I love my space at Capitol Studios.

There’s a lot of history buried in the details of this building.  The frieze, the floors, the walled-over bones of the original structure.  Originally erected in 1923 along the Los Angeles river, the name of the architect has apparently been lost.

It operated as a diesel school for a time, then became the pressing plant for Capitol Studios.  Exactly when is unclear, but it was sometime between the years of 1942 and 1946.

1956 was the year Capitol Records centralized their operations, combining a New York office, the Hollywood data processing office, and other distribution offices into the famous Capitol Records Tower in downtown Los Angeles.

This is a promotional booklet for the new and innovative Capitol Records building.

The pressing plant is featured, but at this point in time there were two active US plants, the Scranton Pennsylvania plant mentioned above, and the California plant on the border of Glendale and Los Angeles.  We can’t really tell if that’s our building or the Pennsylvania plant from the photos above.

So what records came out of our building?  Lots of Sinatra.  Lots of Bing Crosby.  And lots of Beatles.  This is an image of a pristine, sealed Beatles record, certified to have come from the Glendale plant.

How do you know?  There’s a symbol every pressing plant marks its product with. This is the Glendale mark, a starbust, repping Hollywood:

     \  |  /

      \ | /

   —-   —-  Los Angeles, CA

      / | \

     /  |  \

Compare it to the Scranton mark:

       / \   

      / I \     Scranton, PA

     / A M \

     ——- 

The I A M is not an illuminati hippie doo-dah transcendent moment… it stands for the International Association of Machinists, the union working in Scranton’s pressing plant.

They all had to find new jobs when Scranton closed in 1973, leaving our plant and one in Jacksonville, Illinois to press Capitol’s vinyl.

The equipment used to manufacture these records were extremely well made.  A signature of Capitol Records:  sophisticated perfection in every detail.

The Los Angeles plant closed sometime around 1986.  The equipment was sold to RTI, a company who specialized in custom records for organizations with enough money to immortalize their thoughts, songs, recordings, teachings, thetan warnings… wait, what?

And there’s more to discover about the Capitol Studios building.  We’re still stripping layers of paint down to the original 20’s rosy wood and uncovering building relics in attics and behind walls…