![]() Rose, who now lives in Umatilla, said Markham is smart and offbeat. “Tom is a very intelligent guy, a brilliant, brilliant mind. The other for the rest of the band, which performed "this kind of ballet of instruments" around the mic, in classic bluegrass style, as they stepped up or back for vocals and solos. Markham remembers setting up just two mics for that song. The band came to Magnum in 1960 to record "Rank Stranger," a melancholy classic later named to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry. Markham said Rose worked at a TV station where the Stanley Brothers, a renowned bluegrass band from Live Oak, had a show sponsored by Jim Walter Homes. They had some success, including a hit called "Angel" by a Jacksonville singer named Dave Meadows, backed by the studio's band, the Neanderthals. ![]() He bought a tape machine and a high-end condenser microphone, and rigged up a salvaged gasoline tank in the backyard to work as an echo chamber, running sound out to a microphone and speaker in the tank. In 1959 he and partner Tom Rose opened a recording studio on Lovegrove Road, calling it Magnum Studios. They took it from class to class at Landon, doing demonstrations, before it ended up on display inside a glass box at the Jacksonville Children's Museum. While still in high school, Markham and a friend, Tom Sheally, built a Tesla coil that could make lightning 3 or 4 feet long. "We all became sort of a family, trying to make it," he said. Instead, Markham said, Shade Tree offered the young rockers their time and expertise in the recording studio in exchange for publishing rights and royalties to the songs. No one involved in the venture - the band or the record-company producers - had much money. They also got them airplay on local TV and the Big Ape, WAPE, the city's powerhouse AM station. They signed them to a five-year contract, promoted them at grocery stores and shopping center openings, and got them in the recording studio at the Norm Vincent Studio off Beach Boulevard. He also said it was Sutton who in 1968 saw the potential in The One Percent, a Westside band led by a stocky, self-confident singer named Ronnie Van Zant. "Real backyard, homey, a couple good-old boys, that’s what Jim and I were,” Markham said. It was Sutton who came up with the Shade Tree name, which they both quickly agreed on. “Let’s make some money," Markham proposed. He and his friend, the late Jim Sutton, formed Shade Tree Records in the late 1960s with high hopes. Tom Markham, 83, still has the record he helped make, and he still has the tapes on which the six Skynyrd songs were recorded, all carefully stored in an air-conditioned space in his house in Mandarin. Even so, it seemed obvious, these guys, who soon settled on the name Lynyrd Skynyrd, would be big.
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