In a sleepy North Miami warehouse district, right behind me lies musical history, a lot
of it.
This is Criteria Studios and for the last 60 years, this state of the art production
facility has churned out hit record after hit record by the likes of James Brown and
the Bee Gees all the way of to artists of today like Nicki Minaj.
We go and sit down with Trevor Fletcher, the studio manager, who literally grew up here.
You can kind of even feel a little bit of magic around because of all the incredible
talent that's passed through these doors.
Ghosts are still in the wall.
Yes!
It's a pleasure to have you guys here.
Thank you so much.
So the studio's celebrating its 60th anniversary which I'm sure makes it one of the most memorable,
if not the most memorable studio in all of South Floria.
South Florida?
On the planet.
In 1958 when this place first opened, do you have any idea, what was the neighborhood like?
Was there anything around?
Sure, there were pine trees and that was it.
Pine trees, dirt roads.
Originally our phone number was Miami 5611.
So if that gives you any kind of idea.
We have seven studios now and yeah, I mean they're all acoustically correct.
They're well built by the finest builders, the acousticians, and so on and so forth.
[Lolo] And this studio here, Studio A, this is the big one, you can track an entire orchestra
in here?
Absolutely, did last week and will next week, so we do everything from a live Bon Jovi concert
here to the Miami Symphony Orchestra.
Originally this place was open by a musician named Mack Emerman.
He was a jazz musician and I read that he liked to go around and tape live shows and
record people and he kept his gear in his car.
Were most of the early recordings here on the jazz style or was there more variety going
on too?
Absolutely, he was a jazz trumpet player and he did have a recording place kind of in his
living room and his family got pissed off and finally got him to leave and have a free
standing building so he came here and yeah, a lot of it was jazz.
A lot of it was his friends, and it was, he would basically record anything he could get
his hands on.
He was passionate about the music and the people making the music.
Today you still have so many artists coming through and to me, incredible that you're
available for these high level artists, such as Ricky Martin, Nicki Manaj, people like
that.
But you're also a studio that local people can rent out and use.
Miami's Nu Deco Ensemble just make a record here, right?
Yeah we've always done the struggling jazz musician scraping together a couple of dollars
to do recordings to the James Brown session to Ahmad Jamal to Duke Ellington Orchestra.
We used to score the Jackie Gleason Show in this room so it's always been a wide range
of stuff.
We did Marilyn Manson's first record.
We did The Maverick's first record, people that are local bands that blew up.
We do every conceivable type of music.
One of the things I love about Criteria is that all over the walls you can see all of
these incredible plaques celebrating some of the gold platinum and multimillion selling
songs that were made right in this building.
Got REM right here classic Automatic for the People, 1992, I definitely am a huge fan of
this record, so amazing to learn.
It was made right here in my hometown.
Some incredible movie soundtracks you may have heard of.
A little movie called Grease.
A little movie called Saturday Night Fever.
Criteria in general is very closely associated with the Bee Gees.
They had one of the studios booked out for years or something like that I read.
All the studios, they're part of the reason we have so many rooms.
The Gibbs would come in and they'd be working on a project and we couldn't fit anybody else
in so we built another room.
Fortunately they chose Miami to make their home, and we did, I don't even know how many,
five, six, seven albums with them.
So you know more about this place than anyone and that's 'cause you've worked here for 30
years and that's amazing.
And you got started because your mom worked here.
1969 or so my mom started answering the phones here.
So when we recorded Layla, Derek and the Dominos and Eric Clapton and Duane Allman with Tom
Dowd of course, I was on the other side of the wall in the dub room asleep at five because
she couldn't find a babysitter.
So yeah I've been around, I know where all the bodies are buried.
I used to be the little kid running around getting kicked out of sessions and stuff like
that.
And now it's like, I'm the one that's kicking people out of sessions so, full circle.
Full circle.
This is Studio D.
This room was probably built in 197879 something like that.
And one of the concepts behind having so many different rooms is they all have a unique
acoustic footprint and so they can be utilized largely like another instrument.
So if you're cutting vocals and you want a very small, dead warm room, you can go into
a smaller environment or what have you and achieve what you want as opposed to having
to work hard in a big live room to isolate the vocalists and things of that nature.
[Lolo] There's probably artists and producers that have their
[Trevor] Their favorite rooms.
[Lolo] Favorites, yeah.
Exactly, it's crazy too because on a Monday I'll come give somebody a tour and they say,
oh absolutely, this room I can feel it.
I really want to work in here.
I love the vibe of this room.
And then Tuesday I'll come in and somebody will say, I don't like this room, I like the
red room, you know whatever.
So it's different strokes for different folks.
It's a combination of, from colors to the acoustics of the room to the console to the
tape machines to the single processors.
It's all about the collection of the tools that are at your disposal.
We got Bob Marley, we got Eric Clapton, we got Brittany.
We got Fleetwood Mac, more Eagles, Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan.
I mean it is really kind of overwhelming as a music lover to come to a place like this.
And walking around you really can kind of feel the energy here.
You know, the fact that all these people and all this music lived and was birthed right
here, incredible.