As a young man, Jeffrey Reed played guitar in the cover band Psychodelic Reaction. The band wanted to produce a record, so they traveled to SLATS, a Vicksburg recording studio, to make their dream a reality, and Reed was immediately hooked.
“It is still the best studio I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in studios from Los Angeles to London,” he said. “It was up in an attic above a garage. His control room was a deep, narrow closet. The old man had vintage gear from floor to ceiling. He was in there working, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
Today, more than 20 years later, Reed is an accomplished sound engineer who has worked at some of the top studios in the Southeast. His career has taken him all around the world. He now has his own studio space and works as a freelance engineer specializing in post audio production. And he is the broadcast and post-production engineer for Thacker Mountain Radio in Oxford.
The part-time engineer has transformed a small, rented building in the College Hill community into a dimly lit recording studio with red velvet curtains, purple lighting and speakers decorating the walls.
Reed sits at a table covered in electronic buttons with words like: fast, slow, boost, gain and frequency. He uses this “harmonically enhanced digital device” to control what’s happening on the huge display monitor in front him.
Growing up in the small town of Utica, between Jackson and Port Gibson, Reed lived the typical small Southern town life.
“It maybe had a couple thousand people,” he said. “At one time, it was a fairly bustling railroad town. Then the railroad and everything went away. I can remember when we had three red lights, a cafe with a hotel in it and a movie theater, which is crazy. I can’t even imagine that now. It’s kind of a ghost town now.”
Reed’s earliest musical experiences came from his grandmother’s record collection, listening to such classic country stars as Johnny Cash, Charlie Pride and Conway Twitty. He attended Utica High School and Rebul Academy, where his favorite subject was science. Some of his earliest childhood memories are playing outdoors.
“If I’m not in here, I’m in the woods or the water doing something,” Reed said inside his studio. “In Utica, going to the creek is some of my biggest fun, and I remember looking for Indian artifacts.”
Reed attended Hinds Community College and initially thought about becoming an architect, but didn’t like drafting classes. He switched to business administration, but soon realized he was wasting his mother’s money. After dropping out of college, he and a friend started a business hauling pulpwood.
“Thank God that truck broke down,” he said.
He later decided to pursue a career in the recording industry.
“I started making phone calls to studios, because back in the day, that’s kind of how you did it,” he said.
“You got in, swept the floor, and started trying to get in good with the engineer.”
His first job was working with Morrison Brothers Music. Now located in Ridgeland, it’s a leading supplier and service center of pro music, audio and lighting equipment.
While working at Morrison Brothers, Reed also landed a job at Malaco Records in Jackson, a nationally known company comprising recording studios, record labels and music publishing, that has been making Southern soul, blues, and gospel music since 1968.
“A little podunk kid from Utica, I got the job,” he said.
Reed didn’t work as an engineer at Malaco but, rather, learned studio etiquette.
“It’s a combination of babysitting and psychology to deal with so many kinds of egos and the equipment, and make it all work together,” he said. “One night, we were working on an album, and I noticed there was some tension. Nobody said anything and, after the session was over, they told me there is one thing you should never do. Don’t sit in the producer’s chair. I realized they were teaching me some really important stuff, which is studio etiquette.”
Reed later attended Full Sail University in Florida and earned an associate’s degree in recording arts. That’s where he met fellow engineer Eric R. Fischer.
Fischer grew up in the Midwest, moved to Los Angeles in 1993 and began working as a junior technician at a Hollywood recording studio called Music Grinder. He quickly moved into a staff assistant engineering position and eventually became an engineer. Today, like Reed, he owns a small studio specializing in post audio production. Fischer said he and Reed were classmates, lab partners and instant friends at Full Sail.
“After graduating, I moved to Los Angeles and Jeffrey moved to Memphis to work at the prestigious Ardent Studios,” he said.
Fischer said Reed is a “talented engineer with great ears.”
“I think a big part of being successful in this business is being a great hang,” he said. “You spend long hours in a small room with clients. You have to be someone people like to be around. Jeffrey is someone people like to be around — a good person, a great sense of humor, smart, with an interest in always being his best.
“He always wants to keep moving forward, whether it’s in a new area of his career or expanding his business. He truly has a great sense of customer service.”
Two weeks after graduation in 1992, Reed was offered a job with Ardent Studios in Memphis.
“It’s one of the biggest studios in the Southeast and in America,” Reed said. “It’s still one of the top studios. The tentacles of its influence is worldwide.”
Memphis was at one time a city with many recording studios.
“But, obviously, with changes in the music industry, they are dropping like flies,” he said. “I am very fortunate to still be doing this.”
Reed started as the night manager at Ardent, but, within two weeks, he was assigned to work on a major recording session with Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the band Butthole Surfers.
“That was my first introduction to the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll world that was pretty wild,” he said.
“I went straight from that to working with the legendary Tom Dowd. Anything you’ve ever air-guitared to, he did it — Clapton, Rod Stewart, Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
Dowd was an American recording engineer and producer for Atlantic Records credited with conceptualizing the multitrack recording method. He has worked with a number of top artists, from Ray Charles and Chicago to Willie Nelson, Diana Ross and The Eagles.
“I went from working with him, to working on the Afghan Whigs record,” Reed said. The Afghan Whigs is an American rock band from Cincinnati. “They just put out the 20th anniversary edition of that. I got lucky.”
Jim Gaines is an award-winning engineer who currently owns Bessie Blue Studio in Stantonville, Tenn. His career has taken him all over the world and into the lives of many famous musicians.
He has produced and engineered music for Huey Lewis, George Thorogood, Blues Traveler, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Steve Miller Band, Carlos Santana, John Lee Hooker, Huey Lewis & the News, Journey, the Neville Brothers, Van Morrison and Bruce Hornsby.
Gaines said he has known Reed since the early 1990s when Gaines moved back to Memphis from San Francisco to take care of his ailing father and work on Stevie Ray Vaughan’s album “In Step.”
“He was a young assistant engineer at a couple of studios that I worked at,” Gaines said by phone. “That’s how we met. I was the producer/engineer.”
Gaines said Reed moved up to engineer pretty quickly in the business.
“An assistant engineer is someone who helps out the engineer,” he said. “They are there to take care of you or whatever you need. Eventually, they become engineers themselves. I had several people in Memphis that I really enjoyed working with. He’s a great person, a lot of fun, very eager to learn. We consider Jeffrey part of our (music industry) family.”
Reed said he worked at Ardent Studios about six years before becoming a freelance engineer with gigs that took him to Los Angeles and England.
“I’m very fortunate,” he said. “I’m lucky that I was able to come up right at the height of the traditional recording industry. Even now, it’s adapt or die. Having nice tools makes it easier, but my ear is my instrument. People have no idea what is involved in creative endeavors. It’s a lengthy multitiered process.”
Locally, Reed said he is known for working with Blue Mountain, the alt-country/roots rock band formed in Oxford in the early 1990s. He also worked as an engineer on the Kudzu Kings’ first record.
“I still cut and produce records, but now, I’m really focusing on the post-production end,” said Reed, who said he’s one of the few people in the state doing that kind of work.
Reed said this can make a huge difference in the quality of a music or movie project. He also can engineer projects with surround sound.
“I have the ear and the tool set to do it,” he said.
Always a lover of outdoors, Reed said he might one day give up engineering and open a bait shop.
Lately, he’s been thinking of combining both ideas — building a recording studio on a lake called The Bait Shop.
STORY LaReeca Rucker
PHOTOGRAPHY Melanie Thortis