Billy Rhodes Porter (June 15, 1931 – July 7, 2010) was an American audio engineer and record producer who pioneered the Nashville sound and recorded stars such as Chet Atkins, Louis Armstrong, The Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Gladys Knight, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Skeeter Davis, Ike & Tina Turner, Sammy Davis Jr., and Roy Orbison from the late 1950s through the 1980s. In one week of 1960, his recordings accounted for 15 of Billboard magazine's Top 100, a feat none have matched. Porter's engineering career included over 7,000 recording sessions, 300 chart records, 49 Top 10, 11 Number Ones, and 37 gold records.
Porter mixed live concert sound for Elvis Presley, at Presley’s request, from 1970 until the singer's death in 1977. As a University of Miami music professor, Porter helped create the first college program in audio engineering, and went on to teach similar courses at the University of Colorado Denver, and Webster University in St. Louis. Porter was inducted into the TEC Hall of Fame in 1992.
Early life Porter was born in St. Louis, Missouri on June 15, 1931. His father, a professional baseball player, moved the family to Tennessee when he was 10. He grew up loving jazz music and baseball, and for a time considered an athletic career starting with the minor leagues.Rumble, Part One, p. 27 He graduated from East Nashville High School in 1949, then served in the United States Army Reserves while studying electronics at a University of Tennessee extension program in Nashville.
Recording career RCA Records
Porter began his engineering career in 1954 at WLAC-TV in Nashville, Tennessee. He mixed up to four microphones for television broadcast for $92 per week, equivalent to $ today. At nearby RCA Records in 1959, the chief engineer was transferred after angering Chet Atkins, and Porter applied for the position. He was told by an RCA executive in New York City that the job would ruin his marriage, but Porter said "I can handle that." He was hired at $148 per week, equivalent to $ today. He was given two weeks to learn all the equipment and how to mix up to 12 microphones for music recordings.
Shortly after starting with RCA on March 31, 1959, Porter mixed the single "Lonesome Old House" for Don Gibson; it was a crossover success in both the country music and the pop music charts, and Porter began to be requested by name. In June 1959, he mixed "The Three Bells" for the Browns, with Atkins producing and Anita Kerr arranging. While editing the master to be sent to New York for pressing, Porter accidentally hit the wrong controls on the tape recorder and stretched the tape at the beginning of the song, distorting the pitch. Without telling anyone, he spliced a different take with a good intro onto the beginning, and sent that version instead. Four decades later, Porter recalled his quick fix: "this was a need-to-know situation and I figured nobody needed to know. I had been in the business three months or something like that. You're not a good engineer until you destroy a master and hopefully live to talk about it."McClellan, 2004, p. 150 In July, the song went to number one on the U.S. country and pop charts, and Porter's reputation rose.
Porter served for four years as the chief engineer under guitarist and producer Atkins. Porter became the engineer big-name artists wanted to work with, and he was influential in creating the Nashville sound. Record producer Owen Bradley once asked Atkins how he got his sound, and Atkins said, "it was Bill Porter." He recorded more than 579 records that charted—49 were top 10, 11 were number one, and 37 were certified gold records. Most were recorded at RCA Studios in Nashville, where Porter was responsible for the sound. (At the time, there was only one studio, with no letter designation. In 1964, when the larger RCA Studio A was built, the original studio was renamed as "Studio B".) The studio's acoustics were problematic, with resonant room modes creating an uneven frequency response. To lessen the problem, Porter took $60 from the studio's petty cash and bought fiberglass acoustic ceiling panels which he and Tommy Strong, his assistant engineer, cut into triangles and hung from the ceiling at varying heights; these were called "Porter Pyramids". When Porter left RCA in late-1964, Atkins said, "the sound was never the same, never as great."
Adjacent to Studio B was a utility room containing a plate reverb device made by EMT, German makers of similar effects units installed in other recording studios around the world. The EMT 140 reverb was an electro-mechanical echo chamber used to add artificial reverberation effects to recordings. Porter arranged to have the dedicated echo room cooled down as much as possible with an air conditioner, and he adjusted the ten springs on the EMT plate to be tighter than usual, in order to feed the plate more audio signal and get a cleaner sound returning from the device. So much signal was being sent to the plate that Porter disconnected the associated VU meter so that he would not be bothered with its needle slamming against its peg. Porter related that the EMT's springs frequently broke under the increased tension, and he would have to replace them, but that the trouble was worth achieving a "brighter and fuller" echo effect.
Porter recorded nearly all of Presley's number one hits upon the singer's return from Army duty in 1960. Porter had not studied Presley's earlier recordings—he started fresh, "doing what I thought it should be." Instead of the usual microphones used by RCA, Porter chose to use a Telefunken U-47 on Presley's voice, recording several songs through the night of March 20–21, 1960, including "Stuck On You" and the ballad "Fame and Fortune". After Porter edited the two songs from the session tape, an RCA executive took the tapes from his hands to fly them to New York, where record presses were standing by and labels were pre-printed and waiting. The single "Stuck On You" with "Fame and Fortune" on the B-side was released three days later and immediately returned Presley to the number one chart position. Porter engineered "Are You Lonesome Tonight", "It's Now or Never", and other early 1960s Elvis hits.
Much of RCA's business was what they called "custom" clients—independent labels not affiliated with RCA, but willing to pay for recording sessions at the proven hit-maker studio. One outstanding client was Monument Records under producer Fred Foster, bringing his client Roy Orbison. Porter was able to create for Orbison his trademark sound, with background vocals brought nearer the foreground, beginning with "Only the Lonely". For that session, Porter discarded his standard mix style of building up from a foundation of percussion, and instead used the vocal countermelody as the foreground sound, and built the other sounds below and around it, leaving the percussion almost inaudible. The song's success cemented this mix style as Orbison's sound. Other Orbison hits recorded for Monument at RCA Nashville were "It's Over", "Running Scared" and "Oh, Pretty Woman". Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax" and Al Hirt's "Java" are other Monument recordings that Porter engineered at RCA.
By October 1960, Porter was pulling in so many non-RCA clients that RCA decided to emphasize that side of the business. RCA Records placed a full-page advertisement in Billboards Country & Western section declaring that he and his assistant, Tommy Strong, were "a couple of big dialers", ready to help RCA Custom Record Sales engage more independent labels. Full page advertisement. "A Couple of Big Dialers! Say 'Howdy' to Bill Porter and Tommy Strong."
The atmosphere in the studio was important to Porter. He felt that the "music has to show the emotion of the artist", and he took pains to enhance the mood in the room. For the album Christmas with Chet Atkins, recorded in July 1961, Porter knew that getting a Christmas mood in the heat of summer would be difficult—he came to the studio that morning carrying all his Christmas decorations, and made the studio look the part. Years later he recalled, "when everybody came in for the session, they were in the mood."
Friction rose between Porter and RCA's personnel department regarding Porter's small publishing company which he co-founded with Anita Kerr—they said it constituted a conflict of interest. Porter argued that Atkins had his own publishing, as did others in the business, but RCA personnel told him to stop, so he decided to leave the company. RCA's legal department said they found nothing wrong with the practice, and RCA executive Steve Sholes called Porter to ask him to stay, but he determined that he did not want to be "dictated to" by personnel.
Columbia and Monument
Porter left RCA in November 1964 to engineer for Columbia Records in Nashville, where he stayed for six months, bringing some of his custom clients with him. He left Columbia for Monument to manage the Fred Foster Sound Studio, a Nashville recording studio located at 315 Seventh Street North that Foster had acquired from Sam Phillips. Porter found the studio's acoustic space to be superior to RCA's Studio B—it was a high-ceilinged room built to house a Masonic Lodge—but the audio equipment owned by Foster was inferior. The EMT plate was not as good for reverb effects. No top ten hits were engineered by Porter at Foster's studio.
On the advice of his agent, Wesley Rose, Orbison left Monument in mid-1965 for a more lucrative contract with MGM Records, with Rose taking over as producer. Orbison did not ask for Porter on his recording sessions, and he did not have any hit songs with MGM. Years later, Porter said that, though he really liked Orbison, the singer "never understood the engineer's contribution." It was Rose's advice to leave Monument, and he was "doing his job as a manager" to get more money, but, said Porter, "he didn't know that much about the music." Porter felt that only with himself as engineer, Fred Foster as producer and Anita Kerr as arranger was Orbison going to find the right combination.
Las Vegas In August 1966, Porter and his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, to purchase United Recording of Nevada from Bill Putnam of United Western Recorders in Los Angeles. Putnam was slimming down his business and wished to sell the studio now that Wally Heider had left it. Porter's first day at the studio was September 1. At that time, United Recording of Nevada had been operating for four years and was the most prominent of the six recording studios in Las Vegas, but it had problems with its equipment, radio frequency interference from nearby broadcast transmitters, and rumbling noises generated by Union Pacific freight trains passing the building. Porter made recordings at his studio for artists such as personal friend Paul Anka, who would arrive at 2:00 am after his show and record until dawn. Other projects involved recording live shows at Las Vegas hotels, including Buddy Rich's Mercy, Mercy live album at Caesars Palace in 1968. Porter’s studio also recorded Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World.