Wer war/ist Sage & Sand Records ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD und mehr

Sage & Sand Records

Sage & Sand Records was the sole domain of Woodie Otto Fleener. Many paths crossed his, but it seems as if few who knew him are still around. "A nice man, like a father to me," said one of his artists, Bobby Lile, and that's about as specific as anyone gets. Fleener was born on July 16, 1907, and listed his birthplace as Missouri when he enlisted in the Army. The 1910 census found his family in Vernon, Missouri. He was in Oklahoma when he applied for his Social Security card in the 1930s and was still there when he copyrighted his first song in 1939, but he was in Los Angeles by the time he enlisted in April 1943. November 1943 found him as a private in the Army Medical Corps, working at the Station Hospital in Mitchell Field, New York. According to Bobby Lile, he was still in a branch of medicine after the war, running a portable x-ray business before he entered the record business. A few of his songs, written under the name Wooddie (with two "d's") Fleener, were recorded by now-forgotten artists on tiny labels, and so it's possible that Fleener's publishing company was an extension of his songwriting, and his record labels were an extension of his music publishing. But most of his earliest releases featured Eddie Dean and/or his compadres, the Frontiersmen, so it's equally possible that Fleener knew them and started Sage & Sand to record them. It appears as if his labels started at some point in early 1953 and ended in the late 1960s. The business address was 5653 ½ Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, California, not far from the Capitol Records building at Hollywood and Vine. Lile remembered that Fleener had an office and studio on the second floor of a building that had been an ill-fated cartoon studio.

Unusually for a pop and country label (there were a few R&B releases…but only a few), Fleener affiliated his publishing companies with SESAC, the least well-known of the three performing rights societies (the other two being ASCAP and BMI). There were three labels under Fleener's umbrella (Sage, Sand, and Sage & Sand), but the only major hit on any of the three was Eddie Dean's I Dreamed Of A Hillbilly Heaven in 1954. Fleener had a number of contacts who fed him signees. In Nashville, he had Murray Nash. In the Ohio-Michigan area, he had Pat Nelson, who was based in Cleveland and Columbus. Five times married and divorced, Nelson was characterized by one associate as a "jolly little fat man. Everyone liked him and he liked everybody." After severing ties with Fleener, Nelson went on to manage Jackie DeShannon, whom he'd already placed with Sage & Sand. Nelson seems to have broken with Fleener around 1960 or '61 when he moved to Nashville to run Pamper Music's promotion department. Later, he joined former Decca honcho Paul Cohen at ABC Records before becoming one of 'Billboard's' Nashville correspondents. From there, his trail goes cold.

For a year or so in the mid-1950s, Fleener entered into an alliance with Bill McCall at 4-Star Records, and a song that he co-wrote, Fingerprints, was included on an album by one of McCall's artists, Patsy Cline. Two songs by Bobby Lile also appeared on Cline's debut album.

At some point in 1960, Fleener acquired the publishing on Jack Scott's hit, Burning Bridges, possibly because it infringed a song that he published by the Hometowners. In 1963, he joined the Country Music Assocation, signaling a commitment to the record industry that was already flagging. His labels disappeared from view several years later, but he'd already leased or sold bits of the catalog to RPM/Modern's budget Crown label. Fleener continued to run the publishing companies and the studio. He moved the studio around the corner to 1734 North Wilcox Avenue and then a few blocks west to Selma Avenue. It was on the night of October 24, 1969 that Fleener and his employee, Roe Barclay, were stabbed with hunting knives by two men who, according to news reports, had talked to Fleener a few days earlier about buying the studio. Clearly, Fleener survived the attack, but died nearly five years later, in August 1974, at home on Alla Road in Woodland Hills. Fleener's wife, Avis, and his heirs clearly weren't active in the business because they didn’t collect the Patsy Cline income that accrued from the song he cowrote. Avis remarried but died in 2002.

Sage & Sand Music company ended up with Bob Beckham, one of the co-founders of Monument Records’ publishing arm, but Beckham has since retired and no one now remembers how the deal came to be done. The Sage & Sand studio moved to 1511 Gordon Street, just south of Hollywood Boulevard. Before Fleener’s death it was managed by Jim Mooney, and Mooney eventually took over the masters and the studio. Mooney painted out ‘Sand’ on the studio sign and renamed it Sage & Sound.

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