SOMEWHERE IN THE CRITERIA Studios complex, Don Johnson is making an album. The recording business being what it is — and Don Johnson being who he is, the hottest TV star around — nobody wishes to reveal a thing about it. The Manhattan Project would be envious of the secrecy cloaking the recording of this album.
Down the hall, Julio Iglesias is also working, although he prefers to come in at night. The mood is more romantic, you understand. After a laborious couple of hours in the studio, he can walk out and sit for a moment in the rooftop garden, listen to the comforting gurgle of the waterfall, bask in the tropical night breeze. Iglesias comes and goes as he pleases. He has done so much work at Criteria there’s a lounge with his name on the door.
Other people who have recorded at Criteria only get their names in conspicuous places if the album goes gold, which dozens have. They’re all there hanging on the lobby walls, gold and platinum LPs recorded at Criteria that range from Grand Funk Railroad to the Bee Gees, Neil Young and Stephen Stills (together and separately), Jimmy Buffett, Bob Seger, the Eagles, and Aretha Franklin. They are impressive testaments to glory days.
Up the road in Fort Lauderdale, New River Studios cannot compete in the area of memorabilia, but then they’ve only been in business three years as opposed to 30 for Criteria. Still, on a good day, you might find Stewart Copeland, late of the Police, laying down tracks at New River, or the Miami Sound Machine, which was hitting the Top 10 in Europe with Fort Lauderdale-produced records back in 1984, before anybody in South Florida was paying much attention. Today, although the recording studios here don’t have the reputation of those in New York or Los Angeles, there is enough business to pay the bills. Just.
FOR THE PEOPLE behind these studios, money is not a ruling passion. For Criteria’s Mac Emerman, it started as a hobby. For New River’s Cayia family, it started as an investment. But you can’t very well have a recording studio without a lot of investment.
How much money? In Miami, Mac Emerman has dropped somewhere in the vicinity of a million dollars in acoustical and recording equipment to build just one new addition to his Miami complex. The Cayia family of Fort Lauderdale — Edward, an anesthesiologist, his wife Paulina and daughter Virginia — have likewise invested a million dollars in their downtown facility, three-fourths of it personal funds.
The Cayias turned a 4000-square-foot former Italian restaurant into a relatively small but state-of-the-art studio. The studio is equipped with 24- and 48-track capability, as well as a NEVE console, a 2500-knob machine that can separate and combine 48 music tracks in an infinite number of combinations. It is the only NEVE south of Nashville, and an important selling point for the studio. Equally important is the lounge, which has a pinball machine permanently set for free play.
Whether in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Nashville or New York, it takes a great deal of hardware to provide what is actually a fairly simplistic service. And hardware costs. New River’s top rate is $250 an hour; Criteria’s is about the same. Emerman makes the point that, in an atmosphere of cut-throat bidding, with high-overhead equipment standing idle, prices are eminently negotiable.
There are about 30 recording studios in South Florida, most specializing in commercial and jingle recording. About six have 24-track capability, but only two are actively involved in recording pop music: Criteria and New River.
It didn’t used to be that way. In the 1970s, spurred by the disco craze and the success of the Miami-based Bee Gees, Criteria was booked 18 hours a day and earned itself 140 gold and platinum records. Groups like the Eagles recorded at Criteria as well as at overflow facilities like Bayshore Studios, operated by resident producer Bill Szymczyk.
But the same thing that spurred the local industry killed it. Disco was about a sound, not a group; it was an impersonal form. The Bee Gees entered semi- retirement, the Eagles split up and Bayshore Studios closed, even as the record industry entered an overall slump. Record labels began cutting back their roster of acts. As Mac Emerman puts it, “One day the phone stopped ringing.” Now, Criteria has nine employees, down from the 28 they had once upon a time.
In the mid-1980s came digital recording, compact discs and increased sales. Now the local recording industry, once again investing in equipment, is making tentative moves toward reasserting its importance.
Oakland Park’s BRT Studios is busy these days also, half of the time with commercials, half of the time with records for local bands. They have 24-track capability, for which the going hourly rate is $65.
“The rich days are over,” says Beverly Makara, BRT’s general manager. “Ninety percent of the bands we record use digital drums and keyboards. There are no more huge budgets anymore; people are very cautious. The sad thing is, there are excellent musicians down here, but there’s not enough work to keep them busy. The synthetic drums and keyboards aren’t the equal of live musicians, I don’t think, but it saves the band money in the studio.”
Part of what’s keeping the market small, some observers say, is the lack of top quality session musicians. One studio head estimates the number of quality players at 15, as compared to hundreds in relatively nearby Nashville. Thus, lots of vocals are laid down in Florida studios, but the instrumentals tend to be done elsewhere.
MORE THAN anything else, what studios sell, equipment being equal, is ambiance. It is to a studio’s advantage to create an aura that implies it is a place where creative juice flows like the Ohio river at flood tide.
The Cayia family has worked very hard to create an environment that offers more than electronics. At New River, the ceilings are high, fans circulate cool air, while the hanging ferns move gently in the breeze. Several bars of music are painted on a hallway wall; appropriately enough, they turn out to be from Jerome Kern’s Old Man River. In the lounge, fresh doughnuts and orange juice are provide every day, the pinball machine hovers invitingly, and Isaac Asimov novels rest beside back issues of Billboard.
“We try to make it as easy and comfortable as we can,” says Paulina Cayia, the mother of Virgina. “These people come here to work 12 and 14 hours a day. When Cyndi Lauper was here, I made her a paella. She was so glad to have some home-cooked food.”
Despite the big names, the place is still very much a streamlined family operation. Virginia handles booking, billing and rental of lodgings for the talent. There are two engineers and one technician, just as there were when the studio opened.
Criteria is slightly more elaborate. There are secluded lounges, a pool table, private entrances for particularly shy personalities like Don Johnson. As rival companies bidding for the same contracts, the relationship between the two studios is one of wary respect. “Virginia is a tough competitor,” acknowledges Mac Emerman, and lets it go at that.
Well into its third year of operation, New River confirms the adage about a new business taking three years to become established. In the beginning, there was lots of dead air and lots of down time. The Cayias sent out press releases, hired P.R. people, placed ads in the trade papers. The only people who answered were salesmen calling to sell things.
“What supported us were local bands.” says Virginia. “We gave them favorable rates and we still do. None of the majors wanted to be first to use us; the local groups didn’t care.”
Now, much of New River’s studio time is booked by recent clients like Jimmy Buffett, the Miami Sound Machine, and Peter Frampton, who did his newly released “comeback” album there. Buffett chose the New River studio for his most recent album because he liked the idea of boating to work. As it happened, the house he rented for the month came complete with boat, but the boat didn’t work, so he had to drive to the studio like everybody else.
Recently, Stewart Copeland, drummer for the disbanded Police and a talented composer in his own right, spent a week at New River recording and mixing the score for an episode of CBS’s The Equalizer.
“What happened was very simple,” says Virginia Cayia. “He was playing polo in Boca Raton — Stewart loves polo — and the assignment came through. He said ‘Find me a studio.’ There we were.”
IN BUSINESS for more than a quarter century, Criteria is the Florida recording industry in microcosm; it began in the traditional Mom-and-Pop manner. Mac Emerman, a jazz trumpeter by inclination, was running a Hollywood record store for money and doing some recording out of his trunk. Gradually, he found himself the major domo of a facility that can accomplish every step in the recording process from recording to disc mastering. Emerman mainly believes he did it by being in the right place at the right time.
“One record changed my life,” says Emerman, a voluble, very likeable man. “Layla by Eric Clapton. After that, we became internationally known.”
But even as Criteria was enjoying its success, it failed to diversify. Criteria did do the soundtracks for 11 independent features made by Florida movie producer William Grefe, but other than that, its basket was overflowing with recording industry eggs.
“We did some agency work, and some black and Latin music,” says Emerman, “but not that much. Looking back, I think we probably intimidated a lot of local talent who saw all our gold records and figured we were too busy to bother with them.” When the crunch of the early ’80s came down, it hit Criteria particularly hard.
Now, Emerman is open about admitting that what Criteria needs is another Layla, a hit record that will serve notice to the industry that the studio is still the house of hits and the right place to be.
Slowly, then, in gradual increments, the local industry has recovered from its depression. But time and tide affect even a rose-is-a-rose objective thing like a recording studio. What difference does it make where you make a record? Not much, probably, but you can see bloated vanity in the vernacular of the trade; phrases like “recording artists” are thrown around, when there might actually be about eight people to whom the phrase would apply. You can see it on the back of the album covers that proudly inform the reader that the horns were recorded in Nashville, the strings were done in L.A., the vocals in Montserrat, the mixing in Miami.
Aside from the globetrotting inefficiency of it all, what possible difference can it make? “Producers want to impress their clients,” says Emerman. “They want to give them the feeling that they know where the very best musicians are. If they want the sound of the New York Philharmonic strings, they go get them. And who knows, they might be right.”
THE SLEAZY IMAGE of the record industry is something they see only infrequently, the studio heads maintain. There is a famous story about the time John Cougar Mellencamp stubbed out a cigarette on a brand new parquet floor at Criteria, sending Mac Emerman shooting over the precipice into rage. It is a true story, but not everybody has the manners of a barnyard sow.
“Peter Frampton didn’t even drink beer,” says Virginia Cayia. “Jimmy Buffett . . . well, Jimmy did drink beer. And Cyndi worked so hard too. I’d be lying if I said I’d never seen coke and booze, but it happens in small instances. Professional, serious people don’t do that kind of thing when they’re working. A session is a very stressful, serious time for an artist. They’re repeating lyrics over and over, they’re forced to deal with things like deadlines and budgets.”
“The popular image of the recording business is of wild parties and picnic hampers of cocaine,” says Emerman. “But these are people who lock themselves up in a studio for 10 and 14 hours at a time. They’re very self-critical and very absorbed in work that they would have a hard time concentrating on stoned. That’s not to say that I haven’t had a few go crazy and throw spaghetti at a TV set.”
As the professor emeritus of the business, Emerman might be expected to be looking ahead to a gentle retirement, of days spent on his boat and nights spent bathing in his beloved jazz. But it’s not really that way.
“It’s all I know,” says the rumpled, graying little man. “I don’t have a deep interest in anything else besides my family or my sailboat. In any case, before I leave it, I want to establish some continuity; I want Criteria to be the communications complex I dream of, where a band both records the album and shoots their video.”
He still does the engineering for the University of Miami Jazz Band as a labor of pure love, listens to Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock in his spare time. He admits that the hardest thing for him to deal with has been “the bottom-line stuff. I’ve been too idealistic.
“You know when it’s a fun business? When it’s moving, when things are happening.” No matter that it’s happening with Don Johnson, an actor whose musical range may or may not rival Eddie Murphy’s. “With all the problems, I think the future is very ripe down here,” Emerman says. “If you can stand the gaff.”
