Church Studio: Testimony and Confession
The colorful history of Leon Russell and Teresa Knox's Tulsa sanctuary
Confession
Forgive me reader for I have sinned.
The Third Ear is retracting the following statement from “American Humor” :
For forward-looking technology people at the time, the revered Neve 68 was considered a relic of the past, for some reason, though it was only a few years old. So in the early 70s people like Leon Russell went divin’ through dumpsters looking for the necessary parts to piece this Frankenstein back to together.
It’s been updated, to reflect the necessary corrections.
There’s a morsel of truth to this mistake, but I got my signals crossed, there on the mixing board. The time is out of joint—as I’ll testify below.
Something didn’t sit right about my recollection of that story I heard, at Church Studio. So I reached out to the owner for clarification. And my Church Studio guide, Bob.
I heard the docent there refer to this console as a “Neve 68.”
That’s his reflection there, in the confession booth window, Bob.
The docent politely removed himself from every photo frame, which is more than I can say for myself in this Fun House full of mirrors. All that remained of Bob were two ghostly images, and one disembodied hand. Just enough to track him down this week.
I took Bob’s “Neve 68” to be the console’s year of vintage, 1968.
Its full designation is the Neve 8068, one of three models introduced between 1976-1977.
When Leon Russell began building Shelter Records—this console had yet to be invented. Hard to go digging for pieces of something that doesn’t exist.
Moreover, according to Neve History, at the time of Shelter’s founding:
The late ’60s and the ’70s, a lot of this really beautiful equipment was being made and installed into studios around the world and the Neve boards were considered like the Cadillacs of recording consoles…
– Dave Grohl
State of the art, hardly an abandoned relic of the past. However, by the time Nirvana recorded Nevermind on a Neve in 1991—the 8058/8068 was an analogue artifact. A coveted one.
Now, I made it pretty plain and playful that in “American Humor,” I was a two-faced talkin snake with a forked silver tongue speakin in other people’s voices, lyin and signiyin from behind a mask—but I ain’t no hypocrite.
When The Third Ear mishears or re-remembers something—when it makes mistakes, it issues corrections.
I’m my own ombudsman. The sole fact-checker. Lone editor—except this week. Enlisted two saintly assistants for a few days, from Church Studio.
Confession made. Here’s the testimonial truth, far as we can tell it.
Testimony
Let the record show, as previously stated, that Church Studio began life as the Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in 1915.
One of Tulsa’s earliest churches, Grace M.E. survived the Tulsa race riots six years later, in 1921. It housed various denominations, including one of Tulsa’s first interracial congregations, in the ensuing years. Before Leon Russell came along and founded Shelter Records here with his business partner Denny Cordell in 1972.
By that time, the House of God was in shambles, and Russell reimagined it as an artistic sanctuary of eccentricity and experimentation, which flourished in the years between 1972 and 1976.
Until Leon lost interest. “If you really want to get the right sound … Build your own recording studio,” Russell said. He did, but Leon always liked to have a home studio as well. So he built another on the edge of town.
He turned his attention to the Paradise Recording Studio inside his lakeside home, Maple Ridge mansion, previously owned by an oil tycoon.
Which Leon Russell nearly burned down, exterminating wasp nests by flame.
The un-charred chairs salvaged from that 19th century mansion, are now in the “Green Room,” where artists relax or conduct business, while others record below.
The banquet table behind those oil-money antiques is set with plates of vinyl. Shelter records reflecting Leon Russell’s legacy.
The Concert for Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, where Leon performed in a supergroup with ex-Beatles, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston—the first charity benefit of its kind, for East Pakistani refugees.
Carney. First track, side one: Russell’s hit song, “Tight Rope.” The most emblematic, autobiographical expression of Leon’s life as a performer, in this Ear’s opinion.
The Green Room looks down on the main recording space below, once lined with pews. The altar, choir loft, and Reverend’s quarters would’ve been at the back, pre-Shelter Studio.
This is about as high as you can get with a camera, up there with the clouds. Beyond the Green Room ascends a narrow wooden staircase, where creaky footsteps make a music of their own. Up to the belfry, which you can touch but can’t take home. Not in pictures.
After Leon, the Church real estate went through various owners, including the Indian Council for Drug Abuse and Addiction, before it fell back into disrepair. Until one saintly woman bought it for restoration forty years after Leon’s exodus. Woman named Teresa Knox. Not a music-industry person at the time, just a preservationist with a heart of gold.
Teresa Knox only knew the place from the exterior. The owners at the time refused to let her peek inside—there were animal carcasses and syringes in the basement. Feared the potential buyer’d be repulsed by the interior guts.
Teresa took it anyway. Bought it sight unseen, in 2016. Talk about guts. Now that’s Faith.
Mother Teresa, I call her.
Teresa’s the one who went scavenging for, and customizing, the necessary parts to restore Daniel Lanois’ Neve 8068.
Straight from the Mother Superior’s mouth:
I picked the console up (and a Hammond B3) at Dan's Silverlake home. The restoration took place in South San Francisco…
The Neve was pretty much intact but we did have to replace a lot of parts. Neve parts are hard to come by so we have a combination of original Neve and we had a few custom parts made.
It did take 4.5 years to get the Neve back to factory settings. Not sure if anyone ever "dumpster dived" for Neve parts (certainly not Leon) or others. Analog gear has always had a following, even with the digital explosion and post-covid, the analog pieces are even more coveted.
Here’s where The Ear got its signals crossed. Bob the docent rerouted them this morning, speaking into The Third Ear by phone.
As a Church Studio guide, Bob once gave a tour to a man and his wife. Husband happened to’ve been a sound engineer at Saturday Night Live—and if Bob’s memory serves, at Electric Lady as well—along with some other East Coast studios. Helped Eric Clapton, a former Shelter artist, conduct his soundcheck for SNL, where he treated the crew to a little pre-show concert.
As the sound engineer at SNL colorfully put it, at the beginning of the digital revolution in the 1990s, he did go “diving through dumpsters,” plying pawn-shop shelves, looking for the necessary parts to piece his Frankenstein back together. His Neve—not Mother Teresa’s and Daniel Lanois’.
The Church Studio console is in fact the same one on the cover of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, when it resided inside an abandoned Mexican movie theater, which Dan Lanois and Mark Howard converted into a recording retreat, the Teatro in Oxnard, CA.
That was in the late 90s, long before Lanois sold his Neve to Teresa Knox. Here’s how the L.A. Times described the Teatro, and the console that would become Mother Teresa’s mixing board, in 1998.
Kinda sounds like a Church:
This is no mere sterile recording studio: Think neogothic sonic sanctum.
Old movie posters of the risque Mexican comedies that once played in the cinema adorn the walls of the former lobby, now dominated by a large pool table.
The theater itself is a cavernous yet surprisingly intimate 10,000-square-foot space shorn of most of its movie seats, with a soaring ceiling and warmed by an eclectic decor.
A massive recording console taken from the New York studio where renowned producer Phil Spector once plied his trade bisects the theater.
Perched on the knobs of the 1977-era console is a black-and-white snapshot of John Lennon at the controls, an inspirational reminder that the former Beatle used the equipment to record “Double Fantasy” just before he was slain in 1980.
There the console was also used to record Willie Nelson’s Teatro with Emmylou Harris, channel Neil Young, and—one might infer—perhaps something by Bob Dylan. (He sat in front of it for the Time Out of Mind photo, but that album was recorded in Miami.) Now it’s used to record everything from country to hip hop at Church Studio.
Somewhere between the late 1950s and 1972, when Leon bought it, the Church interior became dilapidated. It was in slightly better condition than Teresa Knox found it, when dead animals and drug paraphernalia were hiding in the basement, beneath the chapel floor.
Which is now a “floating floor,” with acoustic airspace beneath it, and “sound clouds” above—floating baffles—thanks to Mother Teresa.
That’s the Hand of Bob pointing towards Cloud Nine in the back, suspended in front of what used to be the choir loft. Leon Russell nearly killed himself demolishing it. Brought the loft down on top of himself.
I’d call this the inner sanctum, what used to be the center of the congregation, but the building is rich with hidden isolation rooms—like that rear drum booth, in the old Reverend’s quarters. And echo chambers, like this one, which reflects not only sound but light.
Spaces like the “BlueVerb Room” and “Carney Room.” This is the latter Room Full of Mirrors.
The real Holiest of Holies resides way up in the belfry, where photography’s not allowed. Unless someone’s recording a podcast or documentary, as was the case when Bob let me ascend and penetrate the sacred bell tower.
Below is the threshold:
No longer a Church entrance, the doors of the old chapel remain locked, except for special occasions. What’s behind those holy doors at the top of the sacred stairs is downright profane… except for this democratic sentiment of spiritual welcoming.
Those two points of light in the reflection—those are peep holes.
If you look closely at the Shelter stairs, you can trace the footsteps of people like Leon Russell, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, J.J. Cale, Jimmy Buffett, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, Stevie Wonder, Freddie King, Peter Tosh, Wolfman Jack, and countless others who hung out or recorded here.
The chips in the stone are from musicians lugging their amps up the stairs. I’m told one indentation towards the bottom belongs to George Harrison.
Here’s what’s behind those doors up top. Might help explain one side of Leon Russell.
That’s not so obscene. The floors are clean. Those window portals were bored so musicians could peep through the doors, which even in Shelter days, remained locked—rough neighborhood.
But if a male songbird fancied what he saw, blinding beauty instead of a shady character lingering on the steps outside, the doors were open to female callers. There’s a celestial chandelier hanging from the ceiling, modeled after Leon’s beard…
If you peek out the window to the left, you can gaze upon the grill where Tom Petty inked his first record deal in 1972—as “Mudcrutch.” (Rumor has it Leon suggested the Heartbreaker might consider a better band name.) At The Ranch House (or as Russell called it, the “Roach House”). Now known as the Free Way Café—in Tulsa, where Highway 66 begins.
Nothing nasty here, just the ghosts of cockroaches past. And the road where Petty returned empty-handed from L.A.
Highway to heaven, or hell, old 66. Depends on how you sing, and which way you look.
Turn around, and hold your breath.
The proprietor’s bidet. Leon suffered from cerebral palsy, had difficulty getting around, and required an accessible washroom downstairs.
The throne is original, but the erotic wallpaper is a liberty of the restoration process. A recreation inspired by Leon’s “velveteen ‘girly’” decor, according to Teresa Knox.
Bob thought the original wallpaper might’ve belonged to the subsequent society of Native American owners as well. Perhaps they merely retained Leon’s sense of taste, or ignored it. (By the time Teresa Knox bought it, the room was patterned in cowhide.)
In an earlier Tulsa post about illustrator Art Spiegelman, I mentioned pareidolia: the psychological tendency to project images onto a nebulous pattern—the Rorschach inkblot test, cloud-spotting, e.g.
As a third example, Spiegelman mentioned seeing a smiley-face in a power socket—and if you Google “pareidolia,” that’s the first example you’ll find.
It doesn’t take much imagination to project an image onto the electrical outlets below.
Profanity inside the Church bathroom, beauty stirred with vulgarity. You might call that “grotesque,” a mixture of high-and-low. Different races, faces, genders and classes, past and future.
It’s kind of like pop music in a way, from the beautiful to the grotesque.
—Leon Russell on his mask collection in Billboard Magazine, 2001
Speaking of pop music, the grotesque, electricity and masks…
I said, “I ain’t no hypocrite”—and I meant it. But that was also wordplay. “Hypocrite” is ancient Greek for “actor.” Literally, “one who interprets from beneath”—a mask.
After Leon Russell, Church Studio was attended by a self-described “electric Indian.” An actor and musician.
I learned that after Leon’s ownership, the Indian Council for Drug Abuse and Addiction purchased the building and turned it into a rehabilitation center that offered counseling services, dance lessons, and acting classes… I was starstruck when I discovered that the Church was where Wes Studi took acting classes.
—Teresa Knox, Oklahoma Magazine (Apr. 2022).
Wes Studi became the first indigenous American to win an Honorary Academy Award in 2019, for lifetime achievement—Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Geronimo…
Last of the Mohicans was a 19th-century romance novel of the popular “disappearing Indian” variety, by James Fenimore Cooper. A Euro-American with a primitivist fascination with Rousseau’s “noble savage”—writing in “redskin.”
Yet Studi played one of Cooper’s Mohicans on the silver screen, along with historical legends like Geronimo.
He was also part of the American Indian Movement resistance, arrested at the occupation of Pine Ridge-Wounded Knee a year after Leon Russell founded Shelter Records. A few years before he took acting lessons at an Indian rehab center inside Church Studio.
Studi also studied acting at The American Indian Theatre Company in Tulsa—which may or may not be related to Church. Their website says it was founded inside “a warehouse” in 1976, the same year Leon Russell left Church.
Bob the docent mentioned the Theatre Company, along with Church—probably because Wes Studi inhabited both. He also mentioned Will Sampson, whose American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts in L.A. helped Studi launch his career in California.
“Chief,” from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Indian. Played by journalist
’s would-be father-in-law, Will Sampson.David Carradine, an Irish-American actor famous for playing kung-fu characters, played the titular role in Black Elk Speaks, a Sioux medicine man alongside Will Sampson’s Red Cloud, in an American Indian Theatre performance in 1984.
According to this article, so did Wes Studi, in his first paid gig, also supporting David Carradine’s Black Elk in the early 1980s.
Wes Studi’s most recent achievement is the first TV series written and directed entirely by indigenous Americans—including Will Sampson’s grandchild, Nancy Rommelman’s daughter Tafv Sampson—Reservation Dogs. Also the first series to be filmed entirely in Oklahoma, where Studi, like Sampson, was born. (Some cast members, along with guest-actor Ethan Hawke, happened to show up at Cain’s Ballroom the week of the Tulsa Switchyard Festival.)
How’s that for a hypocrite’s “interpretation from beneath”? The Third Ear’s vision of “electric Indians,” interracial actors, authors, and grotesque progress delivered from the Church toilet downstairs.
Certain forms of disability have historically been regarded as “grotesque” afflictions—see David Lynch’s heart-wrenching depiction of carnival freak shows in The Elephant Man.
As I discussed with regard to Scott Timberg’s “Origins of the Creative Class,” affliction was often what distinguished the primitive artist-magician from the rest of society. The origins of social hierarchy, this figure went from revered to revolting, to celebrated. From neolithic shaman to lowly Roman actor/musician to rockstar and Hollywood celebrity.
Leon Russel suffered from a disability, cerebral palsy, but he was also a child piano prodigy, with no instruction, by the age of four. Startled his mother in the parlor, if you care to read the blue note below.
Even as a professional, he incorporated childish noisemaker mischief into his carney creations. Bob Dylan’s not the only whiteface minstrel I know, despite my jokes in “American Humor”…
Leon gathered what he found—simple or sophisticated, high or low, beautiful or ugly—and turned it into art and music. Even his afflictions.
Though he was a piano prodigy by the time he could toddle, as a mature guitar player, Russell’s cerebral palsy forced him to improvise his own technique, and develop a distinctive sound.
His high-school band backed Jerry Lee Lewis.
From there, he left Will Rogers High with his friend J.J. Cale for L.A., where they joined the most renowned session band in history, The Wrecking Crew.
Played behind Dylan and the Stones.
The Wrecking Crew’s the backbeat for half of American pop-music’s golden-age hits. Recordings that millions have relished, without realizing they were hearing the same set of musicians, playing in the shadows behind various stars.
Elton John referred to Leon as his “mentor”—which is about all I knew of Leon Russell before I visited this sacred chapel at the beginning of Hwy 66, other than that he was a flamboyant character, who wrote and worked a lotta musical magic behind the scenes.
At some point he came back to Tulsa, turned a church into a Shelter, his home into a Paradise, then set his nests on fire and continued on his way, walking the “Tight Rope” til he died.
I’m up on the tight wire, one side’s ice and one is fire. It’s a circus game with you and me.
I’m up on the tight rope, one side’s hate and one is hope. But the top-hat on my head is all you see.
And the wire seems to be, the only place for me. A comedy of errors and I’m falling…
I’m up in the spotlight, oh does it feel right. Oh the altitude seems to get to me.
I’m up on the tight wire, flanked by life and the funeral pyre. Putting on a show for you to see.
And a woman named Teresa Knox turned his ashes into miracles forty years later, the same year he passed, beginning in 2016.
Life is what you make of it, death awaits us all. Beauty depends on how you look at it. That’s the echoes of a sermon I heard in Church one day:
Perspective is everything.
Like this anamorphic painting, sculpture, and video installation.
See that incongruous blotch at the bottom? That’s death, waitin’ for you to turn the wrong corner.
See those shattered pieces, hanging from the ceiling?
That’s a beautiful place to hide.
The Church Studio, sanctuary for an afternoon.
Like a rubber-neck giraffe, you look into my past. Well maybe you’re just too blind to … see.