They hired Nashville-based designer Steven Durr to bring their ideas to life, starting with a new office building for the label, allowing them to keep the recording facility separate and create a comfortable environment for artists.Ībove: A playlist of YouTube videos from Malaco Studios (malacomg)ĭurr gave the studio a slightly larger footprint, flipping the control room to the south side of the complex and enlarging the main tracking room and three isolation rooms. “We came to the decision that if we were going to rebuild here, we would make it a commercial studio again,” says Bruce, who came to Malaco in the mid-1990s after stints at Bad Animals in Seattle and Muscle Shoals Sound in Alabama.īruce and Stephenson began brainstorming ways to improve on the studio’s layout, which had grown into a hodgepodge with rooms tacked onto it over the years.
But in an era when classic studios were being torn down or repurposed coast to coast, Malaco founders Wolf Stephenson and Tommy Couch had to decide if rebuilding the studio made sense. The Malaco record label and distribution arm could continue without much of a hitch. In an instant, the future of historic Malaco Studios, where Paul Simon, Lucinda Williams, Little Milton, Bobby Rush and so many others had recorded, became a question mark. “It wasn’t gone, but there were these gaps where water’s coming in.” “The tornado picked the roof off the building, turned it and dropped it back down on the walls,” Bruce explains. This is a mess, but it’s time to start cleaning up.”Īs staff chased paperwork from filing cabinets around the parking lot in the rain, Bruce pulled visqueen over the API Legacy console and other prized gear as water poured in from holes in the roof. Then it started sinking in that everyone’s okay. “Slowly, everyone started walking out, and we were all just looking around at each other. “There was a side door on the vault that went out to the parking lot,” Bruce says. Minutes later, what was left of Malaco lay in soggy heaps of debris.
He and a dozen other staffers raced into an interior room just as the suction slammed the door shut and the roof started to cave in. Before he could pull it up, though, his ears began to pop as the pressure dropped. Big Stuff,” “Groove Me” and “Ring My Bell” almost didn’t survive after a tornado blew away much of its Jackson, Miss., headquarters.Ĭhief engineer Kent Bruce was in the facility on April 15, 2011, and had just heard reports of a tornado nearby when he decided to check out the radar.