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BY MIKE EASTERLING
On the surface, there was little reason for anyone to recognize the night of Sept. 17 as a significant footnote in Tulsa’s popular music history. Only a month before, Paul McCartney had graced the stage at downtown’s glittering BOK Center, and two nights earlier, pop diva Britney Spears had jiggled her way through a sold-out show there.
But this particular Thursday night–overcast, muggy and somewhat gloomy–seemed better suited as an evening to take in a high school football game under the lights than an opportunity to experience a music event with historic resonance.
To be sure, there were few people who took advantage of what the evening had to offer. At an unusual-looking structure at 304 S. Trenton–across the street from the better-known Ranch House Café, a Tulsa institution–a couple of dozen visitors were getting their first look inside a building that for decades has epitomized music industry mystique in T-Town: the Church Studio.
A meet-and-greet session with singer-songwriter Willis Alan Ramsey was taking place. Ramsey–who achieved fame in 1972 with his seminal, self-titled debut album on Shelter Records–was chatting up visitors, telling stories and even performing a handful of new songs as part of an effort to raise money to finish his long-awaited second disc. The next night, before a much larger audience in the same venue, he would perform a full concert.
To the best of anyone’s recollection, it was the only instance since the building’s metamorphosis from a church to a recording studio in the early 1970s that a public event had been held there. For the first time, any visitor willing to pony up the admission charge was welcome to step inside a building that has seen some of the biggest names in popular music stride across its threshold.
As home to Tulsa native Leon Russell’s Shelter Records from 1972 to 1976, the “Church” was a rock ‘n’ roll landmark, home to a dizzying array of talent and source of much of that era’s greatest music, as well as serving as the epicenter for what would come to be known as “The Tulsa Sound.” It reclaimed that mantle from 1987 to 2006 when longtime Tulsan Steve Ripley bought it and made it the base of operations for his platinum-selling band the Tractors.
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