Sausalito Record Plant
 

I visited the Plant in Sausalito yesterday and took some pictures to share with you guys.... plus the drive over the Golden Gate was amazing because the evening San Francisco fog hadn't rolled in too heavily yet, so I got some shots of that, too :)



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En route to Sausalito



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The bridge from the Marin County side. This photo looks back over to where I had just come from in San Francisco.


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The city from across the bay.


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That is Sausalito. It's a 15 minute drive from downtown San Francisco.


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THE PLANT!


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The parking lot where they must have shattered that sheet of glass :)

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I was jumping up and down with excitement. Seriously.

OMG, I am soooooo very much jealous of you! I live in Utah and my bff and I are taking a trip to San Fran pretty soon and I am def going there. Stay tuned cus I will have some pics as well, haha. Very cool.

And I love that you are a Mac/Stevie fan and young....I'm not alone, even though my friends try and make me feel so weird for liking them, haha.

I used to live in Utah! I have lived in both Tooele and Ogden. :)

Hey, cool pictures. I'm glad you got a close-up of the door.
Is that a frog playing the cymbals?

From memory, I couldn't tell you-- although I'm keen to believe that you're right and that it is a frog.

Beautiful pictures of the San Fran area! And of the RP too :)
How exciting!!!

Awesome...and I love S.F., hope to get there again this year...thanks D.

SO AWESOME Danielle!!

My next goal is to somehow get inside that thing... it looks like not much has changed sinced 1976.

There is a movement to try and save it. See the Ken Callait thread in this forum. Here's Mick talking about it:

http://www.oursausalito.com/2009/05/...sausalito.html

Did you call? I bet that they'd let you take a quick tour.

I have to say, the parking lot picture is my favorite. I'm OBSESSED with the shattering glass.

That would be a good way for them to raise money, to allow tours. Of course, they'd do it on a limited basis only, maybe just a couple of days a week.

Michele

Are any bands still recording there? Otherwise I don't see why they couldn't make it open to the public for a fee of course.

Thank you so much for posting your pictures! I'm SO jealous! I've gotta get out to the SF bay area some day... the whole area just looks gorgeous. I know I'd certainly visit the Plant if they'd open it up for tours... and I live on the complete opposite side of the country! :lol:

Yes but there is down time and remember sessions rarely start before noon.

As am I... hence why I needed to take that picture.


But yeah, I'm definitely going to call and weasel myself in there. I need to see it!

I hate to break disappointing news, but the overdubs were done at the defunct L.A. Record Plant, so I think the glass was probably shattered there. I could be wrong of course!

So cool! I am very jealous! Thanks for posting!

It hurts my everything :distress:

Well I'm sure plenty of interesting things happened in that parking lot regardless.

Maybe somebody should contact Ken Calliat to ask where the glass was shattered, or we can just assume Sausalito since that's where we now have a picture. I'm checking Cath Carroll's book on the making of Rumours, but even that isn't gospel.

ah man danielle thats awesome, but now im gonna feel like an idiot... whats the shattered glass story?

After recording "Gold Dust Woman", Lindsey still wasn't totally satisfied with the result. Something wasn't quite eerie enough, so he had the idea of recording the sound of a huge sheet of glass shattering and somehow incorporating it into the song.

I just went and listened to the song to check that out haha thanks, your really pretty too, I'm jealous you got to go there

From Cath Carroll's Book On Rumours
 

"The band's roadies were sent out to find six panes of glass, which Fleetwood proceeded to break in the isolation booth of Studio D at the Village Recorder." Aside from all else I guess it would makes sense that the band would record the breaking glass indoors, where a better recording quality could be attained. They went for such a pristine sound on Rumours. I wonder who cleaned up the glass.

Well Danielle I guess now it's down to L.A.: http://www.villagestudios.com/

Very very cool Danielle! San Fran looks like SUCH a beautiful place that I would love to visit in the future!!! How I would love to go inside the plant as well!!

Do you think Lindsey is ever satisfied with a recording? I guess he looks happy with the immediate results on Walk A Thin Line in the Tusk documentary. I bet That's All For Everyone took more like a year though.

Haha well thank you! It was a really cool day and I'm going to go back sometime soon. :)

Carol Ann said in Storms that they did it in a parking lot... although I definitely don't take anything she said in that thing with more than the tiniest grain of salt. Hmmm.

Is that book worth reading? I've read Storms and I'm currently reading Mick's book... but I'm always up for some new Mac knowledge. :)

I'm actually going to LA in a few weeks, strangely enough... More Mac visits!

I'm currently re-reading Mick's book for the 4th time. :wavey:

Cath Carroll's Book On Rumours
 

It's enjoyable but after the first 100 pages (which cover the band's backstory, the formation of the Rumours lineup, and the first album they cut together), the book is very close informationally to the Classic Albums documentary. So you won't learn too much if you're familiar with that DVD. One difference that I found interesting though is Lindsey's statement in the documentary that he "politely informed Mick that Stevie and I were a package deal" versus the account in the book of Keith Olsen, producer of Buckingham Nicks and the white Fleetwood Mac album:

"On New Year's Eve, Mick Fleetwood gave me a call.... '[R]emember those two kids, you played their songs for me? Do you think they'd want to join my band? We really want only the guitar player, but they're a duo, aren't they?' And I said, 'Yeah , if you take one you're gonna have to take the other, that's the honest-to-God truth.' So he says, 'Well, can you talk to them and see if they'd want to join my band?' So, I called Stevie and Lindsey. It was New Year's Eve. I had a date and a bottle of cheap champagne, and we went over. I sat upstairs with Lindsey and Stevie and my date, and we stayed there from 9:00 P.M 'til 2:00 A.M, trying to convince them to at least try it."

Maybe Lindsey had already said something to Keith ("if Mick asks he needs to know Stevie and I are a package..."). But, at least per this account, it is Keith who delivered the message and it is Mick who raised the issue in the first place. Lindsey seems to give more of an impression that he is the one who had to broach the subject. I think it's interesting to read that Mick had already realized that they couldn't be separated, that Keith merely confirmed the impression, and that had Mick called asking for Stevie Keith would have told him the same thing. The "package deal" kind of loyalty seems to be mutual rather than one-sided. I think Lindsey still deserves a lot of credit for refusing to jump at the offer without insisting that Stevie go with him, even if he did so via representative rather than directly. But I think Lindsey comes off a lot less martyrly in Keith's account than he does in his own description of events.

I tried to visit one of the plants that Tusk was recorded at... to find that it wasn't there. D: But my parents thought that these things that appear to be apartments could be what happened to it. I also visited some other Mac sites, but I'll make another thread later. I'm staying at my uncle's house in Malibu and it's like 6 hours away from Sausalito, so I won't be getting to see the plant. D:

I will post the pic tomorrow, it's too big to attach and once again, my wifi card is running out. :/

Well TUSK was recorded at The Village Recorder in L.A.. You could always take photos of that for us, On the side of the building there used to be/might still be/ a painting of a giant sawed- in half- grand piano.

Stevie mentioned that even when Lindsey was in Fritz, he got an offer and the record company knew that they couldn't get him without her (which was odd, since they supposedly weren't even a couple then). So, maybe based on that history, Keith already knew they were a package deal.

Michele

Hi all,

Well I have a Record Plant story from May this year. I combined my US holiday with a few FM concerts on the west coast including SF and LA. I did a ferry trip to Sausalito and found the place on foot. I was about 5 minutes away and saw a limo drive past. Thought nothing of it. When I arrived, there were a couple of limos and some other flash cars outside - see pics (have more but Danielle's are better).

I didn't know the place had closed down and thought some band was inside recording. I didn't have the nerve to go and knock on the door and just took a few photos and happily went on my way.

The next day, Mick's Youtube video went online. This day was also in that free time he mentioned that happened due to their cancelled Sacramento concert. I don't know for sure, but there is a fair chance that it was Mick and his "people" inside, about to shoot that video. I've compared the shadows in my pics with his video and it appears to be a similar time of day.

What bad luck with the timing? I'm sure he would have spoken to a lone Australian tourist who had made all that effort! I would have loved to meet him. Anyway, it's a great story to tell to Mac fans!

cheers, Gazz

This is great! I have never heard this story. It is very detailed from Olsen's perspective, giving a little more credence. Of course, I'm not surprised at Stevie's romantic doctoring...

But, Michele, how are they living in a house in Los Gatos, with bed on floor no less, (per Stevie's new Gypsy intros) if they are not together? I mean, come on...

Is that what it is? I always thought it was a mural of the collapsed freeway overpass from the 1971 San Fernando earthquake.

I legitimately live in Los Gatos. Can someone do some major investigating and find an address or something? I live in Los Gatos, they lived in Los Gatos.......

Wow.

It's a shame. If Stevie had been talking about their little house all along, since the seventies, we'd probably have a pretty good idea where it was by now. But since she just let the cat (or should I say gato) out of the bag this tour, we're all clueless.

Michele