Head to the Clovis Rock ’n’ Roll Museum, where the city has forged a new path in its music history.
Clovis feels like it could have been plucked right off the set of an Elvis Presley movie. The eastern New Mexico border town’s retro sensibilities—Foxy Drive In on West Seventh Street, the 1920s-built Lyceum and Mesa theaters on Main Street, and Taco Box on West 21st Street—fit perfectly.
After all, many of the popular musicians that provided the soundtrack of midcentury America—Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, the Fireballs—recorded in Clovis at Norman and Vi Petty’s Seventh Street Studio. “He was a pioneering music producer,” says Ernie Kos, executive director for Clovis/Curry County Chamber of Commerce. “Their studio really helped shape what we call the ‘Clovis sound’ in the 1950s and ’60s.”
Over the years, Clovis has honored the Pettys in a number of ways, including the annual Clovis Music Festival at the Curry County Events Center and the Clovis Rock ’n’ Roll Museum on East Grand, right below the Chamber of Commerce. Now, Clovis is working to tap into the Clovis sound once again with a professional recording studio constructed inside the Rock ’n’ Roll Museum.
Scheduled to open in fall 2025, Clovis Sound Studios adds a new dimension to the town’s musical legacy by bringing together and restoring rare analog recording equipment, including some from Petty’s personal collection, into a working studio. For the first time, musicians—and music lovers—will have the chance to enjoy the famous Clovis sound with newly recorded material.
Only 10 miles from New Mexico’s border with Texas, Clovis has long been influenced by Western culture. Holly and Orbison were among the era’s many musicians who mixed early rock and roll with country hillbilly music to create rockabilly. Those twin influences run through Clovis, where Petty recorded many of those famous songs.
“This place will be a huge destination for not only musicians and producers, but also for visitors,” Kos says. With regional musicians regularly performing at local spots like Red Door on Main, Bandolero Brewery, and the Rails, as well as national acts scheduled for the annual Clovis Music Festival in April, the city already hosts a thriving music scene. But the recording studio adds an exciting layer to Clovis’s musical ambitions.
“It was so much more than I ever dreamed of,” Kos says of the yearslong project to acquire hard-to-find equipment and replacement parts. “These are specialty items. A lot of things are not just sitting on the shelf.”
Jay Fisher, the studio’s analog electrical engineer, was tasked with getting the old equipment up and running. The 66-year-old grew up in Clovis, and his father, Gerald, worked closely with the Pettys at their studio as their electrical engineer. Some of the analog equipment in the new studio belonged to Gerald before he passed away in 1999.
Fisher’s father collected, repaired, and serviced all the analog equipment he was able to track down. After Gerald’s death, the Clovis Chamber of Commerce purchased the items in the early 2000s.
Clovis has worked hard to bring back analog sound, while adding top-of-the-line digital recording equipment to Clovis Sound Studios. The team members include project manager and music producer Lance Bendiksen, studio designer Sam Berkow, Mark Salamone of Sweetwater Integration, contractor Gerald Griego of Griego & Sons, and Fisher. The fusion of both analog and digital means artists can choose how they want to record their songs from multiple methods, says Kos, who notes that only two other studios in the country specialize in recording with analog equipment.
“[Today] there’s a digital studio on every street corner,” Fisher says. “Just ask any teenage kid and he’ll tell you, ‘Yeah, I can produce music in my home, in my garage, or wherever the computer is.’”
But sound recorded digitally, Fisher says, just can’t compare to the sounds you get from analog equipment. “In an analog recording, you can hear the person breathing who’s singing,” Fisher says. “You can hear the tick of the drumstick on the cymbal, rather than just the cymbal crash.”
Before closing for the studio’s construction, the museum featured some of the original equipment and demonstrations of recordings directly from the tapes. “Musicians would come in and listen to analog and stand there and cry,” Fisher says. “They would say, ‘This is the sound we’ve been looking for. This is what we’ve been searching for for years.’”
Clovis and the music that was recorded there are inextricably linked. That’s why continuing to build on that legacy is so important. “It’s really a labor of love,” Fisher says.
