Gary in Quad studio. photo Courtesy Gary Rubin.
Pioneer Recording’s Gary Rubin looks back at his behind-the-scenes role in the Detroit music business.
Recording gear is kind of an unusual item on the wish list of an average adolescent.
But the Webcor reel-to-reel machine Gary Rubin received as gift when he was 12 years old set him on the path for a history-making career.
“I just started recording people I knew and went from there,” the Detroit-born Rubin, now 76, says from Los Angeles, his home since 1996. And as chronicled in his new, self-published memoir, Big Dreams and the Detroit Record Business, Rubin’s recording acumen took him a great many places.
Gary RubinGary Rubin
From his basement studio at home, the Mumford High School graduate — who went on to study architecture at Lawrence Technological University and broadcasting at Michigan State University — built his passion into one of the metro area’s most prolific studios, Pioneer Recording, on James Couzens Highway less than a mile south of Northland Mall in Southfield. There, he recorded scores of musicians, including Eagles’ late Glenn Frey as a youth, as well as groups such as the Gambrells, the Tomangoes and the New Loves, who released music on Pioneer’s own record label.
Rubin and Pioneer also boasted a broad array of national and regional advertising companies, including the Detroit automotive companies and auto dealerships, Art Van Furniture, banks, beer brands, the Detroit Tigers, McDonald’s and the Coleman Young mayoral campaign. Pioneer was a training ground for recording engineers who went on to win Grammys and other awards, and Rubin also recorded bar mitzvah services and rabbinical sermons — some of which were part of the FBI investigation of the murder of Shaarey Zedek Rabbi Morris Adler during 1966.
And Rubin was happy to be behind the scenes rather than making music himself.
“I discovered early on I can’t sing a note, as much as I like music, and I couldn’t play an instrument,” Rubin acknowledges. He took accordion lessons, at his mother’s behest, when he was 10; “On Valentine’s Day, the teacher gave me a card and asked would I please stop taking lessons,” Rubin recalls. He enjoyed writing poetry and had some songwriting ambitions, but his real talents came from his ears.
“The end of the business I could really get into was being on the production side,” he says. “I had a talent for knowing talent and for knowing how to record them — sound engineering, acoustics, knowing how to get the right mics for the right instrument, lots of little techniques. I picked up most of the details on my own.”
Pioneer became part of a robust network of Detroit recording studios from its opening during the fall of 1964 into the ’80s, when Rubin sold it and went into the construction business.
Fame and More
There were many brushes with famous — at the time or future — musicians and other clients, but being a part of Frey’s early music career is among the best of his recurring stories.
“Glenn was friends with a lot of my friends, and a lot of these guys were in bands,” Rubin recalls. “Glenn and I just became good friends. He’d come over and go in the laundry room with my sister and make out.”
Glenn FreyWikipedia
Others who crossed paths with Rubin and Pioneer included Ray Goodman, guitarist with SRC, the Detroit Wheels and other bands, and a teenage Sixto Rodriguez, who would go on to fame as a recording artist under his surname and was the subject of the documentary Searching for Sugar Man.
Rubin recounts a great many tales and details in the sprawling Big Dreams, a coffee-table style tome that weighs in at more than 800 pages and combines commentary and stream-of-consciousness narration with diary-like entries. In addition to the studio, Rubin also writes about his upbringing and family as well as other pursuits and passions, such as the Detroit Tigers and screenplay writing (his older brother Bruce Joel Rubin is an Academy Award-winning writer whose credits include Ghost, Jacob’s Ladder and My Life).
Rubin also delves into his views of the relationship between organized crime and the music industry.
“It seems to be that in the story of my life so many things are interconnected in so many different ways,” Rubin says. “I try to capture that in the book.”
The project itself was inspired by a Grandfather’s Journal that one of his four grandchildren gave him as a present, and then the pandemic lockdown offered more time to put his thoughts on paper.
“This isn’t a book I expect to make any money on. It’s too expensive and a bit too long,” Rubin acknowledges, adding that he went the self-publishing route so he could have full control over the content. “It’s really just a keepsake. If you’re really interested in what this has to say, it’s a really nice keepsake.”
Big Dreams is, in fact, just the first part of Rubin’s story. The second book is already written, and Rubin is hoping to develop “a TV series or a movie centering around the recording industry in Detroit.”
He’s also working with the London-based M & D Records label to re-release Pioneer titles by the Sensations and the Famous Brothers, among others.
“It’s been fun going down memory lane doing this,” Rubin adds. “It reminds you that everything’s cyclical. Not everything lasts. So just be grateful for everything you get out of life.”