You’ve probably never heard of Criteria Recording Studios in North Miami. Most people haven’t.

It does no advertising. It sits on a nondescript section of highway where it’s easy to overlook. In a part of Florida that’s frequently full of glittering celebrities, its staff prefers to fade into the background. But if you’ve ever turned on a radio, you’ve heard some of Criteria’s handiwork. 

Hits by everyone from James Brown to Missy Elliott were cut at Criteria. It helped produce some of the most famous albums in music history, including “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac, “Young, Gifted and Black” by Aretha Franklin and “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” by Derek and the Dominos. The Eagles named their most well-known album “Hotel California,” but they recorded it in Florida at Criteria.

In other words, these musical creations are as much of a product of the Sunshine State as a box of Indian River citrus, a Weeki Wachee Springs State Park mermaid show or a Jimmy Buffett album (take a guess where “Margaritaville” was cut).

Criteria “put Miami on the map as far as the rock world was concerned,” said Alberto de la Portilla, a music historian who writes the Long Play Miami blog.

There are hundreds of stories about the parade of talent that’s passed through Criteria. Perhaps the best one to explain what a central role it has played in the history of pop, rock, soul and funk is the one about legendary producer Tom Dowd. Dowd needed just 30 minutes at Criteria for remixing, but he couldn’t get an appointment. 

“They told me all the studios were taken, 24 hours a day,” Dowd recalled. “So I drove there, figuring I could sneak in and do my half-hour edit.  I get into the parking lot, and here’s Bob Seger, the Bee Gees and Crosby, Stills & Nash—the three groups that have the studio locked out 24 hours a day—and they’re
shooting baskets.”

One music industry veteran referred to Criteria as “the Vatican of recording studios” because it’s holy ground. If that’s true, the high priest is Trevor Fletcher, its current vice president. He’s its historian, and you could say he lived much of it.

“My mother started answering the phones here in 1969,” Fletcher said (she later became general manager). “I was a little kid. I grew up running around in here.”

His childhood memories are different from your typical playground encounters. At one point he walked in on Bob Marley smoking a joint that looked as big as Fletcher’s leg. 

It’s appropriate that Criteria once functioned as Fletcher’s day care center, because it started out as a way for one parent to keep his son entertained.

Laying Down the Track

Mack Emerman loved jazz. At Duke University, he played trumpet for the Duke Ambassadors, a big band. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he wound up in Miami, where his father ran a candy company. 

During the day Emerman made deliveries of saltwater taffy for his dad. Then at night, he’d use the same station wagon to haul a couple of Telefunken microphones and a Concertone tape machine to different jazz clubs in the area to record the local bands.

He even set up a studio in his garage, running cables into the family living room. His talent, it turned out, wasn’t for playing music but recording it.

“I had hoped to be a good trumpet player, but I was never good enough,” Emerman told the Miami Herald in 1998. “I got very interested in the recording industry. That became a hobby, and the hobby became a business.”

By 1958, his father was ready for Emerman to stop bringing his musician friends over to the house to play. He loaned him the money to buy and open his own studio near WTVJ-TV.

The new studio owner benefited from an early meeting with a Fort Lauderdale high fidelity expert named Jeep Harned, who ran a small company known as Music Center Incorporated. A mutual friend of both men played Harned a record Emerman had made. Harned knew he needed help.

“The studio had all custom-built equipment, and obviously Mack was having some problems with some of it,” Harned said, recalling their first meeting. He said he “loaded all my test equipment into my car, and we went down to Criteria. Mack’s new studio was very pretty,” but some equipment was causing “considerable audio distortion.”

Lightning struck there once, so everybody wanted to be there in case it struck again.
—Grant Gravitt Jr.

The pair had a long talk, and Emerman “made the decision to rebuild all the electronics in his control room … After about a year, we had rebuilt almost everything at the studio—including the record cutting chain.”

The experience helped Harned create the audio powerhouse known as MCI Inc. (eventually bought out by Sony). Meanwhile, he said, “Mack and Criteria got a reputation for getting a really solid low end from the equipment that I had designed and built.”

A Miami Herald columnist wrote about the new studio venture and offered this opinion: “I don’t think Emerman is going to get rich. But he deserves praise for offering the young musicians in the area a chance at a wider audience. I’ve heard many a musician complain that Miami is one of the toughest towns for a jazz musician.”

Then the man they called “The Great One” showed up.

The Great One

Jackie Gleason grew up in the tough-luck streets of New York, where he discovered he had a talent for comedy. He started out as an insult comic (“Is that your head, sir? Or are you diapering a baby?” he once asked a movie executive with a receding hairline). Then he developed a series of funny characters for sketches that made him a wildly popular television star.

Gleason loved to play golf. When he found out he could play nearly year-round in Florida, he moved there in 1964, building a home at Inverrary Country Club in Lauderhill. And he brought along his hit variety show, “The Jackie Gleason Show,” which usually featured him playing blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners.”

Gleason had his own orchestra, so they needed a place to record music for the show, which ran through 1970.

“They were doing the music for the show’s soundtrack,” Fletcher explained. “[They] needed music for the segues between scenes, and there were virtually no other recording studios here, so they came to Criteria.”

That led to other well-known musicians deciding to use Criteria, too—Duke Ellington and Ahmad Jamal to name two. They were impressed with Emerman’s attention to the technical side of recording music because he invested in top-of-the-line equipment.

But most of Criteria’s business involved taping local advertising jingles and the University of Miami band—not exactly the stuff of legends. 

That was until the Godfather of Soul came calling with a musical emergency.

A Hail Mary

In 1965, James Brown was on tour at a stop in Miami. And he needed help.

Brown had already recorded what would become his first huge hit, “I Got You (I Feel Good).” But there was a problem.

“There was some sort of contractual snafu,” Fletcher said. 

According to Songfacts.com, Brown recorded the number in September 1964 and lease it, along with some of his other songs, to Smash Records. Smash planned to release it as a single, and Brown had been performing the song while on tour.

But Brown’s usual record label, King Records, sued to block the release. In October 1964, a judge ruled that Smash Records would be allowed to issue only instrumental recordings by Brown—no vocals.

That’s why Brown needed Criteria, Fletcher said: “They needed to rerecord it.”

The second version turned out to be much better. “The original  1964 version of this so had no guitar,” says Songfacts.com. “When Brown redid it in 1965, he made his screams more pronounced and added some instrumentation,” including more sax by Maceo Parker.

When it was released by King Records, the rerecorded number shot to the top of the R&B charts and stayed there for six weeks. It also went to No. 3 on the Hot 100. 

It became Criteria’s first gold record. There would be another 240 or so more to follow.

Brown’s blockbuster brought more artists to Criteria.

“The best advertisement for a studio is a hit record,” Fletcher said. With this new demand, though, Emerman needed money to expand. In 1966, he met with a Miami TV and film  producer named Grant Gravitt Sr. to ask for a favor. Gravitt had started working at WTVJ the day it opened, ran the audio for Gleason’s shows and the second performance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. He’d created a company called Tel-Air  that produced a broad range of shows and documentary films. 

Emerman told him his problem: None of the banks wanted to lend him the cash he needed so desperately. Fortunately, Gravitt was on a bank board, said his son Grant Gravitt Jr.

“My dad could get the loan for Mack to build more of his studio,” Gravitt Jr. said. In exchange, Tel-Air could use one of the studios they helped build whenever needed. Meanwhile, young Gravitt Jr. started hanging out in Criteria’s game room after school.

“I’d ride my bike over and play pinball for an hour or so,” he said. “It was a cool place.”

Two giants of the music industry soon discovered that, too: Dowd and Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. They loved fishing off the South Florida coast. Wexler even bought a home in Miami. For them, Criteria was a godsend—a way to do their business in the place where they liked to play.

In the spring of 1969, Aretha Franklin traveled down from Detroit to join them at Criteria. In the 30-by-40-foot Studio B, Franklin spread her fingers over the keys of a Baldwin grand piano to play the gospel-influenced intro to “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied).”

“It was a bit of a challenge because Aretha was playing the grand piano live with the band, as well as singing the song live with the band,” Criteria recording engineer Ron Albert told a trade magazine called Mix years later. “So it was our job to get as much separation and sound quality as possible, because all of her vocals were keepers. She may have overdubbed a line here and there, but Aretha Franklin never sang a bad note in her life.”

Part of the sound quality came from something you wouldn’t expect—something from a nearby Italian restaurant.

“We’d close the lid on the piano and cover it with moving quilts, and close-mic the piano,” Albert’s brother Howard, also a Criteria recording engineer, told Mix. “And we always got pizza from Marcella’s. That was also part of the piano sound—the pizza box on top of the piano.”

That song hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and earned Franklin a 1971 Best Female R&B Grammy. She recorded the rest of her album “Spirit in the Dark” at Criteria, including the title tune, then returned to record more hits there, including “Spanish Harlem.” Her landmark LP, “Young, Gifted and Black,” recorded at Criteria and produced two more major hits with the ethereal “Day Dreaming” and funky “Rock Steady.”

Dr. John, renowned for his New Orleans-flavored style, played keyboards on some of those sessions. He then used Criteria to record his own biggest selling album, “In the Right Place,” which featured the hits “Right Place, Wrong Time” and “Such a Night.”

Dowd also made sure to bring to Criteria a pair of Florida’s own musical stars—Duane and Gregg Allman of Daytona Beach. The Allman Brothers Band recorded “Idlewild South” and “Eat a Peach” there. Then Duane wound up playing with an artist some people called God.

461 Ocean Boulevard

Eric Clapton first made a name for himself in the ’60s as a  dazzling guitarist for the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream and Blind Faith. Fans wrote on walls in London “Clapton Is God.”

Then in 1970 he put together a new group, one where he’d be doing more than showing off his prowess with a power chord. The band called itself Derek and the Dominos, and his publicist sent tips to the newspapers that said, “Derek is Eric.” Their manager sent them to Dowd, who took them to Criteria to record an album that became known as the classic “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.” Things didn’t start well. 

“During the day we would go swimming and have saunas, and then it was off to the studio to jam, sometimes with chemical assistance,” Clapton wrote in his memoir. “We were staying in a funky little hotel on Miami Beach where you could score hard drugs in the gift shop … You just placed your order with the girl who worked there, and you’d come back the next day and she’d hand it to you in a brown
paper bag.”

One day when Clapton arrived at the studio, Dowd explained he couldn’t record that night because he had to see the Allman Brothers Band perform in Coconut Grove. Clapton asked to tag along.

“So we walked out on stage, and here, sitting on the front row, is Tom Dowd and Eric Clapton,” Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks recalled on the “Ultimate Classic Rock Nights” radio show years later. “That’s the one time I think I remember Duane being nervous.”

After the concert, the pair jammed in the studio for hours. Clapton wound up inviting Duane Allman to play on the record as they laid down tracks.

“Duane and I became inseparable during the time we were in Florida,” Clapton wrote in his memoir, “and between the two of us, we injected the substance into the ‘Layla’ sessions that had been missing up to that point.”

Critics later agreed that Allman’s abilities spurred Clapton to do his finest work ever. The album’s jacket contains a message of thanks to Emerman—but misspells his name.

That was also part of the sound—the pizza box on top of the piano.
—Howard Albert

Four years later, when Clapton had kicked his three-year heroin addiction and was ready to cut his comeback record, he returned to Miami. He rented a house at 461 Ocean Boulevard in Golden Beach while he spent a month recording the album by that name at Criteria.

Miami is a crossroads for musical influences, including funk, soul, Latin and Caribbean. One of the Miami musicians hired to play on the album, George Terry, brought in a record by Bob Marley and the Wailers called “Burnin.’” Clapton found the sound mesmerizing. Terry especially liked one Marley song, “I Shot the Sheriff.” 

“You ought to cut this,” Terry told him. Clapton wasn’t sure but recorded a cover version anyway. 

“I wasn’t that enamored of it,” Clapton recalled in his memoir. “When we got to the end of the sessions and started to collate the songs that we had, I told them I didn’t think ‘Sheriff’ should be included, as it didn’t do the Wailers’s version justice. But everyone said, ‘No, no, this is a hit.’” 

They were right, and that cover version recorded at Criteria wound up introducing reggae to a lot of new listeners.

When a trio of fellow artists in the United Kingdom who had the same manager asked him to
recommend a place to record in the States, Clapton wholeheartedly endorsed Criteria.

“Maybe the change of environment will do something for you?” he told them.

When brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb formed the Bee Gees in Australia in 1958, the focus of their music was their harmonies. Mostly they sang emotionally-soaked ballads, recorded in England.

But by 1974, their style of music had become passe. They couldn’t get desirable gigs anymore.

“We’d lost the will to write great songs,” Barry recalled later. “We had the talent, but the inspiration was gone.” 

Then, at Clapton’s suggestion, they flew to Miami, rented 461 Ocean Boulevard and began recording the album “Main Course” at Criteria. This was the album that would vault them back to the top of the charts by introducing elements of funk and R&B. 

“Basically, we’d lie all day on the beach, then work over at the studio in the evening and late into the night,” keyboardist Blue Weaver said. The biggest hit from the album came from their drive to the studio each day. 

Barry heard a rhythm their car’s tires made on the 163rd St Causeway Bridge (now known as the Julia Tuttle Causeway) as they crossed it. The sound inspired him to compose a song called “Drive Talking,” later that was changed to “Jive Talking.” Other hit songs from the album include “Nights on Broadway” and “Fanny (Be Tender with My Love).”

“Nights” marked a breakthrough of a different kind.

“Barry, can you give me some really wild ad libs to use on the fade?” the producer asked, according to a writer from Playboy who profiled the trio. The tape rolled, and Barry began his ad libs. “‘Blamin’ it all’ he echoes the verse, over and over. He pushes his voice still higher and suddenly, for the first time in his life, breaks into a falsetto.” 

The stunned producer said, “Can you do that again?” He did, and the falsetto became a hallmark of Bee Gees hits. 

After that album’s soaring success, the Bee Gees cut several more LPs at Criteria, including the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. When the writer from Playboy visited, he described the scene: “The studio, even with its inlaid wood, stained-glass ‘skylight’ and multicolored couches, looks severely lived in. Brown bags from the 7-Eleven, teacups, soda cans, ashtrays full of butts—all attest to the months of recording.”

Other bands flocked to Criteria. “They were the home of the hits,” Gravitt Jr. said. “Lightning struck there once, so everybody wanted to be there in case it struck again. You got that mojo in that room.”

But the place still had a family vibe, he said.

“Barry Gibbs would buy out a whole theater so he and his family could see a movie, and he’d invite everyone else at the studio to go, too,” he said. 

There were limits, though.

“I once got kicked out of an Eagles recording session because I was playing Nerf basketball with them in a studio that was costing $300 an hour,” he said.

Criteria now seemed enormously successful. Even the Bee Gees couldn’t depend on being able to line up studio time there, so they built their own. Dowd and Emerman began making plans for a joint venture they called “Criteria West.” It would be located in Southern California.

“We went so far as to buy the Walter Lantz Animation Studios,” the Criteria boss told Studio Sound magazine. “It would have been a great location. Between us we came up with a fantastic design and actually started construction … and January 1980 came, business stopped and interest rates went to 21 percent. We had to say stop, and stop we did thank goodness.”

Worse was yet to come.

The B-Side

You can tell when some Florida fixture has become a legend: when it merits a mention in one of Tim Dorsey’s 26 comic crime novels about Florida-obsessed vigilante Serge Storms.

In “Hurricane Punch,” Storms uses a crowbar to break into Criteria so he can record his own hit single there. He says he’s going to cover the final cut from Clapton’s “461 Ocean Boulevard” album, a song called “Mainline Florida” written by Terry. Instead, there’s a shootout (followed by sex on the
mixing board).

By the time that 2007 novel hit bookstores, though, Emerman was no longer overseeing Criteria.

“My father was a gearhead, a tech guy and not a good businessman at all,” his daughter Bebe Emerman told The New York Timeswhen he died in 2013.

Deep in debt, he sold the studio in 1988 to a South Florida concert promoter named Joel Levy who also worked for his family’s real estate development company.

“It was scary and there was some skepticism,” Levy told the Miami Herald in 1998. “But now, we’ve definitely had to turn business away. Business is good.”

Just a year later, though, Levy sold Criteria. By the time Dorsey saluted the studio, the place was owned by a historic New York City studio called The Hit Factory. The new owners renamed it The Hit Factory Criteria Miami and launched an extensive renovation.

She may have overdubbed a line here and there, but Aretha Franklin never sang a bad note in her life.
—Ron Albert

“Located near Biscayne Boulevard in northwest Miami, Hit Factory Criteria now has six full studios, including a large scoring room; a mastering studio; a digital audio editing suite; several pre-production rooms; and a host of other enhancements, technical, acoustical and aesthetic” the Mix reported in 2000. “Replete with African slate floor tiles and Italian porcelain fixtures, the environs are as palatial as those of its new northern parent.”

But by 2017, the name had reverted to Criteria Studios. Fletcher won’t say who owns it now. His employer has required him to sign an NDA. 

The staff numbers 17 now, none of them recording engineers. Instead, he said, they maintain a list of freelance engineers with expertise in each genre who can show up when needed.

Criteria is a much more privacy-minded place now. Each studio has a separate, secure entrance. There’s little of the mingling that was once so common. You’ll never again find artists from multiple acts shooting baskets in the parking lot.

Yet people still seek out Criteria, hoping to hit the same jackpot as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees. Sometimes they do. In Fletcher’s emails, there’s a link to a Spotify playlist of Criteria-made hits—438 songs. To listen to all of it takes 30 hours. 

The diversity of the more modern years is astonishing. There are numbers by Missy Elliott, R.E.M., Toby Keith and Céline Dion. Sisqó’s “Thong Song” plays a few spots before Warrant’s “Cherry Pie.” 

But how can Criteria still hold such allure in a time when new singers pop up who claim they can record great music with just a laptop?

“You can also do heart surgery with a Ginsu knife,” Fletcher said. “But should you?”

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