Bob Wayne, founder, director and chief engineer of Culver City’s premier recording studio – Sunburst Recording – enthralled an audience of more than 50 Historical Society members and friends on Wednesday evening, October 20, 2010, with his exploits as a performer and in recording the celebrities of Los Angeles for more than 30 years.
His career began, he explained, 1977 when he founded Sunburst Recording in a converted two-car garage in Westchester. Five years later, he moved the studio to its present location in Culver City on Jefferson Blvd. He described his work as “encompassing a wide array of media (music, film, television, spoken word) and diverse genres (jazz, swing, ska, rock, folk, comedy and children’s).”
He has worked with Adam Sandler, Cesar Millan (The Dog Whisperer), Fishbone, Hepcat, Richie Havens, Micky Dolenz, Steve Allen, plus jazz greats Plas Johnson, Barbara Morrison and Ernie Andrews. He earned a Grammy Award for his work on George Carlin’s Napalm & Sillyputty CD in 2002. Additionally, he produced and engineered more than 50 recording projects for the Rhino Records label. Bob also described his other life in the 1980s as a musician in the parody rock band Big Daddy, which issued 4 albums and toured extensively.
Bob’s presentation included demonstrations of recordings on both digital equipment and vintage analog machines, along with reverb, chorus, other effects, plus hilarious song “mashups” from Big Daddy covering classic tunes by Billy Joel, The Beatles, Paul Simon, Elvis Presley, Harry Belafonte and others.