A Musician in Charge of Suffering with the Audience

My disappointing experience in May at a Snarky Puppy concert in St. Paul somehow reminded me of someone I heard about back in the 80’s. A friend worked, for a short time, for a medical device company in the L.A. Valley. That company was one of the few US corporations that screwed up so badly that it was pretty obvious that someone would end up going to jail. Don’t worry your pretty little conservative head, nobody who was really to blame was punished. My friend met a well-dressed, middle-aged white man at a company party who introduced himself as “the vice-president in charge of going to jail.” And, eventually, he did. Still, you can keep your little skull in place; he went to Lompoc back when the Santa Barbara facility was the show place for Club Fed. 2 years later, he was out with a big cash and stock option bonus for taking the fall and none of the real villain spent a moment in jail, court, or even a little inconvenienced. No real corporate criminals were harmed pretending that USA laws "apply to everyone."

All of this brings me to my current best solution for crappy live music sound systems: a musician in charge of suffering with the audience (MICOSWTA). 40 years ago, on the sound company side of Wirebender Audio, we discovered that nobody in pop music cared what the FOH system sounded like. (Maybe not “nobody,” but close enough for statistical purposes: 99.9999999 . . . %.) As long as the stage monitors fed the egos of the performing “talent,” the audience could drop dead as long as they bought tickets before they croaked. Today, that level of excess has multiplied to the point of total indifference and independence. In-ear monitoring systems not only allow musicians to receive exactly the mix they want but provide 25-35dB of isolation from the hostile acoustic environment their suckers/audiences suffer.

The solution to that problem, which was strongly suggested to me by Michael League’s obvious oblivious take on the job his FOH nitwit was doing at the Snarky Puppy concert, is to make someone in the band (ideally a band leader) suffer exactly the mix the audience hears. By that I mean, either that person either stands near the mains with no other source of audio or, best of all, put a microphone a dozen feet in front of the mains and that all the band’s sacrificial victim gets to hear; either through a traditional floor monitor or in-ears. I mean exactly what the audience at that point receives; including he sound pressure. If the band is deafening the audience with 120+dBSPL, that’s what MICOSWTA gets.

I suspect that not only would live music improve drastically and quickly, but many FOH nincompoops would be unemployed forever. At MSCM, we used to talk about "getting fired moments," often when a recording tech screwed up the headphone mix and caused permanent hearing damage to a client. Likewise, making the band leader live with the potential hearing loss his audience experiences would be nothing but positive.