Gold Star Studios (site)

Gold Star Studios operated at 6252 Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood from 1950 until its demolition in 1984 — three and a half decades during which it became the most sonically distinctive recording room in Los Angeles and, arguably, in American popular music. The studio was built and run by engineers Stan Ross and Dave Gold, who invested in a custom echo chamber that gave the room its characteristic wash of reverb. When Phil Spector began working there in the early 1960s, he found a room that could accommodate his increasingly obsessive vision of sound — multiple guitars, multiple pianos, drums, horns, strings, all layered into a dense, shimmering mass that he called the Wall of Sound.

The records made at Gold Star under Spector's direction include some of the most commercially and critically successful singles in American music history: "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes, "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Then He Kissed Me" by the Crystals, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers, "River Deep – Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. Brian Wilson studied what Spector was doing at Gold Star and then went further: Pet Sounds was recorded here, and the six months of sessions for "Good Vibrations" — arguably the most complex single ever made to that point — took place in this studio. Eddie Cochran recorded "Summertime Blues" here in 1958; Ritchie Valens recorded "La Bamba" in this room. Sonny and Cher made their early records here. The studio that produced this canon was demolished for a mini-mall.

A small historical plaque was later installed at the site. The Wall of Sound and its descendants run through fifty years of recorded music; the room that generated it is now a parking lot on a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard that gives nothing away.