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.
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.
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.
Google is threatening to discontinue updates on Chrome for my Apple OS X, 10.7 or whatever cutsey animal name Apple gave it, and my wife’s exercise room WinXP machine. No problem, I deleted Chrome from both machines and they are happy with Explorer and/or Firefox. I don’t care which browser I’m using as long as it works and I can’t say that Chrome works all that well on a regular basis.
Threats to abandon my computer platform have been entertainment since I began to think about retiring in 2012. We have a WinXP machine in the basement that my wife uses for watching Netflix and Amazon movies and while Microsquash abandoned “extended support” for WinXP on April 8, 2014, that system keeps providing entertainment. The computer is probably 15 years old as is WinXP. The end of Microsoft’s “support” and security updates is only noticable because I can’t shut off the damn wanting that my system is not set to automatically accept updates. I’m not alone in continuing to get along with this obsolete software. As of January 2016, the US Windows XP desktop market share is 8%, China at 26%,and it is still the fifth most popular OS in the world after Windows 8.1 and OS X. Some statistics rank WinXP as second after Windows 7. Support from either Microsoft or Apple belongs in quotes because their definition of that word is only consistent with what other industries might call “customer abuse.”
Almost 50 years ago a friend and I managed to squirrel our way on to the lineup of local performers who played the stage at the Dallas folk music club, The Rubaiyat. Until a few years ago, I could remember the name of the “group” we played as. “Jug Band” was in the name somewhere and some word like “undefined” or “random” was also in the name because there were several of us who played together but you never knew how many there would be outside of the two of us, Ed and I, who were the core. It might be a duet or it might be a 17-piece collection of assorted “percussionists” banging on everything from bongos to forks and spoons with banjos, a stand-up bass, and assorted guitars tossed in for volume and texture. Our high point was intro’ing one of the period’s famous “Toms” or “Tims”: Tom Paxton, Tim Buckley, Tom Rush, Tom Glazer, Tim Morgan, etc. You’d think I’d remember, but I was mostly into soul music at the time and playing on stage, with nothing between me and what felt like a hostile world but an acoustic guitar, scared the shit out of me. Usually, when I left the stage I just kept going until I was out the door and sucking in large quantities of fresh urban Texas air until I could relax a little. All I remember about the headline is when we walked past him on the way off of the “stage,” he said, “You guys know what it’s supposed to sound like.” I have never known if that was a compliment or a mild cut our outright sarcasm.
I’m sure I don’t accurately remember how many people could cram into the Rubaiyat, but it was more than a handful and likely close to 50 or 75. Some people called the place a “coffee shop,” but I don’t remember coffee at all. I didn’t drink the stuff until I was in my 40’s and, like golf and Harley Davidsons, I considered coffee to be something “old people” did. I think you could buy beer at the club, but I didn’t drink beer back then, either.
What I do remember about the Rubaiyat was that we didn’t mess with microphones or a speaker system in the club. You just sat down in front of the room and played. People were quiet if they liked and not as quiet if you bored them. It wasn’t a hostile room to play, but it wasn’t mindlessly supportive, either.
Today, every fool with an acoustic guitar, banjo, autoharp, ukulele, or poem to recite feels the need to pull a microphone closer as some sort of defense against being so pointless that people refuse to listen. I think “sound reinforcement systems” are the performers’ equivalent to the “everyone gets a trophy” education/competition philosophy. You’ll never know if you suck if you are so overwhelmingly loud that you can pretend people are playing attention to your message simply because they can’t yell loud enough to overcome your noise output. That may be a lot of things, but two things it isn’t would be “music” and “art.”
I’d bet if you asked 100 random people how often they have left a club, restaurant, or park because the sound system was painfully loud and the “talent” was missing, you’d discover that close to 100 people would admit to being sound system critics. I realize I’m grumpier about this bullshit than most people, since I openly advocate smacking live sound fruitcakes whenever possible. However, I think sound reinforcement systems are responsible for driving more people way from music venues than they could possibly attract.
Here are some rules I’d apply to when you need a sound system:
There is a thing that happens when someone famous dies where all of the weirdness, bad behavior, and even criminal behavior vanishes from the discussion and we all pretend to feel bad that famous character died. Even weirder, people who disliked, hated, or even wanted to imprison or hang the famous dude now sing his praises. When” Nixon died, probably the most hated man in the United States during the second half of the 20th Century, people who once would have shot the man down on sight praised his “leadership.” When Prince died, the world of “crazy Prince” stories turned into “super humanitarian who was the nicest guy you ever met” stories. Weirder, people I know who had told me tons of the crazy Prince stories practically rewrote their own personal history to make him saintly. I suspect this is something I should have learned as a child, but the only traditions my parents tried to pass on to me were religious and none of that took. Thanks to that flaw in my upbringing, I tend to see people the same after they die as before.
One of the first crazy Prince stories I ever heard came from a live sound guy who was working in marketing with Midas (when Midas belonged to Bosch Communications Systems in Minnesota). Many of the Bosch folks were in some way connected to Prince’s Minnesota facilities or his touring history. This guy was Prince’s tour manger for few years and was pretty close to the purple guy for a while.
During one of Prince’s European tours, he became infatuated with Holland’s windmills and bought one to be delivered and setup at his Chanhassen home. That happened and for a few moments he was happy with his new purchase. Sometime after the installation, Prince called his tour manager and bitched, “It’s pointing the wrong way.”
“It points the way the wind blows, Prince.” Was the only logical reply.
“We’ll see about that,” said Prince. A few days later, he had the windmill torn down and discarded.
We ordered drinks and appetizers and were engage in the usual pre-rock show converstions when a guy the size of a buss showed up and said “Prince wants to sit here.”
I said, “There’s lots of room up here, why our table?”
“Prince wants to sit here.”
I was about to blow him off when my friend appeared and explained that Prince wanted the entire balcony to himself and that we’d have to move. By then, the main floor was over-crowded because the usual morons who chase around Minneapolis following Prince had shown up. So, there was no place for us to sit that would give us much of the new sound system experience or any kind of sight line to the stage. We left.
It was several years later before I saw my friend again and he was still embarrassed about the Prince debacle. He was equally baffled that I didn’t know Prince was a big deal in Minneapolis (or anywhere).
For years, a couple of my geek friends did most of the studio maintenance for Paisley Park. Prince would go through phases where he would sour on his techs (mostly when they insisted on getting paid) and his studio manager would shop for a new tech.
During one of those moments, I took the call to service the studio’s SSL patchbay problems. I had to do a little parts chasing and one of the studio employees showed me a room full of “condemned” equipment where I could salvage a couple of connectors for my repair job. When I asked why all of that stuff was crammed into the room, he told me that when a piece of equipment baffled or irritated Prince, he had it banished to this room. I said something about that being “pretty idiotic” and went on with my work. While I was there, I ended up doing a couple of other small repairs and between the travel time and work the bill ended up being about twice the retainer I’d insisted on (because I knew that Paisley often didn’t pay its bills). Of course, Paisley Park still owes me about $500 for that repair visit. In the Kevin Smith video at the top of this essay, Kevin mentions that Prince had every room in the facility mic’d and after hearing that I’ve wondered if my slight cost me getting the invoice paid?
Over the next decade or so, I’d get a call or an email from the Paisley studio manager of the moment asking if I could stand-in for the regular tech until Prince got over whatever mood he was in at the moment. I’d remind them that Paisley still owed me money and they’d go away. The last time Paisley rattled my cage was a few months after I retired and had sold almost all of my test equipment. Again, Prince was pissed at his regular tech and nobody else would take a chance on getting paid for doing the work. The email said, “Are you really retired or would you come look at our SSL?”
I wrote back, “I’m retired and you still owe me money. So, yes and no.”
To double-check my retired status, the studio manager called some of my friends from the music school where I worked and asked them to use their influence to get me to do the Paisley job. The only one who gave it any sort of shot emailed me and asked, “Still retired.”
I wrote him, “Yep.”
He replied, “Thought so.”
A couple of months later, we were having a beer and he filled me in on why that conversation had taken place.
It was pretty well known that nobody was ever supposed to “look at” Prince or talk to him. I never had the opportunity to break that rule, but I probably would have just to see the reaction.
One of the moments that many people use to justify their reverence for Prince was his solo at the R&R Hall of Fame (“the greatest solo ever”). For sure, that was a pretty good performance. It wasn’t even in the top ten rock solos from my personal experience, but he certainly acted like he thought he was showing up the stage. The bit where he tosses his guitar into a roadie’s hands and struts off like he “showed ‘em” pretty much confirmed all of my biases about Prince. It just looked like an act of disrespect to me.
The other credential his fans give for his Princelyness was when Clapton was asked what it felt like to be the greatest guitarist in the world and he replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Prince?”
There are a couple of ways to take that and my take would be that Clapton was saying the only guy arrogant enough to believe he was the greatest guitarist in the world would be Prince.
I ended up with this device as my primary recording interface purely by accident. For several years, I used a combination of a MOTU 828 MKII and a Focusrite OctoPre MKII as my 18 channel location recording rig. While that mostly worked, MOTU’s software/driver was regularly glitchy and it became one of the many reasons I rarely “updated” my Mac’s software. When I retired and downsized my possessions and hobbies, the mobile rig went pretty early in the garage sale.
I had a couple cheap two channel USB interfaces and sort of assumed that would more than do the job for whatever I’d be doing in the future. A friend, Scott Jarrett, bought an UltraLite when it first came out and suffered with it for a few months before he decided it was unusable. When I came upon a great deal on my MK3 version, I figured I’d buy it, play with it until it pissed me off, and sell it for a profit. Four years later, I still have it. While MOTU has a talent for making interfaces overly complicated, the MK3 mostly works as expected.
MOTU Specs the unit with:
MOTU makes some other specs-claims that I’d have to dispute. The worst of which is “Plug-and-play operation with your Mac or PC via FireWire or USB2.” I’m pretty sure MOTU does not know what “plug-and-play” means. In using any MOTU product, you will have to wrestle with their obscure and user-hostile drivers and software. Like another company I despise, DiGiCo, you can not obtain MOTU drivers without logging into their website and registering a product. As opposed to actual plug-and-play products, absolutely nothing useful happens when you plug in a MOTU product without pre-installing drivers.
MOTU follows that delusion with “Includes AudioDesk full-featured sample-accurate workstation software for the Mac and Windows with recording, editing, mixing, real-time 32-bit effects processing & sample-accurate sync.” On both my Mac and Windows machines, AudioDesk 2 was a total loser, failing to even function on Windows 7 and it was such a glitch monster on my Mac that I deleted it immediately.
Getting Pro Tools or Logic to “see” the features of CueMix is a trick. Once I found a setup that worked, I saved it and haven’t experimented much with it since.
Considering how powerful and flexible the UltraLite is, the fact that it can be powered with a Firewire A port (400Mb/s) is a nice thing. Unfortunately, unless you’re sporting a historic Mac/PC (like me), that won’t do you much good. The IEEE 1394 a spec allowed for about 5W of power on the 6-wire buss and 25-30VDC unregulated. USB2 has plenty of power, but the voltage is too low for most applications including the UltraLite.
The two mic pres are reasonably quiet and provide the usual 60dB of gain. The input connectors are XLR/TRS for balanced or unbalanced operation of microphones or instruments. Gain is 1dB/step continuously-variable analog/digital front-panel controls. The knobs are small and a little hard to find in low lighting. The knobs are also the push-button switches for selecting 48VDC phantom power and a 15dB pad. All 8 of the analog inputs, including the two mic pres, can be controlled remotely through my old CueMix buddy. That is, actually, a nice feature especially during a remote recording session.
Mostly, I’m pretty happy with my MOTU unit. Especially for the insane price I lucked into.
One of the many things I learned working as an instructor at a music college was that talent, creativity, originality, stage presence, and “the right look” are not rare things. In my first couple of years at the school, I recorded original music from students and musicians from the Minneapolis/St. Paul community that blew me away. I recorded songs that I couldn’t believe the world didn’t want and need to hear. As my time there went on, that became such an expected and regular event that it was the background for my existence for 13 years. All the while, the stuff I heard on the radio and internet paled in comparison; or worse, often much worse.
Now that I’m retired and fooling around learning how to build and repair guitars it’s interesting to look back on my teaching and recording experience from the position of being in a classroom full of kids who are taking on a semi-practical trade while still hoping to be the “next big thing.” Most of these kids are pretty good musicians. Some of them are decent songwriters. The fact is that I’ve seen much, much better and all that talent went pretty much nowhere. Saying that, I don’t mean to discourage them. Their chance of making it big as a musician is almost exactly the same as it was for the music students who I thought had it all going for them: practically nill.
Luck and connections are more important than talent. It doesn’t hurt to have a few family members in the business, too. This is true for all areas of the arts. The world is full of amazing musicians, painters, sculptors, singers and dancers, funny people and dramatic actors, glass blowers, story tellers and poets, wood carvers and cabinetmakers, and people who make beautiful things and moments from nearly nothing. Some of those people make small or large fortunes from their “talent” and many of the most wealthy are nearly talentless (Yeah, I’m talking about you Kayne.) At the other end of the spectrum, there are incredibly talented people who, outside of friends and family, no one every hears about.
Like Mike Lewis told the 2012 Princeton graduation class talent only takes you so far. Luck is one hell of a lot more important a contributor to success and if you aren’t successful it could be because you weren’t lucky. If you were, it might not be due to anything about you.
