My Concept Band

[NOTE: Getting to the point will take a while, so if you just want to know what my concept band idea is, skip to the last couple of paragraphs.]

When I was 13, I wrote a pissed-off fan letter to Downbeat Magazine that was mistakenly accepted as a review of what has become a classic modern jazz record. The magazine paid me $25 and included a Downbeat press pass with the check. I should have saved both. In one of my early attempts at running away from home, I saved up my newspaper route money, bought a bus ticket to Kansas City, and spent a day and two nights exploring the jazz clubs around 18th and 12th Streets. I lucked out and got to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet (one of my heroes at the time), a Stan Getz group, and a lot of local talent (or folks I didn’t know at the time). There was a lot of music going on those nights and nobody even asked if I was old enough to be where I was. There were other kids in some of the clubs, but most appeared to be working as dishwashers or busboys. There was no amplification of any sort, other than an occasional small guitar amp, of instruments or vocals in any of those clubs and I was never unable to hear the music.

A few years later, I was in a rock band that was mostly known for being loud. The guy who ran the band was the only son of the family who owned the Little Rock, AK airport, at the time the largest privately-owned airport in the US (at least, according to the band leader). He bought Fender Dual Showman amps for . . . everything. We were a 4-piece band (guitar, keyboard, bass, and drums) with 6 Dual Showman amps on stage and at least 8 Fender cabinets with either a 15” or a couple of 12” speakers in each box. The band lasted for two summers, with a version or ten that carried on, occasionally, into the 90’s. During the school months, I was in a half-dozen more local bands, which were also pretty damn loud. For a bit, I was done by 1967.

I moved to Dallas, TX for one of the state’s many bogus for-profit technical schools. The state was famous back then for that kind of crap, too. For me, it was an opportunity to see many of the soul bands and singers I’d idolized and imitated in my own bands. One stand-out performance was an Atlantic soul review at the State Fair auditorium. Sam and Dave were the headliners and the PA system was a pair of Shure Vocalmaster columns. I’d guess the auditorium held at least 1,000 people and the audience was rocking. Still, the band sounded great and the vocals were absolutely audible with less electric and acoustic power in the sound system than the average duo brings to a piano bar today.

Skip forward to 1982.

I had been in bands and performing acoustically since I was 15, but I’d given up performing a few years earlier to focus on my recording studio and live sound business. One of the last recording sessions I did was pf a local jazz group live in a popular nightclub. To reduce acoustic complications and improve the sound quality of the recording, I’d decided to use my studio’s JBL 4311 monitors as the FOH speaker system. The club held about 100 people and the band, in their last performance before leaving town, packed the club. Not only did the studio monitors and a 120W amp do the job well, but during breaks the many musicians in the audience came up to me to ask where the FOH mains were. The speaker system was so small they didn’t identify the speakers as the sound source.

Since those years, I’ve worked for a pro sound amplification company, QSC Audio Products, in a variety of engineering positions, freelanced as a recording engineer, live sound tech and FOH or monitor engineer, and spent 13 years as an instructor at a music technology college. Mostly, I’ve seen amplification equipment and audiences abused by the technology and general purpose ignorance. Performers are almost always too loud, audiences compensate by being even louder, and nobody from the performers to the audience is paying any attention to 99% of what’s happening on stage. What I learned from 55 years of being on every position possible during a music performance is that volume is not anyone’s friend. If your audience is going to listen, they will be quiet and listen. If you suck or they are assholes or imbeciles, they will out-shout any PA system made. So, there is no point in amplification beyond the acoustic output of a decent acoustic guitar or upright bass or a reasonably well-projected human voice.

With that in mind and the fact that I am no longer inclined to believe that anyone not laundering money for a cartel or mobster is in music for the money, my music group concept is one that would be as close to pure acoustic music as possible. For example, I would like to play bass in this group and I don’t own an upright bass, but I do own a homemade electric bass that I love to play and a Roland’s 20W Bass Cube with a “squeeze” button that limits the amp’s output to the right volume for playing with acoustic instruments. With a little taste and some listening skills, an electronic keyboard could fit into this concept, along with any other acoustic instrument. In fact, the more the merrier. All vocals will be sans-microphone or PA. We’ll just have to sing louder than the acoustic instruments, which is the effect recording engineers are going for regardless of the instrumentation. (You didn’t really think Robert Plant sang louder than Jimmy Page’s Marshall, did you?)

Music-wise, I’d like to break out of the usual suspects of Beatles, Stones, Eagles, etc. and do a lot more modern music; maybe stuff from this century? A few jazz standards and some off-beat stuff from the past would be ok, but too much of that and we’re back to being just like everyone else. Let’s be honest. We’re not in this to remind our audience that they are old. We’re supposed to be entertaining and surprising. If you can find a way to surprise anyone with “Poncho and Lefty,” “Tequila Sunrise,” or “Let It Be,” I’ll be amazed.

Pearls before Swine

In the late-70’s I was playing out my string with a show band I’d led for about three years. Everybody was moving on. The bass player’s wife had their first kid and another was on the way and he needed to focus on his career (mechanical engineering). The drummer wanted to work a lot more, since he was a low-paid Nebraska high school teacher, and he’d found a 5-day-a-week supper club band he wanted to join. The first to leave, our keyboard player, had snagged a scholarship at Juilliard.and he was leaving for school in another month. I had started working with a kid who I’d eventually end up partnering with in the Wirebender studio and live sound. We all wanted it to end and we all had good reasons. We stayed friends and occasionally hung out after the last gig, but that was the end of our musical relationships.

When this band was a 4-piece, we covered most of the Top 40 and filled in spaces with originals and blues oddities and we played for money. We’d fired our management company a few months earlier, but the agency still wanted us to work some of the last scheduled gigs. We owned the band name, so it was either us or find someone else to sell the customer on. The 3-piece version was a lot more bluesy and original than the band the customers thought they were getting. There weren’t many complaints, but I suspect our rate would have gone down if we’d have done a 2nd round with that personnel and repretiour.

One of the last gigs we did was in a southeastern Nebraska town that had an actual 1920’s ballroom with a vintage 30’ foot bar and a round stage slightly off-centered in the room, toward the bar. The audience had room to maneuver behind the stage, between the bar and the stage, and there was a large dance floor (people used to dance, believe it!) to the front and side of the stage. There was a runway, about 5’ wide, that ran about15’ from the stage into the middle of the dance floor. There was a slight downward slope on the ramp, high at the stage and low at the end of the ramp, but it was still a 3’ drop from the end of the ramp to the dance floor. I setup the mains, six (we had eight) Altec Lansing 1207A columns, behind and to the side of the band and ran the show from a 12-channel board on a mic stand near my guitar amp. No monitors, we could all hear the mains and ourselves well enough that we didn’t need more crap to haul up and down staircases. I only used one small condenser on the drums, the three vocal mics were all RE18s, the bass went direct ino the board from the bass player’s amp, keys also went direct, and I had a Beyer M500 on my guitar amp; a modified 1956 Fender Harvard. The room held about 350 people and we always packed it. We were doing one of our last 4-piece gigs, so we pretty much went full-out.

In deference to the large turnout and the money we were getting paid, we pretty much played our old lineup with slightly more originals and less blues. The crowd was into it, the dance floor was constantly full, people were screaming their heads off at the oddest times, and the band was rockin’. Because I am a Townshend freak and we did “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” During the synth middle-break where the guitar comes crashing in and we added a short solo and I’d slide on my knees down the ramp while I played the solo; mildly Townshend-style. I didn’t realize that Pete used knee pads under those coveralls, so my style hurt more than his. On the way toward the ramp, the bass player turned into me and clipped the top of my guitar hard enough to break two tuners and take the whole guitar out of tune. As I slid down that ramp, I discovered nothing on my instrument was in any sort of European-shape of tune. So, I did the only thing a lead guitarist can do under any non-ideal conditions: I played as fast as my fingers would move and stayed as high on the neck as possible to mask the complete dysfunction of my guitar. I cut the slide and the solo short and twiddled trills, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and did pick-slide sound effects until we could end the song.

We took a break and I tuned up my back-up guitar. While I tuned the guitar, sitting on the edge of the stage, people crowded around me. I ignored them at first, but after a few moments I realize they were shouting at me but they weren’t mad. “That was the greatest guitar solo I’ve ever heard” and “Great guitar playing, man!” and and “Damn! That was incredible” and even nuttier stuff. It was not just tone-deaf guys, either. Twenty-or-so girls where in the pack squealing away like something good and true had happened. I, literally, didn’t spend a musical micro-second on that solo. Not one “note” was intended and I didn’t even waste much thought on what the rest of the band was doing. And nobody seemed to be laughing (other than the band guys) at my predicament?

As I was finishing up the work on my back-up guitar, in that moment I decided I’d had all of the “pearls before swine” experience I could stand for a lifetime. I spent hundreds, thousands of hours practicing my craft and all I had to do was wiggle my fingers fast and I’m “great?” I thought, “I quit. No more of this band-shit. I’m done.” When we played our last booked gig a few weeks later, that was it for me. Until a friend talked me into a gig doing his music in St. Paul in 2016, I hadn’t played in front of an audience since 1982. I did a lot of live sound tech work, some recording as a tech and as a guitarist, and lots of electrical audio design work, but for the next three decades I had no interest in being “a musician” for a live audience. To this day, there are a really limited number of places I’ll consider exposing myself to an audience. I’m not that fast anymore.