Millie
Felch and Ralph Terrana in Golden World's former Control
Room
photograph
courtesy of Ralph Terrana
JoAnne, "We were of course still
travelling to New York City to get arrangements done, so now
that we had the premises in place and a source for the
equipment, it was now time for us to check out some studios in the hope
of finding someone
to oversee the installation.
We went
over to Bell Sound on West 54th Street, but it was booked solid.
Someone suggested that we use Yellow Pages to call a
couple of studios. One of them was Mirasound.
The
owner, Mr Bob Goldman, said he would get in touch with an engineer and see
if he could come down and do a session for us and offer some
advice.
The
following day we met up with Mr Bob d'Orleans who apparently
worked at Mirasound in his spare time. His main job was at
Bell Sound, but we had never come across him there. It
was obvious from the session that he was extremely talented,
and when we heard that he had built the Mirasound Studio, we
knew that we had found our man." Bob
recalled those days fondly. "New York City was the
place to be back then as L.A. was still low key. Sessions
were happening all over the place with people running here
and there. Most
sessions would be in three hourly blocks; say from 10am to
1pm, 2pm to 5pm and 7pm to 10pm. So musicians could be
working at Bell Sound in the morning, RCA in the afternoon
and CBS in the evening. The pressure was on however
because nobody wanted to pay overtime! In
the late fifties I was working with the likes of Frankie
Avalon, Paul Anka and Bobby Rydell at Bell Sound. So many
artists and sessions, it was ridiculous. Someone
used to bring in Black artists in the early hours. I vividly
recall engineering Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas
City" at 4am! He wanted three minutes on his song but I
told him I was beat and that we would have to fade out on
two and half minutes.
I think it paid off!"
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