Shot Down Before He Started

The Jamkazam group I’ve been playing with for the past year and a half is half about playing music and half about hanging out. Two of the guys in this group came from places where real music is and was played well and often. Two came from Minnesota where music has always been a fairly big thing. And I came from western Kansas where music is more often a chorus of beer cans clinking, farts, and shouting around a street fight. Seriously, it was and is that bad. This week’s conversation began when one of the guys mentioned that an old friend was going to be visiting and that friend was “the guy” in his neighborhood (Chicago, so it was a big neighborhood) on bass back in their growing-spurt days. That started a round of everybody describing who “the guy” was when they were kids.

For starters, there was no “the guy” on bass in western Kansas. I loved playing bass and when I first went into college in 1966, I wanted to be a music major and I wanted to focus on bass. Guys like Bob Cunningham, Paul Chambers, Charlie Haden, Dave Holland, Ray Brown, and Ray Carter were my personal heroes (only slightly behind Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Sandy Colfax, and Bob Gibson before I was 15). However, in Kansas pop bands the bass player was always the band’s weakest member; ALWAYS. In every band I knew of between 1961 and 1967, the bass player invariable either owned the band’s PA system, had a car big enough to carry the band and equipment, or had a much bigger bankroll and payed for everything anyone wanted as long as he got to be in a band. I started out as a bass player in my first money-making band and I was, hands-down, the worst player in the band by miles (I was also the youngest by at least 4 years). Oddly, I didn’t bring anything else to the band other than a willingness to be positioned in the back of the stage by the drummer and learn my parts. At the time, many of the better-known bands had a hard time recruiting bass players because nobody wanted to be easily identified as the band’s least competent member. As usual, I was too clueless to get the insult and was totally absorbed in my instrument. After that group, I always ended up playing lead guitar because that was a bigger hole to be filled than bass, but I always missed the responsibility of being part of the rhythm section, the anonymity of being “upstage with the drummer,” and the sound of that instrument coming from my hands and mind.

“The guy” in my hometown and probably in a 100 mile circle was Skip Cave. From my perspective, Skip played “everything” better than everyone else. He was, as I remember, mostly known as a drummer, but he played saxophone, keys, guitar, and most everything else that could be induced into making a musical sound. The last time I saw Skip was when I was 15 or 16 and he was about to leave Dodge for L.A., so there are likely many holes, glitches, and fractured fairy tale aspects to my telling of this story. The biggest will become apparent soon, since one of the last gifts I received from Skip was time spent in his room listening to  Howard Robert’s “H.R. Is A Dirty Guitar Player.” A record I later bought and kept until it vanished sometime between my many moves from Dallas, Texas to Colorado. I probably loaned it to someone and it didn’t come back. Sometime later, an on-line friend ripped a copy from his own LP to CD for me, so I still get to listen to Howard the way he was intended to be heard, hiss, pops and clicks and all.

But I, as usual, digress.

Many years later,in 2000, just before I started working for Musictech Skip ran into an article about “cheap mics” that I had written for Recording Magazine. Skip reappeared in my life via an email linked to me by the Recording Magazine editor. Totally by luck, I saved that email and I really wish I’d have been smart enough to record the telephone conversation that followed. The following is a segment of that email conversation where Skip tells the story better (and more accurately) than I could possibly remember:

“[After high school] I had a hard time deciding whether I would major in music or engineering, but after visiting my cousin Howard Roberts in L.A. one summer, I realized that if I wanted a music career, I would have to either get much better at drums, or lower my living standards significantly. I went on to get a BSEE from KU and worked on a masters in EE at SMU after I got to Dallas.

“The Howard Roberts episode makes an interesting story, however.

“Howard was at that time (1964) married to Jill Swartz , my dad's sister's eldest daughter [Who moved from Dodge City to L.A. to become a professional drummer in 1955.]. Nancy (Swartz) Myrick was the younger daughter. Howard was the top session guitarist in L.A. at that time and was playing several studio sessions a day, as well as making lots of great albums. My mother suggested that I go visit my cousins to see what a musician's life was like. I went to L.A. and stayed in H.R's swanky Hollywood home. I was really impressed with the lifestyle, until I went to a jazz club one Sunday night where Howard was playing an improvisational jazz gig with an all-star cast. The gig was AWESOME!

“I then realized that virtually all of the clientele were musicians, all of them were much better than me, and all of them were starving. THAT's when I decided to be an engineer.

“By the way, a recording of that gig (at Donte's Jazz Club) was made, and was recently released as a CD (The Magic Band, Live At Donte's [LIVE]).”

Funny. I just got through telling my remembrance of that story and it was . . . different. Partially, because my memory of the story is filtered through two or three fairly long, story-filled telephone conversations that came later and, mostly, because my memory is so flawed everything gets quickly converted to a compilation story that I can manage to remember.

But that is a tiny glimpse of “the guy” in my hometown. If you followed the link to what Skip is doing now, it’s probably true that getting scared out of a music career into engineering by members of the Wreaking Crew--Howard Roberts (guitar), Steve Bohannon (organ), Tom Scott (saxophone and 18 years old!), Chuck Berghofer (bass) & John Guerin (drums)—might have been the best thing that could have happened to a brilliant young man in 1966.

Even When You Can Play it, Turn It Down

In the 70s and early 80s, my company (Wirebender Audio) did a fair amount of sound system design and consulting, mostly with bands who wanted to buy Dan’s latest loudspeaker systems. I developed a rule-of-thumb, intended to help guitar players know how much their volume and egos cost their band: “For every 100 watts of guitar amp, you’re going to need 10,000 watts of PA.” Mostly, that went in one deaf ear and rattled around in an empty skull until it came out as “What did you think of my 20 minute solo on that last song” Most likely, I thought it sucked, pretty much as badly as did your band’s sound. In case you wondered.

I try to limit my exposure to live, amplified music to “as little as possible.” Red Wing does a Wednesday evening free concert and, mostly, I use that as my excuse to get out and hang with friends in the park and, occasionally, the music isn’t too bad, either. Last night, the music was “classic 70s white people blues,” featuring a cute-but-coarse female lead singer and an overbearing guitar player with no sense of rhythm. Not high on my list of things I ever needed to hear again. Been there, done that, suffered that, tolerated that, hated that.

Inspirational characters like Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, Richie Blackmore, and an almost infinitely long list of insanely loud lead guitar players taught four generations of guitar wannabes that rapid-twitch random finger motion was an acceptable substitute for musical talents involving frivolous complications like melody, harmony, rhythm and timing, and group composition.

40 years ago, I experienced this kind of player close up and way too personally. I ran the tech services department for QSC Audio Products for a few years and we tried to carry on the company’s “yippee we survived another month party” tradition after the company had long abandoned that sort of thing. Initially, there were three of us: a drummer, a bass player, and me (on guitar) and we just jammed. Often we’d start with a rhythm from either the drummer or me and it would turn into something or we’d stop and try again. Then I hired a young man who idolized Yngwie Malmsteen, but who had memorized Daryl Sturrmer’s “New Country” solo off of Jean-Luc Ponty’s Imaginary Voyage album, which impressed the hell out of me. It wasn’t until he tried playing with our little group that we all realized this kid had no idea how to play in a group. He’d spent his whole playing career in his bedroom “playing along” with records with no one to tell him that timing is at least as important as getting the notes right. It’s hard to imagine a worse case of getting the notes right at the wrong time, but this kid pulled off that miracle as if he had no idea that rhythm even existed.

The guitar player in the band we suffered last night was a great example of that plague of notes without context. Typically, he was also the loudest thing in the band by at least 10dB. The mix was a mess and the “tone” quality of the performance was mud, edgy distortion, and a complete lack of rhythm (the drums were totally buried by bass and guitar). You could hear, but not understand a word of, the vocals.

And now for something really different, a band with a magician leader and something totally magical for a guitarist.

Hell's FOH Goober

A friend took this picture for me with his cell phone (No, I do not carry a cell phone.). I call it "Hell's Sound Goober." If a Hardly chair and tee-shirt (you can’t read his shirt, but it is a Harley ad) aren't a warning that the guy behind the console is deaf, unfamiliar with musical sounds, and likely not all that bright, then you are in hell and probably deserve to be there. What a musical mess, which was really sad because the intro band,

Yam Haus, was excellent. The “head line band,” was a weird Memphis Tom Petty cover band that, honestly, wasn’t hurt all that much by a distorted, sub-woofer-dominated “mix” that was apparently intended to deafen as many people as possible and provided some interesting moments when substantial portions of the sound system thermaled-out for several minutes while the sound goobers looked confused and wandered around aimlessly until the system “fixed itself.” At least, I was entertained by the momentary pause in distortion and old people’s music.

There were several things that confused and disappointed me about this local show. First, the order was totally screwed up. Only on yokel small town America would a run-of-the-mill cover band headline in front of a very talented local band on their why (I hope) up. Second, there are at least two Tom Petty cover bands in the area—one in the Cities and one in Rochester—who are easily as good as the group the city overpaid to import. Three, the Sheldon Theater has used this same sound company several times and every time they make a painful, unnecessarily distorted mess out of any audio signal they touch and, worse, this Harley goober is behind the board when it is obvious he has never heard a decent record in his life, let alone a good live show.