Reflection Sound Studios, Loonis McGlohon, and 'Super Dooper Pooper'

The things people heard at the now-razed Charlotte recording studio

I’m going to briefly detour from politics to music. I wrote a story for the magazine’s October issue about Reflection Sound Studios, a place where everyone from R.E.M. to Kenny Loggins to Tammy Faye Bakker recorded, and which an Atlanta real estate firm has razed to make way for apartments. (It occupied what’s now a big, empty lot across from the Salvation Army Thrift Store on Central Avenue.)

One of the tidbits I couldn’t find a place for in the story: In the early 1990s, an educational video company chose Reflection to record a potty training video (excerpted below). The show-stopper, “I’m a Super Dooper Pooper,” was composed by none other than Loonis McGlohon, the songwriter, jazz pianist, and most celebrated musician to ever emerge from Charlotte.

Around the same time, Mitch Easter, the indie-pop musician and producer from Winston-Salem, was recording an album in the main studio while “Super Dooper Pooper” was cut down the hall in smaller Studio C. Reflection was a general purpose studio, after all, not just for recording rock bands.

Easter remembers finishing a take with whatever band he was working with and watching with glee as the band members glanced, brows furrowed, down the hall. “The fact that I was there doing whatever I was doing while the toilet training video was going on in Studio C was just fantastic,” he told me in June. “That could happen only at a studio like that.”

By all means, watch the whole thing for what Easter calls “the full immersion experience.” “Super Dooper Pooper” begins at 2:48. The video's advice remains sound. Y’all enjoy, and you’re so, so welcome.