Hamilton’s legendary Grant Avenue Studio sold to big player in film sector

There are certain places so full of lore and moment that the air in them seems to hum with history, and in Hamilton, Grant Avenue Studio is such a place - the music recorded here, the legends who've come.

Visiting it, I half-imagine sounds trapped in the walls, like the echo of waves inside a seashell, as though the shell were the office of the ocean's voice, and this place, 38 Grant Avenue, the office of song itself. On a humble city street.

They aren't really there, the sounds in the walls, the oceans in the seashells. But they kind of are. Here, with Bob Doidge remembering ... I can almost hear it, the music in the bricks, in the wires, arcing across the 50-year synapse between then and now, fired back into life in an infinite cycle of amplitude, decay and sustain. Gordon Lightfoot, U2, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris ...

Grant Avenue Studio is entering a new phase of its historic existence.

Co-owners (until recently) Bob Doidge and Martin Zucker sold it earlier this year. They'd had it since 1985 after taking it over from Dan and Bob Lanois. After all those albums and artists and sounds it is now owned by Mike Bruce, co-founder of the AEON group (Bayfront Studio, part of our growing film industry), though the GAS purchase was not through AEON.

I'll stay on as producer for select projects," says Bob.

Of course I knew of the amazing legacy," says Mike. And we're going to keep up that legacy."

The building looks from the outside, with its pleasant red brick manners and understated Edwardian phrasing, like a place where you might walk in on a familial hearthside moment.

But if Gladys Kravitz, the snoopy neighbour from Bewtiched," had lived beside 38 Grant Ave., her hand furtively drawing aside the curtain, she would've been as mystified as she was living next to Samantha.

Limos materializing. Iconic types and icono-wannabes in Wayfarers and rock star boots appearing. Johnny Cash?! Bono?! What was going on? The sorcery of some of the best popular music to come out of anywhere.

Hippies lived in it back then," Bob recalls, of the time when he, Dan Lanois and his brother Bob were scouting out a place. They wanted to move out of the basement studio that Dan Lanois and Bob Doidge began in the Lanois home in Ancaster.

They wanted warmth, not something brooding behind glass double-doors and big city attitude where musicians play in isolation chambers. Grant 38 fit the bill.

You would walk into these big studios in Toronto ... cold and impersonal," says Bob Doidge.

This was different. A house with character and charm from the outside. Inside, it has been insulated with cork and sand and other soundproofing materials. There are hardwood floors and wainscotting, as you might expect in such a house, but also flush-mounted overhead studio monitors, big speaker cones set in the ceiling bulkhead, in Mickey-Mouse-ear symmetry.

And at the front, beside the entranceway ... how to describe it? ... the thunderhead. The command station, the central nervous system, built up and expanded on over decades.

To wit, the room-wide MCI 500c mixing console, with its regiments of knobs and instrument controls, the fader buttons sliding up and down their slotted pathways in numerous parallels.

Banked up around the soundboard are a squadron of preamps, equalizers, compressors and levelling amplifiers in a veritable cockpit of sound engineering.

The pilot? Bob Doidge.

My fingertips are numb by the end of the day," he says, of his tireless handiwork at the controls.

The MCI 500c is the finest sounding console in history," says Bob, used at top levels to this day and with a deep history with artists like The Eagles and Elton John.

Below us, miles of cable and wiring, in bundles and sheaths, are secreted through the building like a giant root system.

Cheerleader, babysitter, psychologist, diplomat," says Bob, describing his role as producer.

I've never said to a singer You're singing flat.' I'd say, How about trying to sing that sharper?' You have to stay five minutes ahead of the emotions."

The technical part? Grant Avenue was always A-game. Bob Lanois plunged right in once he came back from Europe in the mid-'70s to find Bob Doidge and Dan producing basement music. They learned as they went, starting from scratch, acquiring equipment, adding to, tinkering with.

Bob packed sand up against the windows (when they moved into Grant Avenue)," Bob remembers. How did he know (that sand is a good soundproofing)? He didn't." But he had unerring instincts and engineering creativity.

Bob Doidge is also prodigiously gifted at the hardware, and, having had some deficits vision-wise from an early age, enjoys remarkable hearing as though by compensation.

Getting the right sounds, I can do that in my sleep," says Bob. But you can't teach how to deal with a singer who's having a bad day."

This combination of technical expertise and creative sensitivity put Grant Avenue Studio in best-in-the-world" company from early on.

Bob has recorded everything from a band with 16 bagpipers to polka king Walter Ostanek to Johnny Cash and, for Bob, the most personally meaningful connection, the late Gordon Lightfoot.

Lightfoot worked at the studio for 27 years and, says Bob, I just finished producing my fifth CD for him a couple of weeks before his passing. The live concert at the Royal Albert Hall is to be released in July."

And let's not forget the studio's history with others like Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Bruce Cockburn, Los Lobos, The Parachute Club, Crash Test Dummies, Tom Wilson, etc., etc.

With the sale, Bob isn't retiring exactly but he's scaling back.

I'm looking forward to spending more time on my Piper Tomahawk," says Bob, a licensed pilot.

The skies await.

Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator.jmahoney@thespec.com