30 Music Square W.
It’s another win for the movement to preserve Music Row. This morning, the director of the National Park Service announced the organization has added 30 Music Square W., the building housing hallowed RCA Studio A, to the National Register of Historic Places. In May, the Tennessee State Review Board endorsed for federal approval a 48-page nomination application prepared by the MTSU Center for Historic Preservation’s Carroll Van West.
The news comes one year and three days after Brentwood developer Tim Reynolds finalized a deal to purchase the famed former RCA building from the estates of founders Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, following an outcry from the local community that — led by rocker Ben Folds, who’d leased and operated the studio for 12 years — eventually made the studio an international news story and cause célèbre. In October, just as Reynolds was putting plans in place to raze the building, Leiper's Fork philanthropist, preservationist, music historian and real estate mogul Aubrey Preston stepped in to buy the building at the 11th hour, later partnering with a pair of fellow philanthropist-preservationists, politician and music mogul Mike Curb and Nashville healthcare executive Chuck Elcan.
“We’ve come a long way in 10 months,” Preston tells the Scene, ”especially considering where this thing was headed.
“Before this designation, [30 Music Square W.] was just a building with some old stories behind it,” Preston went on to say, explaining that the studio’s addition to the Register “sets the table” for the building eventually achieving “some type of protective overlay” or permanent landmark status, something he and his partners hope to see happen in the next year.
Until then, it's music business as usual at 30 Music Square W., and business is good.
According to Preston, most of the building’s office space is currently occupied. Among the new tenants are the Nashville offices of revered reissue label Sundazed Records and legendary R&B guitarist, songwriter and producer Steve Cropper, who is renting Studio C. But it’s the proximity to Studio A that recently led to a chance collaboration between Cropper and blues-rocker Joe Bonamassa, who’s currently cutting his next record in the studio, which is still rented and operated by Folds and his team.
“I have to think Chet [Atkins] and Owen [Bradley] would be smiling,” Preston muses, expressing satisfaction that the 50-year-old building — which he describes as a still-standing Brill Building of Music Row, purpose-built by Atkins and Bradley — is still a creative hub where cottage-industry musicians can record and network.
And while that kind of inside baseball isn't a spectator sport, music fans and members of the local and international community that rallied to save Studio A will get a chance to tour the facility at an open-house event Preston says is slated for Oct. 3 — the one-year anniversary of its saving.
