#1: An Old Fart’s Musical Memories

While the country burns and Trump and Republicans are ripping up the Constitution to use as fragile, single-ply toilet paper, I’m distracting myself with musical moments from my long history.

This memory was inspired by a friend describing his disappointing experience in the audience at the Sheldon Theater with the Duane Betts and Palmetto Motel band in Red Wing, MN last month.  Back in the mid-70s, I was struggling to keep my little family afloat, living in Central City, Nebraska, working 90-100 hours/week at something under $5/hour, installing and servicing electronic scale systems, and playing in a couple of cover bands in my “spare time.”  A recent high school dropout, Mike Gallusha, worked for me, mostly doing unskilled shop jobs and occasionally travelling with me on field service trips, and playing drums in a couple of the cover bands I fronted.  He was largely responsible for one of the first moments in my adult life where a young person drug me (kicking and whining) into another generation of pop music.  

In the mid-70s, all I knew about the Allman Brothers was the “Live at Fillmore East” double-album and I was only half-a-fan of that recording.  By “half,” I mean the instrumental half.  Neither Greg Allman or Dickey Betts’ vocals did anything for me.  So, when I transferred the two records to reel-to-reel tape, I edited out all of the vocals and turned “Fillmore East” into an instrumental-only album. 

Mike, on the other hand, was a true fan.  Early in his life, Mike took some drum lessons from Peter Erskine and, as I remember, Mike was in occasional communication with Peter that gave him an early heads-up when someone special was coming to Nebraska.  However it happened, Mike knew Allman Brothers tickets would be on sale at the Omaha Civic Auditorium before the concert was announced. And I would be passing through Omaha that day on my way to a service call in western Iowa.  He asked me to grab a couple of tickets to the concert, for himself and his wife, on my way through the city.  As I remember, again, the tickets were around $8/each, in the middle of the 1^st balcony, about 70 degrees from stage right, and I bought 4 tickets; so my wife and I could go, too.  That sounds cheap, but it took me almost a full work day to earn $32 back then. 

 

The concert was on January 16, 1976, at the Omaha Civic Auditorium, which was a pretty decent venue, when the stage was properly oriented.  Properly orienting the stage, width-wise, would cost the performers about ¼ of the room’s capacity by putting the stage at one side of the basketball/hockey court instead of at one end.  I, once again, had work in Iowa that day and ended up back in Omaha a couple of hours before the concert began.  A month earlier, the tickets had been advertised for less than a day on the local FM rock station, KOMA, and the concert was sold out before the ticket booth closed that first day (long before the days of online concert tickets or even the cursed and dreaded Ticketmaster).  So, I was lucky to be there at the right time. 

The day of the concert, scalpers were roaming the area in front of the auditorium waving tickets at the unfortunate fans who hadn’t been lucky enough to know about the show before it was sold out.  Scalped prices started at nearly $100 early that afternoon and started climbing rapidly shortly before Mike, his wife, and Ms Day showed up a few minutes before the doors opened. 

I mentioned to Mike that, if we sold our tickets, we could buy every record the Allmans ever recorded, go out to dinner that night anywhere in town, and still have a week’s salary in hand when we got home.  Mike took his pair of tickets and started walking to the door, saying, “You can sell yours, if you want.”  A bit confused, because Mike made a LOT less money than me, I followed him through the turnstile and handed over what felt like a lost fortune to the gate keeper. 

The opening act was a godawful southern rock disaster aptly named “Grinderswitch.”   There were lots of cowboy hats waving in the air, hog calls and more “yeehaws” than I ever hoped to experience again.  Outside of a Trump rally, that was the lowest IQ crowd I have ever seen, let alone experienced.  Their set seemed interminable and it was awful.  I felt like I had made the dumbest financial decision of my life (I would prove that to be wrong, several times, in the future.)  Finally, the yokel noise stopped and Grinderswitch staggered off the stage.  I was ready to leave.

We didn’t have any place to go and the Allman’s crew quickly repurposed the stage and the lights went down as the band found their places via Marshall amp pilot lights and roadie assistance.  The opening rhythm and bass riff of “High Falls” filtered through the background noise of the crowd. The band was touring to support their new album, “Win, Lose, or Draw” and “High Falls” was the only instrumental on that great, under-rated album (still my favorite of all Allman Brothers records).  The cowboy hats disappeared, the audience quickly quieted down, the “yeehaws” and hog callers seemed to dissolve when the 3-piece rhythm section and Lamar Williams’ started playing.  I swear, in less than a minute, the crowd IQ jumped at least 30 points, from sub-human to college graduates and Miles Davis fans.  From that moment on, the night was absolutely magical. 

I have searched the internet for a picture of the mid-70s Allman’s touring sound system with no luck.  It was a variation of the Dead’s Wall of Sound with a wall of front-loaded speakers behind the band and two large arcs of speakers at both front corners of the stage.  There was a Front of House (FOH) mixer toward the back of the floor level of the audience, dead center, and another pair of FOH boards on the 1^st balcony level, about 45^o off of center, probably controlling the two smaller stacks of speakers at the stage corners. 

I had never experienced a sound like that night at the Civic Center and I wandered around the auditorium to see if there were any dead or lo-fi spots.  That show was the inspiration for the equipment and live music sound systems my partner and I would build for our company, Wirebender Audio Systems, and how I would run sound for over the next 40 years.  I read somewhere that the band paid $18,000 per show for the sound system and their performance fee was $36,000 per night. 

The Allman Brothers Band didn’t keep up that high standard for long. No more than 5 years later, my company would provide some of the backline and the stage monitor system for an Allman Brothers Band show in Lincoln, NE.  By then, Greg was solidly into his heroin addict routine and it was Dickey Bett’s band.  That was a totally uninspiring show and a disappointment in every respect, other than having the pleasure of standing a few feet from Butch Trucks throughout the show, one of the best drummers who ever walked the planet.  Still, that 1976 show changed my life for the better and I am lucky to have been in the right place at the right time that night.  Thanks Mike!

Product Review: Steven Slate Audio VSX Headphone

One of the never-ending holy grails of recording studio equipment is a reliable, predictably transferable-to-any-sound-system, studio monitoring system.  A somewhat new product (currently on version 5.1) from Steven Slate Audio, the VSX Headphone system, claims to have solved that problem with emulations of a variety of recording studio, club, and vehicle acoustic environments, well-known and respected speaker systems, several high end car stereo systems, and a pile of typical studio headphones.  This emulation tactic comes on top of a trend that was started with IR reverb plugins, the Line6 guitar amplifier emulations, microphone emulations, and electronically tunable room acoustics.  Now, supposedly, Steven Slate Audio has solved the monitor and room acoustics problems with a pair of “custom made” headphones and plug-in software.  

 This magic grail of studio design has been around a LOOOOOONG time.  Recording studios have cycled through JBL 4311s, Yamaha NS10s, Auratone Sound Cubes, audiophile speakers, and custom studio monitors that cost more than my house in the never-ending search for a monitoring system that can produce reliable mixes, reasonably reproduced on any speaker system and room acoustics from an audiophile’s man-cave to car stereos to cheap earbuds.  That, of course, is an impossible task, but since we all know our work is going to be listened to (if we’re lucky) on great and grubby equipment we hope it will, at least, sound decent everywhere. 

Because I am cheap, I tested the entry-level VSX Essentials system, on Black Friday sale (for at least a month) at $249.  The essentials system includes the phones, the VSX software, and a list of speaker systems and acoustic environments (Steven’s Private Mix Room, Sonoma Studios, LA Club, Luxury SUV Car, 770 Headphones Model, Pod Headphones Model, and HD Linear 1 & 2).  The next level is the Platinum Edition (on Black Friday sale for $349) which includes more emulated studios, nightclubs, car systems, and headphones.  You can, also, buy some of the emulations to add to the Essentials system.  I was skeptical and, without the money-back guarantee (“This is a risk-free purchase. If your mixes aren't better in 30 days, you'll get your money back.”), I wouldn’t have bothered with the hunt for studio magic.  I have a reasonably reliable pair of studio monitors (serviceable, if not spectacular, 20-year-old Tannoy Active Reveals and similar vintage Yamaha HS5s) and I’m used to them and my moderately-treated room.  I have fond memories of larger, better-equipped studios where I’ve worked in the past and, if the VSX was capable of “putting me in” a similar room, I was ready to go there. 

And, at least for me, the VSX system turned out to be a collection of fairly predictable tactics rather than software-firmware magic: lots of phase-and-reverb-related faux-acoustic manipulations, EQ, and dynamics manipulations.  The phones are nothing special and the construction is cheap and, based on other’s comments, not particularly durable.  Without the software, I’d much rather be wearing my 22-year-old Ultrasone HFI-700 phones both for the comfort and the fidelity.  With the software, I was unimpressed with the aural difference between the speaker emulations within a particular studio (near, mid, and far-field speakers and placements).  I’ve worked in large studios and I know the differences are dramatic and that is not a word I’d use, for example, between the three systems in either the Steven’s Private Mix Room or the Sonoma Studios emulations.  I, in no way, felt that the emulations gave me the feel of being in a larger, better-equipped and professionally-treated room. 

At least for me, I quickly determined that the problem with the car emulations is that I don’t listen to my mixes in the car sitting in a dead quiet environment.  The real test is to see how the mix works when the vehicle is on the road, in traffic, and competing with the distractions of driving.  I doubt there is any reliable way to simulate that environment.  I have never been in a car that sounded anything like the “Luxury SUV Car” model that comes with the Essentials system. 

The online magazine, Headphonesty, recently published a painfully honest article titled, “New Study Reveals Why Most Audiophiles Still Fall for Snake Oil Without Realizing It.”  Mostly, there was little-to-nothing in the article that was new to me or doubtful, except a hilarious claim from Benchmark Media stating that, “audiophile cable marketing ‘doesn’t exist in the pro-audio/commercial studio world because it wouldn’t work on engineers.’”  Trust me, it works and always has.  In my opinion, the raving positive reviews of the Steven Slate VSX system are perfect examples of so-called “engineers” desperately wanting a piece of equipment to solve incredibly complicated problems.  The company has put a full-court-press on getting positive reviews from influencers and the clinging remains of pro audio magazines.  From my own past experience doing that kind of work, I suspect a lot of free headphones have been handed out to obtain many those “professional” endorsements. 

After a week of experimenting, I returned the Steven Slate VSX Essentials to my favorite online pro audio vendor and received a quick refund.  Almost as quickly Steven Slate disabled the VSX software from my iLok account, as if I’d want to try using the software with better headphones?  Actually, I had tried that before sending the gear back, using my Ultrasones and a pair of suspiciously similar-looking IKT noise-cancelling Bluetooth phones I’d recently purchased for non-professional use.  Not surprisingly, the VSX software and my Ultrasones was incompatible, but the IKT phones not only looked and felt like the VSX phones but the emulations worked slightly better than the SS VSX phones, with the IKT phones in noise-cancelling mode.  Go figure. 

When Music Was “Great?”

 I am solidly a 60’s, Boomer, hippy-era guy.  But I’ve been blessed with knowing young musicians my whole life and, thanks to them, I’ve been drug (usually kicking, whining, and complaining) into several generations of music and musicians.  One of the side effects of that life experience has been to doubt that there was anything earth-shakingly different about my generation of musicians and music.  To the point that, now, when I hear claims along that line, a bunch of contrary evidence springs to mind in the form of Billboard’s Hot 100 and, especially, the #1 hits over the years.  Mostly, the list of songs contaminating that top spot are embarrassing, regardless of the period. 

My list of the worst 1960’s songs to reach Billboard’s #1 on the charts:

·       1960: El Paso (Marty Robbins), Running Bear (Johnny Preston), Teen Angel (Mark Dinning), Alley Oop (Hollywood Argyles), Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini (Brian Hyland), and Mr. Custer (Larry Verne).  It’s not awful, but it’s sure not some kind of hip rock and roll evidence: Theme from a Summer Place (Percy Faith) was on the top of the charts for 9 weeks.  Elvis had three hyper-schmaltzy bits of tripe that stayed on the top of the charts for 14 painful weeks.  I was 12 in 1960 and nothing on the radio in western Kansas, other than the Everly’s Cathy’s Clown and Chubby Checker’s The Twist, interested me at all.  In 1960, pop music was aimed at a different generation, sometimes called “The Lost Generation” (for good reason).

·       1961: Wonderland by Night (Bert Kamphert), Calcutta (Lawrence Welk), Blue Moon (The Marcells), Moody River (Pat Boone), and Big Bad John (Jimmy Dean) were the absolute worst of the #1’s, but, honestly, most of that year’s pop chart was a painful musical disaster.  I, accidentally, discovered jazz in 1961, through the Columbia Record Club, and most of pop music suddenly sounded worse than boring. 

·       1962: Just a bad year for pop music in general.  You can pick the worst from that year, yourself, from Wikipedia’s list of top of the pops crap.  Elvis’ #1 was Good Luck Charm, a bit of tripe that should have cost him any claim for the King of Rock and Roll.

·       1963: The year the Beatles “arrived” in the USA (in late December) ended with The Singing Nun’s painful drivel-ish Dominique in #1.  Other than 12-year-old “Little Stevie Wonder’s” amazing Fingertips, there wasn’t much good to say about popular music that year.  Pop mush was so drenched in simple drivel, mostly instrumental, that it encouraged 14-year-old me to start playing in bands (“Even I can play that simple crap.”). Early that year, I discovered the miracle of AM radio “skip” and on rare and special nights I could tune in Chicago’s WLS and I “discovered” R&B (aka “race music”  in those dismal days) and started hearing music that “even I” couldn’t play or sing under any conditions. . 

·       1964: Musically, it wouldn’t be unfair to say the 60’s began in 1964.  The Beatles topped the chart six times with some of the absolute worst songs (for example, Love Me Do) for 18 dismal weeks, but Lorne Greene (from “Bonanza”) lowered the taste bar dramatically with Ringo.  I’m going to blame the sales for that awful noise on “The Lost Generation,” but it stained us all. James Brown’s I Got You (I Feel Good) crawled to #3 after two months, smothered under garbage like Leader of the Pack, Mr. Lonely, and Ringo.

·       1965: No question, pop music took a turn for the better in 1965 with the Rolling Stones arriving on the charts and something resembling Rock and Roll finally making a consistent breakthrough in record sales.  Still, Petula Clark’s Downtown held the #1 spot for two weeks, Sonny and Cher atonally whined I Got You Babe in #1 for three weeks, and Herman’s Hermits Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter and Freddie and the Dreamers I'm Telling You Now made it clear that the “British Invasion” wouldn’t be painless. Papa’s Brand New Bag made it all the way to #8 that year. 

·       1966: This is the year that I always point to when I’m ridiculing “the old music is best” claim.  My posterchild for pure pop crap is ? and the Mysterians’ 96 Tears,  a two-chord piece of crap that stuck on the charts for 15 freakin’ weeks and at #1 for two weeks!  Both the song and the even-worse-album went gold that year. It's a Man's Man's Man's World  crept up to #8, idling under throw-away garbage like Winchester Cathedral, Last Train to Clarksville, and I’m A Believer.

·       1967: Coulda been a contender.  Jimi Hendrix 1^st single, Hey Joe/Stone Free, almost crept into Billboard’s Hot 100 list and James Brown’s Cold Sweat made it to #8, while the Monkees’ I’m A Believer, Kind of a Drag (Buckinghams), Incense and Peppermints (Strawberry Alarm Clock), and (ironically) Something Stupid (Nancy and Frank Sinatra) peaked the Billboard chart.  Network television’s made-up rock band, the Monkees, held the top of the charts for 10 awful weeks.

·       1968: Another of my favorite crapband hits stuck at #1 for a whole week: Green Tambourine {The Lemon Pipers). Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower made it to #20, his only top-40 single, although the Electric Ladyland LP was the #1 album for a bit.  Love is Blue (Paul Mauriat), This Guy's in Love with You {Herb Alpert}, and Harper Valley PTA {Jeannie C. Riley} were all pretty solid examples of the awful trip that we foisted on the world as “good music.” 

·       1969: The last year the 60s had to redeem its reputation for coolness and Tommy James and the Shondells’ crushed that hope with Crimson and Clover with as strong assist from Tommy Roe’s Dizzy (along with a really stupid video), the incredibly schmaltzy Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet (Henry Mancini), despicable one-hit-wonder bits of tripe with In the Year 2525 (Zager and Evans), Sugar, Sugar (The Archies), and Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye (Steam).  A Vegas-bound 33-year-old Elvis dumped his last #1, Suspicious Minds, on a tasteless public. 

And that wraps up the worst of the 1960’s #1 Greatest Dumpster Dive.  There were a lot of even more awful songs that lingered in the Top 10 through that period and some really fantastic music that never scratched the surface of Billboard’s Hot 100.  SF author Ted Sturgeon once said “90% of everything is crap” and I have always thought he was an optimist.  That goes for things that are the most popular at the time, too. 

When I was 11 years old, RCA issued an Elvis record titled “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t be Wrong.”  It would be hard to make a dumber, more easily disproved claim than that.  The ten songs on that gold record are about as forgettable as any pop music on my worst of the #1’s list.  To this western Kansas kid, at the time, everything about that record came to prove one of my favorite irrational arguments: the ad populum fallacy, “a claim that, if many people believe something to be true, then it must be true.”  History has proved that, so consistently, to be a fallacy that the opposite claim is likely closer to the truth.