Snarky Puppy in St. Paul

A couple of years ago, my ”yet to see” list was down to one artist and one group: Van Morrison and Snarky Puppy. There is, literally, no other live pop music act that I’m interested in suffering for. I have seen every group I’ve wanted to see and most of them have been sonically and musically grossly disappointing. Overwhelmingly, attending a live music performance is mostly about as fun for me as being one of Dick Cheney’s captured “armed combatants.” Venues and performers alike are careless with my hearing and their sound quality. From the performances on their live recordings, I had high hopes that seeing Snarky Puppy on 5/25/2019 at the St Paul Palace Theater might be an exception to what has become a hard-and-fast rule. When the tickets went on sale, in late January, I drove 100 miles round-trip to get a pair. Through the last few months of age-related medical problems and way too many doctors’ appointments and tests, I clung to the hope that I would see something like the kind of performances Snarky Puppy puts on its DVDs. I was wrong. I knew the odds were against me, since "quality" and "live sound" rarely coexist, but I had unrealistically high hopes based on Snarky Puppy's "live" recorded existing music catalog.

It’s hard to know who to fault for the generally awful sound of this terrifically talented band in what should have been pretty easy-to-manage venue. The Palace Theater (or Snarky Puppy’s road company) does have an array system, which more often than not seems to be an identifying marker for lousy sounding shows. Unfortunately, the sound system also includes subwoofers; hardware and technology that almost no live sound doofuses know how to use half-competently. I didn’t bother to get close enough to the FOH sound doofus to look at the console, but it was (obviously) digital and I suspect it was either Avid or DiGiCo. I figured if I got close enough to evaluate the mixer I’d be tempted to strangle or knife the moron. Seriously. There were many moments in Saturday night’s concert where I considered the risk of terminating that useless human wastebasket vs. the few months or years I might have left on my odometer spent incarcerated. He was that incompetent and destructive. I have to suspect he has never listened to a Snarky Puppy CD or heard an actual non-distorted musical instrument. He is too young to have grown up listening to AM radio, but just right for the iTunes 128kBPS MP3 experience.

From the start, it was obvious that the subwoofer component of the system overwhelmed his “talent” level. The first clue to what was to come arrived quickly as the intro act—a vocalist, keyboard, sax, bass, and drums—was as grossly distorted, poorly balanced and mixed, and unintelligible as the usual First Avenue sound disaster. The bass and kick drum merged into an atonal train rumble and the bottom end of the keyboard (anything under 200Hz) was added to the constant drone of the overloaded and poorly managed sub-channel. My wife, Elvy, kept looking at me, wondering, “Is this really the band you wanted to see?” It wasn't, but the band I came to see would prove to be an even bigger disappointment. 

After a pointlessly extended intermission break between acts, Snarky Puppy came on stage. Michael League mumbled some incoherent stuff about the band and, I think, the band crew, as an introduction and the mix went downhill from there. Even reinforcing simple speech was beyond the capabilities of the FOH moron. There was never a moment where anything in the mix improved, but it did get much louder and more distorted as the night went on.

From everything I thought I knew about Snarky Puppy, I did not imagine I would need hearing protection during one of their concerts. By the 3^rd tune, I was cutting pieces of my clothing to stuff into my ears. If that was Nic Hard on the board, he has passed his prime (if he had one) and is well into needing hearing aids and another less complicated and largely unskilled profession. Hard gets credit for Culcha Vulcha, one of the Grammy-nominated SP records and the only one of their CDs I've sent back to Amazon due to what I thought was a defect (intermittent gross distortion) and I now suspect was "intended." My local library's copy of Culcha Vulcha has the same distortion, so I've moved from suspicious to sad confidence. I think League even threatened that the FOH nitwit would be mixing their next CD, which is no kind of good news. 

The sound was so out of control that we were even often abused by the high-pitched squeal of microphone feedback that the FOH doofus usually made worse before he “solved” it. He clearly never heard a sound system that was loud or distorted enough for his tastes. The sub-channel flat-out rattled, it was so overloaded. I would estimate that the overall sound system regularly produced 20-30% distortion at 125-130dBSPL and often pegged at solid clipping well over 30-50%. Close to the end of the show, League mentioned that the audience could buy downloaded copies of the show we saw. I could almost be convinced to spend that money since the live show was one of the least musical experiences I have ever had in a concert venue. On a perverse and unlikely level, I would kind of like to know what I missed.

The 9 pieces of Snarky Puppy were introduced as "band leaders in their own right," which was sadly reflected in the performances, too. Instead of a coherent group intent on blending their talents into the kind of rhythmic orchestrations we hear on the early Snarky Puppy recordings, Saturday night's performance was more like the usual 90% of jazz, which is a loose collection of individuals demonstrating their technical prowess at the expense of anything resembling "music." Unlike their best recordings where "solos" often are enhancements of the theme, most of the night's solos were exactly that; solos. Sadly, most of those excursions reminded me of the mindless and boring 60's and 70's guitar hero days or what my studio partner used to call jazz; "meandering saxophones." Weirdly, in 2021, Puppy released a double-CD set of their 2019 "Live at the Royal Albert Hall" performance that sounds absolutely nothing like an actual live Snarky Puppy show, based on my experience. If this record was an attempt to build their audience, I suspect it won't work with the victims who have heard an actual Snarky Puppy show.

Elvy, an experienced visual artist, called the light show “painful.” She spent a lot of the show with her eyes closed to avoid looking at the stage. For some weird reason, a good bit of the white spots were randomly aimed into the audience, creating a blinding effect similar to the deafening effect of the awful audio mix. So, pretty much every aspect of the show that the Snarky Puppy crew touched was a fucked-up mess. I'd love to report that the band overcame this deficit with tremendous performances, but from where we sat and stood it was almost impossible to make out any detail of the music. So, much of the evening seemed like a repetitive hip-hop loop of kick drum, snare, and gurgling subwoofer distortion. Rather than a jazz band, the best SP managed that night was something more akin to 1980's Studio 54 electronica "dance music." Perfect music for a near-overdose of coke, PCP, or ecstasy. The light show was probably aimed at those customers.

As a general principle, I’m against capital punishment. However, I would regularly make an exception for FOH doofuses who ruin otherwise excellent shows. At the least, I think morons like the Snarky Puppy FOH doofus should have been smacked on the back of his empty head by each of the 3200 sold-out show victims. The beauty of either beating to death or shooting FOH morons is that, if no one volunteered to do that job because of the risk no one would be inconvenienced. Many of the best shows I have ever heard were completely managed by the band from the stage. All of the worst shows had a “professional” mangling the mix from FOH. Two constant factors in the sound quality of the shows I have seen has been the FOH tech and the band. The sound system is inconsequential. The equipment is NEVER the problem and the people using said equipment are ALWAYS responsible for the sound quality of a show. You can find examples of that fact in many of the show reviews on this website and some of my rants about live music in general.

The Palace’s “acoustic treatments” are pretty hilarious, at best. Typical of First Avenue penny-pinching mismanagement habits, there are some tiny and pointless 1” thick strips of “acoustic foam” dangling from the balcony overhang and, maybe, some absorption materials behind the side curtains on the first floor. Otherwise, it’s a big oval-shaped 1900’s theater sans chairs with absorptive padding, a concrete floor, bare walls with residual bits of 1900’s fresco and artwork clinging to the walls, and a 21^st Century high-volume, low fidelity array sound system poorly placed and aimed. In other words, 1^st Ave spent as little as possible to bring this venue to life and expects to get a big return on the investment since the audience “taste” for actual music is declining exponentially in the current MP3-earbud-cellphone-industrial-noise climate.

Due to my wife's mobility problems, we were kindly given ADA seats right behind the FOH console. Our purchased seats were fairly high in the balcony and the Palace has limited elevator capabilities, so that was a really generous act by one of the facility's managers. We were there early, because of her limitations, which gave me the opportunity to move around a lot early in the show. I listened to the opening act at several points in the balcony and, before and during SP's set, on the floor (mostly in the 10-20' just in front of the house console). It wasn't any better than our seats at any of those spots, but most of the areas were considerably worse: closer was painfully louder and further away was incoherently more distorted and muddier. The balcony is a giant bass resonator, which only exacerbated the low frequency problems I've described above.

Speaking of the crowd, when did drill-Sargent level yelling throughout a concert become normal? On the floor level and all around the bar, most of the “audience” were more involved in max-volume yapping at each other than the music. On the floor, the crowd noise was at least as irritating as the sound system. I do believe the excessive volume of the sound system is partly to blame, since there was no effort at reproducing dynamics, fidelity, or even decent bandwidth in the sound system, it is clear that the band wasn’t particularly concerned with the audience's musical experience. That being the case, I guess a concert is an expensive way for people to come together for a really loud conversation about the usual drivel people talk about in bars. I generally avoid live music in bars for this reason and from here out I'll be avoiding indoor live music in general. I do not need the hear about the boring lives of wealthy 20-to-40-somethings at screaming volume.

I can’t decide if I would be relieved or disappointed to learn that the sound system was not the Palace’s house system. The upside might be that it could still be possible to see a show there that didn’t suck. The downside would be that Snarky Puppy and Michael League have lost their edge and concern for their fans’ experience. For me, it’s kind of the end of the trail, regardless. Live music has become such a painful experience, physically and sonically, that I generally avoid any indoor concerts out of self-protection. My anticipation and disappointment in this show was pretty obvious. On the way home, Elvy kept asking “Are you ok?” The next morning, she even cried in sympathy, knowing better than anyone how much I had looked forward to this concert. Since were were there early, I bought a copy of SP's Immigrance CD and a shirt before the show started. I have yet to open the wrapper of the CD and the shirt ended up in the rag bag this morning. I do not need a reminder of that evening. If I had waited to the end, I wouldn't have wasted that money.

Over the years, I have seen a handful of amazing live music performances. I’m OK with that, disappointed that part of my life is over, but I have some great memories. Snarky Puppy will not be among those, though.

That Is Not A Studio

About 5 years ago, I wrote a diatribe about motorcycle helmets, titled “That’s Not A Helmet.” After hearing a friend’s description of a few hours in a local “recording studio,” a lot of the thoughts behind that motorcycle rant came back to me.

First, a recording studio should be an excellent acoustic space. If it is not that, the best you could call it would be a “practice space that also stores some recording equipment.” Let’s be honest with why people want to call an overdub space, lousy practice room, or even a living room “a recording studio.” Money. Money. Money.

1) Money spent by the wannabe recording engineer on equipment that far exceeds both the talent of the user and the acoustic capabilities of the space. If you spend $5,000 on a half-dozen high end preamps and an outragesously cool A-to-D interface and your acoustic space is like any of the spaces I’ve collected in the pictures in this rant, you’re fooling yourself. You don’t need 100dB S/N or 126dB of dynamic range, because your crappy space has a 55dBA noise floor. No manufacturer currently selling equipment makes a preamp that is anywhere near as awful as your recording space. $200 is overkill for your room.

2) Money being made by boutique and so-called pro-level manufacturers over-selling equipment to people who don’t need anything near high-end, wouldn’t know how to obtain high-end performance in a pro studio with a professional assistant, and who have almost infinitely more money than sense or talent. While I saw some of this when I was teaching at a music college, I’ve seen way more of it since living in what is essentially a retirement community in southeastern Minnesota. Every little rich kid in this 16,000 person town seems to have a “studio.” That universally means they have thousands of dollars worth of equipment and instruments crammed into a spare bedroom or basement family room space. At the most, they might have spent $200 on an Auralex kit, which they mindlessly applied to the walls in odd places. Everyone in the supply chain saw these suckers coming and sold them on the idea that “there is money to be made in those recording hills.” Trust me, there isn’t. As a brilliant and experienced friend often says, “The only way to end up with a million from a recording studio is to start with three.” You won’t even make minimum wage renting your space to friends and suckers and if you ever knew how to calculate ROI you’ll have to completely ignore that knowledge if you want to stay sane.

3) Money being made by the various vanity distribution channels from CD Baby to YouTube to Spotify. Every one of those characters will be telling you that “you too can be a rock star.” You can’t. You won’t. And you shouldn’t be.

I’m no saying that you can’t make great music in a non-studio environment. You absolutely can. It’s just a lot harder to get great acoustic sounds in a lousy-to-mediocre acoustic environment. My real complaint is that calling a bedroom or basement rec room a “recording studio” degrades the phrase in the same way calling a garbage man a “sanitation engineer” pisses on the training and education required to actually be an “engineer.” Find another word. I call my workspace “our spare bedroom” or “my office.”

One Story, Two Books

One of my wife’s favorite concepts is “evolutionary convergance”; where the same evolutionary decision is made independently, likely because it is a good idea. The two books are The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll by Ian S. Port and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar by by Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna. Play It Loud is a 2016 publication and The Birth of Loud came out this year. Your take on these two books will depend on your personality. The stories are, essentially, the same.

I read Play It Loud first and am just now finishing up The Birth of Loud. Of the two, Play It Loud is my choice.

There are too many technical flaws in The Birth of Loud and the writing style is too emotional and concentrated on personalities rather than technicalities. Your mileage will, probably, vary. Lines like this are show stoppers for me, “When Leo heard this story [about his pickups failing during a performance], he made sure that if the Esquire’s wiring shorted, the signal would only be diminished, not completely cut.” Wrong. If the wiring is “shorted,” there will be no output, regardless of Leo’s technical “genius.” Birth of Loud is littered with this kind of technical foolishness, to the point that when the author attempts to describe how anything works I have to kick into speed reading mode to get past his mistakes and misunderstandings. Otherwise, I’d toss the book in a pile and find something more interesting to read. There are moments in Birth of Loud that make suffering the flaws worthwhile, though. I knew almost nothing about Paul Bigsby, other than the fact that he knew the difference between vibrato and tremolo; unlike Leo Fender. By himself, he would be an interesting story, so the fact that there is a little more about Bigsby in Birth than Play makes that book worth reading; at least, for me. I do have to suffer through an awful lot of hyperbole, emotional language, and outright silliness to get to the good stuff, though. Port’s descriptions of the music discussed in the book are so over-the-top silly that it’s hard to take any of the book seriously.

Play it Loud is less emotional, more technically accurate, and a more entertaining and interesting read. The authors either check each other’s excesses and technical misunderstandings or they are simple more knowledgeable; or they had a better editor.

Interestingly, neither book is the usual Les Paul pandering that we’ve suffered for the last 40 years. I suppose Paul has been dead “long enough” that the shadow of his self-promotion is fading. I remember watching a Los Angeles AES discussion in the 80’s where Les Paul and Tom Dowd were on the panel and when Les started bragging about buying the “first Ampex 8-track machine,” Dowd reminded him that most of the design work on that machine came from Dowd and Ross Snyder’s idea of making a single 1” multi-track head, instead of Paul’s stacked individual heads and eight stacked ¼” tapes. Also, both Dowd and Paul ordered 8-track machines, more or less, at the same time and Paul’s was supposed to be delivered first, but Dowd snatched it off of the Ampex loading dock and installed it himself. Ampex delivered the 2^nd one to Les Paul’s studio and installed it for him. Les Paul was the Jimmy Page of his time, claiming the creation of everything from electric guitar pickups to solid body Spanish-style guitars to recording techniques to tube amplifiers. Of course, there were predecessors for all of those inventions, but Paul made his claims more often, louder, and more prominently than that actual inventors. His contribution to the famous Gibson Les Paul guitars is accurately reduced to his signature on the instruments and some of people who actually designed those instruments are credited. History is catching up to Les Paul’s legacy.

Leo Fender gets a similar look in both books, probably more harshly/realistically in The Birth of Loud. His personal and technical limitations have been rarely discussed outside of knowledgeable conversations between engineers or technicians. The fact that Leo overcame his technical limitations with hard work is a fact, but the fact that his products were littered with the downside of those technical limitations has barely received a mention. The contributions of the many people who compensated for Leo’s limitations are finally documented in both of these books. Rarely, does one person actually “create” a significant product; almost never, in fact. Fender’s guitars and amplifiers are the product of a lot of unheralded effort by many people who at least get acknowledged in both of these books, more so in The Birth of Loud, to the credit of Ian Port.

From the "Are You Completely Insane?" Department

Reverb.com often supplies me with evidence that humans are unfit to survive. This ad for a "Dumble modded Fender Brown Delux 1962" pretty much tops the list. Let's be honest, if you can afford a $22,100 guitar amplifier, you aren't a musician; you're a trustfund brat, a mobster, or a bankster.

Red Wing’s Big Turn Music Fest

The better pro sound equipment gets, the worse the sound goobers are. That was my opinion of my first day at the 2019 festival. Part of that low opinion came from the fact that I made poor choices of venues and was stuck in one place for 4½ hours of the first day of the festival because I’d volunteered to help out with a venue. My venue assignment was the Red Wing Bicycle Company and Outfitter, which is one of the city’s coolest businesses but, unfortunately, doesn’t get the top acts. The kid running sound for our venue was . . . inexperienced. Like most of the people who end up in live sound, he didn’t know much about the equipment he was mishandling and knew even less about room acoustics. Friday’s first two acts, Theyself and Vild, didn’t give him much to work with. The wrap-up group, Loons in the Attic, had a great start, but degenerated into a noisy jam band and the sound system and mix totally came unglued. Great bass player, though. Between the musical misdeeds and the sound goober’s incompetence, I went home with a splitting headache and aggravated tinnitus.

Rudely, I know, I had to ask the goober if he paid for an “education” to become that incompetent or if it just came naturally to him. I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear well enough to know what I’d said.

I ended my Friday meeting my wife at Fair Trade Books and wandering over to see Charlie Parr at the St. James Hotel’s Portside Room. The Portside Room is a decent meeting room and a mediocre acoustic environment for music. I didn’t identify the source of this speaker system, but my takeaway from Charlie’s set was that the problem was either a miserable sound system and a deaf sound goober or just a deaf sound goober. It’s hard to imagine butchering a one piece act, but those nitwits managed it. I’ve worked with Charlie in the past and heard him a few times before in outdoor concert settings and he’s easy to work with, a lot of fun to hear, and talented. None of that straggled through the sound system. A more tolerant music fan, Brian Stewart (Treestrings Music) and his wife, Brenda, were at the show and they thought I was too hard on the sound goober. Knowing something about Charlie and his music, they said “it wasn’t that bad.” (PC code words for “it was awful.”)

So, I asked, “Did you understand anything Charlie said in his show?”

Brenda said, “I think I heard him say the word ‘soul’ a couple of times.” Brian didn’t get a single joke and couldn’t identify a single song lyric.

My case rests.

Saturday, I had no obligations. I skipped the Saturday Morning Treestrings Jam, stopped in at the Southeast Tech Guitar Program’s swap meet and bought a DiMarzio pickup I absolutely don’t need, and bought my wife takeout lunch to make up for abandoning her for the day. (Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. Works for me.)

I started my festival day at the 223 Barrel House with Ryan Mingone. The Barrel House has miserable acoustics, even for a tunnel-shaped bar. So, I crowded up to the “stage” with about ½ of the crowd and listened to Ryan’s keyboard work and vocals. Not bad and a tolerable start. From there, Red Wing Elks Club where Sevenseven slaughtered a variety of Minnesota-based pop band songs. I sat with some friends who are much more versed in Minnesota music and after I was the first to identify Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” it was obvious that “cover band” is a loosely-used term for Sevenseven. There were occasional moments when one of their covers sounded familiar, but mostly . . . not.

From there, I hiked past 3 or 4 venues and listened outside momentarily on my way to the Christ Episcopal Church (I know!), which is one of the festival’s coolest sounding venues, for the end of Land at Last’s set, Ben Weaver, and a brief refresher of Charlie Parr to wipe the bad taste of his Monday performance from my memory. The guy running sound at the church was not a “kid,” but a grown man with a decent pair of functioning ears. He did a fine job and disproved my theory that those weird faux-array speakers are incapable of reproducing music. Ben’s set was especially fun because . . . Ben is a cool guy and a terrific songwriter/musician. I complimented the sound tech, a couple of times, before I left. Snow was beginning to fall about the time Ben’s set ended and was coming down “briskly” when I left.

From there, I headed to the St. James, but The Old Fashioneds just didn’t do much for me. 30 seconds of rockabilly is about my limit. So, I kept heading toward the river for the Red Wing Arts Depot Gallery and the Constellation Band, a four piece, young jazz group. To be honest, I mostly wanted to look at the art on display and see where a band would perform in the old train station. The Constellation Band could have been the highlight of my evening. They started off sluggish, but kicked into gear after the 1^st tune and just got better as the set went on. The young man who sound tech’d the show did a fine job and I complimented him on his work. He said, “It was all them,” but it wasn’t. Sometimes it’s about what you don’t do, rather than what you do that wasn’t necessary or desirable.

From there, I climbed the hill back to downtown and the Sheldon Theater for Dessa’s set. I’ve seen Dessa a few times, but it was a while ago, when and before she was an “artist in residence” at McNally Smith and, maybe, once after that. Her music has evolved dramatically since then. I do not know how to describe her performance other than “she knocked it out of the park.” Again, the sound tech (her guy) did a fine job and I told him so. I checked my truck on the way past and it had about 6” of snow cover and I wondered if the snow plows would start to bury me or if it would get towed and ticketed if I didn’t move it. I wondered all that, but kept walking.

My last stop was back at the St. James Portside Room because I am a glutton for punishment. The People Brother’s Band looked like a good bet, an 8-piece R&B group with several good vocalists. The band started off decently but slowly began to degenerate into blubbering subwoofer dominated garbage heavily doctored with massive midrange distortion. Eventually, either the band lost control of their stage volume and sabotaged the FOH goober (unlikely, since during the sound check the most consistent hand signal from the band was "turn it down") or the sound goober went even more deaf than he started and completely forgot what music sounds like; substituting industrial noise for anything resembling melody, harmony, rhythm, and clarity.

I’d planned on seeing a couple of other bands after that, requiring either a walk back across town or moving the truck. I decided to clear a foot of snow off of the truck, move it, and see how I felt after all of that. A couple of nitwits almost wiped me off of the planet as I cleared the driver’s side of the truck and I think that experience and my ringing ears (although Saturday night I wore earplugs for all but two of the shows) convinced me I was done for the night. Getting up my driveway and into the garage was an adventure and I think I made the right decision. Still, I would have liked to have seen Light45 and General B and the Wiz. Maybe next year.

Why Don’t You Leave?

I've had a few people ask me how I ended up in Minnesota—the frozen north, Rocky and Bullwinkle country, Fargoland—after living in California for a decade and owning a home in Colorado. It is pretty simple and I think this song is a fairly straight-forward reminder, at least of California.

Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I can't slow down, I can't hold back
Though you know, I wish I could
There ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good

Living in Southern California without a big inheritance safety net was like living on the edge of destruction for most of those years. “I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed” and every time I got a little safety margin built up it came crashing down on me with some piddly medical issue (we never had any major medical issues in California). California is a great place for skilled single people and an ever greater place for people who come from money. I moved there as the provider for a single-income family I was running-in-place for all but the very last year of my life in California. That last year, I was working full time managing QSC’s Tech Services department, going to Cal State Long Beach full time at night, and doing as much of the husband/father thing as I could manage while working and going to school 60 hours a week.

I remember standing in the middle of QSC’s chassis assembly area one afternoon. I was in that spot because I’d been in an engineering/marketing meeting earlier and I needed to install some upgraded product verification software in the assembly Audio Precision test fixtures. While I tried to upload the software, I was being bombarded by questions from people on the assembly floor, the final product test techs, and people who heard I was out there and had questions they’d been saving up for the next time they saw me. Tech Services was in another building and I didn’t venture into the assembly area any where as often as I had when I’d been the Manufacturing Engineering Manager; the job I’d had for the previous five years. The new manufacturing management regime didn’t spend a lot of time explaining itself or answering questions from assembly personnel, so there was some pent-up energy out there looking for an outlet. One of the techs, Tom Northway, watched a while and, when there was a small break in the action, said, “You have the answers for all of us, don’t you?”

I don’t think I ever felt like I had anywhere near enough answers, but I always thought I owed anyone who cared enough to ask for my help, or advice, some kind of attempt at providing that help. The end result, for me, was that I totally burned out trying to be everything to everyone, often at the same time. One of the things that originally attracted me to electronics engineering was the fact that I could focus all of my attention on a problem, a project, or even just a small aspect of a product design and no one would expect me to do anything else. By the time I left QSC Audio’s manufacturing management, I’d practically forgotten everything I knew about focusing on one thing. Moving to Technical Services was the right thing for me to do, for myself, but it was too little, too late. By then, I was so mentally tired that getting out of the California rat race seemed absolutely necessary.

That moment on the manufacturing floor where all of those minutes, hours, and years of constant head-spinning management frustration was eye-opening. For at least a year, I had been telling my family that I was leaving when I finished my degree at Cal Long Beach, but that frantic, frustrating, multitasking moment and Tom’s question sealed the deal. At that moment, I knew I was on the road again; a phrase that has followed me since 1965. Bob Dylan’s line, from “On the Road Again,” has been a song always near and dear to my heart, “Then you ask why I don't live here. Honey, how come you don't move?”

That’s a pretty good description of life in southern California. All my life, I’d heard about “La La Land” and how that “good old Midwestern work ethic” would blow away California (and New York). Don’t believe that shit for a second. Everyone who doesn’t have a permanent silver spoon stuck to their lips is running in place. The pace is frantic, the pressure is intense, the competition is fierce, and the cost of failure can be catastrophic and there are 100 people waiting in line to take your place, if your place sucks. If your place is a really good life, home, job, or opportunity, there are 100,000 people waiting to take it away from you. They probably won’t steal it from you. They’re just waiting for you to drop the ball for a few seconds and they’ll pick it up before you even know you dropped it. And when you lose in California, you might lose everything. The distance from superstar to living under a bridge is far shorter than you can imagine. The path back up is filled with traps, obstacles, opponents, and expenses.

I “made it” in California. I succeed in an occupation that has more failures and escapees than most (engineering). I supported my family in a middle class manner without a college degree or a nickel of inheritance or outside support. I even managed to collect a respectable college degree before I left; after almost 25 years of night classes. When I left, I was more than ready to move and I have never once been tempted to move back to the Golden State's constant stress and motion, high rent, and the precarious lifestyle of the middle class in California. And that is why I’m here in Rocky and Bullwinkle Land.

Messy Exits and Revising History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave Spirits or Just Dumbasses?

In August of this year, John Baccigaluppi wrote a TapeOp End Rant titled "An Endangered Species?" The gist of this article was "The beauty of older analog gear is that we can actually fix it with fairly common parts, or at least we have been able to so far. I recently sent a pair of 1950's-era RFT bottle mics to Scott Hampton, of Hamptone in order to upgrade their power supplies and he had this to say, ‘These things are beautiful, in the fact that it's like working on a 1940's truck. Everything is easy to access and is straightforward. [The work is] going quick and smooth.’" This is a much different experience than troubleshooting why a DAW stopped working after the operating system was updated." I’ve owned 1940’s trucks and I remember that they needed major work about every 10,000 miles, could barely make 10mpg, puked out climate-changing emissions including lots of unburned fuel, were noisy, unsafe at most speeds, and rusted as fast as sugar in water. I’m unimpressed. My response to that column was: 


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


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


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


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

That response appeared in this month’s TapeOp Letters to the Editor. It was also interesting to read this month’s end rant about how much maintenance analog equipment needs to be marginally musical and how TapeOp’s editor warns newbies away from the stuff for that reason. 

POSTSCRIPT: My grandson gave me his old eBike because it needs a lot of work after a season and a half of daily commuting; especially because of the damage the bike suffered during a Minnesota winter in the Cities. One of the components that failed was the throttle, which is a Hall Effect transistor-controlled electronic device. Wholesale, the throttle is a $2 Chinese-made part, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to obtain that part in the USA except through the bike’s distributor. 

The part is assembled in a way that doesn’t allow for disassembly for repair without either carving into the case or finding a way to dissolve the cyanoacrylate that was used to glue the part together. So, repair is close to impossible and impractical. While waiting for the replacement, I’ve fooled with troubleshooting the circuit and became facinated with the idea that this kind of assembly would fail since it has not real moving parts. 

When an engineering friend was visiting us, I asked if he had some thoughts about why this part might have failed and he tossed it back in my face, “Are you kidding? You know the transistor is mounted on a circuit board, right? Most likely a solder joint failed.” Of course, I should have known that. Consistent with my 55+ years of electronic engineering and manufacturing experience, most likely the failure is a soldering fault.

Concert Review: Crash Test Dummies at the Fitzgerald

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.

An Acoustic Guitar Experiment

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.