The Building
A Room With
History.
Every era brought different music. The address never changed.
The room was born into the Hollywood psychedelic underground. Continental Sound Recorders opened its doors in 1967 at 6035 Hollywood Boulevard — a small, focused studio in a neighborhood thick with music. The early sessions were raw, live-to-tape, and often late at night. The acts were local, the sounds were experimental, and the room was already developing a personality of its own.
It didn't last long in this form, but it planted the address on the map.
Around 1970, the studio was acquired by Seymour Heller — manager of Liberace — and renamed Producer's Workshop. It became home to AVI Records and a hub for some of the most commercially successful sessions in Hollywood history. The room stopped being a local secret and started becoming a destination.
Ringo Starr tracked his first two solo albums here, with guest appearances from every other Beatle. Steely Dan laid down most of the basic tracks for Aja and Gaucho in this room. Fleetwood Mac mixed Rumours here. Pink Floyd completed and mixed The Wall here. The list reads like a greatest hits of the 1970s.
For fifteen years, this was one of the most recorded rooms in Los Angeles — and almost nobody outside the industry knew its name.
In the mid-1980s the room changed hands again — this time to Brett Gurewitz, guitarist of Bad Religion and founder of Epitaph Records. Renamed Westbeach Recorders, it spent two decades as the beating heart of West Coast punk and alternative rock. If it came out on Epitaph, it probably came through here.
Blink-182 recorded their early records here. Bad Religion, Rancid, NOFX, and The Offspring all called it home. Mazzy Star's Fade Into You — one of the most enduring songs of the decade — was captured in this room. For a long stretch, this address was where independent music in Los Angeles got made.
Westbeach closed around 2008. The room sat quiet for a few years. Then it got a new name.
In 2011, Clay Blair took over the room and renamed it Boulevard Recording. He brought in the Sound Techniques ZR36 — one of fewer than twenty of its kind in existence — and picked up where the address left off. The history didn't reset. It just kept going.
The Grammy came in 2018 with The War on Drugs. Then Sam Fender's People Watching debuted at #1 in the UK and won the Mercury Prize. The room kept working. It still is today.
