Numero Group excavates Cavern Sound for a new compilation

Jim Wheeler welcomes me into his spacious Crossroads studio, Wheeler Audio, looking every bit the child of the 1960s he is: faded jeans, wavy hair, chunky silver rings, and an oxford shirt printed with peace signs and doves that opens over a Cowtown Ballroom T-shirt. He recorded dozens of live shows at that legendary Kansas City venue during its prime, and he was also an audio engineer at Cavern Sound in the 1970s, experiences that have made him a resource for anyone interested in KC’s rock history — like, say, Numero Group.

The Chicago reissue label has just put out the compilation Local Customs: Cavern Sound, featuring two dozen songs salvaged from the studio, which closed in the late 1980s. Cavern, Kansas City’s first 16-track recording studio, opened at Pixley Quarry in Independence, in 1967. Wheeler started working there when he was 19, in 1971, and stuck around for three years, an era represented on the album. It was one of just two commercial studios in the metro back then, and the work kept Wheeler busy.

“I missed the daylight,” he tells me. He laughs but he’s not joking — Cavern, true to its name, was located underground, in a limestone mine. That meant a lot of dust and a lot of fluorescent bulbs. “The reason they [Cavern’s founders] picked it was because it was 6,000 square feet and $35 bucks a month. What a limestone mine is, they go in and excavate out maybe 25 feet vertical of limestone rock, but every 60 or 70 feet, they leave these pillars that are maybe 25 feet in diameter to support the roof. We basically went in between four of such pillars and put up concrete walls to close the space off.”

Wheeler shows me photos he took at Cavern in those days, some of which Numero used in the release.

“They’re real shitty, scratched through the years,” Wheeler says of the images, now stored on his computer. “But here’s one of James Brown. He recorded with us in 1972. You can see the limestone walls there, in the studio. We did everything — country, rock. There was no heavy metal yet. We took whatever work came in.”

Days later, I call Tom Sorrells. He never worked at Cavern, but he knew of it. A longtime record collector — and co-founder of the 1970s Kansas City power-pop label Titan Records — he called up one of Cavern’s owners, Jerry Riegle, in the late ’80s.

“I was interested in a lot of the older Kansas City records from the ’60s and ’70s,” Sorrells says, “and I knew that Cavern was still in operation back in the mid-’80s, and I wanted to see if I could get some copies of the records they released through the label over the years.”

Sorrells was mainly interested in the early 45s, he says, but Riegle offered him a much bigger bounty.

“Jerry told me they were just getting ready to close the studio down — they had a 20-year lease — and he was like, ‘Do you want everything?'” Sorrells says. “And I said, ‘What do you mean, everything?’ And he said, ‘The filing cabinets, the master tapes, the business records, the phonograph records, everything.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ I didn’t want it to be thrown away and go to the dump or something.”

So, just like that, Sorrells became the keeper of all things Cavern Sound. Slowly, he began to compile an anthology from the mint-condition master tapes of the early recordings (all of which were serendipitously accompanied by the session logs). Unable to track down all the artists, though, he never finished the project.

Then, in 2008, after Numero had released the Titan compilation It’s All Pop!, Sorrells saw an opportunity. In 2012, he sent Numero two discs full of tracks he’d transferred from Cavern’s master tapes.

“I went through the licensing for the Titan project with them, so I knew they were good at what they did,” Sorrells says. “Once they heard the tracks, they said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’re interested.’ So I shipped everything off to them, and they took it from there.”

“This was a unique case,” Dustin Drase, Numero’s general manager, tells me. “Usually, we find out about a label and we have to go dig up the pieces. But Tom came to us with a box of correspondence and contracts, and we spent two years analyzing all of it. We had all these master tapes to listen to, and we would listen to them over and over, and we’d make notes about what jumped out at us, and then we’d go track those people down.”

Numero started by ruling out certain styles: folk, gospel, assorted odds and ends.

“The catalog was so deep, and we chose a specific sound because those bands were interesting to us,” Drase says. “It’s definitely a curated compilation. A lot of what we do [at Numero] is telling stories from record labels that never really made it, so to speak. We’re interested in the underdogs of the world, and the story of the underdog label that was underground is one of the most incredible stories you can think of.”

The songs that made the cut for Local Customs do not add up to an incredible story. Local Customs instead tells a fairly familiar tale: For the most part, the bands here — among them Pretty, Jaded, Bulbous Creation, and Classmen — outgrew rock and roll pretty fast. They settled into adult jobs, had families. The music they made ranges from scuzzy, dirty psychedelic numbers that recall the James Gang (see “Mustache in Your Face” by Pretty) to doo-wop-inflected punk (Morningstar’s “Little By Little” sounds like the Beach Boys and Bikini Kill recalling a one-night stand), and the album itself feels a little off-center, with half-realized genres brushing elbows and no future champion waiting to emerge. But that’s Numero’s point. Local Customs captures a moment in this town’s rock-and-roll history with fascinating clarity.

For Sorrells, that’s enough.

“This is all there is from Kansas City music in this time period,” he says. “There’s nothing else out there. A city like Chicago, they’d probably have 20 studios, and each individual studio would just have a portion of the local scene. But this was pretty much it. For the people that care about history and music and just like hearing things they haven’t heard, it’s important.”