The History of Thunder Road Studios: Calgary's 1980s Soft-Rock Paradise

Thunder Road Studio logo/ Photo Courtesy of Mark Holden

After the success and wide spread interest in the 2012 film, Searching for Sugarman, it seems like crate diggers have been enthralled with the idea of re-discovering underappreciated talent. And somehow over the last two years that attention has wormed its way to musician Lewis Baloue. A long lost singer-songwriter with out-there melodies, a heartbreaking voice and iconic golden hair, he was an easy outsider to obsess over. After his breakthrough album L’Amour was reissued by record label, Light in the Attic to critical acclaim a second private press LP from the artist surfaced last summer. Titled, Romantic Times, the album was discovered in the warehouse of Calgary’s Recordland and immediately ballooned in price when it was put on eBay. Through the website’s listing a photo of the original pressing’s back cover revealed some details about the album’s creation. Namely, we learned that it was recorded in Calgary by someone named Danny Lowe at a place called Thunder Road Studios. It also listed a guest saxophonist named Neil Armstrong. Living in Calgary myself, I used these clues as an effort to hunt down Baloue's real name: Randall A. Wulff. Ultimately, I never found him—and I was quickly scooped by Light in the Attic, who shared a photo confirming that he was alive and well but refused to share any details about his location (although there are rumours he’s haunted by gambling debts and disowned by his family). In the process, however, I learned all about a state-of-the-art recording paradise that housed a small group of soft-rock dreamers in early 80s Calgary. From recording radio jingles and almost making it as AOR superstars to striking it big in the worlds of tech and fashion, they’re a unique ensemble like something out of a real-life Christopher Guest movie. This is the story of Thunder Road Studios.

Thunder Road Studios operated from 1981 to 1985, located right off of Barlow Trail (the building is now home to Higher iQ, an Islamic preschool). Saxophonist and audio engineer Mark Holden co-founded the studio with Ron and Neil McCallum. “I started my career in Calgary as an engineer and musician,” Holden tells me. “I worked in a studio called Sound West that use to be an old church in the area, and then in the late 70s, I moved to Frankfurt, Germany for a year and worked at a studio called Hotline.” When he was ready to return to Calgary, Holden says, “I came back and built Thunder Road. I literally built it.” Before they crammed it full of state-of-the-art recording gear, the facility was designed by Tom Hidley, a truly legendary acoustic architect who is arguably the most influential recording studio designer of all time. “He was the guy,” Holden recalls. “At the time, Thunder Road Studios was the third largest acoustically designed studio of Hidley’s in the world.” Since it was built from scratch, the building could be perfectly customized for optimum sound quality. “We came together with a developer and built the building. And the benefit of this was we actually had the ability to create the layout,” Holden explains. “The floor of the studio was actually one foot thick concrete slabs that are independently floating, sitting on an inch and a half thick insulation. So there's no physical contact between those two layers of floors and the actual walls. And the reason for this is so the sound doesn't transfer up the walls.”

Thunder Road Studios' Control Room A/Photo Courtesy of Mark Holden

In addition to running Thunder Road, Holden formed the studio band Modern Minds, which eventually became Boulevard. The group would sign with the German subsidiary of CBS Records and achieve some minor fame with their dreamy soft-rock hit “Rainy Day in London.” Looking back on those times, Holden still remembers meeting Baloue in the early 80s. “He heard about the facility, and he literally just inquired and asked for a tour,” Holden recalls. Baloue soon teamed up with engineer Danny Lowe, recording two albums’ worth of material at Thunder Road. “I remember hearing bits and pieces of his music as I'd walk by the control room. It was very mellow and kind of ethereal,” Holden recalls. “He just seemed to be like an Engelbert Humperdinck kind of guy. He was very suave and he drove a Mercedes.” Now based in Vancouver, Holden spent a few years working in media technology before reinventing himself as a fashion designer. In true 80s soft-rock fashion, he specializes in [silk scarves](http://www.markholden.com/collections/all painted). “I decided I wanted to make scarves, all centred around peace symbols—just kind of reinvent the symbol into my own interpretation of it.”

Serving as an independent producer and engineer at the studio, Danny Lowe refutes some of the claims made on the original back cover of Lewis’ album. For one, he says he’s never heard of Neil Armstrong, and that the sax was most certainly played by Thunder Road’s Neil McCallum. Furthermore, despite the album’s claims that he played bass and drums as well as serving as album engineer, he says he never played a note on the record. However, he does remember the man we now know as Baloue. Born Randall Wulff, the Thunder Road staff referred to him as Randy California. “[That was] our internal code name, as he looked like the utopian surfer,” Lowe recalls. “Lewis was an enigma for sure. Very charismatic but odd at the same time. He drove a 450 Mercedes convertible and had a stunning girlfriend whose name we never knew. He was extremely focused on his craft and knew exactly what and how he wanted things.” Besides being an producer, Lowe would play with numerous bands including, Prototype, who would record their first and only self-titled album at Thunder Road. Although, best known as the drummer for the band Chillwack, Jerry Adolphe is an affable old rocker who use to also serve as a member of Prototype. “We never played live, just because we wouldn't let Danny onstage,” he says, laughing loudly into the phone. “Make sure you say that, okay?” In addition to Prototype, he served as a studio drummer on many Thunder Road projects including few track on Romantic Times. “In the mid ’80s, there was a lot of money to be spent by artists and stuff,” Adolphe says. “I remember a quote, a few years later, from my friend David Foster. He said it used to be first class and limo, now it's coach and cab.”

Even though he was based in British Columbia, Adolphe would often fly out for recording sessions at the Calgary studio. He also remembers enjoying Calgary’s 1980s nightlife. “What else did we do back the but drink?” he asks, cracking up in laughter. “I remember every now and then we'd go to Stromboli Inn for pizza. And of course Danny, who's a cheese-sandwich-on-white-bread-hold-the-cheese kinda guy, it would waft through his house on the way home and he'd complain he couldn't sleep.” Adolphe also remembers an infectious feeling of creativity in the studio. “The best part about Thunder Road was Danny sitting there like a mole inventing stuff,” he says. “It was like a learning thing for everyone. You'd go in to do another project, and he'd say, 'Well, I want you to hang for a day' and experiment with a lot different things- sounds, feels and stuff. He was absolutely amazing. I would lay down a drum track and I'd hear it a month later and absolutely not believe what he was making.” Lowe’s inventiveness paid off big. About a year after recording Romantic Times, Lowe co-founded the QSound, a stereo technology that allowed for three-dimensional recording. Becoming something of a video kid himself, the technology was used in classic video games like Ecco the Dolphin, Sonic CD and Super Street Fighter II in addition to albums from Pink Floyd, Madonna and, er, MC Skat Kat. In 1985, QSound purchased Thunder Road after it ceased operations—even using the private recording facility for a brief time for game development.

In a 1982 Billboard article called, “Canada, Canada, Canada: melting musical borders” author, David Farrell writes, “Neither of Calgary’s two 24 tracks—Smooth Rock, which opened in 1980, and Thunder Road, which opened in ’81—have produced much of consequence yet, but the general feeling is that when Calgary’s talent is ready, both facilities will proved a vital link that was missing before.” True, in 1982 it would have been impossible to predict that a pseudo-spiritual mysterio would one day arouse record collectors with a bizarre album called Romantic Times, but outside of that there were plenty of other fascinating projects at Thunder Road. These spanned from film scores and commercial work through a wide variety of interesting amateur musicians. In my search for Baloue, I happened upon another Lewis in Lewis Levin. “I used to work professionally at Thunder Road,” he says. “I was a jingle writer and producer. I used to go and rent their facility and produce jingles there.” “I don’t know if you remember that Servpro jingle,” he continues, referencing a Calgary company that Google tells me specializes in cleaning domestic fire and water damage. “You know like, ‘Servpro / the one you know / You’ll be glad to go with Servpro.’ It was a big one, they played it for years.” Unfortunately, I had never heard the jingle until Levin sang it to me on the phone.

When he wasn’t writing jingles, Levin recorded Moments in Between, his debut solo album at Thunder Road in 1985. Helmed by Lowe, it was a big production. “For the album we actually used the top session musicians in Calgary and in Western Canada. We flew in some session musicians from L.A. and we used the string section from the Calgary Philharmonic,” he recalls. “Thunder Road was really a world-class recording studio." Calgary-based performer, Paul Finkerman also shares this sentiment. Although he was fairly green at the time, Finkleman remembers recording his debut album, The Music Wheel in 1981 with Mark Holden and being shocked by the cost of recording. “Thunder Road was very expensive,” he recalls. “When they first opened up, we were one of the first groups to record in there. I had a financial backer, who back then put about $25,000 to $30,000 to back it, but it cost a fortune.” As Levin puts it, however, the steep price-tag was likely justified. “I started in Montreal, and I worked in the best recording studios in Montreal, and I could tell you that Thunder Road was a truly world-class studio,” he says. “It was on the A-list, as good as any other studio in the world. For any musician that wants to record it’s like dying and going to heaven.” Still, despite the valid boasts of these artists, Thunder Road simply couldn’t keep up with Calgary’s demands at the time. “It was busy enough, but it was still hard for people to justify the kind of rates,” Holden admits. “You had big overhead with maintenance people and upkeep and the building itself i think was 12-and-a-half thousand square feet. It was more than Calgary knew what to do with — it was overkill.” Nonetheless, he looks at Thunder Road as a glowing success. “It was our aim to provide, to put Calgary on the map as a place where you could go to record,” he says. “We definitely did our part in that by building a million dollar room in 1981, which was a lot of money in ’81 dollars. But you know, that's all you can do. You build a beautiful room with the best equipment money can buy, and hope that the world discovers you.”

Thunder Road film studio/Photo Courtesy of Mark Holden

Holden wagers the studio would have done a little better had it been located in a larger city like Vancouver. Still, he refers to the decade from the mid 80s to the mid 90s as “the glory years of record labels and recording,” adding, “Budgets were huge, so we were right place, right time—actually not the right place, right time. Right idea, wrong place.” Whether the business had been there or not, it’s likely that Thunder Road would’ve lasted past the so-called glory years either way. With the rise of digital home recording, smaller hobby projects have found less need for big-budget recording studios and listeners’ ears have become less picky about audio quality. In fact, most of the large studios that still exist from that studio have stayed afloat by doing sound design for big films. No matter what would come, there’s no denying that the era of Thunder Road was a dream come true for a select few Calgarian soft-rockers. “I fondly remember the sound that we got out of that room,” Holden says. “The massive drum sounds and guitar. The recording room itself, was absolutely extraordinary—it was everything we hoped it would be. You can design and build, and you can spend $10 million on a room, and it wouldn't necessarily sound amazing. It could sound okay. But in this case, this room was exceptional.”

Josiah Hughes is a writer based in Calgary. Follow him on Twitter - @josiahhughes