emphasize that side of the business. RCA Records placed a full-page advertisement in Billboards Country & Western section declaring that he and his assistant, Tommy Strong, were "a couple of big dialers", ready to help RCA Custom Record Sales engage more independent labels. The atmosphere in the studio was important to Porter. He felt that the "music has to show the emotion of the artist", and he took pains to enhance the mood in the room. For the album Christmas with Chet Atkins, recorded in July 1961, Porter knew that getting a Christmas mood in the heat of summer would be difficult—he came to the studio that morning carrying all his Christmas decorations, and made the studio look the part. Years later he recalled, "when everybody came in for the session, they were in the mood." Friction rose between Porter and RCA's personnel department regarding Porter's small publishing company which he co-founded with Anita Kerr—they said it constituted a conflict of interest. Porter argued that Atkins had his own publishing, as did others in the business, but RCA personnel told him to stop, so he decided to leave the company. RCA's legal department said they found nothing wrong with the practice, and RCA executive Steve Sholes called Porter to ask him to stay, but he determined that he did not want to be "dictated to" by personnel. Columbia and Monument Porter left RCA in November 1964 to engineer for Columbia Records in Nashville, where he stayed for six months, bringing some of his custom clients with him. He left Columbia for Monument to manage a new studio set up by Foster at 315 Seventh Street North in Nashville. Porter found the studio's acoustic space to be superior to RCA's Studio B—it was a high-ceilinged room built to house a Masonic Lodge—but the audio equipment owned by Foster was inferior. The EMT plate was not as good for reverb effects. No top ten hits were engineered by Porter at Foster's studio. On the advice of his agent, Wesley Rose, Orbison left Monument in mid-1965 for a more lucrative contract with MGM Records, with Rose taking over as producer. Orbison did not ask for Porter on his recording sessions, and he did not have any hit songs with MGM. Years later, Porter said that, though he really liked Orbison, the singer "never understood the engineer's contribution." It was Rose's advice to leave