Few people know this, but in the 1980s and 1990s, 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 nestled among the wooded hills of Nicasio. It operated so quietly and so far off the radar that hardly anyone knew where it was or who worked there.
And that was exactly the goal. Secrecy and privacy were among the advantages of the site, a secret studio where famous people could live and record in privacy and comfort, away from the crowds and madness of the music business.
“It was a good room with state-of-the-art equipment and it was remote,” recalls Bob Brown, former manager of Huey Lewis and the News. “No one would stop by because no one knew where it was.”
The studio diary reads like a musical who’s who of that era: Neil Young, Linda Ronstad, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Tracy Chapman, Joe Satriani, Night Ranger, Hootie and the Blowfish, Third Eye Blind, Aaron Neville and many more recorded there.
Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones loved the place so much that he wrote a letter extolling its virtues, which was once proudly hung on a wall in the plush living quarters.
No longer a working studio, the gated property is tucked away from the main road at the end of a steep lane. A private residence for the past few decades, it still exudes an aura of faded rock star opulence with its swimming pool and spa, sauna, lanai, solarium, basketball court and spacious high-ceilinged studio with picture windows that overlook a green, wooded valley.
Adjacent living space features a spacious kitchen, second floor master bedroom and bath with Heath tile in Sausalito. There is a two-room guest house 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 parcel.
The place was built in the mid-1970s by producer and musician Dick Mithun, former bassist for the Marin-raised band Sons of Champlin, in a rural, low-density housing development called Santa Margarita Ranch.
“The guy who built it did it very secretly,” 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 [email protected].
“No one in the neighborhood even knew it existed,” she tells the site. “Then it would have been a big problem. Even though I live almost across the street, I knew it existed, but I didn’t know the extent to which he was making these recordings with all the famous people hanging out there.
Ironically, The Site’s claim to fame may be an album by a rocker who can’t stand the venue. In 1993, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam recorded their acclaimed second album, Vs., in the site’s woodland setting. At the time, the fledgling rock stars were under intense pressure to repeat the phenomenal commercial success of their debut album ‘Ten’.
For Vedder, who rose from the shabby Seattle grunge scene and wasn’t comfortable with the gaudy trappings of sudden fame and fortune, the Site couldn’t have been a worse place to find inspiration. His record label thought the isolation and creature comforts would be an ideal setting for him, but it was completely at odds with the anger-filled songs he wrote about suicide, police racism, child abuse and gun violence.
During the sessions, the idealistic young singer-songwriter told Rolling Stone magazine: “I hate it here. How do you make a rock record here? Maybe the old rockers love this. Maybe they need comfort and relaxation. Maybe they need it to make dinner music.
Vedder joined his bandmates, who were shooting baskets in the driveway and playing softball against a team from the Skywalker Ranch. But to get into the heavy mood he needed to write his socially conscious lyrics, he drove to San Francisco and slept in his truck before returning to the studio to record.
“At that point it was hard for me to write a record, especially with lyrics,” he says in the oral history book Pearl Jam Twenty. “I didn’t want to write about hills and trees in luxurious surroundings. I was more fond of people and society, chaos and confusion, and answering the question: What are we all doing here?’
Despite Vedder’s struggles, “Vs.” ended up breaking sales records, selling 10 million records worldwide and going seven times platinum in the US. Rolling Stone called it “an album that still stands as one of the strongest records of their long and storied career.”
With “Vs.” turning out to be the blockbuster everyone hoped the site would be, after all was said and done, maybe it was the right place to record it after all.
Contact Paul Liberatore at [email protected]
