#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 experience in the audience at the Sheldon Theater with the Duane Betts and Palmetto Motel band in Red Wing, MN this past Thursday.  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 “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, which 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 about an hour before the concert began.  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 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 band 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, and, outside of a Trump rally, 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 to that point (I would prove that to be wrong, several times, in the future.) Finally, the yokel noise stopped and Grinderswitch staggered off of the stage.  I was ready to leave.

We didn’t have any place to go and the Allman’s crew repurposed the stage quickly and the lights went down as the band found their places via Marshall amp pilot lights and roadie assistance.  The opening chords 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 corners of the front of the stage.  There was a Front of House 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. Less 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 dope 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. 

Reading Biographies

Be careful of whom you idolize, you may become them.

A recently retired friend, who had a lifetime of serious academic and theological study, has resolved to “catch up” on popular culture by binge reading the biographies and autobiographies of a host of 50s-70s rock stars.  I have been the unwitting and, mostly, unwilling recipient of many of his books after he’s finished them.  First, I try to avoid books made from paper.  I am old, but not so old that I feel the need to “smell the pages” or any of that nonsense.  I don’t have a manual typewriter, adding machines, cassette tapes or floppy disks, a VHS or Betamax player or tapes, but my wife does still keep phone books.  I do have a “home phone,” but it’s a VOIP (OOMA) system and it is way cheaper than a cell phone and OOMA’s software does a wonderful job of screening out the scammers who want to sell me overpriced life insurance, windows, a cemetery plot or cremation plan, and security updates for my Windows computers.  I do read a lot of books, but I mostly read “books” on a pair of eReaders (a KOBO and a Kindle).  The Kindle is for library books I will get around to, eventually, since as long as it isn’t connected to the internet (in “Airplane Mode”) I can keep library books “checked out” indefinitely.  Second, after reading a loaned copy of Keith Richard’s “Life,” I have been trying to scrub those stories and images out of my skull with a metal scouring pad for almost a year.  Likewise for The Ox: The Authorized Biography of The Who's John Entwistle and Phil Collin’s Not Dead Yet: The Memoir. 

[Admission: I did enjoy This Wheel's on Fire, Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, and even bought a copy for my KOBO reader.  I’d believe Levon over anything Robbie Robertson said about any subject, including guitar playing.  Having heard as much as I could stand of Robbie Robertson’s solo work, it’s obvious that his “creative” output was on the business side of The Band.  There isn’t a single Band song that wouldn’t be improved by the deletion of Robertson’s predictable guitar solos.]

I was not much of a scholar during my early semi-adult years and I don’t have any drive to “catch up” on what I missed.  Mostly, I’m happy to have avoided most of the bear traps society set for my generation of skeptics and creative people.  I avoided drugs, mostly thanks to the examples set by friends and artists I knew who didn’t.  I lucked into a career that supported my family and our hobbies and habits for almost 60 years and left Ms. Day and I with a decent retirement and a modest home in a small Minnesota town.  We’re debt-free and our kids have been self-supporting, functional adults for more than 30 years.  On the other side of that, I have lost friends and family to drugs and alcohol, suicide, poor choices and just being in the wrong place at the wrong time that resulted in their lives being wreaked by the highest incarceration rate among developed countries and a “justice system” that only “works” for the rich, powerful, and white.  I was on the technical support sidelines for a lot of musical careers and a lot more failed attempts at that brass ring.  For a lot of years, I was a lot more interested in the gear in recording studios than the people on either side of the glass.  Still am, in many ways, but I don’t believe in the “magic” behind pretty much anything claimed by anyone pretending to possess “golden ears.”  Engineering and technology have come a long ways since the supposed “golden years” of recording and music and old gear mostly leaves me cold, unless you’re willing to pay me my old $225/hour rate to repair it. 

I have also been blessed to know a few brilliant people really well.  I was lucky enough just to have been in the room when other brilliant people were talking, creating music, inventing, teaching, or just being their incredibly nice selves.  In my life, I have found that the best people are “best” in every way that matters.  That experience beats reading the edited version of lives, usually mostly written by either ghost writers or fans.  I found that doing a lot of stuff, often wildly unrelated, accidentally brought me into contact with people I never imagined getting to meet.  George Massenburg, for example, was a keynote speaker at a Students’ Audio Engineering Society conference in St. Louis and I was a faculty AES advisor.  During an instructors’ dinner, George and I hit it off a bit and I hope to remember those conversations until I die.  Thanks to Mr. Massenburg, I have multitrack copies of a couple dozen classic rock recordings for which he was an engineering participant and I have learned a lot just from playing with re-mixing those recordings.  While I was in California in the 80s, I met several dozen almost-famous musicians, a few famous-only-to-musicians musicians, and a couple of “stars” that most people might recognize.  Some were assholes, some were incredibly humble and decent (talkin’ about you, Larry Carlton and George), and most were no more special than the players, technicians, and engineers I worked with in every other area of my life and work.  Luck has as much to say in success as talent and being lucky enough to be born rich makes pretty much everything a whole lot easier. 

I especially appreciate listening to music I had some part in creating.  I rarely listen to any radio, outside of NPR for news and interviews, but when I’m in my car I listen to a 256G USB stick full of my favorite music and a fair bit of that is music I’ve had some part in recording; either as a player or a recording tech.  I often get a perverted kick out of knowing that, out of 8B people on the planet, I’m likely the only person listening to that song at that moment.  There aren’t many of those people who I don’t admire on several levels.  Nobody will ever write their biographies and, if they have written autobiographies, few will read them, but they are every bit as “special” as whoever is at the top of the charts today and I appreciate their talents, their generosity and courage, and their music. 

Bend Over and Take Your Apple Like A Man

A few nights ago, I was playing music at an outdoor party with friends and when one of the players wanted to see the scrolling music app I was using on my tablet,Guitar Chords and Tabs (an Android app, which is also available on the web at https://www.chords-and-tabs.net/). He was excited, at first, that so many songs had already been worked out just for the taking, but when I told him it cost $5 “for life,” he started arguing “Why not $10, or $10 a year?  How can the guy make any money only charging $5?” 

This is a person who (I think) would probably describe himself as somewhere between liberal and socialist in his politics, but he has a giant fault line in his expectations: he owns an iPhone.  As an Apple product user, he has been conditioned to be ripped off every few moments when Apple “updates” some piddly aspect of their mediocre products and requires the Faithful to march down to the Apple Store or T-Mobile or where ever they take their Apple cornholing and spend ten times what the competition asks for a better, more flexible, and at least as secure product.  (Cell phones are notoriously insecure computers.)

I, of course, made it worse by demonstrating all of the free-to-$10 apps I use on my $80 Samsung phone and my $70 Hi10 (10”) XPro Android tablet. His marketing- tutored mind seemed to go into overload and he started to download Ultimate Guitar, a $90/year app that runs on Android and Apple.  I probably broke something else in his head when I told him that I get Ultimate Guitar for free because I submit 6-10 song “interpretations” to the app every year.  Years of Apple-conditioning has taught him “there is no reasonably priced lunch” and he couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that someone working on a program in their spare time would settle for “only” making a few hundred thousand dollars on a very popular app that only costs $5 per customer.

I haven’t always despised Apple. Back in the early 80s the Apple II was sometimes the only small business computer that made sense.  Even up to the moment the Mac arrived, Apple was a reasonably customer-friendly and responsive company.  When Jobs squeezed Wozniak out of Apple in ‘83, the company started rolling downhill fast and by the time Jobs was back and in full control, the company tried to monetize every breath their sucker/customers took.  By the ‘87 an Apple keyboard, never a particularly impressive piece of equipment, cost $150 when even a decent name-brand PC keyboard from Logitech sold for about $50.  Software, hardware, and service were all sold at a premium and Apple’s customers loved the abuse.  Like the Trump cult, the more ruthlessly and rudely Apple treats its victims the more they lavish fealty to the rotten-cored company.

People are weird.

I got a big taste of those expectations on one of the Facebook groups when a few young Logic users practically came unglued on another musician for using an “obsolete Mac Pro running an unsupported OS and several generations ancient version of Logic.” Their “logic” was, “1) You can’t make good music on old software and 2) not running state-of-the-art software and hardware is ‘cheating the Apple developers.’”

When I taught music production classes I’d constantly remind my students that people made great records on every “crappy” old version of DAW software in existence. Supposedly, The Beach Boys (sans Brian Wilson) " Summer in Paradise” was one of the first albums recorded on Sound Tools, which later grew up and became Pro Tools.  That’s not saying much for Sound Tools, since that was a really awful Beach Boy’s album (covering songs from Sly Stone to The Drifters).  It has been a long time since a crappy sounding record was in any way the fault of the technology.  And that #2 argument is disgusting.  Software developers are the last people who would be rewarded (if ever) in a braindead, greedy, top-heavy corporation like Apple.  If you bought the software, it’s yours not theirs.  You owe them nothing, unless you stole it.  Even then, you could probably make a convincing argument that once it’s on your computer, it’s yours. 😉