Downey Records was an American record label owned by Bill Wenzel (July 26, 1912 – November 20, 1999) in

Downey, California Downey is a city located in Southeast Los Angeles County, California, United States, southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is considered part of the Gateway Cities. The city is the birthplace of the Apollo space program. It is also the home of ...

, and distributed at times by

Dot Records Dot Records was an American record label founded by Randy Wood (record producer), Randy Wood and Gene Nobles that was active between 1950 and 1978. The original headquarters of Dot Records were in Gallatin, Tennessee. In 1956, the company moved ...

. Wenzel worked as a

sound engineer An audio engineer (also known as a sound engineer or recording engineer) helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduction, ...

for

MGM studios Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and abbreviated as MGM, is an American film, television production, distribution and media company owned by Amazon through MGM Holdings, founded on April 17, 1924 a ...

and in 1958, opened Wenzel's Music Town in Downey, California. In 1959, he began the Jack Bee label which he eventually turned into the Downey label with a studio in the back of the record store. Wenzel operated the store with his wife, his son and daughter-in-law. When they were not creating masters in the studio, the studio was rented out. Wenzel produced Downey Records at his studio and made dubs of out-of-stock songs upon request. When Wenzel retired from the business in the 1960s, his son Tom Wenzel (1935–2008) and Tom's wife Maxine continued running the shop. The biggest hit on the label was the instrumental "

Pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

" by the Chantay's which peaked at No. 4 on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 and No. 11 on the

R&B chart The Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart ranks the most popular R&B and hip hop songs in the United States and is published weekly by ''Billboard''. Rankings are based on a measure of radio airplay, sales data, and streaming activity. The chart had 100 p ...

in 1963. Singer-songwriter

Barry White Barry Eugene Carter (September 12, 1944 – July 4, 2003), better known by his stage name Barry White, was an American singer and songwriter. A two-time Grammy Award winner known for his bass voice and romantic image, his greatest success came ...

produced "Feel Aw Right" by the Bel Canto's on Downey Records in 1965, and released his first recordings under the name Lee Barry on the label in 1966. During the early 1960s, Downey was also producing records by The Rumblers, whose biggest hit "Boss" was leased to

, as well as "Pipeline", which had been leased around the same time. In 2007, Big Beat Records released the compilation album '' It Came from the Garage! Nuggets from Southern California'', compiled from Downey recordings.

Selected discography

References

American record labels Rhythm and blues record labels Rock and roll record labels Pop record labels Record labels established in 1961 Record labels disestablished in 1967 Downey, California Defunct record labels of the United States {{US-independent-record-label-stub