The Record Plant Sausalito: 1972–2008

The Record Plant Sausalito opened in October 1972 at 2200 Bridgeway, a few minutes' walk from the ferry landing, and closed as a commercial studio in 2008. It was the third and last of the Record Plants that Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone built, after New York in 1968 and Los Angeles in 1969. The New York and Los Angeles rooms are gone. Sausalito is the one still standing.

The idea behind it was simple and, at the time, slightly heretical: a studio should be somewhere a band wants to be. Kellgren's rooms were built to be lived in — low light, deep furniture, a kitchen, a lounge you sank into rather than perched on. The engineering was serious, but the design brief was hospitality. Records got made because people stayed.

By 1972 the Bay Area had the bands and the audience but not enough serious multitrack capacity. Acts recorded in Los Angeles and came home. Sausalito answered that: a room across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, on the water, an hour's drive from most of Marin's musicians and a short trip from the city.

It also mattered that Sausalito was not Hollywood. Sessions ran on their own clock. The waterfront and the houseboat community set the tone as much as the console did — which is a real part of why certain records made here sound unhurried.

Most of what happened in the building was never released. Session reels went home with producers, into label vaults, into garages, and in some cases into landfill. What we can document comes from a mix of surviving reels, session logs, credits, photographs, broadcast recordings, and the memories of people who were in the room.

The KSAN live broadcasts from 1973 to 1975 are a distinct and unusually well-preserved thread: the station carried live sessions from the studio, and a large portion of that material survives as audio. Those broadcasts are catalogued individually in this archive, and roughly sixty-four of them can be played here — either from inside the article about that night, or straight through on Plant Radio, which streams the surviving broadcasts back to back.

If you only do one thing on this site, do that: start the KSAN overview for the story of how live studio radio was invented in this building, then let Plant Radio run while you read.

2200 Bridgeway is a working studio again. The rooms have been restored rather than reinvented, which is the harder and slower option, and the archive exists alongside the working business rather than in place of it.

This page is the front door to the history. The studio itself — rates, rooms, booking — lives at 2200studios.com.

Every claim in this archive is meant to be traceable. Where a date, a credit, or an attribution is contested, we say so on the page rather than picking the tidier version. Where we have only an oral account, it is labelled as one.

This page is a summary and a map. The detail — with sources — sits in the chapters, the artist pages, and the archive entries linked throughout.