Not many people know this, but in the 1980s and ’90s, some of the biggest stars in rock, pop and country music found their way to Marin County to record albums in a bucolic, big-budget studio tucked away in the forested hills of Nicasio. It operated so quietly and so far under the radar that hardly anyone knew where it was or who was working there.
And that was exactly the point. Secrecy and privacy were among the selling points of the Site, a clandestine studio where famous folks could live and record in seclusion and comfort, far from the crowds and craziness of the music business.
“It was a good room with state-of-the-art equipment, and it was remote,” remembers Bob Brown, former manager of Huey Lewis and the News. “Nobody was going to drop by because nobody knew where it was.”
The studio log reads like a musical who’s who of that era: Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Tracy Chapman, Joe Satriani, Night Ranger, Hootie and the Blowfish, Third Eye Blind, Aaron Neville and many others recorded there.
The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards liked the place so much that he wrote a letter extolling its virtues that was once posted proudly on a wall in the plush living quarters.
No longer a working studio, the gated property is hidden from the main road at the end of a steep driveway. A private residence for the past couple of decades, it still radiates an aura of faded rock star opulence with its swimming pool and spa, sauna, lanai, solarium, basketball court and capacious high-ceilinged studio with picture windows that overlook a green, wooded valley.An attached living space boasts a spacious kitchen, second-floor master bedroom and bath with tiles by Heath in Sausalito. A two-room guest house is above the garage.
This little-known piece of Marin County music history is now for sale for $3.2 million plus an additional $800,000 for an adjacent 10-acre lot.
The Site was built in the mid-1970s by producer and musician Dick Mithun, a former bassist for the Marin-grown Sons of Champlin band, in a rural, low-density residential development called Santa Margarita Ranch.
“The guy who built it did it very secretively,” recalls Susan Cox of Northgate Realty, who is handling the sale. She and her husband, Ted, have lived in the Santa Margarita community for 45 years. She can be reached at tcoxrealtor@yahoo.com.
“Nobody in the neighborhood even knew it existed,” she says of the Site. “Back then it would have been a big issue. Although I live almost across the street, I knew it existed, but I didn’t know to what extent he was making these recordings with all the famous people who were hanging out there.”
Ironically, the Site’s claim to fame may turn out to be an album by a rocker who couldn’t stand the place. In 1993, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam recorded their celebrated sophomore album, “Vs.,” in the woodsy surroundings of the Site. At the time, the newly minted rock stars were under intense pressure to repeat the phenomenal commercial success of their debut album, “Ten.”
For Vedder, who rose out of the threadbare Seattle grunge scene and wasn’t comfortable with the lavish trappings of sudden fame and fortune, the Site couldn’t have been a worse place for him to find inspiration. His record label thought its isolation and creature comforts would be an ideal setting for him, but it was completely at odds with the angst-filled songs he was writing about suicide, police racism, child abuse and gun violence.
At the time of the sessions, the idealistic young singer-songwriter told Rolling Stone magazine, “I f—ing hate it here. How do you make a rock record here? Maybe the old rockers love this. Maybe they need the comfort and the relaxation. Maybe they need it to make dinner music.”
Vedder joined his bandmates shooting baskets in the driveway and playing softball against a team from Skywalker Ranch. But to get into the gritty mood he needed to write his socially conscious lyrics, he would drive into San Francisco and sleep in his truck before returning to the studio to record.
“It was a hard place for me at that point to write a record, especially with lyrics,” he says in the oral history book “Pearl Jam Twenty.” “I didn’t want to be writing about hillsides and trees among luxurious surroundings. I was more into people and society and chaos and confusion, and answering the question: What are we all doing here?”
Despite Vedder’s struggles, “Vs.” ended up smashing sales records, selling 10 million records worldwide and going seven times platinum in the U.S. Rolling Stone calls it “an album that still stands as one of the strongest records in their long and storied career.”
Since “Vs.” turned out to be the blockbuster that everyone hoped it would be, the Site, when all is said and done, may have been the right place to record after all.
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net
