the rooms.
About the author
Katiana Giacona is a professional DJ, certified naturalist, author, and mother. She's a lifelong local to Sausalito and a member of the Sausalito Historical Society. Before writing the book she was working two jobs at Harmonia — DJing and the front desk — when she first walked through the door into the sealed studios. The tours came next. Then the binder. Then the book.
The Ken Caillat foreword is not incidental. Caillat cut Rumours in Studio B in 1976 and knows the building at the level of the console; his endorsement is the industry saying, on the record, that Giacona got it right. Arne Frager, who operated the Plant through its second life from 1993 to 2008, supplies the modern-era continuity — the years between the founders' Plant and the reopening as 2200 Studios in 2024.
Why it belongs on the shelf next to Buzz Me In
Buzz Me In is the definitive institutional history of the Record Plant system as a whole — three cities, three decades, hundreds of interviews, built from co-founder Chris Stone's personal archive. Giacona's book is smaller and more local. It's the view from the front desk, from the tours, from the wall of covers, from the Sausalito Historical Society. The two books don't compete. They complete each other. If you're serious about the room at 2200 Bridgeway, you want both.
Signed copies are available directly from the author at salgiacona.com. 128 pages, paperback, $38.