Serious Music

Back in the late 70s, I signed up for a recording seminar at the University of Iowa. Believe it or not, Iowa City, IA had a very small recording program and decent studios (primarily for classical music and the college jazz band) in the 70s. The presenter was Stephen Temmer, who must have been in his early 50's when I met him but who seemed "ancient" to me at the time (I was in my late 20's.) Temmer died in 1992 at 64, which I would probably consider "young" today. 

Mr. Temmer later became an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa, but at the time we met he was still President and owner of Gotham Audio Corporation, the only North American distributor for AKG, Neumann, Studer, EMT (plate reverbs), Lexicon, and many other things European. At the time of the course I took, Temmer was just beginning to market a collection of audio cables that he claimed were significant improvements over "ordinary wires" and we had some spirited discussions about that subject, too. 

I was at least as big an asshole then as I am now. During Temmer's introduction to the two-week-long, 8-10 hour/day course, he said something like, "We won't be discussing popular music recording in this class. Our topics will all be regarding the recording of 'serious music.'" 

I couldn't let that pass. Up my hand went and I said, "I didn't think music was a 'serious' thing. If it's not fun, it doesn't have much point does it?" I got a scowl and no reply. That was on Wednesday, the first day of class. For the next two days, Mr. Temmer pretty much ignored me. 

Luckily, the school's studio maintenance tech, Stephen Julstrom and I had hit it off pretty well, mostly talking about tape deck and console maintenance and design. The "in" with Mr. Julstrom, who was about my age (and who later became a design engineer with Shure Brothers in Chicago about the time I went to work for QSC Audio Products), provided me with some amazing opportunities including recording student classical performances and the college jazz orchestra (I still have a copy of that last one.). Unfortunately, one of the nights I'd volunteered to help Stephen record a student jazz group at a local coffee shop was the night the rest of the class went to see one of my lifelong heroes, Dizzy Gillespie, direct the UofI's big band. I've always regretted that and didn't get to see Gillespie until the early 90s in Long Beach with a small, mostly electric band. However, I got to play with some very expensive microphones that I'd only read about up to that moment and work in the college's great performance spaces using the school's very expensive equipment; although some of it was expensive, but not particularly high fidelity.

When the first weekend came, Steve Julstrom had invited Mr. Temmer and me out to his lakeside place for an afternoon barbecue. Because we were a one-vehicle family at the time, I'd taken the bus from Nebraska to Iowa City and Mr. Temmer offered to give me a ride to the lake. The school had rented a Cadillac for Mr. Temmer and I hadn't been in a new Caddy for several years. At the least, it would be a comfortable drive, even if we didn't talk much. I'd mentioned this experience in another Wirebender essay a couple of years ago, "That’s Not Serious, It’s Art." Who knows why, maybe to irritate me, maybe because it's how he always traveled by car, maybe he thought he was going to educate me, but Stephen fired up the stereo as we took off and found a classical station. When the orchestra started playing something I wish I could remember, Temmer began to wave his arms while he drove and sing along with a pretty decent voice. I watched him for a bit and about the time I started to smile at his performance, he looked at me and started laughing. We laughed together for a bit and had a great conversation about music being about "fun" and entertainment and a distraction from serious stuff and by the time we arrived at Julstrom's home we were more than acquaintances. 

The next day, Sunday, the Stephen's invited me to help record a piano-violin Bartok record with two of the school's faculty musicians and a collection of Temmer's Neumann microphones; new and historical (Including a Neumann omni that Temmer said was either "Hitler's microphone" or one like that used to record Hitler's speeches. It looked a lot like the one in this picture, as I remember. Temmer was an Austrian immigrant.) I also included several of the Audio Technica and Tascam microphones from my own collection in the recording and, later, we did a single-blind comparison of all the microphones used in this recording with the rest of the class. To Temmer's mild disappointment, the class overwhelmingly selected my Teac ME-120 condensers as their favorite in that test. The "Hitler mic" was pretty obviously lacking in high end response as the violin would often slide above the mic's capabilities far enough that it vanished in the mix. If nothing else, that proved that there are some limits to the vintage cache. 

For the next several years, any time I came upon a low-to-moderate cost microphone that I thought was either interesting or exceptional, I would write Stephen Temmer about it and, often, he'd ask to borrow it for a bit. I fell out of that habit a little before I moved to California in 1983, after my 2nd studio closed and I was convinced my life in music was all but finished. At the time, I was managing a manufacturing company building everything from high voltage inductance test equipment to the Arrakis Systems broadcast equipment. That might seem like I was still working in audio, but it didn't feel much like it. In my last few months in Omaha, massive personal turmoil pretty much squashed everything in my life but work and home. I'd been working with a friend, Mark Hartman, on jingles and pitches for commercial music, but that sort of withered away in those last months before I accepted the QSC job. 

Once in California, I was a regular member and occasional officer with the Orange County Audio Engineering Society (which no longer exists) and I bumped into Stephen at least once at the LA AES Show before he retired from and sold Gotham Audio in '85. A year or two later, I ran into him at Wes Dooley's AEA Micophones facility in Pasadena, when I was buying a couple Audio Precision test fixtures for the QSC assembly line. It still would be a few years before I started collecting and messing with microphones again, but I always clung to the idea that music wasn't a serious thing. If it's not fun for someone it's not music. I didn't see or hear from Stephen again and didn't know he'd died in 1992 until recently.

Note: Heidevolk and their one and only flash-in-the-pan semi-hit, Vulgaris Magistralis, are the poster children for my music is "fun" point. It's hard to tell from their other songs, but I can only hope these characters are posing as Viking assholes. Regardless, I love this song and it never fails to make me laugh when i hear it. I would just as soon not know anything more about the band or their opinions on "life, the universe, and everything." They might be "serous," but I think they are hilarious.

Messy Exits and Revising History

I started writing this the day I came back from the auction of McNally Smith College’s equipment. I wrestled with all of my thoughts for several months afterwards. The end of that school was in no way a surprise to me, but hearing that the end came so incompetently and ruthlessly was a surprising disappointment. I'd thought that I had put the place and its dysfunction behind me after retiring in 2013, leaving the Cities in 2015, and unintentionally disconnecting from too many of the people I loved and respected because the 50 miles between the Cities and Red Wing turned out to be a far greater psychological gap than physical. When I started getting emails from friends still at the school and friends who were still more connected to the place than me, my first response was anger. I'd been there long enough to blip past the "denial" stage without much effort. "Bargaining, depression and acceptance" weren't difficult to transition through, either. But, if I'm being honest with myself, I'm still holding on to some anger about the way good people were treated by seriously bad people and how academia's incompetent, corrupt, and lazy fingers got hold of an otherwise useful school and turned it to crap so easily. 

The scene of the MSCM auction on June 22. Almost all of the bidding was done on-line.

Like the nitwit I am, Thursday morning (June 22, 2018) I decided to attend the 2nd day, Thursday, of the McNally Smith College of Music (MSCM) equipment auction. As a more intelligent person might have suspected, it was a sad affair that offered no closure, no celebration of the good years the school experienced, and not even much camaraderie (except for the lucky chance that ex-student, ex-MSCM employee Sam Clark was there for a few moments and he stopped to talk before heading back to work). At the 9AM start of the auction, most of the people physically at the auction quickly realized that they would be overwhelmed by the on-line bidders, which meant very few of the in-person participants participated enough to make their presence worthwhile. Like me, they didn’t stay long even though the auction continued until a little after 6PM. I left about 10:30AM and by then there were fewer than a dozen people in the auditorium who were not associated with the auctioneer’s staff.

In a perfect world, I’d have found some comfort in a group of graduates and faculty outside in the court yard playing music. Instead, I discovered the school’s ex-president, Harry Chalmiers, talking to a friend who also was once a McPhail instructor, like Harry. Over the years Harry headed McNally Smith, he took advantage of more perks than you’d hope a small college might have to offer; from luxury housing, to overseas vacations with his wife, to free recording services and performers for his “compositions,” to using his position for self-promotion, to an large and well-appointed office that might make a Washington lobbyist blush, to casual work obligations for the school that often seemed secondary to his actual interests. To many of us, his claim to fame and his office was an unlimited willingness to lavish outlandish public compliments on Jack McNally and Doug Smith (aka “J&D”): words that would have made people with actual accomplishments want to escape out of embarrassment. The first half hour of every commencement Harry presided over was a hilarious litany of Jack and Doug worship. If you where there before Harry, Jack and Doug’s minimal contributions (and financial profiteering) were pretty much a given and their efforts to purge the school’s history of the people who actually made the place work and to replace their efforts and success with a fabricated fable of themselves was a sad, painful story. Harry used to brag that “I have the best job in the world” as president of the school. Many of us suspected that was true, even if we couldn’t figure out the functional aspect of that “job” outside of flattering J&D at every opportunity and creating as much distance between administration and the actual activity and function of the school as possible.

It is slightly entertaining that these characters liked to pose next to equipment they didn’t use, understand, or even know why it was there.

For a moment while standing outside of the wreckage of Jack, Doug, and Harry’s legacy that June morning, Harry’s story and opinions changed substantially since his last formal public statement to the press. Now, he imagined he had a book to write about “what really happened” in the whole MSCM debacle. Worse, he thought he had the insight and skills to write a “leadership” book. (I guess if JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon can claim some place in the “leadership” hierarchy anyone can.) Right after the school’s collapse, Harry was hustling the delusion was that the school simply ran out of time in making the conversion from for-profit to non-profit. In reality, the universe doesn't print enough time for incompetent, greedy people to find a mission. Jack, Doug, and Harry never really got a grip on what the school's business was. Jack and Doug thought the school was about "making me a ton of money without me having to do a lick of work." Harry thought it was a place where he could pretend to be a "leader" and a musician and make a lot of money without having to get his hands dirty making hard decisions that would involve requiring administrative people to be more useful and productive and less political. Harry built an empire of administration, equal to the number of instructors in the school and way more expensive, and that is what toppled the business. Jack and Doug extracted money from the school like it was a rich daddy who just wanted to keep his kids happy and out of the way without having a clue what would happen when daddy's pile of money ran out.

I was in the room for some of those discussions, years before Harry arrived, and it was obvious why non-profit was a non-starter: Jack and Doug weren’t willing to give up the giant pile of cash they paid themselves from the school’s annual profits. Suddenly, as of that June morning’s conversation, Harry said the school ran out of money because Jack and Doug extracted “millions” from the school’s bottom line during the flush years and put as little as possible back into the facilities and nothing into what probably should have been an endowment for the school to use in hard times. That Thursday morning, Harry’s argument for the school’s failure was that J&D’s “share” of the school’s income was so large that it didn’t allow the school to build any sort of savings buffer to carry it through when emergency expenses came up or income went down. Harry was not the first employee to realize that, but he might have been one of the last. Around the time the school changed its name from Musictech College to MSCM it became obvious that the real school mission was "make Jack and Doug rich without asking them to do anything useful. From equipment purchases to using student fees for actual student activities, it was clear that administrative lackeys had received the message, "Don't spend any money that can be flipped into Jack and Doug's profits at the end of the semester."

Harry’s new insight was not even close to being a new story. I’ve heard variations of that from everyone I know who was in a position of administration at the school. Jack and Doug, two mostly absentee company owners (to them it was always more a “company” than a school), extracted enough money from the school every year to fund a second school. According to Harry, Jack never met a pile of money too large to be quickly and foolishly spent. So, it’s possible that Jack is at least inconvenienced, if not bankrupt. Unlikely, but almost imaginable. Most likely, his money is safely protected in “retirement savings” and property and bankruptcy is just a corporate tax and responsibility dodge. According to Harry, Doug, has squirreled away “plenty of money” in retirement accounts that are untouchable by bankruptcy courts. The media’s stories about Jack and Doug “loaning” the school money to keep the doors open are as half-researched and gullible as you’d expect from a news media staffed mostly with lazy, entitled, rich-kid interns. If I were betting my money, I’d bet that J&D put themselves on the list of creditors just to make one more extraction from the school’s victims: sorry, I mean “students” and ex-employees.

In the 13 years I worked at the school, I never saw any evidence that sacrifice was among the things Jack and Doug were willing to do for the good of the school. J&D liberally used facilities, employees, and students to produce their own musical abortions; as did Harry. Their seldom-used offices were as large as most student apartments, while their participation in actual school management was so slight someone who was once the head of Admissions barely knew who they were. Harry’s office could have been, and should have been, a classroom or an office for several administration characters.

Harry going on about how brilliant J&D were to hire him and to manage to dress themselves in robes that day.

NOTE: At this point, does anyone else see the irony in McNally and Smith being bounced from McPhail, starting Guitar Center/Musictech, moving to St. Paul which spawned IPR and the other Twin Cities music production competition, and finally naming their school after themselves forever cementing their memories as incompetent mismanagers in business and academic history? Maybe they should have skipped some steps and just called their new guitar lesson business “McFail?” At least when someone looks up Jack McNally and Doug Smith it wouldn’t be a story about their personal failures with their names plastered all over it. For a pair who were once so concerned about “perpetuity” they sure found an interesting way to get there. 
 
There are good things to be taken away from the school and my experience there. The school became successful largely because of the vision, hard work, talent, and expertise of one great manager, the school’s director when it was still called “Musictech” and the man in charge of the move to St. Paul; Michael McKern. McKern staffed the school with excellent teachers, found, hired, and managed an incredibly efficient administration staff, designed the school’s studio complex, administrative offices, and classrooms, managed the school’s rapid growth with class and competence, oversaw maintenance and expansion, carefully selected and installed appropriate equipment for the school’s educational mission, and provided staff and students with a mission that was summed up in the school’s name and reinforced by consistent commitment to our students’ best interests and careers. J&D observed all of this hard work from a safe, comfortable, and non-functional distance. After it appeared that Michael had the school running smoothly, they “took over” by replacing him with an assortment of academic “professionals” who steadily degraded the school to its final state. McKern’s efficient and lean administration was replaced with a staff that, in the end, gave the school a 1:1 administrator-to-faculty ratio that was not only inefficient and unresponsive to anything but serving itself, but inexcusable in its expense and irrelevance.

Once J&D decided to turn the school over to traditional academic administrators, all of that mission stuff vanished. When they decided to honor themselves by renaming the school, and selling that as something that was decided by anyone but themselves, the die of self-destruction was cast. Any interaction with Jack or Doug would immediately inform a sentient person that their sole “mission” for the school was to pack their pockets as quickly as possible with the least possible effort required from them. J&D were particularly susceptible to lavish and slavish compliments and most of the so-called “professional academic” mismanagers and academics picked up on that quickly and used it to pad their own nests and degrade the school and its operations.

Not many businesses—educational or otherwise—have a real mission. Most organizations arrive by accident, succeed by accident and luck, and wander through their history as clueless as a headless horseman. For a brief period in its 35 year history, Musictech College had a mission and any student or employee lucky enough to be there then should treasure that memory for what it was; a rare opportunity in a rare moment.

Worshiping Tin-Lead and other Old Bits of Junk Technology

The following is a letter I sent to TapeOp Magazine regarding a silly end rant by John Baccigaluppi about how much he loves tin-lead solder and big iron audio electronic equipment. A year ago, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photography tour and I have stuck a video of that

While it is always entertaining to hear old men (or old souls) rhapsodizing about when “spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,” John Baccigaluppi’s “An Endangered Species” harping about the deficits of lead-free solder was funnier than I suspect it was intended to be. Solder defects have always been a substantial part of electronic equipment failures. In the 80’s, I had a side business repairing Roland Guitar-to-MIDI converters because that company failed to anticipate the mechanical stress of their power supply components on their fragile circuit boards. In my MI equipment repair career, I would estimate that at least 75% of all electronic component failures were initiated by solder connection failures. Even the often-praised point-to-point tube circuits were known to rely on their unreliable mechanical attachment to the terminal posts because the heat from the tube circuits and the lack of flux removal caused the lead to degrade into powdery lead-oxide. As many companies demonstrated over the last century, the beauty of tin-lead solder was that any half-trained chimp could make a mediocre but hard-to-inspect solder connection, but the flaw in that technology was that the circuit designs were rarely conducive to sufficient removal of the flux residue which led to deterioration of the connections with heat, moisture, or just oxygen exposure.

Like the lovers of big iron American cars, unreliable but repairable out of necessity overweight vintage motorcycles, and lead-based ceramics, Baccigaluppi’s rhapsody for the days past when equipment failed often but could sometimes be repaired with enough effort, patience, and money is nothing new. However, those old vehicles rarely survived 50,000 miles without some sort of major overhaul and while they might have survived in a climate-controlled garage for “60 to 70 years” they were useful transportation for about three years before the cost of repair overwhelmed the cost of replacement. Today, a car that doesn’t last for at least 200,000 miles before needing major work is clearly a lemon.

Likewise, I suspect at least a few thousand “vintage” large format consoles have ended up polluting the nation’s water supply because their performance and capabilities didn’t warrant the cost of repair, let alone the real estate necessary to house that equipment. Like old cars, motorcycles, and pottery, the collector/hoarder business in audio equipment is coming to an end. Baccigaluppi asked, “how many pieces of classic recording gear have you seen in a trash dump?” Last fall, I took a “ghost town Detroit” photo tour and saw a building full of “classic recording gear” and broadcasting gear abandoned to metal scavengers in a Detroit public school building: MCI and Otari tape decks, racks of AT&T patch panels, recording and broadcast consoles, effects and signal processing gear, and piles of audio and video patch cables. The school had, supposedly, tried to find a buyer for the broadcast vocational school’s equipment, but no one was interested. So, sooner or later all of that stuff will end up in a trash dump. About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to obtain a pair of Otari consoles that had been used on the first Star Wars movie, just for the cost of getting the consoles out of a 3^rd floor warehouse and finding a place to store them. No thanks. So, to the trash dump they went along with a warehouse full of 1970’s and 80’s video equipment.

Some products are worth salvaging, if just for the historical value. Most electronic products are obsolete regardless of whether that was “planned” or not. There is an educational value to repairing an old piece of gear and that shouldn’t be discounted too quickly. There are, however, good reasons why the old equipment gets discarded for the new. There is a wide line between tossing a $600-1,000 phone every year to “stay current” and spending hundreds of hours maintaining old equipment that isn’t even close to capable of performing to modern standards. I suspect the best way to decide where you draw that line is by determining what your time is worth.

Did We Exist?

Several years ago, just before I retired, I took a quick pass through McNally SmithCollege of Music, to document some of the acoustic treatments my tenure there created. That is documented here, somewhere, I’m pretty sure. Yesterday, I visited the remains of the school to look at the items that will be auctioned off this week. The evidence of my existence and participation in that facility are vanishing quickly.

You Can't Go Home Again

In late-March, a friend from Detroit visited the Cities and we got together at the downtown St. Paul Keys Restaurant for breakfast Saturday morning. I can't remember the last time I was in downtown St. Paul and didn't run into someone I know, but that Saturday was a time when that happened (or didn't happen). I couldn't help look around the restaurant for familiar faces. From 2001 on, I ate a lot of meals in that place with a lot of friends and it was eye-opening to realize that they were all scattered to the winds because of the McNally Smith College debacle. St. Paul isn't the same place it was a few years ago. As a result of that hole in our visit, we decided to walk over to the former home of the school. He sent me a few of the pictures he took and those pictures inspired this essay.

For the first time since I turned in my last course grades in 2013, I returned to the scene of the McNally Smith College crimes. Not long after I retired, my wife and I took a winter-long camper trip west. When we came back, we got serious about downsizing our possessions, bought a house in Red Wing, sold our Little Canada house, and started our new life in small town Minnesota. Other than by staying in touch with former students through Facebook and a few of the school's instructors and administrative employees, I didn't think much about the school or its fortunes until in late December of 2017 when I received a flurry of emails from friends still working at the school; the school's owners suddenly decided to close the school a week before Christmas break.

There are people who claim they had no idea the school was in trouble when it suddenly closed the doors. I'm not among that group. There were multiple times during the 13 years I worked at MSCM when it was apparent the school's management was dysfunctional, uncommitted, and disconnected. In fact, pretty much every time I came in contact with either Jack McNally or Doug Smith it was obvious that they were incredibly lucky to have been owners of something like a music "college" rather than desperately poor marginal musicians trying to make a living teaching guitar in a music store closet. Unless you’ve ever met a “job creator,” you could be fooled into believing that all sorts of positive attributes contributed to their success. In most cases, the successful entrepreneurs I’ve known were just incredibly lucky and their real work behind their success had nothing to do with the owners’ involvement; or lack of.

All of the school's success was due to people McNally and Smith hired more out of accident than management brilliance. Somehow a few competent and committed people who found their way into positions of authority and management; mostly because Jack and Doug were busy admiring themselves in the mirror. Michael McKern, for example was exclusively responsible for the complicated and timely move from the Minneapolis Musictech facility to the abandoned St. Paul Science Museum building in 2001. Occasionally, Michael would shepherd Jack and Doug through the construction project, showing them where the money was being spent and describing what the school would look like when the contractors were finished (just in time for the beginning of the 2002 spring semester). The two "owners" were about as involved in that process as a pair of squirrels watching a house being constructed across the street from the forest where they lived.

I was in a few committees that included either Jack or Doug during the years I worked for MSCM. I was always amazed at how decoupled they seemed from what was going on in the facility they later decided to rename after themselves. One of my favorite fables about MSCM is pretty much the story about the school's name found on Wikipedia, "Formerly known as Musictech College, McNally Smith College took its new name in honor of its two founders, Jack McNally and Doug Smith, on its 20th anniversary celebrated in 2005." That is a pretty funny take on the fact that the accrediting organizations (to use that term loosely) strongly advised the school to lose the "tech" aspect from the original school name, MusicTech. The goofballs from National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) met with the accreditation committee members and told us that they had a problem with "tech" being associated with higher education. I wondered if they had the same problem with MIT, the three Cal Tech variations, Georgia Tech, Illinois Institute of Technology,

Florida Tech, Texas Tech, Virginia Polytech, etc? It was a rhetorical question, since I doubt any of those schools would bother with a low-life group of wannabe academics like the NASM characters. Nobody even tried to answer that question, though. In the end, the naming committee recommended a collection of music-related possibilities with the suggestion that "anything but McNally Smith College" would be a not-awful possibility. The "in honor" part of Musictech College being renamed to “McNally Smith College of Music” was purely inspired and demanded by Jack and Doug. I suppose, otherwise how would anyone know they had anything to do with the school?

In a Star Tribune article about the closing, Jack McNally was quoted as having sent an email "asking faculty and staff to 'consider finishing the term and issue grades as usual to avoid these horrific consequences for our students, even if it is without pay, simply for the sake of our students.'” That might be the first thing I ever heard of that Jack did "for the sake of our students." However, since all of the effort and cost of providing that service would be coming from faculty and administration personnel who would not be paid for the work, it's tough to cut Jack even a little slack. One of the last things the remaining administration folks did was on display on one of the school's doors: a "transfer fair." That must have been sobering, disappointing, and a slap in the face for everyone involved. It has been a well-known fact for most of the school's life that few credits were transferable to any real college. Often, no credits were transferable and sometimes no credential was allowed for a MSCM degree when a student decided to try to continue his or her education with one of the more traditional and substantial higher education facilities.

I admit I felt sad and disappointed when I saw the state of the school and when I took these pictures. A lot of effort and commitment went into creating the facilities inside this building and even though much of that work was done 16 years ago, it could have gone on being useful and valuable for a lot more years. Everything ends, but this particular institution ended in the most despicable way possible.

From the beginning of the semester in August 2017, there is no chance (other than gross incompetence) that the administration and ownership did not know precisely the day, or week at the worst, the school would run out of cash, based on the registration and tuition available. IYou’d think at least some regulatory agency would be taking note. In a decent world, you’d think the employees of the school would be owed a formal explanation and apology along with substantial severance pay for the interruption to their careers, the economic strain the sudden closure and unpaid work the owners expected from them, and their inconvenience and displacement.

Yeah, I admit it. I’m pissed off. I left a lot of friends at MSCM when I retired in 2013. I expected the school to slowly wind down and, eventually, either close or be absorbed by a competitor or just someone who either wanted the facility for a school or someone who wanted the real estate. At no point during the years that I knew them did I expect much from either Jack McNally or Doug Smith or Harry Chalmiers, but I expected more than this. If this turns out to be a ruthless cashout of the real estate and assets, I will not be surprised.

How Much Will This Cost?

One of the many things students don’t get much of in school is practical economics. As a result, the hourly rate lots of freshly-hatched audio technicians earn is embarrassingly unlivable. One of many reasons the career-longevity of people in the music and entertainment business is notoriously short. While I was working on one of those projects that usually inspires the notion “I could be doing better than this working at a convenience store,” I decided to write something about my own business experience in the music and audio business.

Until the day I retired, I had a price list for the various services I supplied to a variety of; from musicians and facilities who hired me for location recording gigs to studio and audio equipment repair services for musicians and recording studios to building contractors (acoustic design consulting) to law firms (audio forensics). Some of my price list was determined by the liability insurance required which was mostly determined by the customer (law firms) and the risk (to me, financially) involved in making a court statement about whatever the law suit involved. Acoustic consulting work for commercial construction was almost as risky and required similar insurance protection.

My rates ran from $75/hour to $275/hour. Those are “billable” rates, however, which are not necessarily the same as the hours I actually spent on a project. For example, a lot of recording work requires prep time and effort that the customer doesn’t see or appreciate. So, it just gets folded in to the billed rate. Recording projects are particularly expensive, time-wise, from my perspective. It’s possible at the high end of the “audio engineering” world that people actually make a decent income, but I always suspect a trust fund is involved when someone can afford to spend a career in entertainment.

Oddly and classically American, my experience with the high-ticket projects came dangerously close to being volunteer work because my liability insurance was so expensive. When I started planning for retirement and was winding down my businesses, the legal work went first. That saved me about $3500/year in insurance costs. The only way doing that work makes sense is if you do enough of it to make up for the insurance cost; at least 20 billable hours. It isn’t reliable work and lawyers, as you might guess, don’t pay their bills quickly and are hard to collect from. It was easy work to give up.

For that same reason, the acoustic consulting work went next. That saved me about $1500/year in insurance costs. Again, it is work you can’t count on and it’s usually not much fun. Although the engineer for the last contractor I worked with was terrific. He did everything he could to take responsibility from me for liability and customer interaction. Designing a quiet staircase in a multi-use building or plugging all of the sound passage routes between a first floor pediatric dental office and a lower-level computer programming company is just not exciting work. Recording studio work is fun, but not particularly profitable. Most of your customers are cheap and not particularly sophisticated and your competition all has a trust fund to spend.

Mostly because several of my ex-Studio Maintenance students were doing a lot of studio maintenance and looking for more work, that business was mostly easy to quit. I just started directing inquiries to them. In the last two years, I’d raised my prices to $225/hour hoping that would drive the business to cheaper techs. When that didn’t work, I had to tell a few customers that I was absolutely no longer interested in crawling around their studios or scouring the food, drink, and drugs out of their wreaked equipment. At least one of those characters had alienated every decent tech I knew of and, I suspect, they simply shut down the studio after the last piece of gear quit working.

Since the 70’s, I haven’t done music equipment repair for anyone other than myself, mostly buying broken gear and selling it in original or hot-rodded condition. In March, 2018, I had about a half-dozen pieces of equipment left in my shop and I am slowly working my way through the pile. When it’s done, I’ll probably convert the electronics shop to a guitar building and repair shop. Or maybe I’ll hand the bench over to my wife for her art projects.

I still do occasional location recording gigs, but with really limited capabilities: no more than 8 simultaneous channels and my interest in working on overdub or large-track-count projects is close to zero. My simple rule for recording projects is, “If I like what you’re doing and the project is fun (meaning, you are not an asshole), I do the job for my cost. If I don’t like you or the project, you can’t afford me.” Most people can’t afford me. I’ve quit pretending like people or projects that I’d just as soon avoid.

I’m not being a snob, I would just rather be retired and working on my own projects than worrying about pleasing someone else. I spent more than 50 years of my life trying to make other people happy. For the few years I have left to live, the only person I’m interested in satisfying (avocationally and vocationally) is me. I’ve paid all of the multi-tasking, menial labor, service-job dues I’m planning on paying until I croak. For a long while, I was fairly good at pretending to care what marginally-talented, egotistical, humorless, joyless people thought of my work. Those days are done and, unless I find a way to go broke between now and my last breath, they will never return.

Passion or Mastery?

I stumbled on an unusual book at the library this week and it has taken over my reading list until I wrap it up: Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. Having recently left teaching for a school that hyped the “follow your passion” delusion (The school’s demented marketing chant is “It's time to do what you love. Music is your life. You want a music school that connects you to the industry, to your inner voice, and to new worlds of possibility.”), this book struck more than a few chords with me, maybe a whole song worth.

While my institutional educational mandate was “turn half-interested hobbyists into professional recording engineers,” my personal goal was always to broaden the perspective of my students so they could see other opportunities for themselves. In case they discovered they weren’t going to be among the tiny percentage of folks destined to be rock stars or the slightly greater group employed as servants of rock stars (recording engineers), I hoped to put the bug of alternative career universes into their ears. Having watched Searching for Sugar Man last night, what I read this morning was even more relevant.

This search for meaningful work is a fairly modern human pursuit. For most of our million-something years,  our ancestors mostly struggled to live through the seasons. We white folks, in particular, had winter to contend with and the usual population die-off associated with that stark season with the occasional complete failure of spring-summer-fall due to climate catastrophes. If you were from one of the southern hemispheres, your mileage differed only in that you substituted vicious and insane plutocratic governments and a lot more warfaring to keep the populations under control. If winter didn’t kills us, we killed us and the search for meaning was reduced to searching for a safe, warm place for our families and friends. The industrial age and, later, more sane socialist governments, created the middle class and that led to people wanting work with meaning and job satisfaction. This is a BRAND NEW THING, so we aren’t good at it yet.

Most parents who spent their lives either as the idle rich children (with careers consisting of calling their money managers and asking “Am I still rich?”) of the robber barons or the lucky few who lived a significant portion of their lives during the tiny historic moment of middle class aspirations (asking themselves “How the hell did I luck into this life?”), understandably, have no idea how to guide their kids toward a meaningful, successful life. Being a parent has always been a hard, mostly thankless job, but with a rapidly evolving job market, economy, and technology it’s a lot harder. Academic marketing doesn’t help, either. With a butt-load of higher ed and bullshit vocational schools hustling the “you have to have a degree to get a job” garbage, it’s harder than it needs to be. Being hovering, genetically “old” parents adds more calories to the lard, too.

This is where So Good They Can’t Ignore You gets really valuable. The author’s three rules are #1 Don’t follow your passion, #2 Be so good they can’t ignore you, #3 Turn down a promotion, #4 Think small, act big. I am not going to summarize the big points, because there is a whole book that does that better than I can and really efficiently. Sticking with #1, the passion thing, a Canadian studio listed Canadian university students as picking “dance, hockey, skiing, reading, & swimming.” If that list doesn’t demonstrate how useless passions are as career guides, I have a list of bridges I’d like to see you. You are clearly dumb enough to buy all of them, if I price them right.

One of my personal rules for career planning is “Don’t become expert at something you hate. You’ll have to do it for the rest of your life.” It is kind of the polar opponent to Newport’s #2 and it flies in the face of the idea that we can become wonderfully skilled without passion for a career. Live with it. It’s possible and a problem if you are the kind of person who wants to do everything well.

What Every Good Teacher Knows

Back in June while running errands around the Cities, I listened to a really good NPR program on education (I really recommend following this link and listening to the whole program.). The lead-in was a a trio of quotes from an Indian physicist/computer programmer/educator, “Children will learn to do, what they want to do” and “Education isn’t broken, it’s obsolete” and a line from Arthur C. Clarke “A teacher who can be replaced with a machine, should be.” 

Every real teacher knows that you can’t teach anything to disinterested “students.” What is less well-known is that real students teach themselves. Or, maybe, that is less accepted.

I have “taught” a lot of students a lot of stuff in my 35 year career: basic electricity, electronics troubleshooting and repair, manufacturing quality systems, music, pacemaker and ICD implant and programming techniques, human cardiac biology, recording and live sound “engineering,” writing (fiction and non and technical), investments and money management, and stuff I have probably forgotten altogether. Most of my “students,” until the last ten years, were industry-based; in-house education of people who were wired to learn and true self-teachers. I was more of a facilitator than an “educator.” In many of those classes, my response to questions was “I’ll have to get back to you on that” because the questions were beyond my knowledgebase. (I did, in fact, always try to get back to the questioner with an answer, no matter how long it took me to find that answer. When I began my medical devices career, I couldn't ‘t find a heart with an axe. I used this line constantly when docs asked questions. Fuckin’ cardiologists look for a hole in your knowledgebase and poke at it until it bleeds.)

When I stumbled into academia, I found myself in a totally different environment. First, the only formal performance criteria I was evaluated on was “retention.” In academic-speak, retention means “people don’t drop out or get dropped from school until we have all of their money.” You’d like to think it meant something about retaining what is considered to be valuable information, but you’d be wrong. Second, no more than half of any class contained people who were vitally interested in the subject. Our current fearless leader likes to say, “No parent ever forced their kid to go to music school,” but that’s far from the truth. The whole “you gotta have a college degree to get a job” mental illness has gone so far from reality that “any degree” appears to be parents’ goal. (I’m from the Woody Allen school of thought that says you haven’t survived the third trimester and can still be aborted until you have a law degree, an MD, or a PhD in something useful.) All kinds of kids go to art school, music school, hairdresser school, cooking school, or whatever other hobby activity you can invent “just to get a degree.” They have no more interest in art, music, hair, cooking or basket weaving than does a chicken. They are just avoiding life and adulthood doing the Garrison Keilor MFA thing (My Fabulous Adolescence).

I think, in fact, education might be obsolete. Most of the K-12 system is a glorified babysitting service. The reason so many “parents” are in favor of abolishing summer vacation and extending school hours has nothing to do with education. They are just looking for more time either for themselves or work. If that’s your goal, don’t have kids, dumbass. Of course, these dimbulbs recently passed through the American babysitting service where crap like “parenthood is a wonderful adventure” propaganda is blasted as if it were true or actual information, so they can’t be blamed for being morons.

All of the “best students” I’ve enjoyed in the last decade have been self-taught. Looking back, I think the only thing I provided was a tiny bit of grandfatherly guidance (“Don’t grab the hot end of the soldering iron, dumbass!”) and the same kind of encouragement (Not bad for a dumbass, dumbass.”) When the students wanted to learn something, the school’s resources were their best tool. The teachers were just there to open the doors and keep the kids from setting the building on fire in the first couple of years.

Today is my 65th birthday and I think it is officially time for me to call this a “career.” I’m paid way too much to open doors and pat people on the back and way too little to pretend to care about young adults who are just burning the most valuable years of their lives hiding from themselves. Thanks for listening, it’s been . . . semi-real.

Making A Mark

I suffered a decade in medical devices between 1991 and 2001 before coming to my senses and giving up any hope that something good could come from that experience. From there, I went from unemployed to part-time employed and full-time self-employed to full-time college instructor over the last dozen years.

One of the reasons I failed miserable in medical devices is that I was completely unable to make any sort of identifiable difference in the way either of my two employers did business. That never happened to me before. Even at the two Misfortune 500 companies where I’d been employed before medical devices, I’d been able to make a dent in the places.  American medicine, however, is a different, much less ethical, largely inflexible, massively incompetent business and there is no place for creative thinking. Sad, but true.

One of the things that I’ve loved about working for a music college is that there are signs all over the place that I’ve been there:

If for no other reason, the school’s acoustic treatments reflect what I’ve taught and recommended in nearly every classroom and practice room of the school. I, clearly, was there.

Educational Theory

I have a theory (surprise!) about traditional education. Academia is, contrary to popular opinion and its own self-image, always behind the curve. Because of the "accreditation" and "credentials" hang-ups, it's all-but-impossible for traditional universities to hire people who actually know something useful. So, by the time one of these institutions figures out that an industry has a need for qualified, trained, and skilled entry-level employees, the industry is practically historic and the need is long gone.

Here, for example, is a job posting for an instructor in a substantial state school:

Position: Assistant Professor of Music Technology (Tenure –Track)
Department: Music 
Rate: Minimum Starting $46,400
 
SUMMARY: The faculty in this position must have a strong commitment to teaching excellence, creative activity, scholarship, student advisement, and university and community service.
 
DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES: Faculty contractual duties include, but are not limited to:
 Teach a full load of Music courses equivalent to four courses (12 credit hours) per semester or eight (24 credit hours) per academic year;
 Teach and /or oversee the teaching of music education courses such as instrumental conducting, instrumental techniques, and music education techniques;
 Provide leadership and recruitment of students who major in music technology, composition, and education;
 Participate in professional music education organizations, fostering relationships with local and state secondary school music programs;
 Procure and maintain music technology equipment and software, musical instruments, and instrumental music library materials;
 Observe Field Base Level III music students as they near graduation;
 Direct student instrumental wind and jazz ensembles;
 Instruct applied brass and/or bass in a variety of styles, including jazz;
 Advise students;
 May be assigned to teach evening and/or Saturday classes, courses via ITV, and/or develop and teach Desire to Learn courses;
 May be assigned to supervise field experiences;
 Develop and maintain collaborative and professional partnerships/relationships with local schools and provide service at the university, state, local and national levels;
 Hold office hours as required;
 Direct and/or supervise student research, independent study, field project, and thesis;
 Serve on faculty or University committees;
 Conduct scholarly activities such as research in a particular field of knowledge and submit findings for publication and/or presentation at professional conferences;
 Maintain regular attendance;
 Perform other related duties as assigned.
 
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
 EDUCATION: Doctorate in Music and/or Music Education
 EXPERIENCE: Five (5) years of teaching music technology and education courses, conducting instrumental ensembles, and teaching applied instrumental and composition lessons.

In addition to the minimum qualifications, preference will be given to the following:
o Demonstrated experience in composing and performing music for live performances, recording, editing and producing recorded music using the latest computer software programs
o Experience teaching digital audio recording, production, editing and notation software;
o Demonstrated experience excelling as a team member with good communication skills while maintaining personable relationships with educators and students;
o Demonstrated experience in facilitating improvements in music curricula;
o Experience with event planning associated with music concert performances;
o Experience participating in recruiting events and public music performances.
 
KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES Skill and expertise in the classroom;
 Ability in the use of technologies and/or strategies to enhance pedagogy;
 Ability to work effectively with a culturally-diverse student body;
 Ability to develop effective methodology for the integration of teaching and research;
 Ability to demonstrate excellent communication skills;
 Ability to teach undergraduate and graduate level courses;
 Ability to supervise undergraduate and graduate student research.

Presumably, this "instructor" is going to be useful to students as some sort of credible resource, but how is that possible? What would someone with a "Doctorate in Music and/or Music Education" and "Five (5) years of teaching music technology and education courses . . . " know that would be useful to a prospective professional recording engineer or producer? The answer is obvious, isn't it? Not to academia.

A lot of this comes from a wrong-headed delusion that is core to academia: the disconnect between what students want and expect and what educators imagine they want. Students have bought into the fantasy that "education is important." The kinds of numbers educators promote are based on some pretty sketchy numbers games. When students ask colleges to accept some of the risk, they get nothing but blank stares from those risk-adverse institutions. And for good reason, the connection between higher education and earnings are nebulous, at best. A few years back, I read an article that claimed that if you remove the "honorary" PhDs from the educated side of the ledger, the payback for higher education falls to nearly non-existent. When the Steve Jobs, Mark Zukerbers, George Soros, Richard Bransons, Bill Gates, Warren Buffetts, Steve Woziniaks, and the rest of the incredibly rich honorary PhDs are reduced to their dropout or BA status, it's possible to suspect that spending a lot of time in class might be a mistake. In some professions, it is.

So, my theory is "Any time you see a profession that is academically represented by people who should be in the prime of their careers, that profession is obsolete." It's also possible that any profession that is thoroughly ensconced in academia is history.

A while back, I got involved in a "discussion" on the AES Faculty Advisor newsgroup after I'd recommended an excellent instructor who had recently become "available for employment." When I mentioned that he had everything going for him except a college degree, several of the discussion participants chimed in that a recording engineering "terminal degree" was absolutely necessary in their institutions. When I suggested that educational paperwork was pretty much a non-issue in the industry, one instructor replied with "Well, what we're selling students is a degree, so I think it's pretty important from our standpoint." I guess I was wrong. I always thought we were trying to teach kids how do to useful work?