Where Did the Audience Go?

In the last month, I’ve participated in two conversations about how difficult it is to find and maintain an audience: one with a bookstore owner who has struggled to find an audience for and participants in his store’s monthly “open mic” and the other with an “acoustic musician” who believes the US is no longer supportive of “good” live music. The one thing both of these men have in common is that they are unwilling to give up their addiction to their sound systems and unnecessary/excessive volume. I’ve written about this before, in “Killing Music Loudly,” and I’ll probably beat this horse again. However, these two conversations reminded me of an incident from 40 years ago that stuck with me because of its relevance to my own live musical history.

When Wirebender Audio was in its prime, there were two of us: Dan and me. Dan’s special interest was loudspeaker cabinet design. Between our dissatisfaction with commercially available speaker systems of the time (1976-1982) and his fascination with recent developments in loudspeaker and speaker cabinet theory, our company deviated from just being a user and vendor into system design and sales. Over a period of a couple years, Dan made one great sound system after another. We were on a Biamp craze, amplification and mixer-wise (Remember the Biamp 1642 and the TC-120 and TC-225’s? They needed a lot of mechanical engineering and some component replacement,for reliability, but they were well designed for their price-point.) and some of those systems were just huge audiophile rigs. Dan was particular enamored with front-loaded, non-horn, non-vented systems, which are notoriously inefficient, but very high-fidelity. Likewise, our systems were some of the cleanest, quickest sound systems I’ve yet experienced. Repeatedly, after Dan would wrap up a system and take it out the band he’d be working with would buy the whole system and he’d have to start over. Not a bad problem to have as a systems designer. Eventually, he built what became his “ultimate” system, using everything he’d learned in every area of system design. On a budget, I like to think a lot of what Dan ended up with resembles much of the Meyer Sound system designs.

Coincidentally, we were recording a power-pop band that he really liked and when their record was finished he did a few shows with the band at local Lincoln, NE clubs to showcase their music. In one of the more upscale clubs in town, Dan met his Waterloo. During the first set, when he’d dialed in everything beautifully and the band was cooking, the bartender kept coming back to the FOH position and telling Dan to “make it louder.” It was pretty loud in the first place, being an early 80’s rock band with the usual collection of Fender, Marshall, and Orange amps on the stage, but the bartender insisted it wasn’t loud enough. Dan brought it up incrementally, but knowing the limits of his system and trying to stick with his quality sound concept he didn’t bring it up nearly loud enough for the bartender.

During a break, the bartender and owner ganged up on Dan and explained their philosophy with words something like this, “When the music sounds good, the crowd is a bunch of music lovers. They don’t drink or tip much and we don’t make any money. Crank it up, drive those cheap bastards out and make room for the drunks. They don’t care what it sounds like, as long as it’s loud, and they’ll drink until they drop.” Dan did push the system a little harder, the music got crappier, the audience morphed into brainless drunks, and the night went on.

Afterwards, Dan lost interest in live music speaker system design. After a few really great non-rock gigs with the University of Minnesota orchestra and a couple of outdoor musical performances, he sold that last system and told me he’d had enough of what we were doing. He didn’t like the commercials we were making most of our money doing and he’d lost interest in sound system design and live sound engineering. We packed up the company, after selling the last 100 of our “Musician’s Preamp” product and finishing the recordings we’d committed to, and went our separate ways. Dan became a tech school electronics instructor and stayed as far from popular music as possible for the rest of his life. I moved to Omaha, built a small production studio for a friend and went to work for a company that owned Aarakis Systems, building broadcast consoles and A/V switching systems. A year later, I was in California working for QSC Audio Products, doing live sound for a 9-piece horn band, and hustling Wirebender as a backline supplier, studio equipment and electronic musical instrument repair service, and contract audio and industrial electronics design service.

The lesson learned that would, today, apply to those two conversations that inspired this trip down Memory Lane is that the problem may be that you have both misidentified your audience. The bookstore isn’t trying to attract drunks and the acoustic musician isn’t trying to appeal to people who shout “Freebird” at every pause in the music. However, the quality of your sound system is exactly aimed at that audience. The bookstore, for example, isn’t large enough to warrant a sound system at all. Most of the people who used to attend the bookstore’s open mic have been punished enough by kids who imagine that more volume hides imperfections. They’ve decided that suffering through the loud awful stuff for the occasional loud decent stuff isn’t worth the effort. The acoustic musician isn’t acoustic at all. I’ve check out his YouTube performances and he is always surrounded by at least two stage wedges and he’s highly electrified. Yeah, he plays a beat up hipster’s acoustic guitar, but it’s plugged-in and so is he. With those monitor demands, the FOH has to be painfully loud for any bandwidth to exist out front. Again, he’s misunderstanding his target audience. He imagines himself to be a weird combination of Leo Kottke and Eric Clapton, but he’s neither and the audience he is best suited for would be more Kottke and no Clapton. Volume is the enemy of both of these guys, but they don’t know it, won’t accept it, and it will continue to defeat their objectives until they figure it out.

Reflections on Guitar Building

When I started actively looking at moving, I stopped at Southeast Community Technical College to get a feel for the possibilities (for me) in that program if we moved to Red Wing. Luckily, I hit a day when David Vincent was working on course preparation and he spent a couple hours with me showing me the facilities, talking about my experiences at McNally Smith, and my experience with tools, shop equipment, and guitar repairs.

David also described the first year of classes and when he told me about “GTRB 1400 Intro to Tools,” I admit that I balked at having to take a basic hand and power tools class after a lifetime of tool-using. Since I wouldn’t be able to get in to the program for about a year, David recommended that I consider the cabinet-making class in Winona just to get my woodworking skills up a bit. So, I did. That was a pretty awful class, but it did show me how much I didn’t know about power tools I thought I was fairly familiar with.  I really didn’t want to take “Intro to Tools.” David made it clear that skipping that class wasn’t an option.

So, I signed up for all but one of the classes a first year student takes in the fall of 2015. I didn’t take the Electric Guitar Design class my first year because I wasn’t yet convinced I wanted to build an electric guitar. After three weeks of “Intro to Tools” I wasn’t convinced I was going to be building any sort of guitar. David’s class was kicking my ass. It turns out that my personal quality standards weren’t even close to good enough for a luthier.

To start, we all had a list of fairly expensive tools to buy. Four Canadian-made chisels for about $120 for the set, were on the list. You’d think that if you paid that kind of cash for a couple of pounds of steel they would come sharpened by the manufacturer. You’d be wrong. There was also a 4” plane on the list. It cost about $70 and it also needed sharpening. We spent about a week (it felt like a month) learning how to properly sharpen these tools. In the end, I was able to create an edge that would easily shave the hair off of my arm. The factory edge was far from that sort of edge.

For example, this sanding stick. It’s about 10” long, with a prescribed taper, different on both sides, and two different radiused sides, also prescribed by Mr. Vincent. I worked on that stick for days and, after three weeks, didn’t feel I was any closer to getting it right (+/-0.002” for all specified dimensions) than I was when I started. Everyday, for a couple of weeks, I wrestled with myself and my failure to be able to do the work to David’s standards. I was not that far from the edge of saying, “Screw this. I’m retired and I don’t need eight hours a day of failure.” Then, I got it. All of a sudden, I was not only getting the assignments but I was bringing in work from  home and doing it to my new workmanship standards.

In the end, I did pretty well. I made the Dean’s list and, even more importantly, I made this guitar. Yeah, I know it’s a long ways from a Gibson Hummingbird, but it is exactly what I wanted to build, including a fairly individual semi-V shaped neck that I LOVE.

Also, I have a trio of super-sharp planes—from a 6” 1950’s Stanley to a 24” Stanley/Bailey that found in a Red Wing garage sale for $10 (with two new 7” saw blades tossed in for good measure) that I turned into a terrific manual joiner.

Occasionally, in my 68 years, I have learned things that if I’d have had them in hand when I was young would have made a world of difference in my life. This first year at Southeast Community Technical College was full of that kind of experience. I’m not kidding when I say that I think every kid who doesn’t know what he or she wants to post-high school ought to seriously consider the Southeast Tech Guitar Bulding and Repair Program. You will not be the same person after you’ve experienced the high standards this school and these instructors set for you.

Does This Face Make Me Look Fat?

Flying Pigs and So On

This is a fun story, but even more fun is the British use of language. The only place you’re likely to hear the words “tannoy system” or “poopoo’d” are from Brits.

The Price of Listening Tests

The Neumann KM184 is one of my all-time favorite microphones and, at $1,000/each, it's a microphone that I would gladly accept a cheaper-but-equal substitute. Michael Joly Engineering's Octava modifications are interesting, but if you listen carefully to his sound examples on the company's sound sample page I do not think you will agree that he's captured the sound of the KM184 with the SDC 991.

Electro-mechanical devices are insanely complicated, both to manufacture and to design. Anything that sounds good is an impressive accomplishment. Sounding spacious, detailed, and natural is miraculous. I think the Joly mics are impressive, but not enough to displace the Neuman small element condenser from it's holy place by the Grail of beautiful electromechanical instruments. At least, that would be my position based on the sound samples we have from Joly.

There are lots of problems with listening tests of all sorts. For over a century it has been widely believed that high quality classical guitars – their soundboards being the major exception – have to be constructed from tropical woods. This applies particularly to backs and sides (rosewood/mahogany) but also to necks (mahogany/Spanish cedar), fingerboards and bridges (ebony/rosewood). Indeed most builders and players alike consider such tropical hardwoods as the preferred, if not the only choice for instruments of the highest tonal quality. Whilst some non-tropical back and side woods have become established for certain applications - most notably cypress for flamenco guitars and maple for the more affordable “student” classical models - experimentation with other, alternative non-tropical woods has only ever occurred on a small scale and has not delivered the empirical proof required to indicate that such woods can be regarded as acceptable tonewoods. Until this present study, there has been no reliable, scientific investigation into the suitability of non-tropical species such as alder, ash, oak, plane, birch, false acacia, chestnut etc. for classical guitar building.

 In order for the widespread belief in the tonal superiority of tropical wood in guitar making to be validated, research would be required to prove that, under blind conditions, experienced guitarists and listeners show a clear preference for guitars made from tropical woods, and are able to reliably distinguish them from their non-tropical counterparts. The Leonardo Guitar Research Project made such a study: http://www.leonardo-guitar-research.com/research-report-lgrp. "In order for the widespread belief in the tonal superiority of tropical wood in guitar making to be validated, research would be required to prove that, under blind conditions, experienced guitarists and listeners show a clear preference for guitars made from tropical woods, and are able to reliably distinguish them from their non-tropical counterparts."

The conclusion probably irritates more people than it convinces, "This study, however, shows that first-rate guitar players and experienced listeners alike are unable either to register a clear preference between the two sets of guitars or to distinguish between both wood groups at anything better than chance levels. 

"Furthermore, under non-blind conditions, the non-tropical wood guitars saw, on average, a marked fallback in preference of some 50%. This would indicate that sound perception is strongly influenced by visually transmitted information such as the aesthetic qualities of an instrument, or the preconceptions surrounding good and bad tonewoods that their recognition allows."

You could argue that since this test as conducted on a moderately primitive guitar design, classical guitars, that it doesn't mean much. What it does for me, however, is prove that human hearing is generally as malformed as the schematic diagram and biology indicates. Our ears, unlike other senses, are a cobbled mess of mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical components that are mostly tuned to the human voice frequency range with some consideration for self-defense in the natural world. Many components are so poorly designed that they are easily damaged and age quickly and weirdly. Similar results have been found in ABX tests on electronic audio equipment, disproving some of audiophiles' and professional recording engineers' favorite myths. In the 90's, my old employer (QSC Audio Products) made a device called the "ABX Comparator" which was designed to allow the company's sales force to demonstrate products in fair comparison tests. Mostly, that proved to piss off wanna-be golden ears who were forced to admit they were nothing more than typically hearing-damaged audio professionals.

And It Will Sound Like . . .

Some friends are starting up an old guys’ R&R band and they need a bass player. They aren’t going to ask me because, “You don’t want to be in this band. It’s gonna be loud and sound like shit.” Of course, they know me too well. I don’t want to be in a band like that and haven’t since I was in my mid-twenties.

I missed the “opportunity” to run FOH for a “bluegrass band” at Hobgoblin this past Saturday because of family obligations. I know one of the band members a little and he’s a fine musician, a terrific songwriter, and a nice guy. The band’s banjo player/sound guy and I had a couple of email conversations and it was obvious (at least to me) that we wouldn’t work well together, so missing the gig wasn’t at all painful for me. Sunday, I was at Hobgoblin for another gig and, as expected, the house sound system was mangled and as far from reasonably “zero’d” as possible. [Who turns powered speaker systems’ volume controls to “off” and messes with the crossover settings?] The questions that cued me into knowing this wouldn’t be a fun gig were all about the number of monitors (4) that would be needed for a 5 piece “bluegrass” band in a 70 person (max) venue. Any is too many, four is a symptom of deaf rockers pretending to be purists.

Somehow, this sequence of conversations reminded me of one of my favorite 60’s albums, Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow.” There are lots of stories about how “awful” the studio experience was for the Airplane kiddies, but it’s pretty obvious from the quality of the playing that some actual musicians were involved in the making of the record. Post-Pillow, the Airplane’s zombies were big stars and in charge of their own sonic future; which accounts for the godawful sound of every other recording they made in the band’s lifetime. The band had no input as to how their instruments or voices would be recorded by RCA’s actual engineers (guys in white coats) and if they couldn’t play a part, someone else did. The lack of technical input from the kiddies resulted in a historic record of the times.

Those days will never return. Everyone with $500 and an ego can afford a decent recording rig, today. Goldman’s rule, “nobody knows anything,” has been multipled by millions of uninformed, tasteless kids with a cheap microphone, Pro Tools, and an endless collection of loops and plug-ins. I guess the logical extension of the rule would be “nobody knows anything and everybody thinks they do.”

The end result for me has been that when I’m asked if I’d be interested in a recording project and, if so, what would it cost, my reply is, “If I like it, I’ll do it for free. If I don’t, you can’t afford me.” Most of the time, I won’t like it and the conversation doesn’t get that far because I change the subject before the question is asked.

Losing History

Americans are, almost by definition, people who distain learning from the past. We generally despise academics and intellectuals and politicians have made successful careers based on nothing other than deriding “smart people.” A few weeks ago, one of my brothers made a fairly innocent comment about wishing that age had brought wisdom along with the usual crap we expect from getting old. I told him, “Wisdom is overrated. Nobody wants to hear anything from someone who has actually studied a subject.” I mean that. We have a whole political movement that appears to be proud to be the “Party of the Stupid.” Every aspect of our national life is infected with this foolishness. It is a part of our national character.

One of the reasons I decided to quit teaching was that I grew tired of hearing 18-25-year-olds tell me how shit works without a fuckin’ clue about the subject at hand. From writing computer code to using audio equipment to music theory (a subject that nearly evades me entirely, but I still knew more than most of our “students”), I was forced to listen to harebrained theories, mindboggling stupidity, and flat-out craziness in the interests of “self-esteem building” and student “retention.” I’m here to tell you that I don’t care how happy you are with your inner self. If you’re a moron, you are a moron. You are far better off knowing you're an idiot and settling for the life of an idiot than being dumb as a brick and whimpering about how the world doesn't properly appreciate you. When you are wrong, you’re wrong. And when you don’t know what you are talking about, it’s best not to talk at all.

Recently, I listened to someone close to me explain why cheap-ass, designed by hillbillies Pyle speakers driven by even more inferior dedicated amplifiers sounded better than powered, Class-D actively crossed-over JBL cabinets. None of this self-delusion is new to me. I have been there and done that. Sometimes flawed material sounds better on crappy speakers. Nothing new there. This, however, wasn't about that. This was about a tin-eared live guy babbling about his hearing deficiencies as if they were super powers. I could have argued the point, but I knew there was no interest in my experience, technical knowledge, or value judgments. I could have saved this doofus some money, time, and dramatically improved the quality of their sound system, but what I know would have fallen on damaged, untrained, disinterested ears. Why bother?

The end effect is that we Americans will continue to repeat our mistakes as if every day is brand new. This is exactly the kind of world cattle and sheep inhabit, but it seems a little primitive for a species that prides itself in being some sort of higher animal or chosen species. There is, of course, no evidence of that specialness on display or even well-hidden in our behavior.

 Considering this, I have to say the best thing about being old is knowing that I won’t have to watch all of this shit happen again because I won’t be around for the reruns.

Technorati Tags: learning curve,education,sound equipment,audio

Vanishing Point

Three years ago, last month, I left

After a dozen years standing in one place

I walked away, alone

At the time, it felt like dying

It felt like being liberated from cement shoes

It felt like losing my family

It felt like winning the lottery

Who knew it would be like vanishing?

No one said, “Don’t go”

Or “We need you”

They all said, “We’ll keep in touch”

I threw my own going-away party

Otherwise, I would have disappeared unnoticed.

Picking Grapes or Ducking Bullets?

When I was a kid, I worked a good part of two summers on a farm to avoid having to live in a squalid Army barrack with my family while my father worked on his Masters degree in Hays Kansas. The summer I turned 13, I went along with the crowd and suffered the slings and discomfort of living in close quarters with a squalling baby, my three bitchy younger siblings, and my parents and decided that death would be better than doing that again. Any kind of death. The next summer (1962), I was in a rock and roll band that toured Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas, eastern Colorado, and a bit of Nebraska for most of the mid-to-late summer and if I hoped to get to go on the road with the boys I needed a good story to convince my father that I should get to stay behind. So, I found a job working on a farm for the early wheat and hay harvest with the plan of taking off the moment the band got the first gig of the summer.

I was the youngest member of the band, by about 4 years and the bass player. I’d met the band leader in Hays the previous summer and lied about being able to play bass. He was a rich kid and, because I only owned a crappy Sears/Silvertone acoustic guitar and an even crappier Western Auto/Silvertone electric guitar, he bought a Fender bass (probably a Musicmaster) and a Bassman 50 for me to use. I practiced the bass all winter and was more than ready for the 3-chord garage punk rock would be the Tracers specialty. We weren’t talented, but we were loud. The PA system was a pair of Fender Showmen amps with two 4-ten cabinets per side. We were one of the few R&R bands in Kansas at the time with vocals loud enough to be heard.

That first summer touring experience ruined me for most kinds of work, forever. That year, I was smart or lucky enough to be back in Dodge staying in my step-grandparents’ basement before my family returned home. I’d made pretty good money between the farm work and the band, but I didn’t make it back with much to show for the summer.

The next summer, 1963, I used the same story to skip out on the Hays family excursion and it worked again. This was also the summer my father laid his ultimatum on me, “live in my house, go to my church,” so I wanted to make my escape permanent if I could work it out. That summer I planned on saving my money. The farm work paid even better that year, because I was old/big enough to get a truck and combine driving gig. The band did a whole lot better, too. That year we were advertised on KOMA Oklahoma City radio and  booked through Lawrence, Kansas’ John Brown Midcontinent Productions. You could hear ads warning that “the Tremendous Tracers are coming to your town, TONIGHT!” all over the Midwest. I came home after the family returned that fall. In fact, I was about two weeks late for the start of high school. I bought my band gear home and more money than my father earned in a year teaching high school. Like an idiot, I bragged about it when he yelled at me for missing the start of school. He tossed the amp down the stairs (where my old room was) and I can’t remember what happened to the bass, but I didn’t have one to practice with that summer. He confiscated my money and stuffed it into US Savings Bonds that I couldn’t redeem until I turned 18. That was a game we’d played with any money I made up to that point. Later that summer, I got a job and moved out of my family’s home for good.

The next summer, I didn’t bother with the farm story. One night I just packed up and moved to a friend’s house in a small town about 30 miles from Dodge as soon as school ended. A few weeks late, the band picked me up and I was on tour all summer. I made more money that summer than I did for the next several years. That year, my family stayed in Dodge and I ended up moving to Hays because about every band in the Midwest was there. The Blue Things, the Playmates Blues Band, The Fabulous Flippers, Spider and the Crabs, and a bunch of terrific bands lived in a trailer court, between gigs, not far from the college.

At the end of that summer, life went to shit, the Tracers disbanded, when the band leader crashed his T-Bird into the only fuckin’ tree in Oklahoma on the way back home to Little Rock, Arkansas. When I came back, I rented a trailer with a friend and enrolled in the local community college. Big mistake. The school, Dodge City Community College, was as bad as schools get and probably isn’t much better today.

While I played in a couple dozen bands between 1963 and 1982, none of them were as fun as the Tracers and I pretty much played for money rather than love after I got married in 1967.Money is lousy artistic motivation and a result of that experience was that I slowly stopped considering myself "a musician." From then on, when people asked "are you a musician?" my answer was "I own some guitars."

But to the point of the title of this article, thanks to life-long allergies I have always despised plant life. My last brief stint on the farm, in 1966, resulted in an asthma bout that turned into bronchitis and pneumonia which coincided with my draft physical and my 1-Y draft deferment. Over the years, I have learned to dislike plants to the point that I’d rather kill and eat a herbivorous animal than dig or pick food from the ground. You might get the creeps from handling birds or snakes or insects or spiders, but neither of those bother me at all I’d just as soon avoid the poisonous variety of the animal world, but I can usually tell which animal might be a problem. The only way I can identify a plant that might infect, kill, or cause an allergic reaction from lettuce is the hard way.

This weekend, I was “volunteered” for an afternoon of grape picking. I knew it would be a miserable experience, but after about an hour I realized that I’d rather be a mercenary than a farmer. I used to tell my students that when I was their age I’d have killed someone to get to work in the studios we had at MSCM. I was not kidding.

A Backward Look at the Music Industry

Lots of people are selling their insights into “the music industry” these days and, mostly, that’s because making an actual living in what’s left of that so-called industry is next-to-impossible. It always has been, so that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the territory.

A Facebook discussion with a friend today reminded me of one of my many missed “opportunities” to dive into the music business face (and life) first. When I moved to California to work for QSC Audio Products as a Design/Test Engineer, leaving Nebraska required selling off almost all of my recording studio equipment, most of my musical instrument back-line, and the disposal of probably 90% of my family’s personal possessions. We were moving from a 2,200 square foot house with a full basement and double car garage to a 650 square foot apartment in Huntington Beach, California. It was a sacrifice-filled “adventure” that required all of us, including my two adolescent daughters, to give up a lot of stuff.

1983 was a seriously economically depressed time in the Rust Belt and finding technical or manufacturing work of any sort in Lincoln, Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, Denver, or any of the smaller Midwestern cities was unlikely. Make that doubly-unlikely in my case, since I was 35 and still going to school nights working on my Electrical Engineering degree. Thanks to an old connection, I got a few job offers from the coasts and QSC seemed like the best of the lot. In fact, for almost a decade, my jobs with QSC were close to a dream come true. I got to work closely with Patrick Quilter, one of the best, most creative engineers I’ve ever known. I was instrumental in turning a small, still mostly start-up after a decade of struggle, manufacturer into one of the first American-made quality-driven manufacturers. California still provided incredibly cheap education and actually catered to non-traditional students, so I was able to continue my pursuit of a degree and hold down a 60-80 hour/wee management job. Most of all, we built the absolute best professional power amplifiers in the world and could prove it with customer testimonials.

It’s hard to imagine now, but I was a driven, workaholic for most of my life. While I was engineering and testing products for QSC and going to school nights, I also ran a repair business that serviced much of Roland and Yamaha’s customer returns and provided equipment and studio repair services to Orange and LA counties. That business began through an AES contact, Wes Dooley, who introduced me to several studio owners and maintenance engineers at our local AES meetings. One of the techs was a young man who was the maintenance engineer for Record Plant on Third Street in LA and for a few years in Hollywood. When he was overloaded with clean-up (often vacuuming the coke out of the faders) and repair work, I occasionally filled in to help: for a price, of course.

When he decided it was time for him to crawl out of his repair shack and get a life, he let me know the Record Plant job would be open. I drove up to Hollywood to hear more about the job and, eventually, he told me it paid about $20k/year. Without overtime, that works out to about $9/hour and there would be plenty of unpaid overtime (it was a salary job). I thought he was joking, but he reminded me that he “lived” in the repair shack about 5 days out of a week and his “home” was a rented room. 

My kids were teenagers, my wife didn’t work, and my family depended on my income. Honestly, I couldn’t find any way to consider what my friend had been doing for a decade anything resembling a “career.” Today, I suspect we’d call that sort of wage-slave an “intern.” Back then, in LA, I lost about 90% of the respect I had for my friend’s job and the Record Plant in that one conversation. I have never been able to do much with the “do what you love and the money will follow” philosophy because the cost of my reality always trumped the income my dreams would produce. Getting married at 19 and becoming a father at 23 will do that for you.

As we were winding down the job conversation, my friend offered to show me the resumes from the other applicants. I expected a bunch of right-out-of-tech-school kids with no experience in audio equipment repair or use. What I saw were guys (and a couple of women) with EE degrees from schools like UCLA, Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, and other decent electrical engineering schools along with the applicant pool I had expected. There were also guys I knew from the LA AES chapter who had good jobs with manufacturing companies. Some of those guys were decent engineers, too.

Before that moment, it never occurred to me that working for a recording studio would pay that poorly. While a friend back in Omaha did the maintenance engineering job for the city’s one-and-only professional studio, Sound Recorders, and I knew he still lived with his parents, I hadn’t considered the possibility that he lived like a college kid because that’s the kind of money he was making.

Way back in the 1960’s, I had a 1959 MGA. The MGA was a dream car, until it was my responsibility to maintain it. In less than six months, that awful vehicle wiped out my fairly substantial savings and left me broke and transportation-less. I have never envied a sports car owner since. In fact, I usually pity any sports car goofball, unless he is obviously a trust-fund brat: then I’m happy for his misery and transportation disabilities. Likewise, since my moment-of-zen at the Record Plant, it’s tough for me to consider recording studio work seriously and I can’t generate any level of jealousy when it comes to working for peanuts, regardless of the work. I’ve done a lot of studio work since then, but other than my own studio maintenance business I have never considered the studio business anything but a fun hobby. Not only do I not have a trust fund to fall back on, you could burn up my entire inheritance on a decent New York restaurant in one meal for two.

A couple decades later, I made a connection with an old acquaintance, Skip Cave, from my hometown. He had wandered off to L.A. in the 60's to make his fortune as a musician after graduating high school. His aunt was married to Howard Roberts who took Skip to one of the seedy nightclubs where the jazz guys hung out. The music was amazing, as the band was the core of the famous Wreaking Crew, and the audience was filled with jazz musicians the kid knew about from his record collection. Possibly Skip's strongest memory of that place was the gist of most conversations, "Have you got a couch I can crash on tonight?" Famous jazz musicians who didn't have a place to stay or anything resembling dependable income. Skip went back home determined to look for something else to obsess on, which turned out to be electrical engineering. His obsession was a lot more focused than mine and he did really well for himself. He still plays music at a high level, in retirement, and always has a bed to sleep in.