The concert was billed as the "Crash Test Dummies: God Shuffled His Feet 25th Anniversary Tour." A better person would have known what that meant, but I was mostly a first Crash Test Dummies album fan. The tour started in St. Paul with the core band of Brad Roberts, Ellen Reid, Dan Roberts, Mitch Dorge, Stuart Cameron, and Eric Paulson.
Local bar solo act, Paul Metsa, was the opener. He was as surprised to be there on the Fitz stage as we were to see him there. He didn’t even manage to get the performance up on his webpage retroactively. He had moments of ok-ness and talked way more than he played, which was an odd choice since he seemed to believe he was getting a lucky showcase that night and should have used the time to demonstrate his musicianship. Ending with a patronizing version of the Star Spangled Banner was pure Toby Keith schmaltz. He was, apparently, desperate to get audience attention.
The FOH guy, as usual, was near deaf. As usual, from the start it was obvious he’d never heard an actual record and imagined that we were all just dying to hear kick drum and bass solos; especially that all-captivating territory between 15Hz and 80Hz. (Or maybe his own hearing is so damaged he needed those frequencies boosted 10-20dB to compensate.) As the night went on, the sound goof became more hearing-impaired and eventually it was difficult to even sense the existence of the vocals unless all three of the band’s singers were really wailing. That was particularly disappointing because I don’t often get to hear a singer with Brad Roberts’ mic and vocal technique. If there was ever a band that deserved to have the vocals upfront and on point, Crash Test Dummies are it.
During the many quiet moments and, especially, when the musicians except Stuart Cameron (acoustic guitar) were absent, Roberts really knocked it out of the park. “Heart of Stone” was so incredible that my wife and I simultaneously and spontaneously turned to each other and said “that was worth the price of the trip, hotel, and concert tickets.” Of course the lyrics are close to our own story, "And so now we are old, both our stories are told and we wait for the end. If you're first to go I will follow you, know that my heart will not mend. And I wish I owned a heart of stone.” Trust me, it does not read as emotionally powerful as it sounded with Roberts’ incredible voice.
As hard as he tried, the FOH goof did not destroy the evening. The musicianship was solid and the spare arrangements allowed many of the high points to fight their way through the sound system incompetence. There were few moments where the lyrics were decipherable, but when those words were either heard or memorized the whole point of this philosophical, insightful band was proven to be true. If there was a Crash Test Dummies’ song that someone didn’t hear Friday night, it was a really obscure one. I held my breath hoping to hear Superman’s Song, but not expecting it if this was really supposed to be the God Shuffled His Feet 25th Anniversary Tour. They played Superman as the end of the regular set and the last song of the encore was "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" Go Figure.
There were many moments that were worth the trip to St. Paul, the hotel hassle, and even the downtown St. Paul parking hassle. It takes a lot to overcome those obstacles, but Crash Test Dummies pulled it off.
One of many irritants about getting old has been circulation issues. I sleep with at least one half of my body tingling from lack of circulation regardless of which side I sleep on, bed softness or hardness (although, hard is better), sleep position (although after being married for 51 years I am “trained” not to sleep on my back), pills, or anything else I’ve tried. Playing guitar is one more place where my poor technique has turned into a minor medical issue. Like many non-classical guitarists, I “rest” my right arm on the edge of the lower bout. For 50-some years, that hasn’t been a problem for anything but the limitations in speed and technique it causes (which are substantial, I know, Scott). This last couple of years, it has begun to cause another problem. After a few minutes of playing or practice, my wrist, hand, and fingers begin to tingle and will eventually get numb feeling from the lack of circulation caused by that pressure on the edge on the blood vessels of my inner arm.
A few months back, I saw Brian Stewart—music store owner and guitar builder/technician extraordinaire—working on an arm rest for one of his customers. I wondered if that device might help with my circulation problem? So, I built one.
Saturday morning at the TreeStrings morning jam, I tried it out. For the most part, it worked pretty well. Brian and I talked about his design verses mine and we had some other ideas as to how this might become an actual product (which he really doesn’t want to build) and I thought about some of those changes while I played this morning. I wish I’d taken a picture of my original design, if for no other reason than to show the evolution of the idea and because I thought the original piece was really pretty. It did cover more of the top than necessary and was heavier than necessary, too. To keep from having to split another piece of walnut to start from scratch, I decided to hack away at my original piece. Might have been a mistake.
When I got back home, I took that first attempt down to my basement shop and started carving it down to about half of the original width. I smoothed out the bandsaw cuts, sanded the piece back to a beautiful gunstock satin, and tried it again. This time it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as my original design and that was a huge disappointment. So, I reshaped the top side, losing about 1/3 of the total thickness and creating a little more of a flat spot on top while keeping the soft edge I’d originally designed. I refinished that work and reattached the piece. For the initial experiments, I’m using fairly weak double-sided tape to hold the piece in place, but when I decide I’m happy with it I’ll use something more aggressive.
One of the things I did not expect to happen was for the guitar’s tone and output to change for the better. If you look at that guitar-playing picture (at the top of this essay), you’ll notice that the arm damps a fair portion of the guitar top (especially true when the player is wearing long sleeve anything). I play a very small Composite Acoustics Cargo travel guitar and I’d never really thought much about how much of the guitar’s top I was sacrificing with my playing technique (I know, Scott). After listening the “with and not-with” sound of the guitar, I was interested in the concept on a whole different level. I would guess the overall volume is close to 3dBSPL louder with the arm rest in place and it is substantially more full and brighter, too. In retrospect, all of that makes perfect sense, but I hadn’t thought about it until the evidence was right there in my arms.
I will be playing with this concept a lot more in the future. For now, I’m enjoying being able to practice guitar for several hours without numbness and that irritating feeling (or lack of) that comes with circulation problems.
I remembered Terry being amazing, but this is an incredible reminder of how badass Chicago was when Kath ran the show. I saw Chicago in Amarillo around 1972, the James Gang was the into band. I put away my guitar for a couple of years after seeing what Terry did with the same instrument I owned.
The telephone has been around almost 150 years, since 1870. By 1879, telephone service subscribers began to be identified by their phone numbers, not by their names and by 1918 a million telephones were in service just in the USA. In 1962, Telestar, the first communications satellite was launched. In 1973, the beginning of the end of telephone communications arrived when Martin Cooper developed the first handheld mobile telephone. The first analog cell phone system went into service in Japan in 1979. In the 1990’s, cell phones began the switch to digital and there are hundreds of millions of people now frustrated by the awful sound of low-fidelity (at best an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression) digital cell phone conversations and miscommunication created by lousy digital connections.
In fact, according to an Atlantic Magazine article "Don't Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone" a whole generation, Millennials, have been diagnosed with a “kind of telephoniphobia” regarding voice telephone communications. Now that half of Americans under 35 use cell phones exclusively, “the intrinsic unreliability of the cellular network has become internalized as a property of telephony.” It isn’t. It’s a property of fuckin’ cell phones and I absolutely hate the damn things. I hate getting calls from people on their cell phones. I hate calling people who I know will answer my call on their cell phone. Between the distortion, the Auto-Tune-like Mr. Roboto voices, and the forced long pauses while we try to determine if there is still a usable connection (on their side) I just assume that at least 3/4 of the things that were said were misunderstood or not heard at all.
I have stopped listening to audio fidelity complaints from people who tolerate cell phones. This is not an anti-digital rant. I love digital data storage and have been perfectly happy with digital audio for music since the early 1980’s. However, the fact that cell phone users don’t even insist on full duplex communications capability from their crap-stick phone providers is evidence enough to me that they are not serious audiophiles of any sort. If you don’t know the difference between half and full duplex, I particularly like this comment and response for an answer: “GSM operates in duplex (separate frequencies for transmit and receive), the mobile station does not transmit and receive at the same time. That's called half-duplex. It's done to save bandwidth and battery power, and to make cell phone conversations more difficult.” While I’m sure the real reason cell phone providers don’t deliver full duplex is because it would be technically slightly more demanding and marginally more expensive, I’m entertained by the assumption that “it's done to . . . make cell phone conversations more difficult.” No matter why it’s done, it sure as hell makes conversations more difficult, less convenient, less entertaining, less personal, and less pleasant.
This afternoon, I tried to have a conversation with my brother who lives in Phoenix and this statement from that Atlantic Magazine article on why people hate phone calls rang true, “On the infrastructural level, mobile phones operate on cellular networks, which route calls between between transceivers distributed across a service area. These networks are wireless, obviously, which means that signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible. Together, these factors have made phone calls synonymous with unreliability. Failures to connect, weak signals that staccato sentences into bursts of signal and silence, and the frequency of dropped calls all help us find excuses not to initiate or accept a phone call.”
It’s not just “weak signals” that are the problem. Grossly misnamed “communications companies” have jammed so much data into so little bandwidth that signal strength is just one of many factors that creates an incoherent telephone call. My brother, for example, said he had “five bars” of signal strength, but our conversation was mostly a collection of Mr. Roboto vocoder noises, weird electronic bird song tweeting and screeches, and long pauses where neither of us were able to get anything across the satellite signal path. After a bit, we gave up and went back to email to carry on our “conversation.” A few moments later, my daughter called. We both have “land line” phone systems; hers is provided by her telephone company and mine is through the internet and an Ooma Telo system. We had a pleasant 1/2 hour conversation; with each of us laughing at the other’s jokes and stories made even more personal by being able to hear the laughter while we continued the stories. No weird noises, no Auto-Tuned Kayne West sound effects, no forced pauses waiting for the phone system to reboot itself and reconnect us; just a normal telephone conversation. The kind we used to have every time we picked up a telephone that was wired to the fuckin’ wall; 75 years ago.
The fact that the quality of telephone data transmission is lousy allows cell phone manufacturers to dumb-down the whole signal path. The microphones, the “speaker,” and the analog electronics connecting those transducers to the crappy data transmission system are all degraded. Why connected a decent micro-condenser microphone to an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression system? It doesn’t make sense to waste a decent transducer on a crappy ADC system. Likewise, at the receiving end why connect a half-decent speaker to a low-fidelity DAC? So, they don’t. You clearly don’t notice or care. Some of you low-life weirdoes even listen to music on your phone, out of that godawful speaker!
As a rule, I not only don’t do movie reviews but I don’t buy movies. I had a small (probably 15 tapes) VHS collection that I tossed when we moved to Red Wing in 2014. I have about that many DVDs, most of which my wife inherited from her father and some motorcycle DVDs that were sent to me to review when I wrote for Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly magazine. I kept most of the review DVDs because I couldn’t find anyone to give them to. Mostly, I’m happy to watch a movie once and forget about it.
Before you get driven away from seeing Bohemian Rhapsody by the bullshit reviews—most of which apparently wanted long scenes of gay erotica, lots of orgies, and other soap opera gibberish—try to imagine that the band (and, most likely, Freddie) wanted a movie about their musical lives and the music. That is the movie they made and they have good reason to be proud of the outcome. (Brian May and Roger Taylor are listed as “Executive Music Producers) Also, remember that when the band was in its prime most of the reviewers, media rags, and television nitwits hated Queen and Queen’s music, including Bohemian Rhapsody. They were wrong then and they are wrong now, but at least they are consistent. Take everything Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Rotten Tomatoes, the Guardian, and the rest of the wannabe rock critics with a block of highly diluted salt. A typical comment from that crowd was this bit of drivel by a Pitchfork reviewer, "The film also manages to rob Mercury of nearly all his queer pleasures." Another way to say that would be that the film manages to keep its eye on the musical ball rather than Freddy Mercury's balls.
Likewise, the movie spends a little time portraying the media obscessing on Mercury’s sex life, even during band media events intended to promote their music and touring. Nobody dislikes having their image accurately held up for ridicule and nobody deserves that more than the entertainment jackals.
Rami Malek nailed Freddy Mercury perfectly and bozos like sore loser Sacha Baron Cohen are just jealous that not only did he not get the part but the members of Queen thought Cohen’s take on Mercury was pure bullshit. The movie covers more territory in 2 1/4 hours than we have a right to expect from a pop music movie. All four of the character actors who played the band’s members knocked their parts out of the park. Brian May must have felt like he was watching a 30 year old mirror Gwilym Lee had him down so perfectly. Honestly, before a recent documentary about Queen and this movie, I didn’t know squat about Roger Taylor or John Deacon, but Ben Hardy and Joseph Mazzello nailed the characters I saw in the BBC documentary and all of the scenes I’ve seen of Queen on stage.
Watching the actors in the recording studio reminded me of how much I love that world. The freedom, creativity, sounds, energy, control, fun make the recording studio one of the few places on the planet that some of us every get to be who we are; the best of who we are. Taking time away from the performances, the recording studio experience, to spend it on Mercury’s gay high life would have ruined the movie for me. Watching the band on stage, backstage, and on the road reminded me of why people get into pop music in the first place.
Movies are snapshots, at best. They are not rambling 1,000 page tomes on history, society, and sociology. Screenplay authors often have to condense moments that you and I might think are important to something that, to us, may not resemble the story we’ve heard. Often, the story we’ve heard has been distorted and doesn’t even slightly resemble the truth. Movies are not Ken Burns PBS documentaries that can go on for hours in a series of segments. 135 minutes is pushing the boundaries of movie length and if you would have rather had less of Queen’s Live Aid performance or any of the music this movie was supposed to be about and more gay bar scenes, you probably were never a Queen fan. This a movie for fans of the band’s music, but probably not a tell-all semi-porno if that’s what you’re hoping for.
In case you thought I was being hard on the Red Wing goofballs who grossly overpaid for the theater's DiGiCo SD9, here's what the resale is on the big boy's DiGiCo, the D5 Live (https://atlanta.craigslist.org/atl/msg/6717399160.html). The D5 Live is a substantial improvement, user-friendlyness-wise, over the SD9 with 4 much more user-friendly screens that actually make a little sense when you use them of the one poorly located screen that is totally disassociated from the channel faders. This used Craig's List console comes with a "road case and 100 meter coax cable. Also have a second D5 with bad power rail and needs power supplies rebuilt. the 2nd can be used for spare parts or fixed and it comes with a brand new road case and I'll just let you take it for free. I have put the engine from the broken console in the working console and it works fine so it would give you a spare engine.” So you get 1 ½ Digico D5’s, a road case, and coax cable for $3200? Red Wing paid $60k-80k (depending on how you read the bid) for a D9 that still can’t talk to any recording rig and was about 90% of the way to End of Service (EOS) and nearly out of warranty (a measly 1 year warranty, the industry minimum) before it the installation was complete.
The damn things don’t hold value well, do they? Any rational user would expect to see no more than a 1 year ROI on this kind of technology, but who's counting?
Back in the mid-80’s I thought I had a small vision of the future. I imagined that there would be a much larger market for small, high fidelity, high reliability power amplifiers for the home studio market. First, I talked Pat Quilter into designing a one-rack-space Series One amplifier for that market; the QSC 1080/1100. From my own studio experience, I added a pair of headphone jacks for control room monitoring, with independent and easily replaceable limiting resistors so that two different monitor headphones could be plugged into that amp with the expectation that the acoustic output would be the same on both phones regardless of sensitivity or impedance. My contribution to the company’s documentation was the schematics that were found at the back of every owners’ manual for more than a decade. I also spec’d all of our circuit boards at 2 mil thickness to make servicing easier without causing damage to our boards during repair and to add to the durability of our products. I even argued that slotted screws were more repair-friendly than Philips screws, due to my experience working on Japanese motorcycles. (I was wrong in that argument.) 40 years ago, I was a big believer in designing field-repairable products. Today, not so much.
I have a long career in music instrument (MI) and audio equipment repair. That means, I have worked on equipment from the end of the tube design period through the 30-some years of analog equipment and discrete-to-integrated-circuit designs to today’s surface mount technology (SMT) components and our current age of equipment that is so complicated it is very nearly unrepairable for anyone but factory technicians. I have worked for several manufacturers, either as a captured employee repairing company products or as an independent tech working as an authorized service center or repairing equipment long past warranty. I’ve worked on a lot of equipment after someone else has attempted to make repairs. I’ve seen butchered single-sided printed circuit boards (PCBs), slaughtered double-sided PCBs with nonsensical jumpers scattered all over the board to bypass the wreaked traces, and point-to-point terminal strips so buried in cold solder that I needed a bottle of flux to get the solder to flow well enough to remove past repair attempts. And those messes were often created by factory authorized service center technicians and even the factory technicians! There are at least two well-known, high end Eurotrash console makers (who may or may not remain nameless) that were infamous for shipping new consoles with so many butchered and jumpered boards and wiring harnesses that we just assumed their crap would need reworking out of the crate. All of that equipment was repairable, but it needed repairing on a constant basis; rarely less than every 100 hours of use.
In fact, most of the products from our past that are “repairable” were made that way because their expected lifetime was incredibly short without occasional repairs. The old VW air-cooled motors lasted about 35,000 to 50,000 miles between major overhaul (35 for the van, 50 for the Beatle). In the good old days, an analog tape deck required recalibration with every new reel of tape and serious and expensive maintenance every two thousand hours (about 250 8-hour-days) of operation. In modern vehicles, safety features like crumple zones, air bags, ABS brakes, and other electronic-controlled features and functions limit repairability to module replacement because of their complexity and design. It’s not just the SMT components, but the incredible increase in complexity of the circuit designs that limits field repairs.
However, we’re at a point in auto manufacturing history where any vehicle that doesn’t last 200,000 miles between major service intervals is considered a lemon. Other products offer similar longevity expectations. I’m still using a 2008 Dell laptop, although it is on its 3rd keyboard (which was designed to be easily replaceable). While Millennials seem to think a cell phone is obsolete after a year or less, my flip phone has been working just fine for the last decade and it is still on the original battery. Televisions usually get replaced becauses they are “too small” or don’t have current features, not because the CRT or other tubes and components have failed. Appliances are often handed down to a home’s next owners because, on average, Americans stay in their houses fewer years than an appliance survives.
Much of what we buy today can be repaired, it just costs so little to replace it that we do that instead. Click and Clack, the guys on the old Car Talk NPR radio show once estimated that it cost an average of $600/year to maintain an old car, far less than car payments. People still buy new cars, even when their current vehicle is probably good for another decade or two. My father, on the other hand, habitually traded in his “old” Chevy at 50,000 miles because he was used to his cars falling apart about then; and losing trade-in “value.” My first decent vehicle, a 1973 Toyota Hilux pickup, lasted for 350,000 miles with a valve job at 250,000 and a rear transmission seal at 275,000 being the only significant necessary repairs. I sold it for almost exactly what I paid for it, thirty years later. Now that is both longevity and repairability, but no crumple zones, no ABS, decent fuel economy but lousy emissions, lots of vehicle noise, and not much interior comfort. My current 2008 Nissan pickup has most of the creature comforts and safety features of the best car; at least as of 2008. It is pretty servicable, too. My brother’s new Toyota coupe looks like a nightmare to service, but it has a 100,000 mile power train warranty.
Finally, while there is lots of talk about fighting the disposable product economy, there isn’t much energy going into actually doing it. Consumers are quite happy being ignorant about how practically everything they own works. I would bet that the percentage of consumers (including musicians and studio owners) who are capable of repairing even the most simple electro-mechanical problem is less than 1% and many of those would rather they didn’t need to. At some point in manufacturing history, someone asked “How many customers read our detailed owner’s manual with maintenance and service information?” When the answer came back, it was obvious that was a waste of time and effort. Soon after, someone asked, “How many customers care if a service manual is available?” That discouraging answer eliminated service manuals. As long as those kinds of questions keep getting money-saving answers, you can assume servicability will continue to vanish.
If you really like working on old junk, there is more than enough of that crap availble out there for you to play with. Since all of the post-Boomer generations appear to be mostly bdisinterested in “vintage” crap, prices are falling and demand is vanishing. At that rate, you should be able to buy Grandpa’s muscle car for less than your father paid for it. Hurry, though. Old stuff is showing up in the dump on an accelorated schedule. Turns out, most people would rather recycle old equipment rather than wrestle with fixing it.
The other end of the decision process is function, value, and price. For the cost of a 24-track record head you can buy 24-or-more high definition preamps with a high-resolution A/D interface that will likely last for a decade or more with no maintenance required. For the repair cost of a vintage Eurotrash tube condenser microphone, you can buy a modern condenser microphone that will emulate a whole collection of vintage microphones. If that kind of analysis doesn’t convince you to reconsider tossing good money after bad, you are clearly convinced that there is something special from obsolete technology and I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) change that.
[NOTE: Getting to the point will take a while, so if you just want to know what my concept band idea is, skip to the last couple of paragraphs.]
When I was 13, I wrote a pissed-off fan letter to Downbeat Magazine that was mistakenly accepted as a review of what has become a classic modern jazz record. The magazine paid me $25 and included a Downbeat press pass with the check. I should have saved both. In one of my early attempts at running away from home, I saved up my newspaper route money, bought a bus ticket to Kansas City, and spent a day and two nights exploring the jazz clubs around 18th and 12th Streets. I lucked out and got to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet (one of my heroes at the time), a Stan Getz group, and a lot of local talent (or folks I didn’t know at the time). There was a lot of music going on those nights and nobody even asked if I was old enough to be where I was. There were other kids in some of the clubs, but most appeared to be working as dishwashers or busboys. There was no amplification of any sort, other than an occasional small guitar amp, of instruments or vocals in any of those clubs and I was never unable to hear the music.
A few years later, I was in a rock band that was mostly known for being loud. The guy who ran the band was the only son of the family who owned the Little Rock, AK airport, at the time the largest privately-owned airport in the US (at least, according to the band leader). He bought Fender Dual Showman amps for . . . everything. We were a 4-piece band (guitar, keyboard, bass, and drums) with 6 Dual Showman amps on stage and at least 8 Fender cabinets with either a 15” or a couple of 12” speakers in each box. The band lasted for two summers, with a version or ten that carried on, occasionally, into the 90’s. During the school months, I was in a half-dozen more local bands, which were also pretty damn loud. For a bit, I was done by 1967.
I moved to Dallas, TX for one of the state’s many bogus for-profit technical schools. The state was famous back then for that kind of crap, too. For me, it was an opportunity to see many of the soul bands and singers I’d idolized and imitated in my own bands. One stand-out performance was an Atlantic soul review at the State Fair auditorium. Sam and Dave were the headliners and the PA system was a pair of Shure Vocalmaster columns. I’d guess the auditorium held at least 1,000 people and the audience was rocking. Still, the band sounded great and the vocals were absolutely audible with less electric and acoustic power in the sound system than the average duo brings to a piano bar today.
Skip forward to 1982.
I had been in bands and performing acoustically since I was 15, but I’d given up performing a few years earlier to focus on my recording studio and live sound business. One of the last recording sessions I did was pf a local jazz group live in a popular nightclub. To reduce acoustic complications and improve the sound quality of the recording, I’d decided to use my studio’s JBL 4311 monitors as the FOH speaker system. The club held about 100 people and the band, in their last performance before leaving town, packed the club. Not only did the studio monitors and a 120W amp do the job well, but during breaks the many musicians in the audience came up to me to ask where the FOH mains were. The speaker system was so small they didn’t identify the speakers as the sound source.
Since those years, I’ve worked for a pro sound amplification company, QSC Audio Products, in a variety of engineering positions, freelanced as a recording engineer, live sound tech and FOH or monitor engineer, and spent 13 years as an instructor at a music technology college. Mostly, I’ve seen amplification equipment and audiences abused by the technology and general purpose ignorance. Performers are almost always too loud, audiences compensate by being even louder, and nobody from the performers to the audience is paying any attention to 99% of what’s happening on stage. What I learned from 55 years of being on every position possible during a music performance is that volume is not anyone’s friend. If your audience is going to listen, they will be quiet and listen. If you suck or they are assholes or imbeciles, they will out-shout any PA system made. So, there is no point in amplification beyond the acoustic output of a decent acoustic guitar or upright bass or a reasonably well-projected human voice.
With that in mind and the fact that I am no longer inclined to believe that anyone not laundering money for a cartel or mobster is in music for the money, my music group concept is one that would be as close to pure acoustic music as possible. For example, I would like to play bass in this group and I don’t own an upright bass, but I do own a homemade electric bass that I love to play and a Roland’s 20W Bass Cube with a “squeeze” button that limits the amp’s output to the right volume for playing with acoustic instruments. With a little taste and some listening skills, an electronic keyboard could fit into this concept, along with any other acoustic instrument. In fact, the more the merrier. All vocals will be sans-microphone or PA. We’ll just have to sing louder than the acoustic instruments, which is the effect recording engineers are going for regardless of the instrumentation. (You didn’t really think Robert Plant sang louder than Jimmy Page’s Marshall, did you?)
Music-wise, I’d like to break out of the usual suspects of Beatles, Stones, Eagles, etc. and do a lot more modern music; maybe stuff from this century? A few jazz standards and some off-beat stuff from the past would be ok, but too much of that and we’re back to being just like everyone else. Let’s be honest. We’re not in this to remind our audience that they are old. We’re supposed to be entertaining and surprising. If you can find a way to surprise anyone with “Poncho and Lefty,” “Tequila Sunrise,” or “Let It Be,” I’ll be amazed.
In the late-70’s I was playing out my string with a show band I’d led for about three years. Everybody was moving on. The bass player’s wife had their first kid and another was on the way and he needed to focus on his career (mechanical engineering). The drummer wanted to work a lot more, since he was a low-paid Nebraska high school teacher, and he’d found a 5-day-a-week supper club band he wanted to join. The first to leave, our keyboard player, had snagged a scholarship at Juilliard.and he was leaving for school in another month. I had started working with a kid who I’d eventually end up partnering with in the Wirebender studio and live sound. We all wanted it to end and we all had good reasons. We stayed friends and occasionally hung out after the last gig, but that was the end of our musical relationships.
When this band was a 4-piece, we covered most of the Top 40 and filled in spaces with originals and blues oddities and we played for money. We’d fired our management company a few months earlier, but the agency still wanted us to work some of the last scheduled gigs. We owned the band name, so it was either us or find someone else to sell the customer on. The 3-piece version was a lot more bluesy and original than the band the customers thought they were getting. There weren’t many complaints, but I suspect our rate would have gone down if we’d have done a 2nd round with that personnel and repretiour.
One of the last gigs we did was in a southeastern Nebraska town that had an actual 1920’s ballroom with a vintage 30’ foot bar and a round stage slightly off-centered in the room, toward the bar. The audience had room to maneuver behind the stage, between the bar and the stage, and there was a large dance floor (people used to dance, believe it!) to the front and side of the stage. There was a runway, about 5’ wide, that ran about15’ from the stage into the middle of the dance floor. There was a slight downward slope on the ramp, high at the stage and low at the end of the ramp, but it was still a 3’ drop from the end of the ramp to the dance floor. I setup the mains, six (we had eight) Altec Lansing 1207A columns, behind and to the side of the band and ran the show from a 12-channel board on a mic stand near my guitar amp. No monitors, we could all hear the mains and ourselves well enough that we didn’t need more crap to haul up and down staircases. I only used one small condenser on the drums, the three vocal mics were all RE18s, the bass went direct ino the board from the bass player’s amp, keys also went direct, and I had a Beyer M500 on my guitar amp; a modified 1956 Fender Harvard. The room held about 350 people and we always packed it. We were doing one of our last 4-piece gigs, so we pretty much went full-out.
In deference to the large turnout and the money we were getting paid, we pretty much played our old lineup with slightly more originals and less blues. The crowd was into it, the dance floor was constantly full, people were screaming their heads off at the oddest times, and the band was rockin’. Because I am a Townshend freak and we did “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” During the synth middle-break where the guitar comes crashing in and we added a short solo and I’d slide on my knees down the ramp while I played the solo; mildly Townshend-style. I didn’t realize that Pete used knee pads under those coveralls, so my style hurt more than his. On the way toward the ramp, the bass player turned into me and clipped the top of my guitar hard enough to break two tuners and take the whole guitar out of tune. As I slid down that ramp, I discovered nothing on my instrument was in any sort of European-shape of tune. So, I did the only thing a lead guitarist can do under any non-ideal conditions: I played as fast as my fingers would move and stayed as high on the neck as possible to mask the complete dysfunction of my guitar. I cut the slide and the solo short and twiddled trills, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and did pick-slide sound effects until we could end the song.
We took a break and I tuned up my back-up guitar. While I tuned the guitar, sitting on the edge of the stage, people crowded around me. I ignored them at first, but after a few moments I realize they were shouting at me but they weren’t mad. “That was the greatest guitar solo I’ve ever heard” and “Great guitar playing, man!” and and “Damn! That was incredible” and even nuttier stuff. It was not just tone-deaf guys, either. Twenty-or-so girls where in the pack squealing away like something good and true had happened. I, literally, didn’t spend a musical micro-second on that solo. Not one “note” was intended and I didn’t even waste much thought on what the rest of the band was doing. And nobody seemed to be laughing (other than the band guys) at my predicament?
As I was finishing up the work on my back-up guitar, in that moment I decided I’d had all of the “pearls before swine” experience I could stand for a lifetime. I spent hundreds, thousands of hours practicing my craft and all I had to do was wiggle my fingers fast and I’m “great?” I thought, “I quit. No more of this band-shit. I’m done.” When we played our last booked gig a few weeks later, that was it for me. Until a friend talked me into a gig doing his music in St. Paul in 2016, I hadn’t played in front of an audience since 1982. I did a lot of live sound tech work, some recording as a tech and as a guitarist, and lots of electrical audio design work, but for the next three decades I had no interest in being “a musician” for a live audience. To this day, there are a really limited number of places I’ll consider exposing myself to an audience. I’m not that fast anymore.
Steve La Cerra's “Mix Blog Live: How Big Does a Kick Drum Really Need to Be?” sounded a lot like the things I’ve been saying about live music for the last several decades. "In the past year or so, I’ve witnessed several major internationally acclaimed artists get murdered by their sound person. I won't mention names because there's no need to embarrass anyone, but I find it somewhat disturbing that an engineer can take a gig but not be responsible enough to do some homework, such as listening to the act’s recordings. It's a sign of respect for the band and their fans that an engineer is aware of an act’s musical legacy, and to honor that legacy."
From rap to country to pop, it all sucks.
Screw that. I think the acts need to be named and the sound companies ridiculed until either this shit gets fixed or people quit going out for a night of sonic punishment from these nitwits.For two decades I've been advocating that every audience member pissed off at the lousy sound quality of a show "whack a sound doofus" on the way out the door. It is still the best option.
Over the dozen years I taught audio engineering at Musictech College and McNally Smith College of Music, I accumulated a lot of material that might be useful to all sorts of budding audio techs and musicians. This site will include comments and questions about professional audio standards, practices, and equipment. I will add occasional product reviews with as many objective and irrational opinions as possible.
