Oak Cliff is mostly a working class section of Dallas, Texas. Many know it as the home of T-Bone Walker and the Vaughan brothers — Jimmie and Stevie Ray. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald lived and was subsequently captured there. Errol Morris' documentary, The Thin Blue Line, partially takes place on Ft. Worth Avenue, down the street from Clyde Barrow's grave. A streetcar line ran in Dallas until the 1950s and today sections of track are visible in Oak Cliff through worn asphalt. Large parts of the area remain frozen in time. Some of the old buildings have survived through preservation efforts, but whole blocks of them remain because it doesn't make economic sense to demolish them. Clusters of one-story retail spaces, which built up around the transit stops, endure decades of indifference. Begun in 1924, Elmwood is a residential area within Oak Cliff. Development here continued until the 1960s so it includes everything from Craftsman bungalows to ranch-style homes. There's a small business section within Elmwood, which dates to the 1940s and runs along Edgefield Avenue. In 1988 Oliver Stone used several blocks there to recreate Ron Kovic's 1969 "Welcome Home" parade in Born on the Fourth of July. With only superficial changes the neighborhood played its role perfectly. In recent years Latino immigrants have moved into Elmwood. Taquerías now occupy some of the decades-old buildings. Stuart Sikes is standing in the doorway of his new recording studio in Elmwood. He likes to have a smoke and take in the neighborhood. He sometimes has lunch at nearby La Competidora. He says he settled in Oak Cliff because he lived in Memphis for a long time. The areas, he feels, have a lot in common. He has a friend who likes to say that, "Memphis doesn't give a shit what's going on with the rest of the country, and the rest of the country doesn't give a shit what's going on in Memphis."
Sikes grew up in Plano, a suburb of Dallas thirty miles to the north of his new studio. The two are in the same metropolitan area but don't share much else. Sikes says he learned to enjoy music back in Plano through an older sister and her friends. An uncle, whom he describes as "pretty good with electronics and a huge audiophile", helped get him started with critical listening. In high school his friends started learning to play music. Sikes himself took up drumming but didn't feel his skills were good enough. While his friends formed bands he discovered the 4-track cassette recorder. He found that he liked recording and did it well. He graduated from Plano East High School in 1991.
At that point he took one semester of a recording class at a local community college. Short of inspired, he fled to Austin for a year. It's a period that remains hazy. So, tapped out, he returned to Dallas. He found work at a copier repair company, in a warehouse as well as cleaning typewriters in area schools. There are a couple of versions of what happened next. Sikes' father was on a plane. Or was it his stepmother? He says both claim credit for what happened. One of them had a seatmate who related that his son had just started going to a recording school in Florida. It sounded like it was worth a look so Sikes and his father soon went to Winter Park and visited Full Sail. It felt right to him. Sikes enrolled in school, relocated to the Orlando area and moved in with two other students. He describes living with housemates who were very different as well as surviving without a car in a car-oriented city. Eventually he met people he felt connected to, but it was a struggle. Reflecting now he insists that kind of training gives back "whatever you put into it. They give you the basic tools to [avoid looking] like an idiot in a studio. Whether you can take that and do anything with it is another thing."
As graduation from Full Sail approached Sikes' sister again influenced him. She was in Memphis, attending graduate school. She knew that Sonic Youth had just recorded at Easley-McCain [Tape Op #44]. According to Sikes, she called and said, "Hey, there's this great studio here and that's where you should be trying to get a job!" The knowledge he'd gained at Full Sail gave him the confidence to call the studio. Coincidentally they had recently purchased a Neotek console. "One of those had been provided at school so I knew how to work on it," he explains. Also, the timing seemed right. Doug Easley was in Europe and the console was on its way. Davis McCain faced rewiring the room alone and Sikes came around in time to assist.
Sikes began as an intern at Easley-McCain in 1995. "I cleaned up, made the coffee and sat in the corner and didn't say anything until somebody said something to me," he remembers. Nevertheless, he says that during his internship there he learned "double" what he'd picked up in school. "But," he insists, "I can't bash [school] too bad because it still got me in the door." He made ends meet during his non-paid position. "In school," he says, "I took out a cost-of-living loan and didn't use all of it so I used that money to live on." The funds went further in Memphis than they would have in other cities — his first apartment cost $210 a month.
Davis McCain says that with Sikes "it was a good match from the start." He believes that Sikes distinguished himself from most other interns through his work ethic and temperament. Furthermore McCain observes, "A lot of the interns couldn't relate to the music that we were recording but Stuart was right on top of it." McCain says that later it became apparent that Sikes also had people skills. With a client McCain points out, "You've got to try to figure out what they're hearing in their head and translate it. I think he learned that well."
Sikes converted his entry-level duties into an assistant's job in under six months. Through that period others came and went. He thinks the best thing he did during those first months was to stay quiet. "Nobody shows up at a studio for the intern," he says. Some beginners insisted on voicing their opinions during sessions. "Who cares what you'd do," he remembers thinking at the time. "You're not even getting paid!" The casual, artist-oriented atmosphere at Easley- McCain was genuine but its foundation was built on long hours. The two owners rotated on the schedule. "One guy would come in the first six hours of the day and the other guy would come in the last six hours of the day," Sikes explains. That allowed them to be rested for the work. Sikes, on the other hand, was there throughout.
The first project that came in with Sikes assisting was a band called Two Dollar Guitar, led by Tim Foljahn. For Sikes it meant something because Steve Shelley was the drummer. "I was a big Sonic Youth fan so to be able to meet him for the first time was pretty exciting." Gradually Sikes began to run sessions on his own. "One guy would have the whole day off and the other two guys would work," he says.
One of his first engineering jobs was the Promise Ring's Nothing Feels Good (1997) with J. Robbins [Tape Op #13] producing. Robbins had already made a name for himself as a musician/engineer/producer. According to him the band wanted to work at Easley- McCain because of its reputation. "[Sikes] was just incredibly easy to work with," says Robbins, "and really good at keeping the apparatus of the studio out of the way of the music." About that session Sikes says, "I was still nervous and didn't want to fuck up. That's all." He remembers finishing a song's basic tracks and suggesting that they do another tune. After a playback of the previous song he'd stopped the tape on the song's outro and forgot to fast-forward. "I hit RECORD and erased over the outro," he grimaces. "I could've thrown up I was so disappointed." He had to admit his mistake. To his relief the band members weren't hostile. "I backed the tape up and they started playing along with it," he recalls, "and I punched them in." Sikes overdubbed a cymbal at the punch to mask it. He says that spot on the record is hard for him to locate today.
Subsequently Robbins went back to Easley-McCain for Jets to Brazil's 1998 release, Orange Rhyming Dictionary. They had more time in the studio than Promise Ring did. Robbins had gained trust in Sikes through that first experience and says having Sikes there freed him to function as a producer rather than as "ghost engineer." Robbins remembers getting stuck during the overdubbing phase looking for a specific guitar sound. Sikes insisted that he "just get a sound and go for it" which Robbins now recognizes as "total wisdom — not to get hung up but trust some things to happen in the spirit of the moment and let the recording reflect that." Robbins maintains that the best records are marked by those "unplanned details." For Robbins it helped that Sikes' suggestions seemed to come from a desire to further the project rather than out of ego.
From there a burst of activity began at Easley-McCain. Sikes and the owners scarcely had time to take a long view of their work. The list of artists who came through the studio included The White Stripes, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Modest Mouse, The Walkmen, Jets to Brazil, Rocket from the Crypt and The Spinanes. Dozens of other clients of national, local and no renown worked there. "Mostly," Sikes explains, "a long recording during that time would be ten days." That's tracking and mixing. He says that bands would just show up and start recording "and so you were always kind of hauling ass and trying to do the best job you could. It's not like you're sitting around the studio hanging out with the band." Sikes figures the studio's popularity was due to at least two factors. One was the Memphis mystique. Studios such as Memphis Recording Service (Sun), Stax Records, Ardent Studios, Sam Phillips Recording Service and Easley- McCain had all made history and artists wanted to be a part of that. Also the studio itself made an impression. Easley-McCain was in the old "American East" building, "the first studio in Memphis," he says, "that was built as a studio. It had a big room and it had still-functioning live echo chambers." Furthermore clients found both Easley and McCain to be kindred spirits. The atmosphere they created while working also made an impression on Sikes. Through their mentoring he recognized that making a recording was more than having racks of gear.
The White Stripes were encouraged, as far as Sikes knows, to use Easley-McCain by their Memphis friends, The Oblivians. Independent of that Sikes had just recorded and mixed Rocket from the Crypt's Group Sounds, released in 2001. Sikes says that John Reis of RFTC also recommended him and the studio to the White Stripes. For White Blood Cells (2001) Sikes says Jack and Meg White were in the same room — baffles between them — during the recording of the basic tracks. White overdubbed his vocals and a second guitar on all songs. "[Meg] said she didn't really know the songs." Sikes remembers. "I think she knew the songs. We recorded it in like two days and then the last days we just did rough mixes. Some of those mixes I think are on the record. And then they came back for two more days and they did maybe one or two more songs." Of that record he says simply, "It got me a lot of work." He finds, however, that it's always necessary to remain busy. "I think usually people know you by the last thing they heard," he says. "But [White Blood Cells] helped. It was good."
Sikes was at Easley-McCain for seven years until late 2001. "I never thought I was going to leave there. I loved that place. I recorded all the bands for like the last three years." Speaking of both owners he says, "They were great. I learned everything from those guys." Sikes' wife, Diane, is an artist and sculptor. They got together in 1997 and married in 2001. She had earned a Master's degree from Memphis College of Art and wanted to teach but opportunities in Memphis were limited. Furthermore Sikes knew people in Dallas, his hometown, and realized there was potential opportunity there. So the Sikes moved to Dallas in October of 2001. Oak Cliff's locally-owned businesses and oozing history reminded them of where they'd been, so that's where they landed. Clearly, Dallas itself has an important musical history and recording studios have been there since the beginning. It's almost certain that Robert Johnson recorded "Hellhound on My Trail", among a dozen others, at the Brunswick Records Building in 1937. Bob Wills' first recordings were also made in Dallas. The city has simultaneously been known through the years as a place where jingle packages are produced.
John Congleton is a Dallas-based producer, engineer and musician. He also leads the band the pAper chAse, and now shares space with Sikes. He says that jingle studios are places that seek a neutral sound, "and that's exactly what you don't want out of a rock and roll studio." Consequently, he admits, "it's been tough for me and Stuart both to find a place to really feel comfortable working in Dallas. Don't get me wrong: there are good places and good people." He explains that it's just necessary to look for them. That was the environment that Sikes entered toward the end of 2001. "It was pretty bleak," he remembers. "'Cause you'd go around to studios and you'd have your little list of bands that you'd done, which you thought are pretty good bands, and they didn't know who those people were." Pro Tools wasn't something that Easley-McCain saw much of in the late '90s, but by 2001 "they'd ask you if you knew how to use Pro Tools. I would say 'No, but I can learn really fast.' So I didn't really work very much."
One studio owner Sikes contacted upon arriving was Gary Long of Nomad Recording Studio, which was located in suburban Dallas. After visiting with Sikes, Long was reminded of Congleton. "I noticed that they had similar taste in music, a similar approach to recording and mixing philosophies. [With them,] it doesn't have to be all lacquered and glossy and perfect." Sikes did a few sessions at Nomad. Long remembers clients being pleased, and not only with his knowledge. "He doesn't push himself on people," he says. "He works with it, not against it." Long sees Sikes as a person who's not afraid to take chances to get the sound he wants. Long believed that if Sikes and Congleton met they would hit it off. He was right, Congleton says. "My first real conversation with [Stuart] was about how he was completely blown away with how many people were using Pro Tools in Dallas. I think our first talk was about his adjusting to that." Congleton had been using the workstation and offered suggestions. Sikes decided to purchase a Digi 001 Pro Tools interface and to learn what he needed to know.
