The Deaf Leading the Deaf

Because I’m a slow learner, I went to a local outdoor concert this past weekend. The headliner is a friend and I know a couple other folks who would be playing earlier in the day.Honestly, I felt a bit of an obligation to be part of the audience for their music. I know that a Red Wing, MN audience isn’t typical of pop music audiences with an average age approaching at least 70, but music “fans” of all ages are sadly similarly hearing-impaired. Depending on perspective, I was or wasn’t disappointed with the “music.”

Over the past couple of decades, I have become less inclined to suffer for someone else’s “art,” in the form of painfully loud, distorted, weirdly-mixed live music. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this, so it might be boring. It struck me, about 3 songs into the set I’d come to see, that live music today is doomed because all ends of the people involved in production and listening are functionally deaf or, worse, don’t care about sound quality at all. My friend is a songwriter and his band is tasteful, talented, and they make an extreme effort to stay out of the vocalist’s way. The soundgoober (the man leaning on the console as if it were a drunk’s crutch) started the show with a severely distorted and loud kick drum and bass guitar blast and took 3 songs to squeeze the vocal a little way into the mix; not enough to understand the lyrics but enough to know there was a vocalist. Worse, it took him 45 minutes of “check, one, check, two” crap to do a musically pointless soundcheck, making the headline show start time 30 minutes late.

As usual, when I described my disappointment to other people who had seen the show, I was the Lone Ranger of Criticism. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, “About 2 percent of adults aged 45 to 54 have disabling hearing loss. The rate increases to 8.5 percent for adults aged 55 to 64. Nearly 25 percent of those aged 65 to 74 and 50 percent of those who are 75 and older have disabling hearing loss.” I, personally, think that is grossly optimistic, based on my own experience with live and recorded music listeners. Back in the 80s, the Audio Engineering Society invited an otolaryngologist organization to test the Society’s convention participants on a voluntary basis. The outcome was the discovery that practically everyone involved in music recording and, especially, live music was functionally deaf. Today, most or much of the audience is equally hearing damaged. It is not even slightly odd to be in a small music venue with a band blasting deafening volume and some of the audience, even so-called critical listening reviewers, shouting “I can’t hear you!” In their arrogant, self-centered manner, they are clearly willing to damage everyone else in the room because they are disabled.

Check out these two charts, one from OSHA that was established during WWII manufacturing, and the other from NIOSH that more accurately reflects what is currently known about hearing loss from environmental “noise” (aka “music”). In some fairly progressive companies, the first numbers on either chart are used to determine when hearing protection is required for workers in those benevolent work environments. Typical amplified pop concerts subject their audiences to noise levels upwards from 115dBC, which means after about 30S of “music” you are experiencing permanent hearing damage. The music better be damned amazing to give away your hearing in exchange.

Ego Noise

This has been a week where two of my blogging interests, motorcycling and blogging, have unfortunately grown together into one large irritation. Last Monday, a parade of nitwit of bikers blubbered past our home at their usual barely-above-a-crawl speed and well-above-a-thunderstorm noise level, proving that there are more than enough reasons to defund the lazy, cowardly couch-potatoes who inhabit our local police and sheriff's departments. If you can’t identify a national, state, and local crime that produces enough noise to drown out a freight train, you are too dumb to be carrying a gun and badge and do not deserve to be wasting public funds pretending to be “law enforcement.” 

A few days later, I went to a downtown outdoor concert and was assaulted by another of the many painful, anti-musical sound systems I’ve suffered in my lifetime. I have an stock of ear plugs in the car, but I shouldn’t have to use them to protect myself in an outdoor concert that drew 75 people max. It took me a few moments to realize that it would only get worse and, as a result, my ears rang all through the next day.

A few days after that, we went to a graduation party for a friend who had been workingm part-time and nights, on her Master’s degree for the last 25 years. Her husband made the event into a “look at me” episode by playing in 3 different bands that were all so loud that nobody could carry on a conversation anywhere in the building. His wife’s celebration was turned into a “I can do stuff too” event for her husband. We all only have a wild hope that she heard, or recognized, at least a few of the many congratulations that were mimed her way.

At the first event, I got into a discussion with a self-admitted deaf guy who argued that the sound system wasn’t as bad as I alleged because he could pick out the three instruments and two voices with some effort. We’re talking about a male and female vocal, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and cajon. If you couldn’t at least make out the existence of those “voices,” the sound would amount to pure cacophony. That is a massively low bar for a sound goober to achieve. At the second event, a musician friend and I decided that an upside to this nonsense is that as long as live sound is this bad, there is no point in wasting a lot of energy on learning lyrics. As Ms. Day said, “Every song is ‘Louie, Louie’ so why bother learning any other song?” Honestly, as long as the vocals were sorta in the general territory of the key, even the melody was obscured by the noise, the dominating mediocre bass and guitars.

A few nights ago, an old friend and his daughter went to a Bastille, Nile Rodgers & CHIC, Duran Duran concert at the Atlanta State Farm Arena. His comment on the show was, "The bands were good. The sound was fairly unintelligible due to extreme loudness. But, I didn't let the sound people steal my joy!" He has been nearly a life-long fan of Rodgers and CHIC and “I didn't let the sound people steal my joy” was the best he could say for his outlay of several hundred dollars for the tickets, the cost of the trip and an overnight stay, and the experience. He also spent a good bit of his life working backstage and FOH with professional sound systems and touring companies. That is how low the bar for live, amplified music has become, at best, we hope the sound system doesn’t ruin the experience for us.

Kick Drums and SM58s

For the first time in a while, I “experienced” a live sound-reinforced show last Friday night. At Red Wing’s Sheldon Theater, to be specific. I’d volunteered to monitor one of the Big Turn Music Festival venue’s gate and had occasional moments to wander the theater to hear the three acts from that evening. I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to know I was less-than-impressed with the sound goober’s “work.” In fact, it was about as SNAFU as is typical. The goober clearly believed impressing the audience with how much bass (exclusively kick drume) he could shovel into the mix was more important than attempting a musical demonstration. Nothing new there, but it was particularly depressing with the evening’s first act, Tony Cuchetti’s band, because Tony’s powerful voice did not blend well with a kick drum-dominated mix and the other musicians in his band, including the bass player, suffered the same clueless sonic disaster.

From my perspective, if the sound is obviously “reinforced, “ the sound goober is a screwup. Obviously, there are types of music where the sound has to be reinforced because the input is garbage and must be manipulated to resemble music: DJs, too much of hip hop, most metal, and almost all of the crap that falls into today’s Top 100, for example. But music and musicians only need subtle assistance from the sound goober to carry their music into the cheap seats. Doing more than that is just a sound goober projecting his/her own insecurities, sort of like the Harley Davidson characters trying to disguise their lack of motorcycling skills with the “loud pipes save lives” nonsense.

After my Sheldon shift, I took in a couple of the other venues and, Saturday, returned to tour the lot of the bars, stores, and churches that had volunteered to be in the Big Turn. A big part of the problem with several acts I heard over the two days was the chronic poor choice of vocal mics for every kind of singer. Over the past 50 years, I haven’t been shy about voicing my opinion of Shure’s SM58 workhorse. The mic is a brick, almost impossible to damage with all sorts of abuse, but it has limited musical applications. The mic’s bandwidth, proximity problems, self-noise, and polar pattern severely limits the SM58’s practical application; especially on quality voices.

Even more confusing is the fact that most vocalists don’t seem to know or care about the damage this lowfi hammer does to their voices. (If your own tool is an SM58, every voice sounds like a nail?) Why do musicians insist on playing their own instruments through their own amplifiers while appearing to be totally indifferent to the instrument their voice passes through? It’s not like it would be complicated to simply remove the 58 from the stand, clip and all, and replace it with a more suitable mic. If the goober can’t deal with the slight (or major, in the case of a condenser) variation in microphone sensitivity, that will be the least of your problems.

The advantage a serious vocalist would have in knowing how to replace the default poor microphone choice with their own well understood and properly selected replacement would be a night-and-day difference in the performance outcome. You could defuse any objections by telling the goober, “My RE20 (for example) has, essentially, the same sensitivity as your SM58, so you won’t need to change the preamp levels. However, I would like to have the vocal EQ set flat and I have selected my own high pass filter values. Thank you.” Or, in the case of a condenser, telling the goober how much gain to take off of the pre.

You might have to actually walk to the sound board to verify the goober knows how to do those things, but it would be worth a trip. It is always a good bet to assume incompetence when it comes to sound goobers. If you are pleasantly surprised, say so. One of the reasons bottom-of-the-barrel types end up running live shows is that the job is too often thankless. If no one notices a good job, the techs who know what they’re doing end up doing something else and the ones who don’t end up wreaking every show they touch.

Friday night, the one place the 58 did an acceptable job was with the last act’s “vocalist.” He was an atonal screamer whose range began where Tony’s left off. and never approached anything resembling musical. I still couldn’t understand the lyrics, but I wasn’t particularly tempted to put much effort into that task. 

Talent, Technique, and Tone: How to Hide Them All

Back in the mid-70s (as an old friend would say, “When the sun was little-tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet.”), I was a wannabe rock lead guitarist with a lot more confidence than talent and had just moved from rural Nebraska to a city within easy striking and gigging distance from the “Big City”: Omaha, Nebraska and, almost as often, Lincoln, Nebraska and, occasionally, Kansas City and Des Moines. It didn’t take long for me to learn that all of the hot players in town got together fairly regularly at the Saddle Creek Bar for an open mic/jam session and as soon as I figured out where Saddle Creek was I geared up to go into battle.

My amp and gear, at the time, was a 1970s Peavey Artist 100W combo with a Peavey 12” speaker. It was more than enough amp for any gig my band ever did and with an assortment of pedals screwed to a board and a Morley wah, I could handle almost anything on the pop charts at the time. That was considered a “tiny” rig at the time for a rock band guitar player. The Artist was the first amp I ever owned that had a “switched” input setup where I could go from a clean channel to a distorted one with a footswitch. The distortion that amp provided was pretty much fuzz-box quality and, at the time, my tone roll model was probably Carlos Santana.

The Saddle Creek jam session was a different setup than I’d expected. The stage backline was a permanent setup. As I remember there were a couple of Fender Twin Reverbs for the guitars, a Rhodes, a drum kit, an Ampeg bass amp of some sort, and 3 or 4 vocal mics; all set up and ready to go. This was 40 years ago, so my memory of the equipment is open to question, but I won’t be far from wrong. As a guitar player, I was “allowed” to bring myself and my guitar, but no pedals and sure-as-hell no amp. What I learned about myself that first time at Saddle Creek was that I sucked. Without the crutch of distortion and sustain to cover up my mediocre right and left hand technique, I sounded embarrassingly mediocre and having to pick every note or cleanly hammer-on or off slowed me down to 1970s country and western music territory. I went home with my tail between my legs, my ego squashed, and my confidence turned into brutal humiliation. Not that anyone I was on stage with or who heard me said anything. They didn’t need to, I said it all to myself.

After getting my ass handed to me, I went home and re-evaluated my equipment choices and my playing technique. There were a lot of terrific musicians at the Saddle Creek jam and I desperately wanted to go back and, even more, I did not want to suck in front of my peers. I started practicing on an acoustic guitar, even with the band. We lowered our practice volume drastically to accommodate my acoustic guitar and to protect our hearing. For performances, I sold the Peavey Artist and lucked into a 1950s Fender Harvard, which I immediately “hot-rodded” with a JKL K120 12” speaker, Marshall-style tone controls, and a foot-switched gain-boost circuit (all tube). [Yeah, I know. I destroyed the “collector value” of the amp. I did that sort of thing to a few hundred amps between 1974 and 1984, so get over yourself.] No more pedal board, no fuzz box sound, just a collection of tones produced by my Moonstone guitar, my amp, occasional contributions from the Morley wah pedal, and my fingers.

A few months and dozens of gigs later, I went back to Saddle Creek and I didn’t suck. I went back often over the next few years and learned more from that experience than I had from practicing and playing in bands in the previous dozen years. In the process, I also learned a lot about live sound systems, acoustics, electronics, and even audiences. Not only did I improve, as a player, enough to feel reasonably happy with my performance among the great players at the Saddle Creek Bar, but my band’s overall sound improved enough that I would often have other musicians walk right by my little Harvard, on it’s folding stand right behind me on stage, They’d often ask, “How do you get that sound from that amp?” And they’d be pointing at the bass player’s SVT, totally ignoring the little Harvard they’d walked past.

And so, sometime around 1976 I discovered “small is better” and I have never found any evidence to the contrary. But I have seen a lot of evidence that big is bad from everyone from the rich and famous to the godawful cacophony produced by wannabe guitar players in cover bands from Texas to Nebraska to California to Colorado to Minnesota and the surrounding territories. When my Nebraska sound company was designing and building sound systems for bands in the late 70s, I’d tell whoever was spending the money “For every 100W Marshall you let on to your stage, you’ll need at least 1,000W of PA system to get the vocals over the guitar.” I haven’t seen any evidence to conflict with that advice, either.

“You Can’t Hear What I’m Hearing”

This scene in the movie “Crazy Heart” is probably my favorite music business scene in any movie ever, including documentaries. Bear, the deaf-and-dumb front-of-house goober, tries to tell Jeff Bridges’ character, Bad, that he can’t believe his lyin’ ears and should trust someone who probably never critically or competently listened to a record in his life. “The mix is good man. You can’t hear what I’m hearin’ out here.”

Instead, Bad does what every musician should do in a live performance; he stops the rehearsal until the goober does what he tells him to do. “Yeah, you’d be surprised. Set it the way I tell you and leave it!” After a short, hilarious wrestling match between the goober and Bad, the show goes on. Of course an even better solution would be to have a bodyguard/assistant standing behind the FOH nitwit smacking him every time he touches a fader. It doesn’t matter how much the assistant knows about music, it will always be more than the FOH goober.

The power of the mix should be on the stage, but usually it isn’t because the musicians are so swollen up with their ego crap they don’t bother to listen to what the audience is suffering through. They smother themselves in a wash of stage monitor noise that buries the FOH sound and allows the worst people on the planet to torture their fans with incompetence. Worse, most musicians are convinced that being loud will cover up flaws, which is beyond stupid.

There are at least two ways (both negative) to take Bear’s reply, though:

1. “You can’t hear what I’m hearin’ out here” could be a reflection of Bear’s deafness: “I’m mixing to compensate for decades of severe hearing loss and general stupidity and you’ll never know what I’m hearing.”
2. Or Bear is pretending the FOH position is important enough to tell Bad “you can’t hear” what he’s doing because what Bear isn’t going to allow it. The goober thinks Bad’s opinion doesn’t matter. In other words, you don’t have permission to “hear what I‘m hearin’ out here.”

I Hated Steve Martin

Between  1973 and 1978, I absolutely despised Steve Martin. There, I said it and it’s true. Yep, that funny guy on the right side of the pair of “King Tut” era Steve Martin pictures was a guy I regarded as a thief, at best. If he was in a movie, I wouldn’t watch it (I didn’t see “The Jerk” until ‘79 or so.). If he was on SNL or any other television talk show, I ignored it. I hated the man.

There was a “good” reason, believe it or not.

Sometime in 1978, I stumbled on to a brief article in Rolling Stone where Martin said his friend, John McEuen the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “came to me in a dream” and provided the inspiration to “King Tut,” which was performed by “Martin and the Toot Uncommons” (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band members) and produced by William McEuen at McEuen’s Aspen Recording Society studio. And that was when I realized I was hating the guy I thought Martin had ripped off; himself.

Sometime around 1971, Mrs. Day and I went to a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concert in Amarillo, Texas. The Amarillo City Auditorium had an intermission break policy, so they could sell concessions. Essentially, we’re talking a 60’s hippy band and a 60’s hippy audience and the Dirt Band’s usual concert was non-stop music for 3 hours and some change. They were not happy about having to take 45 minutes out of the middle of their show so someone else could sell popcorn. They’d apparently heard about this popcorn bullshit in advance and had brought “a friend” who was a comedian. I’m sure they introduced him, but I was probably looking at something sparkly and I don’t have a brain for names in the best of times. The friend’s purpose was to fill the 45 minutes completely enough that we’d all stay in our seats and the popcorn asshole would get frustrated and go home.

The friend/comedian more than did the job. He was freakin’ hilarious and a pretty good magician and banjo player, too. He did all the “let’s get small,” “excuuuuse me,” balloon animal, Steve Martin standbys that made the clean-cut guy famous., Then, a few years later the “other guy” appears on television doing exactly the routines and I thought (distrusting straight fuckers as did any hippy of the day) it was a clear cut case of theft. But . . . come on! You tell me, how the hell was I supposed to know the hippy freak on the right would instantly turn into the the geek in the suit at the top of this essay? In fact, I remember the guy I saw in Amarillo as being even more of a long-haired, bearded hippy. Martin is from Waco, Texas and, maybe, it was a “short” (by Texas standards) drive to Amarillo for that night’s gig.

From Whence It All Began

Recently, I saw a Facebook post on Pat Metheny’s page where he said, “"The Beatles were huge for me. Without them, I don't know if I even would have become a musician or a guitar player. When their hits started coming out, I was 8 and 9 years old and it had a tremendous impact on me. . .” and he proceeded to play “And I Love Her.” Obviously, Pat turns a fairly deplorable song into something very likeable and almost infinitely more complex than the original composition.

I have been a Pat Metheny fan since his Gary Burton days and he is in my Top 5 guitarists, some days at the top of that list. I played in bands that had a fair share of Beatles songs for 20 years, but in my mind I was always pandering to the lowest common denominator when I played most of those songs. (I admit to liking “Taxman,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Got to Get You into My Life,” and “Birthday” [for about a decade, the only song I would play when someone requested “The Birthday Song” and one of the Beatles only actual rock songs]). Otherwise, the band often labeled as “the greatest Rock and Roll band ever” mostly left me wishing for silence.

I absolutely admire George Martin’s genius in recognizing that 4 moderate talents were visually (and could be made to aurally be) the exact right thing for a crowd of blooming Boomer teenagers to obsess on. His commitment to molding that mess of “talent” into what the Beatles became is historic in R&R history. If Martin hadn’t forced the Goofy Three into dumping a mediocre drummer and accepting a professional musician who rewrote the job of pop drumming forever, they likely would have been a one-hit-wonder; if that. To highlight that point, in 1971 neglected and mostly unsuccessful John Lennon asked “What's he done now?” in regard to George Martin’s post-Beatle career. I have loved that typically clueless moment in John’s feet-in-mouth career for 50 years. Wikipedia’s George Martin discography is only a partial list of Martin’s accomplishments before and after the Beatles. “Blow by Blow” alone changed as much in pop music and recording history as had most of the Beatles’ output. (There, I said it and I hope that is out of my system forever.)

But Pat’s comment started me thinking about my own considerably less creative or interesting original musical path origins. One band is probably most responsible for me giving up on my Dizzy Gillespie clone trumpet-player pipedreams and that would be The Ventures. I’m older than Pat, so there is that, too. I was 12 when Walk Don’t Run became a hit in 1960 and had been flailing at the trumpet for 3 years by then. With paper route money, I bought a terrible Sears acoustic guitar and two years later gave up on the trumpet forever. When I was 13, I was in a kid band playing (badly) surf music and Venture’s hits and the summer I turned 14 someone in that band had a connection to the nun (not a typo) who was responsible for bringing the Ventures to the Dodge City, Kansas City Auditorium. Their concert was being promoted and organized by the now-defunct St. Marys of the Plains Catholic College and two of my bandmates were very Catholic Italians and at least one of them had a good enough connection to the college to get me a “job” as a stage hand for the Ventures’ show.

Back in those days, setting up a stage for a rock and roll show was a whole world different than the past 40 years of pop music. The Ventures had three guitar amps and one bass amp, all Fenders, and their instruments, also all Fenders. The auditorium provided the “sound system” for any vocals or dialog, a three or four-channel Bogen tube mixer with about 20W of power and a pair of awful Bogen columns. Worse, it was all being manned by an old man who, I think, was a plumber by day and, later, ran a Suzuki motorcycle shop. As I remember, the “sound check” amounted to him plugging in a mic on a stand and tapping on it. He quickly went sleep next to the mixer before the show even started. Talk about a harbinger of what live sound would become in the future!

I carried amps and guitar cases from the loading dock to the stage and did whatever the band wanted me to do and was finished with my part of the job in an easy hour or so. They noodled around a bit with the guitars and amps, but didn’t really do anything resembling a sound check or rehearsal before they headed off to the backstage area to wait for the crowd to show up. With no adults in the room to care about what I did until after the show and load-out, I climbed the ladder to the grid over the stage and found a great seat right over the middle of the band about 20’ up and well out of sight of the audience. In the dark, I dangled my legs over the edge of the waffled grid and hung out in nervous excitement for the band to appear and the curtains to open.

Someone from the college walked in front of the curtains and said something like “Ladies and gentlemen, the world famous Ventures!” and the current opened up, the band walked to their instruments, strapped them on, and with a short count-in started with the as-yet-to-be-recorded or released Ventures’ version of Richard Rogers’ opera “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” When they struck the opening chord, I almost bounced off of the grid and rained down on their unsuspecting heads. Only luck and a good last minute grip kept me from “bringing the house down” before the first verse. As good as this remastered version of their record sounds, in my memory the live performance was 1,000 times better and more powerful.

Except for the songs they played that night that I’d yet to hear, my band covered almost everything in their catalog from “Walk, Don’t Run” to “Sleepwalk” and all of the surf tunes. Nothing I’d heard in those recordings prepared me for the real, live Beatles . . . I mean Ventures. My life was changed forever and for the next 15 years I was focused on becoming as much like those four guys as possible, except for the greasy hair. Not that I didn’t admire their hair, I was just too lazy to comb mine let alone coat it in Brylcreem.

After the concert was over and I’d helped load everything back into their vehicle, I remember walking across the parking lot with Nookie Edwards, Bob Bogle, and Don Wilson and asking them to autograph something I’d managed to find that was autographical. The response from Nookie Edwards was, “Surely.” And he reached for whatever I had to sign.

Bob Bogle said, “Don’t call the kid Shirley.” And they all broke up. That was the first of a few thousand times I head that joke, but every other time I’ve heard the lines it brings up a fabulous memory of getting to hang out with my childhood idols. For me, the Ventures started it all, first with their records, second with a live performance. Live sound, recorded music, technology and a life-long fascination with audio electronics, and whatever music I have managed to reproduce or create in my limited-talent life as a bass and guitar player. No band, ever, more deserved to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It Is Not A Victimless Crime

At the moment where the US Congresscritters are contemplating decriminalizing marijuana use and establishing “procedures for expunging previous convictions from people’s records,” I’m thinking about ways to refill the nation’s for-profit prisons with real criminals. [We can’t ask those prison-owning billionaires to suffer just because the country has decided to be slightly more just and rational.] For years, I’ve advocated several punishment for lousy live sound reinforcement. In “What I Have Learned about Live Sound” I pretty much wrapped up a lifetime experiences and suffering with amplified . . . music? (For lack of a more accurate term.) In 2013, I wrote “Weapons of Mass Destruction – Live Sound” when someone I know butchered a Robert Randolph and the Family Band’s live show so badly I haven’t bothered to listen to or buy an RR record since. “Snarky Puppy in St. Paul” described one of the most embarrassing, awful, and disappointing anti-musical experiences I’ve suffered and one that was a turning point for me in that my response was “never again” regarding all things related to that band. “Isolation from the Audience,” “Where Did the Audience Go?,” back in 2004 I wrote an article for FOH Magazine that disappeared after my friend Mark Amundson died “Loud Noises,” and way back in 1991 one of my first Wirebender Audio website essays was “Loudly Killing Live Music.” I think I have sufficiently documented my case for prosecuting the “the moron behind the sound board.” Back in 1991 I said, “The solution is simple. When you think the sound clown is wreaking your favorite national or local band, he probably is. Walk up behind him and broom his line of coke into the crowd. Smack him in the back of the head with a mid-sized brick. Kick his chair over and spill him, head first, into the mosh pit. Unplug his effects rack. Narc him to the cops. Do whatever you have to do to make his life miserable. Scare him into going back to his boombox pickup truck and out of the wonderful world of music. No punishment is too severe.”

This moment in history presents us, the members of the civilized world and music lovers world wide, an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. As the nation and even the world considers relaxing penalties for victimless crimes, we could turn to prosecuting criminals with thousands of victims who to get our punishment ya-ya’s out. Obviously, the thousands of big bank financial scammers, government officials who advocate the overthrow the government, corporate executives who have profited from decimating the environment or harming citizens with dangerous products, and anyone who betrays the public trust should be on that list. Beside that, though, what about the many “morons behind the sound board?” These violent criminals have deafened thousands of unsuspecting music lovers without suffering even civil prosecution since the early 1960s; 60 years of blatant negligent criminal behavior without even minor financial penalties.

If it were up to me, I’d just put the bastards against the wall and shoot them. Your mileage may vary, but at the last I think doing the kind of violence to music and a musical audience that I witnessed at the St. Paul Palace Theater in 2019 deserves as much jail time as a minor marijuana possession used to earn: back in the 60s, someone caught with practically any quantity of grass might expect a life sentence in toothless hillbilly states like Texas and much of the Midwest. Today, there are still parts of the country, like Minnesota  where possession of as little as 42.5g (1.5oz) gets a 5 year, $10,000 sentence. And if you don’t think those nutty laws are still being applied, you’re nuts. I especially like the idea of applying the three-strikes “mandatory 25-years imprisonment for repeated serious crimes” to live sound goobers. Like I said, in 1991, what’s the worst that happens if idiots suddenly don’t want to do the job because of the risk? If no one ever touched a live sound board again, music would be the primary beneficiary.

This Is How Stage Monitors Are Supposed to Work

Back in 2015, I was a regular volunteer back stage at the Red Wing Sheldon Theater. Initially, I did volunteer work pretty much the same way I’d worked paying gigs for the previous 40-some years. I’d show up for the unloading and setup and stand around back stage out of the way until the show was over and be there for the tear-down and load-out, staying until all of the cables were wrapped and put away and the stage and theater were swept up and ready for the next show. Almost like a theater employee, except without a paycheck. I don’t have any idea how many shows I worked, but it was a lot for the first 2-3 years we lived in Red Wing.

One of the weird things about volunteering is that most of the people who get paid to do these things are often way too impressed with themselves and they act as if they are granting you a favor in letting you do the grunt work. I’d run into that often long before I retired and was pretty much on a hair-trigger, ready to escape quickly on the first signs of that attitude when we moved to Red Wing. My tolerance for bullshit from “kids” (anyone 20 years younger than me or more) has slowly vanished with experience over the last 20 years. Lucky for me, the Sheldon’s Production manager, Russell Johnson, is not that kind of manager. As a professional lighting guy and stage manager, Russell actually appreciated my audio experience and as a result I got to do some really fun shows and escape the stuff I usually don’t like about live music: often that includes the actual live performances. My habit, after a few months of establishing myself as useful, was to stick around through setup and the sound check and if the sound check was a typical noise-producing disaster, I’d sneak out the back stage door and call it a night. Live music rarely gets better as the evening proceeds and if the band and/or sound goober are deaf at the beginning they will only be much worse a few minutes into the show. Been there, done that for decades. Don’t have any reason to suffer through it again. And Russell was fine with that.

I’ve been an Arlo Guthrie fan since the Alice’s Restaurant days, the record and the movie. So, when the Sheldon booked Arlo in 2015 I signed up to be part of that crew. The initial setup was pretty straight forward with the band bringing most of the gear they needed flushed out with some of the Sheldon’s backline and stage equipment. The sound check started off with the band, which included his kids—Abe and at least one of his daughters—doing what bands usually do with a sound check: making individual monitors and mixes as loud as possible. I’d pretty much decided not to stay for the show at that point.

After a bit of the usual musical ego-pumping, Arlo came out, moving to his mic at the front of the stage and listening for a bit. A few moments of that and he asked to have all of the monitor sends cut so he could hear the FOH mix. He had some suggestions for Russell about the house mix and asked for a bit of his voice and guitar added to his stage monitors. After he was satisfied, he turned to the band and said, “That’s good for me. You can do anything you want with your monitors as long as I don’t have to hear it.” And that is the way you manage stage volume. After Arlo’s sound-check moment, I decided to see if I could stay for the show and Russell let me find a SRO spot on the 2nd balcony where I could hear and see the show. It was terrific, musically and sonically.

After that, I had a spectacular experience with Leo Kottke at the Sheldon, a terrific evening hanging out with Buckwheat Zydeco, an excellent Ladysmith Black Mambazo show,  and a couple of weirdly fun experiences with the Southeast Tech “Strings, Winds & Brass” shows in 2016 & 2017. Eventually, general disappointment in amplified live music plus some conflicting opportunities working with Hobgoblin Music and the Crossings in 2016 and 2017, ending with a show with one of my all-time favorite live performers, Peter Mayer at the Crossings, convinced me it was time to hang up my live music tech shoes.

My days of lugging heavy equipment are in the past. I don’t need to injure myself doing stuff I would just as soon avoid (I’m talking to you, Elvy. I don’t need to rupture anything lugging giant pots full of weeds around the yard and house, either.) and 99% of amplified live music is at lest 50% distortion, 40% crappy mix, and rarely more than 10% music. I’ve seen everyone I have ever wanted to see and a few of them were even worth seeing. Almost nobody is worth what it costs to see them in concert today. Snarky Puppy put the last nail in that coffin in 2019. A lifetime of seeing most of the big name bands when labels were subsidizing tours and tickets were rarely more than $10, working shows and getting paid for being there, getting free concert tickets as an industry perk, and being invited backstage by someone in the band or the touring company has probably given me a severely devalued outlook on what live music is worth. But I’m glad I was there on those few occasions when everyone involved was more concerned with the music and the audience. Those are the shows I remember best.

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.

Making Your Own TC Helicon Perform and Play Acoustic 3 and 6 Switch Pedal Boxes

 Just for laughs, I decided to make my own version of the TC Helicon Switch 3 and Switch 6. First, because I'm cheap and have the "spare time" to do the research and assembly work and, second, because I wanted to fool around with "swirl painting."So, I did. 

What you see in these picture at left is the result. To highlight how cheap I really am, the 6-switch unit was made with the cover of  a gas water heater I had to replace this past winter. I made a nice looking wooden base for it, but you can only see the wood base when you are holding the switch box. The wood does add a decent amount of mass to the assembly, though, which helps to hold it in place on the floor. 

The 3-switch unit is a pretty simple and obvious device, except for the 3rd switch. As you can see from the schematic at right, the first two switches connect from ground/common to the ring or tip connector of the TRS jack. The third switch connects to both tip and ring through a pair of diodes (pay attention to the correct polarity) and to ground/common. It's not complicated wiring and the parts are cheap. 

I bought a pile (10) of cheap SPST momentary switches from Amazon and used them on both switch boxes. After almost a year of use, they are still working well. They are cheap plastic and I'm sure ham-footed use would break them and if you dawdle with the soldering iron you'll likely melt the plastic holding the solder tab. The switches must be momentary. If they aren't, you'll have to press the switch twice for each change action. That is NOT handy.

The six-switch unit is a little trickier than the three switch unit and requires some planning and assembly skills. Not many, though. Along with the  six SPST momentary switches, you'll need another TRS jack and seven 10k ohm resistors (anything, wattage-wise, will work). You can see I staggered my switches, mostly because I did not want a long switch box and because my TC Helicon PerformVG only has four harmony combinations that I am likely to use, so the two offset switches are for voice echo and guitar echo, which I almost never use. 
 
 I've included a second drawing for the six-switch unit, in case that layout makes more sense to you. They look different, but they are exactly the same circuit. The drawing at right might more resemble the physical layout of your assembly, which might make error-free assembly easier. I should note that I did not create any of the drawings included in this blog. I snagged them off of the internet, like you probably did when you found this essay. I should go back and find my sources, but that was about a year ago and I'm lazy. So, I didn't draw them, I apologize for not giving full credit where credit is due, and I used them and they work. In fact, the 3-switch unit works incredibly well on my Roland Cube Bass, too.

This is what my performance rig looks like, including a Bluetooth page-turner footswitch, a cheap Android 10" tablet for lyrics and chords, the TC Helicon PerformVG voice and guitar processor, and my trusty and beloved EV RE18 microphone. That and a powered speaker and I'm a louder-than-I-should-be busker or coffee house performer (should I ever want to be such a thing). With a set of in-ears, I can entertain myself for hours.

It Just Doesn’t Matter to Me? I Guess Not

The title of a GetPocket.com article, “Are You Forgetful? That's Just Your Brain Erasing Useless Memories” struck a nerve with me. The contents of the article reinforced that reaction. For almost 40 years, I’ve complained that when I quit playing in bands in the early-80’s I lost the ability to remember song lyrics. A neuroscientist, Dr. Blake Richards explains that we mistakenly believe that the “argument is that memory isn’t supposed to act like a video recorder, but instead like a list of useful rules that help us make better decisions.”

For 15+ years, I had hundreds of songs memorized—lyrics, chord progressions, solos, harmonies and melodies—and within a few weeks, of my deciding that playing in a live band wasn’t for me, all of that vanished. Before the year was out, all of those once-useful memories disappeared and, for the most part, I didn’t give it a moment of thought. I was very busy in my new life. Off and on over the next four decades I would occasionally and unsuccessfully try to learn a new song and be mildly baffled at my lack of success. I wouldn’t make the attempt again for several years each time.

This idea that importance is linked to memory isn’t new to me. 30 years ago, I started a new career as an engineer in a medical device company. Part of my job included training new employees, sales representatives, doctors and nurses in the company’s products. I had been doing in-house industrial training since the 1970’s, but those experiences were considerably less formal (product certifications were involved in medical devices) and the outcome of my new job’s training product could be life-or-death. I was renting a room from a friend when I first started in that job and he regularly amazed me with his ability to remember our “students’” names. I am sure I told him, “I just can’t remember names.”

We regularly watched NBA games after work, I was still a big Showtime L.A. Lakers fan and we were watching a game at the time. He replied, “Bullshit. You know the names of every NBA player down to the 13th guy on the bench. You just don’t care about the sales reps’ names.”

Of course, he was right. I didn’t. For the most part, I never did care about sales reps’ names, ever.

A decade later, I was beginning another new career as a college educator. One of the instructors in my new department was fired, partially, because he couldn’t be bothered to learn the names of the students in his half-dozen student labs. Listening to my new boss talk about how he felt that was disrespectful, I promised myself that I would learn my students’ names if it required tattooing their names on my eyeballs. For the most part, I managed that objective and I did it be making sure that I always cared about my students as human beings and potential associates in the industry within which we were all aspiring to work.

Finally, back to why I can’t remember songs today, I really don’t care about individual songs enough to memorize them. I have to admit that. I don’t believe, at this point in my life, songs are an important thing in my life. Music is important, but specific songs are not. Pop music has been the soundtrack to my whole life, but it has been a 50-year-long soundtrack. Other than the jazz that I stumbled upon when I was 11 or 12, specific pieces of music have held almost no claim to my life. Music as an overall thing is not-lifesaving or threatening. Musicians and their music comes and goes and is forgotten or remembered at random based on mostly emotional, juvenile nonsense. People in my generation “love” the Beatles because they were young and cute and hopeful when they first heard that music. Today, they are mostly MAGA assholes who would burn the world to a crisp just to hang on to their gas-guzzling SUVs and golf carts. My kids’ generation clings to punk and metal and disco for the same lame reasons. And on that silliness goes.

I like all kinds of music from pretty much every generation that has touched my life: not all of any of it, but there is some music from every period between the 1920’s (my grandparents’ music) to today (my grandkids’ music) that strikes my fancy in some way. But I don’t love any of it, at least any of it that I’m technically capable of playing, enough to spend the energy and braincells to memorize it. And now that I know why I seem to be unable to memorize music, I’m going to quit beating myself up for that “inability.” I have almost 500 songs on my performance tablet, charted, organized,

The one exception to that failed memory in the last 10 years has been Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers.” The lyric to that song, if you know me and my life, is clearly why that song remains important to me:

• I'm leaving my family,
• leaving all my friends.
• My body's at home,
• but my heart’s in the wind.

The first time I heard that song, at the end of a “Numb3rs” television episode, it struck a chord (literally and pun intended) with me that stuck like glue. That song’s lyrics are important to me. In the last year, a John Mayer song, “Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967," is beginning to stick, too. The lyric, “with a library card and a will to work hard” found a place in me that is as personal and important as “Shiver Me Timbers.”