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.