BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Billy Rhodes Porter
Description: Recording, Audio engineer
Known For: Porter mixed concert sound for Presley from 1970 until the singer
Music Styles: Rock
Location: United States of America
Date Born: 15th June 1931
Location Born: St. Louis, Missippi, United States of America
Date Died: 7th July 2010
Location Died: Ogden, Utah, United States of America
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Bill Porter (sound engineer)
An American audio engineer who helped shape the Nashville sound and recorded such stars as Chet Atkins, The Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison from the late 1950s through the 1970s. In one week of 1960, his recordings accounted for 15 of Billboard Magazine’s “Top 100,” a feat none have matched.
Porter mixed concert sound for Presley from 1970 until the singer’s death in 1977. At the University of Miami, he helped create the first college program in audio engineering, and he taught similar courses at the University of Colorado Denver, and at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. Porter, said to have a golden ear, was inducted into the TEC Awards Hall of Fame in 1992.
Porter began his engineering career in 1954 at WLAC-TV in Nashville, Tennessee, where he wished to be a cameraman—nobody wanted to mix sound, though, and that job was assigned to him, the guy with the least seniority.
He mixed up to four microphones for television broadcast for $92 per week, equivalent to $733 today. At nearby RCA Records in 1959, the chief engineer was transferred after angering Chet Atkins, and Porter applied for the position.
He was told by an RCA executive from New York that the job would ruin his marriage, but Porter said “I can handle that”—he was hired at $148 per week, and given two weeks to learn all the equipment and how to mix up to 12 microphones for music recordings.
Shortly after starting with RCA on March 31, 1959, Porter mixed the single “Lonesome Old House” for Don Gibson; it was a crossover success in both the country music and the pop music charts, and Porter began to be requested by name.
In June 1959, he mixed “The Three Bells” for The Browns, with Atkins producing and Anita Kerr arranging. While editing the master to be sent to New York for pressing, Porter accidentally hit the wrong controls on the tape recorder and stretched the tape at the beginning of the song, distorting the pitch. Without telling anyone, he spliced a different take with a good intro onto the beginning, and sent that version instead.
Porter served for four years as the chief engineer under guitarist and producer Atkins. Porter became the engineer big-name artists wanted to work with, and he was influential in creating the Nashville sound. Record producer Owen Bradley once asked Atkins how he got his sound, and Atkins said, “it was Bill Porter.”
He recorded more than 579 records that charted—49 were top 10, 11 were number one, and 37 were certified gold records. Most were recorded at what is now RCA’s Studio B in Nashville, where Porter was responsible for the sound.
Porter recorded nearly all of Presley’s number one hits upon the singer’s return from Army duty in 1960. Porter had not studied Presley’s earlier recordings—he started fresh, “doing what I thought it should be.”
Instead of the usual microphones used by RCA, Porter chose to use a Telefunken U-47 on Presley’s voice, recording several songs through the night of March 20–21, 1960, including “Stuck On You” and the ballad “Fame and Fortune”.
After Porter edited the two songs from the session tape, an RCA executive took the tapes from his hands to fly them to New York, where record presses were standing by and labels were pre-printed and waiting.
The single “Stuck On You” with “Fame and Fortune” on the B-side was released three days later and immediately returned Presley to the number one chart position. Porter engineered “Are You Lonesome Tonight”, “It’s Now or Never”, and other early 1960s Elvis hits.
Much of RCA’s business was what they called “custom” clients—independent labels not affiliated with RCA, but willing to pay for recording sessions at the proven hit-maker studio.
One outstanding client was Monument Records under producer Fred Foster, bringing his client Roy Orbison. Porter was able to create for Orbison his trademark sound, with background vocals brought nearer the foreground, beginning with “Only the Lonely”.
For that session, Porter discarded his standard mix style of building up from a foundation of percussion, and instead used the vocal countermelody as the foreground sound, and built the other sounds below and around it, leaving the percussion almost inaudible. The song’s success cemented this mix style as Orbison’s sound.
Other Orbison hits recorded for Monument at RCA Nashville were “It’s Over”, “Running Scared” and “Oh, Pretty Woman”. Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax” and Al Hirt’s “Java” are other Monument recordings that Porter engineered at RCA.
Porter left RCA in November, 1964, to engineer for Columbia Records in Nashville, where he stayed for six months, bringing some of his custom clients with him. He left Columbia for Monument to manage a new studio set up by Foster at 315 Seventh Street North in Nashville. Porter found the studio’s acoustic space to be superior to RCA’s Studio B—it was a high-ceilinged room built to house a Masonic Lodge—but the audio equipment owned by Foster was inferior. The EMT plate was not as good for reverb effects. No top ten hits were engineered by Porter at Foster’s studio.
August 1966, Porter moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, to purchase United Recording of Nevada from Bill Putnam of United Western Recorders in Los Angeles. Putnam was slimming down his business and wished to unload the studio now that Wally Heider had left it, so he sold it to Porter for a low price.
Porter’s first day at the studio was September 1. At that time, United Recording of Nevada had been operating for four years and was the most prominent of the six recording studios in Las Vegas, but it had problems with its equipment, radio frequency interference from nearby broadcast transmitters, and rumbling noises from a railway carrying freight past the building.
Porter made recordings at his studio for artists such as Paul Anka who would arrive at 2:00 am after his show and record until dawn. Other projects involved recording live shows at Las Vegas hotels, including Buddy Rich’s Mercy, Mercy live album at Caesars Palace in 1968 .
In 1969, Porter and his maintenance technician modified the 12-input, 4-output mixing console to give it 8 outputs, and made their own 8-track tape recorder from Ampex parts.
In August, Presley’s producer Felton Jarvis brought the master tape for “Suspicious Minds”
The song became a number one hit; the final one both for Porter and for Presley. Also in 1969, Porter founded Porter Industries, as a basis for engineering and electronics sales outside of his studio.
In December 1969, Presley called Porter to ask him to fix the sound for him in the main showroom at the International Hotel (renamed the Las Vegas Hilton two years later); he said he could not hear himself the last time he sang there, and a new run was scheduled for January.
Porter went to see Presley’s first rehearsal there, and found three stage monitors hanging 18 feet (5.5 m) high above the stage, with only one working. The hotel’s engineers did not get the other two to work, so Porter had some of his own Shure Vocal Master loudspeakers brought over from the recording studio.
He laid the column loudspeakers on their sides at the front lip of the stage and propped them up to aim at Presley, who was very happy with the result. Presley insisted upon having Porter mix his live show in January even though he was a recording engineer with no experience in live sound.
On tour, Porter specified the best-sounding, most roadworthy equipment that existed: he used a Midas PRO4 mixing console and UREI equalizers. The tour was supported by Clair Brothers, who supplied all the audio gear and a monitor engineer, Bruce Jackson, who designed a powerful stage monitor system for Presley’s show.
In August 1977, Porter was changing planes in Boston to fly to Portland, Maine, to mix a Presley concert when he heard that the singer had died. He attended Presley’s heavily guarded funeral ceremony at Graceland.
Between Presley appearances, Porter also handled sound duties for Ann-Margaret in Las Vegas and on the road, under the business name Captain Audio Productions. He consulted on television specials for Ann-Margaret and for Bob Hope in 1972–1973.
Porter was named director-at-large of the Country Music Association (CMA) in October 1972.
As a freelance engineer, he continued to work recording dates with famous artists including Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross and Sammy Davis Jr. By 1980, he had served as engineer on more than 7,000 recordings.
In 1992, the TEC Foundation inducted Porter into their TEC Awards Hall of Fame, along with synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog and record producer Phil Ramone. Porter asked Chet Atkins to accompany him to the ceremony, but Atkins could not attend because of a prior engagement at Carnegie Hall.
However, before the honor was conferred at the ceremony, a video was played of Atkins congratulating Porter, saying “you improved the echo sound tremendously and made things sound so big and so full.”
Late in life, Porter said that among his favorites of his career recordings were Atkins’s The Most Popular Guitar, an album recorded with lush string orchestration, and Jerry Byrd’s Byrd of Paradise, recorded during Porter’s stint with Monument Records.
Porter’s health declined from Alzheimer’s disease, and he died in a hospice near Ogden on July 7, 2010, at the age of 79.