Tucked away in an industrial area of Garland is a small, unassuming building that holds the keys to Texas music history.
Audio Dallas, formerly Autumn Sound Studios, is where the king of outlaw country, Willie Nelson, recorded three albums, including Red Headed Stranger, which turned 50 this spring.
Garland hosted a two-day, citywide celebration that included tours of the storied studio.
Paul and Kim Osborn bought the property in the mid-’90s and have been running it ever since. They cleaned, painted and removed the shag carpet, but tried to keep everything else the same.
“The hardest part was getting the smoke smell out of the walls because they smoked in the building,” Paul Osborn said. “There's a lot of elements that we just said we're not going to change. We want to keep it like it was. We want you to be able to walk in and feel like you were still back in the ’70s recording a hit record.”
Willie Nelson, center, records in Autumn Sound Studios. (Courtesy | Audio Dallas)
When it comes to equipment, Osborn’s theory is the older the better. “We still record on tape, and we do it the old-fashioned way. It sounds better to us,” he said.
Rhett Miller, of the Old 97s, appreciates this approach to making music, and said it is part of what makes Red Headed Stranger so special. Miller was one of a handful of North Texas musicians who performed in a tribute concert at the Granville Arts Center.
“It’s a really magical thing. It’s just so human,” he said. “I think that Red Headed Stranger benefits, all of these years later even, from its humanity. It just sounds like a real thing that was happening in a dimly lit room somewhere out of the public eye. And somebody is really exposing their deepest human self.”
When the record first came out, record executives panned its stripped-down production. Jon Mastin, a bass player and longtime member of the North Texas music scene, said that at the time, labels wanted all country albums to have what was called the “Nashville Sound.”
“They put a bunch of steel guitars on it. They put a bunch of chorus vocals over it. They just kept stacking crap on there until there wasn't a place to breathe anywhere in the song where there wasn't a bunch of stuff going on,” Mastin said. “Willie had a different vision.”
That vision opened doors for other Texas artists, and it earned Nelson his first Grammy award. The album topped the Billboard charts and went multiplatinum.
The album remains a boon to Garland today.
“The one thing that I'm proudest of, it's been Audio Dallas for a couple of decades. It was Autumn Sound for a short period of time. Autumn Sound was successful with the Willie stuff, but it was short-lived. We took it and we carried the torch,” Osborn said.
“And we've done 30 or 40 gold or platinum records here since we've bought it. It's still alive. It was here for the past generations. It was here for this generation, and it's going to be here for generations to come.”
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