"To be radical in your art, you need to be conservative in your life."

In an article about the NBA’s Allen Iverson’s economic troubles, the author quoted his artist-girlfriend, "To be radical in your art, you need to be conservative in your life." Similar to the excellent advice Dessa once gave to McNally Smith’s graduates, “Keep your overhead low,” this way of looking at finance and freedom is critical to artistic integrity. Honestly, I think it’s good advice for anyone with a creative bent.

These days, most Americans are “conservative”; which is another way of saying that we are terrified of pretty much everything, especially ideas. The only thing we appear to be fearless in the face of is debt. Our president is a king of leveraged fake “wealth” and many Americans appear to admire Trump’s willingness to pretend to be rich in the face of constant business and investment failure. The US median household owes around $140,000, pays about $1,300 in annual credit card interest, and even the over-65 crowd’s median savings is well under $100k while middle-aged Americans average about $25k in savings. There is nothing conservative about those numbers.

So long ago I can’t remember when or who, someone told me that you can’t retire until you own your home. This isn’t the bullshit “homeownership” crap people spout when they still owe 20-150% of their home’s value to a bank. This is outright ownership. To own a home, you need some luck and a lot of financial restraint. You’ll have to give up a lot to be a homeowner at the end of a 50 year work life.

Giving up things for a better future or to obtain a goal seems to be a vanishing American trait. Most Americans appear to believe they can have it all: new cars, new computers, new big screen televisions, cell phones, an active social life, etc. The fact is, if you aren’t earning big money you can’t afford to spend big money.When I left McNally Smith College in 2013, it was pretty obvious that the school had totally lost sight of any aspect of that fact. There were a few more folks in administration than there were instructors and the administration people were clearly convinced the purpose of the school was to support them and their habits, hobbies, and perversions. It was not a fun place to work anymore.

Paraphrasing Larry Niven and Greg Benford, from, Bowl of Heaven, “[He] thought that life’s journey wasn’t to get to your grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to tumble in, wreaked, shouting, What a ride!” Of course, the trick is to do that tumbling in the last few minutes of your life. Crashing with a decade or two of life left means living under a bridge for a couple of decades and that isn’t an adventure, it’s a disaster. I think you have to “live to scale”: meaning you set your expectations, expenses, and anticipated opportunities based on your average past income and expenses. If you plan on being rich in the future and spend like that in the present you’re more than likely going to be worse than disappointed. You are going to be homeless, broke, and without a chance in hell of any sort of hopeful future.
On the other hand, if you are conservative with your resources and expectations, you can go way out on a limb in your art. You can take the kind of risks that so often leads to success because you have something to fall back on and are not gathering so much karmic and economic mass that when you have to fall back you are crushed. That’s what being conservative is really all about. Creating a space cushion for yourself that provides time and resources to regroup and make another run at your goals.

Updating the CA Story

Way back in 2014, I bought a used Composite Acoutics Cargo travel guitar. I liked it a lot then and I like it more now. Peavey bought the remnants of CA and that company appears to be purging the memory of the original company as quickly as possible. So, I thought I’d try to compile a little history while it’s still possible:

Pre-Peavey Composite Acoustics Assembly Videos

The Peavey Version

Use ‘em if You Got ‘em?

I recently did FOH and monitors for a rock band in a small (250 seat), historic, municipal auditorium. It was a four-piece group: two guitars, bass, and drums along with three vocals. I’d never worked that room before, which meant a lot of new things for me to figure out. It would be my first time out with the Behringer X32 digital mixer along with a few other firsts. One of the reasons I took the job was that the director of the facility is a big proponent of low volume shows and there had been some discussions about keeping it small and quiet from past show experiences. The room acoustics weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible either. The auditorium’s equipment was decent and so, it turned out, was the band.

Mostly because the previous house engineer had a show “scene” from the last year’s show, I sort of went with his stage setup. I mic’d both guitar amps and ran a DI from the bass. I setup two overhead mics and a kick mic on the kit, abandoning the previous session’s snare and tom mics. In the end, I used about 16 channels for the 4-piece band. We did a quick sound check, first with the FOH system for me followed by ringing out the monitors. The guitar player at far stage right complained that he couldn’t hear the bass (who was setup far stage left) and I ran up the bass in his monitor to the point it was cancelling the output from the bass player’s amp and overwhelming the FOH bass output. He still couldn’t hear it, so I dialed it back to where it interfered less with the FOH sound. He was the old guy in the group and the loudest amp on stage, so I made the assumption that he was stereotypically R&R deaf. It’s also possible that there was a LF phase-cancellation problem on the stage.

The facility manager complained about the volume during the sound check and I got the bass player and lead guitarist to dial it back a bit. The rhythm guitarist made a show of fake adjusting his amp, but it was obvious that he didn’t intend to comply with the venue’s volume limits. I didn’t bring an SPL meter because I assumed the venue had one, based on the fact that there is a loudness restriction there. I’d guess the show was somewhere between the low and mid-90dBSPL territory.

I started the show with instrument volumes very low to see where the players would go once they got into the performance. Pretty quickly, I pulled the rhythm guitar, bass, and kit out of the mix. I tried to mix the lead guitar signal, up during solos and down the rest of the time, but his signal was mostly so distorted (It was a Neil Young cover band after all.) that my addition to the distortion fog only served to screw up the rest of the mix. That was really demonstrated during a song where he solo’d without his distortion pedals and the guitar lept out of the mix all by itself. That clue’d me into the fact that, if I wanted to hear his solo guitar I needed to band-limit it drastically. I low-passed the lead guitar at about 3kHz and high-passed it at 300Hz, which gave me a signal that I could work with.

In the end, I found myself with faders up on three vocal mics, a DI’d acoustic guitar, and everything else fully attenuated or close to it. I had one moment, about 30 seconds long, where I brought the kit up noticably and I flailed away for most of the first set trying to figure out how to get the lead guitar prominently into the mix. I should have taken a picture of the console: two-to-three faders up and the rest all the way out. All that equipment, all that processing power, and no real need for me to be there for most of the show.

If I’d have just setup up three mics and one DI, I’d have had more sound than the room and audience needed. Even from the monitor standpoint, no one asked for drums in their monitors. The drummer wanted a little lead guitar and bass in his mix. I already talked about the rhythm guitarist’s problems. The end result, from front of house, of the monitor mix was that the bass was constantly overpowering the rest of the band; even though I didn’t put any of the bass in the FOH mix. I nagged the bass player to turn down during the break and he claimed that he didn’t change anything from the sound check. In retrospect, I should have believed him because I was what changed when I tried to make the drummer and rhythm guitarist happy with bass blast in their monitors.

It’s a serious temptation to use ‘em if you got ‘em. You spent all that time and energy setting up mics and running cables for no good reason other than the wild hope that you might actually get to mix a show. In my case, 12 of the 16 lines and mics I’d run were unnecessary. I suspect if I did this on a regular basis, I’d be inclined to give myself more faders to play with just out of boredom. The volume would creep up, the sound quality would disintegrate, but I’d be occupied. It’s something to keep in mind if mixing live sound is going to be your life. You are often unnecessary.

Another Brick Falls Out of the Wall

In late 1991, I left my job at QSC Audio Products and my 9 year career with that company for what turned out to be one of the dumbest career and relocation moves I could have possibly made. My tolerance for high density overpopulation and the Southern California pace had played out. A couple of QSC’s direct competitors had been trying to recruit me for a year or so and one company that was in a slightly different audio market made me an offer I decided not to refuse. That resulted in the shortest period of employment in my 55 year career; 30 days. The manufacturing leg and my office for my new employer were in Elkhart, Indiana and the headquarters were in Chicago. No decisions could be made without several meetings in the Chicago office and most decisions were undermined by the office politics that took place after I had returned to Elkhart. After what seemed like an infinite number of pointless meetings and product and production decision reversals and constantly shrinking mismanagement expectations and commitments, I began to suspect my employment with the company was a mistake. So, I expressed a little of my frustration to the CEO, “I’m surprised a $50M company has so many more financial limitations than a $25M company (my previous employer).”

He said, “What makes you think we’re a $50M company?”

“That’s what you had told me in the cover letter that came with your employment offer.”

“I guess that proves you can’t believe everything you read.”

I thought about that conversation on the way back to Elkhart, collected my test equipment and personal belongings from my office that evening, and wrote a letter of resignation that night. The next day I started shipping resumes to everyone I thought might be interested in my skills and experience, including both of those companies that had been interested before I moved to Indiana.

Within a few days, I had lined up interviews with a Bose design site in Michigan, a medical device company in Denver, Sony in San Diego, Underwriter’s Laboratory in Chicago, Audio Precision in Oregon, and Crown Audio in Elkhart, Indiana. I didn’t leave California with a lot of resources and quitting my new job on such short order meant Unemployment Insurance wasn’t an option, so time was fairly critical. I did phone and in-person interviews with UL, Bose, the Denver medical device company, and Crown by the end of my first full unemployed week. Crown called to setup a second interview for the end of the next week. Early that week, I received firm offers from the medical device company and Bose and both companies wanted a decision from me on fairly short order. For mostly personal reasons, I decided to accept the Denver offer on Thursday. I have liked Denver and loved Colorado since I was a kid. I was a little lonely and a good friend (who I would be working with) offered to put me up in his home for as long as I wanted to stay. Finally, the opportunity to work in an entirely new-to-me industry was an interesting challenge. Partially out of curiosity, I went back to Crown on Friday for the 2^nd interview.

The Manufacturing Engineering Manager, whose name I have long forgotten, brought me into a fairly large corporate meeting room that was lined with poster paper full of relationships, responsibilities, activities, anticipated results and achievements, and likely advancement possibilities. Crown’s management had put more effort into my possible employment with the company than the management all of my previous 25 years of work. What followed was an interesting interview with a half-dozen managers and another half-dozen people I’d be working with or who would be working for me. I was a little more blunt and honest in my answers to their questions, since I was pretty committed to the Colorado offer I’d already conditionally accepted and to getting the hell out of Indiana (a generally low income state that could be the poster child for economical inequality). I hadn’t yet received the written details to the Colorado offer and the formal offer, so I could still change my mind without too much guilt and I could discuss the possible Crown job without feeling like I was wasting their time.

On Monday, the Denver job offer arrived in the mail with a Wednesday decision deadline. I hung on to it until a little before the end of the work day Wednesday and called to accept that job. My new employer sent a moving van for my stuff the next day and I was on the road to Denver Thursday evening. Friday night, I was camping in southern Illinois and called my wife in California to check in. She said someone from Crown had called and really wanted to talk to me, leaving a home number. It wasn’t that late, so I called the number and discovered that Crown had tried to contact me in my Elkhart apartment that afternoon to make a very generous offer of employment. I had to tell him I was “taken” and wouldn’t be coming back to Indiana any time soon. He sounded disappointed, but I had warned them my decision was time-sensitive and that there were lots of factors that would determine my next career move.

I left Indiana in mid-November and didn’t have to be at my new job until January 2 and my new employer had provided me with a signing bonus and moving allowance so I wasn’t even in much of a hurry to get to Denver. The friend I’d be staying would be available to receive the moving van, so even making sure my stuff arrived intact wasn’t pressing. I took a full month to get from Indiana to Denver and, other than a little recording engineering and occasionally music equipment repair business, I was out of audio for the next decade. I never forgot the impression Crown made with me, though. I honestly felt like I’d been working in a poorly equipped garage at QSC for the previous 9 years, Crown felt that much more substantial and organized than we’d been while I thought we were their most serious competitors.

So, when I read that Crown had been absorbed in 2000 by the music business’ brain-drain conglomerate, Harmon, I was both disappointed and glad I’d passed on the Crown job. Honestly, other than Crown there wasn’t much about Indiana that appealed to me. I might not have lasted long there. Harmon was purchased by Samsung Electronics last November and the writing was on the wall for Elkhart before that depressing news. This month, when I read that Crown was closing the Indiana facility doors for good and only 115 jobs were affected, I have to admit I felt more than a little sadness. When I interviewed with Crown, I’d guess the facility employed at least 500 people. More importantly, there were a lot of decent, hard-working, competent people making and designing Crown products in 1991 and I hate to think that their efforts were wasted.

At one time, Crown was the only target in our sights at QSC. They were the industry leaders and everyone else was at our level or below. Go back to the late 1960’s and Crown’s DC300 solid state power amp was the only serious pro power amplifier game in town. Crown was an innovative, trustworthy, and decent American company and there is nothing good to say about the death of that sort of business. There aren’t many left and as the US continues to de-evolve into a minor 3^rd world industrial power there will be a whole lot fewer in our future.