If you want a slick sound, we're not your studio.
If you want soul and funk and real passion and feeling, this is your place.
I'm Judy Hood.
I'm Chairman of the Muscle Show's Music Foundation.
We're at 3614 Jackson Highway, the original Muscle Show sound studio, which Keith Richards
refers to the room we're standing in as Rock and Roll Heaven.
Four young men came here and turned this tiny, concrete block building into one of the most
influential recording studios in the world.
And those four young men were the swampers, otherwise known as the Muscle Show's rhythm
section.
They got their start at Fame Studio under the tutelage of Rick Hall.
And in 1969, they left Fame, they were his house fan, they left Fame and came here to
start this studio.
The stones cut here, Cher was the first client that they had to cut here.
Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bob Singer, the staple singers, Levon Helm, Linda Ronstadt, I mean
the list just goes on and on and on.
They left in 1978 because they had totally outgrown this place.
I mean, rock bands from all over the world were wanting to come here and they just had
this one studio.
So they moved to a much bigger facility.
They were here from 1969 to 1978.
And after they left, the building became a lot of different things.
At one point, it was an appliance store with a used washing machine right about where Mick
Jagger stood over there and a broken down dishwasher just about where David was sitting
when he played his signature bass lick on I'll Take You There.
After the Muscle Show's documentary premiered at Sundance, we knew that people from all
over the world were going to want to come here and fill the mojo.
So we formed the Muscle Show's Music Foundation, which is a non-profit, and through some very
generous donors purchased the building.
It was in terrible shape.
The roof was leaking, the floors were horrible.
It was structurally not sound, not really safe.
So we thought, okay, now we have a fixer-upper, which it definitely was, but no money to fix
her up.
And then one Tuesday night, Dr. Dre and his partner Jimmy Ivey saw the Muscle Show's
movie in a theater in Santa Monica.
And that very night, they were so captivated by the story that that very night they decided
to form a philanthropic wing of Beats Electronics and call it Sustain the Sound.
And the mission of the philanthropic wing would be to take iconic studios, old iconic studios
like this one, and restore them to their original glory, and they decided to start with us.
We were all totally committed to restoring it authentically, absolutely, the way it was
when the Swampers were here.
That piano is the original piano, so when you listen to songs like Codacrum, Bob Seeger
hits, and Stone's hits, that's actually the piano where the original Freebird was recorded.
Since March of 2014, we've had 32,000 people from 40 countries in every state of the Union
come to stand where we're standing right now.
More often than not, at least one member of the group cries when they enter this room.
And it's usually a big burly male that you wouldn't expect to do that.
And I think there are a few reasons for that.
I think one is nobody can believe that this humble building became that.
So I think this room represents hope.
This room represents passion and dreams that can come true.
We will be forever indebted to Beats Electronics because they made it possible for the Swampers
to come home again.
