Founded by engineer Gary Kellgren, the Record Plant was the first successful studio by and for hippies. He decked the place out with high-tech equipment (a board capable of recording twelve tracks...twelve!) and, inspired by the perpetual skinny-dipping party at Peter Tork's house, an atmosphere of sexual and chemical malaise. It's where rock and rollers could escape the sterility of their grampa's recording studios to rock out, experiment, snort, and screw as much as their bodies and labels' budgets could bear.
Martin Porter and David Goggin dance through the decadent history of the Record Plant and its three locations in their new book Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios. Because so much went on within the studio's vividly decorated walls, the authors can only strap in and race ahead. Any one of its stories of studio financing and constructing, classic album recording, gross rock star misbehavior, and mysterious death (Kellgren and his secretary drowned together when he was just 38 and she 34) could have made a book in itself. Rather we get a smorgasbord of stories within the overarching story of a location as haunted by outrageous ghosts as the Overlook Hotel. Sleepy engineers get blasted in the balls with fire extinguishers. Phil Spector points his gun at everyone, including lovely Stevie Wonder. Techie specs get bandied about. John and Paul jam (badly) for the one and only time post-Beatles. Keith Moon torches barrels of MCA's cash making one of the worst albums of all time. A successfully pranked Fleetwood Mac collectively drop to their knees to hoover flour off the studio floor. The on-site hot tub gets filled with so many non-water fluids that you might want to take a bath yourself after reading some of this stuff.
The artistry and decadence are fleshed out with a welter of photos and remembrances from the likes of Bob Ezrin, Eddie Kramer, Henry Diltz, Jack Casady, Todd Rundgren, May Pang, and Mark Mothersbaugh, who was so skeeved out by the goings on at the Record Plant he wisely brought his own clean bath towels when Devo recorded Freedom of Choice at the Hollywood location.
