For eighteen years, behind an unmarked door between a tire shop and a church, Slow Cooked Music operated one of the finest-sounding rooms in Memphis and one of the worst-run businesses in Tennessee.
The live room was forty feet of old growth pine that had previously been a feed store floor. Engineers wept in it. So did creditors. The console was a custom desk of unknown origin that hummed in the key of B-flat; every record cut here is secretly in a fight with that hum, and every record here lost gracefully.
The studio's motto, painted above the control room glass, remains the only piece of business philosophy the founders ever committed to: "It's done when it's done, and it's not done."
Slow Cooked Music closed in March of 1989, owing to what the Memphis Commercial Appeal described as "every possible reason at once."
The building is now a barbecue restaurant. This is not a tragedy. The pit sits where the drum booth was, which the pitmaster insists matters, and having eaten there, we decline to argue. The brisket is genuinely excellent. The room still sounds incredible. Nobody is recording in it. Sometimes, over the dinner rush, you can hear the hum. B-flat.
The catalog, the philosophy, and the remaining unpaid invoices passed north over the years to Back Pocket Music of Traverse City, Michigan, which continues the founding tradition: take your time, mind the room, and never, under any circumstances, let the label pick the week.