Getting that Call from Ruben #

One day I get a call from Ruben, the owner of Rulen Records. He wanted to know if I would be interesting in leasing out the studio from him as in run your production company from here and pay me rent. Wow, this seemed like this was the next step of the journey. I have to admit that I didn’t think I wanted to be a studio owner, I wanted to be a producer and produce the stuff that I wanted to produce. I soon learnt that I needed to bring in people into the studio to record and most of that I did not want to be a part of. However, there was a singer songwriter that I had met through my girlfriend at the time, Tracy. She introduced me to Rita Miller and we spent hours and hours talking about music and playing songs that we had written and so on. Anyway before we go there I should let you know that I went straight over to Catherine and asked her if she wanted to manage a recording studio and told her about the call with Ruben. We went over there and we made the deal, we were now an official recording company with a real professional recording studio.

We took on the studio and I don’t know where we had the money to pull this all off. We did record a couple of different bands for pay. One that I remember quite well were these two brothers, the McDonalds and they were from Dauphin, Manitoba. This is the same place that my guitar player friend Wes Yaciuk came from and they were very familiar with him. They were a number of years younger than Wes and they had seen him play several times and just admired his playing skill. This would be the Wes before he ever went to Grand McEwan, he had always been a natural talent and Grant McEwan just expanded the world of music for him.

When we were leasing the recording studio we wanted to bring to the attention of all local musicians in Edmonton that there was an active recording industry here as people were surprised when I told them I worked at a recording studio. Most people did not even know that there were any here, let alone 12 of them. We advertised and had a very successful open house which brought in musicians from all over Edmonton including other recording studios. Copying is the biggest form of flattery as more studio’s started to put on open houses that they called birthday parties which coincided with the anniversary of their opening.

I have found that in most cases the bands that I wanted to work with had no money and the only ones that could pay, usually lacked in talent and I wasn’t even interested in recording them. I even pawned off those projects to Randy who was interested in getting his chops down to record these bands.

I did bring Rita into the Studio and we started working on her tracks for an album. I brought in my regular crew for the sessions, Richard as the engineer, Wes on Guitar, Randy on Bass, I handled all the keyboards, and Lonnie came in for many of the sessions playing drums. We also used Doug McCormick and I always had an idea of doing like a Doobie Brothers thing when they had two drummers. Lonnie and Doug all ready were friends and I am sure they would have welcomed the chance to do that. That would have driven the churches crazy, not one drummer but two. During the Rita Miller sessions, I think that it was either Randy or Richard that brought in Joe Fritz to do some backup vocals. We later formed the “Wes Y” band which was made up of Wes, Randy, Lonnie, Joe and myself. This was probably the best band that I had ever played in. We did one engagement in the basement of a nurses resident of the Royal Alex Hospital.

I had to step away from the band as I had to focus more on the business of studio management if I was going to save the studio as we were in need of some serious money to keep things going.