Me and Bob

I left medical devices, mostly willingly, in mid-2001. It couldn't have been a much dumber time to leave a well-paying, secure, undemanding (not including ethical considerations) job.  A few months earlier, the tech economy had crashed when G.W. Bush was elected, blasting any hope for US investment in alternative energy or tech manufacturing and taking a fair amount of my retirement savings with it.  A year after that, with US national security sidelined while Republicans raped and pillaged the economy, the towers would fall in New York and the economy took a bigger hit. At least, by then what was left of my savings was securely isolated from the stock market.  Thanks to a series of incredibly lucky associations, in particular a friendship with Michael McKern, I fell out of one lucrative but painful situation into a far more complicated, lower paid, and infinitely more fun collection of situations.  As the song goes, "one thing leads to another."

25 years earlier, I had been working as an engineer for an Agricultural Equipment Company and, on the side, I was trying to start an audio services and equipment company with a friend. We called that company “Wirebender Audio Systems.” So, my day job was designing, testing and developing, and troubleshooting some fairly weird and complicated electronic control systems for guiding half-mile long center-pivot irrigation systems. And my nearly full-time Friday through Monday morning dream job was running a recording studio, a live sound company, and an audio systems installations business. 

There was only one place where those two very different vocations met: the agricultural equipment company often installed large, noisy diesel-powered generator systems close to suburban housing developments or at the edges of small towns. This would be in the late 1970s, when there were still some rules about disturbing the peace, unnecessary noise, and the sort of thing that no longer exists in this rapidly collapsing empire. So, one of the tasks I was given was to design an acoustic enclosure to contain a substantial amount of the noise (~30dB_SPL) those diesel motors generated. Other than the very rudimentary acoustic background that most musicians have a slight grip on and a bit more information I had collected in building our recording studio facilities, I knew very little about acoustics. Lucky for me, every other engineer in the company knew nothing. So, I got the assignment.  Those were also the days before most companies employed consultants for every out-of-the-ordinary assignment. 

It seems hard to imagine today, but there was a period when large, profitable American companies, relatively willingly, provided education resources for employees. And my employer was no different. To assist me in background for the assignment, the company paid for about 12 hours (three classes) of acoustics-oriented physics courses at the University of Nebraska and several out-of-state industry seminars including four days of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) national meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Today, there are several companies that specialize in prefab acoustic isolation enclosures, although not many are intended for four-season outdoor applications. And absolutely none of them would have fallen into the budget that I was given for the fabrication I had to design. I wish I had at least one picture of one of the finished enclosures, but the designs were proprietary and back in the film days I didn't take many pictures.  At least for me, that experience turned into a lot more than a one-off industrial construction design. 

One of the half-dozen routes I went for earning a living after leaving medical devices, was acoustic consulting. The Twin Cities was a dumb place for a 53-year-old to start that kind of career, since there were a plethora of actual acoustic experts there at that time. But, I found a niche and several of those local experts turned out to be incredibly helpful, generous, and a few became good friends. My membership in ASA and some of the connections I made there didn’t hurt, either. 

One of those lucky friendships, David Berg from Orfield labs, recommended me to Bob Feldman, the owner of Red House Records.  Bob was trying to help the Cedar Cultural Center with acoustic problems in their performance hall. I have been retired since mid-2013 and I haven't done much of anything that wasn't purely recreational since retirement. Today it's hard, even for me, to remember how incredibly hectic and chaotic a good bit of my life was back then. That is as close as I can come to an excuse for not knowing why the project with Bob and the Cedar fell off of my radar.

Bob's big focus was to make some quick improvements to the facility before Tony Rice and his group—The Tony Rice Unit with Mike Marshall, Darol Anger, and Todd Phillips—performed and recorded at the Cedar sometime between late 2001 and 2004.  (Sorry, I can’t nail it down any tighter than that, date-wise.)  There wasn't much we could do in a short time that would even be musically noticeable, let alone an actual improvement. There was a lot less we could do with the almost non-existent budget the Cedar had for acoustic treatments.  So, that project fell into the background noise of my life. 

I had the really special opportunity to work with Bob on two Red House artists' concerts and the Tony Rice show and I did some work on one song for a Red House compilation record. It never felt like work with Bob. He loved the music, the venue, the audiences, and the artists and that feeling was infectious.  I either didn’t know or had forgotten that Bob died in early 2006.  He was only 56 and two years younger than me.  When this story started to form in my mind, I fully expected to see that Bob was retired or still going strong.  So, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t and that Red House Records was no longer a Minnesota label, as of 2017.  2017 was obviously a bad year for many things. 

 

“I’m An American” (also 😊, me too)

 Bruce Springsteen’s song, “The Streets of Minneapolis” came out of the gate swinging and smacked Donny’s fragile ego right in the balls.  In “response,” Pedo President came out moaning, “White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson shared in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The Trump administration is focused on encouraging state and local Democrats to work with federal law enforcement officers on removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from their communities — not random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information. The media should cover how Democrats have refused to work with the administration, and instead, opted to provide sanctuary for these criminal illegals’ and Pedo himself whined back with a limp-wristed slap, calling Springsteen “dumb as a rock” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.” (I guess Trump thinks he’s an expert on “dried out prunes,” since he has to look at one in the mirror while some poor makeup “artist” slathers orange paint on his face.)

But even a biased right-wing source like Forbes Magazine has been forced to admit, “Bruce Springsteen’s ICE Protest Song Soars To No. 1” and not just in Minnesota or the USA but in 19 countries and counting.  Bruce took his rage and channeled it into an anthem that people are singing around the world and in some very unusual places.  Fairly often, I volunteer at our local hospital and last Friday, as I drove to my “shift” at the hospital, I was listening to “The Streets of Minneapolis” in my car.  It put me in a good mood, which has been rare the past year.  As I was pushing my cart through the hospital, the song was a total earworm and I have never enjoyed the stuck song syndrome more.  In one of the clinic’s departments a nurse who I often talk to when I’m doing that job asked, “What’s got you in such a good mood?” 

I said, “I have a song in my heart and it’s moving my feet, too.”  She wanted to know what the song was and I asked, “Are you sure you want to know?”  She did and I played the chorus of “Minnesota” and, in less than a line in, she and two other nurses started singing along with Bruce and the E Street Band, “Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice, singing through the bloody mist.  We'll take our stand, for this land, and the stranger in our midst.  Here in our home, they killed and roamed, in the winter of '26.  We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.” 

If you are living under a fucking rock and haven’t heard this new anthem for protest, freedom, and getting off of your dead ass (if you’re American) and standing on your hind legs and doing something, here it is:

In early 2020, friends and I started playing music online through a couple of online, real-time music collaboration services (initially Jamkazam, currently Sonobus) and that resulted in e writing my first original tune since the late 1970s, “I Don’t Want to Do This Anymore.”  The constant barrage of Republican lies during the early days of COVID and as the 2020 election approached “inspired” me to write a second song, “I’m An American (Lie to Me).”  The bullshit was so intense I actually made a slight attempt to move this song into public view with a YouTube video.  Last I knew it was on a few of the music streaming services, but I haven’t kept up with that because it’s not worth anything other than some kind of ego boost.  Bruce’s song, in 4 days, has 368,000 hits and my song, in 5 years, has 368.  We’re not in the same league.

However, when I was ranting about how great “Streets of Minneapolis” is to a friend, he told me he thought “I’m An American” was at least as good.  It isn’t, but I’m not ashamed of it, which isn’t a small thing for me.  As my YouTube video description explains, “It would have remained an acoustic guitar-only folk song without Harold Goodman's having written and recorded a killer bass part, which forced me to add electric guitar tracks to the song. Stu Anderson and Scott Jarrett added pedal steel guitar and keyboards, online, through Jamkazam.com. Michael McKern recorded the drums in his home studio space.” 

It’s almost impossible to explain how much I dislike video editing and the fact that I’ve only managed to put two of my songs into videos is some kind of evidence to that fact.  My friends and I (we call our group thing Downstream Consequences) have managed, so far, to record 41 cover songs and 19 originals since 2000.  And you can listen to it all in my Dropbox Original Music MP3 folder.  Even download some or all of it, if you feel so inspired.  In the absence of an album cover with snazzy artwork, credits, and the usual album stuff, I’ve created a document, “Liner Notes.pdf,” that does all of that paraphernalia in a small, electronic format. 

For what it’s worth, I’m adding “I’m An American” to the long list of songs inspired by Trump and the fascist in a long line of protest songs that goes back far before Woody Guthrie and even the labor protest songs of the 1890s.  When we can’t do anything else, song, poetry, and story is how we mark where we stand against inequity, violence, lies, misery, and outright evil. 

Thanks for your attention to this matter and, Donald Trump and all Republicans, fuck you. 

Demanding Attention or Earning It?

One of the two best jobs I had in my 50 year working life was the 8 1/2 years I worked for QSC Audio Products in Costa Mesa, California. I started as an engineer and left a manager and the ownership, especially Pat Quilter and John Andrews, were always not just supportive but good friends. The company I started with in 1983 wasn’t at all the same place when I left, but it was still a pretty good place to work and the products we made were always something I felt proud to be associated with. At least all of that was true until one of my last escape trips to San Francisco. The products didn’t change, but my perception of what amplification and our products were doing to music, musicians, and the audience shifted dramatically over a short period of time.

There used to be a lot of music on the streets of San Francisco, before the place turned into a bankers’ paradise and hell for everyone else. I would ride my motorcycle up PCH to San Francisco, snag a room at a motel on Fulton Street across from Golden Gate Park and a couple of blocks from the ocean, lock up the bike, and take the bus downtown to wander the streets near the pier or take the Bart to Berkeley and hunt for music and street entertainment. I was never disappointed or at a loss for something to look at and listen to on those trips. On that last trip, Fisherman’s Warf was brimming with entertainment. Walking along Embarcadero was like being in the middle of a festival; comedians, magicians, con artists (“I bet $5 I can tell you where you got your shoes.”, and musicians on every corner, part of almost every storefront. The street talent was intimidating. None of it was amplified and all of it was audible. I stood in a small crowd and listened to a guitarist who could have been Michael Hedges, his technique and style was that striking and original, until he took a break. I suspect his tip jar haul that morning was at least $200, it was overflowing with $10 and $20 bills. A little further down the street, there were at least 50 people clustered around a comedian whose routine was pretty much a hip take on Don Rickles and no one escaped un-insulted. I heard classical violin, bluegrass banjo and acoustic guitar duets, a solo singer unaccompanied by anything other than the applause of her audience, a sax trio, and a kid who duplicated Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solos as perfectly as humanly possible. By the time I found the Bart for Berkeley, I was down almost $100 well-spent entertainment dollars.

Downtown Berkeley was a different story. There were still entertainers and great street food vendors, as before, but everyone was amplified. Right off of the Bart, I was assaulted by a loud three-piece blues band producing more noise and distortion than music, even though it was sort of obvious that the players were talented. Instead of attracting a crowd of listeners, the band’s cacophony acted like a cop telling people “Move along, nothing to see/hear here.” The less attention they attracted, the louder they got, and the more alone they were. It didn’t get better on the street. There must have been a dozen amplified acts in two blocks of Shattuck Avenue and they were all competing with each other for attention and irritation factor. There were no crowds of people around any of them. There were a couple of non-amplified performers, but they were drowned out by the electronic “enhancement” of their entertainment neighbors. My prime motivation for going to Berkeley was always a food cart near the Bart station that served the most astounding shrimp-stuffed rice flower confections. I stocked up, hiked over to the UofC Berkeley campus and found a quiet spot to eat.

Afterwards, walking around the campus grounds, I was back in unamplified territory. The University of California campus is, in my opinion, one of the wonders of the world. The place houses the best engineering, chemistry, science, journalism, creative writing, and music departments in the known universe and the campus is beautiful. My alma mater, then Cal State Long Beach, is a beautiful campus and I spent hundreds of hours enjoying those gardens and buildings, but Berkeley is a level above that. As you might expect and I definitely hoped, it wasn’t hard to find students producing amazing music there and that helped gird me for the noise gauntlet I’d have to pass through on my way back to the Bart.

Back at home, in Huntington Beach, a few days later I was stuck revisiting that experience: entertainment vs noise production, attracting attention vs demanding it. Our company, QSC Audio, at the time only made power amplifiers¹. Our whole mission was to increase the volume of any damn signal to the point of pain and beyond. In concert after concert, bar after bar, and even a few neighborhood parties, I witnessed the abuse, misuse, and needlessness of most audio amplification; almost all amplification, in fact. As much as I liked the company and the people I worked with, the products seemed to me to have no other purpose than to destroy music and music appreciation. The more powerful our amplifiers became, the worse the music they amplified sounded. It wasn’t, of course, the fault of the amplification, but it was because there is no qualifications required to use the stuff. Any damn moron with a few thousand dollars can buy a PA system and turn music into deafening noise.

Other than making money, I could not see the point in our corporate existence. Up to that moment, I’d felt like we were part of the music business and making a contribution to music. Afterwards, not so much. That might have been the moment when I realized that I need some sort of “mission” in my life to be happy, but I’m not that bright. It took 10 wasted years in medical devices flailing about looking for a purpose in a purposeless industry, severe burnout, and the good luck to have met Michael McKern, a man to whom “mission” is a core principle, to clue me into the concept.

Now, watching even folk musicians at local farmers’ markets drag their bullshit battery-powered Roland or Fishman rigs out to try and demand the attention they feel they so richly deserve or seeing bands like Snarky Puppy, who should know better based on their semi-live album sound quality, let ego overwhelm any attempt at sound quality and a musical experience is just painful. It is a painful reminded that I spent a good bit of my life enabling this garbage and nothing I do can atone for it. The fact is, if your music is worth listening to, it will be heard. Yeah, some deaf assholes will bitch “I can’t hear you,” but sacrificing the quality of your performance for deaf people won’t fix their problem and it will drive away people who give a damn.

¹ We’d experimented with some “brass and fern bar” products, QSC Series 2, that included line inputs, phono inputs, and a mic pre for announcement purposes. The products stunk and the market was gone before we managed to deliver an unwanted product. One of our CEO’s brilliant ideas that should have been ignored until he went back to pestering secretaries.

Original Music: “I’m An American”

This is the first song I've actually "finished" in almost 50 years. Obviously, being fenced in during the COVID pandemic had a lot to do with it. More importantly, the contributions of four friends--Harold Goodman, Stuart Anderson, Scott Jarrett, and Michael McKern—practically forced me to move this song from a half-hearted folk song that I might play for friends hanging around our backyard on a summer evening to what it has turned into (whatever that is). I’m not sure there is a better outlet for something like this than YouTube. 

Parts of it were recorded in home studios: Michael McKern’s drums, Harold Goodman’s bass part, my vocals, acoustic and electric guitars). Some parts were recorded live through Jamkazam sessions: Scott’s keyboards and Stu’s steel guitar were pieced together, and synchronized, from several live recordings over a couple of months.  The percussion instruments and some other “instruments” are Apple Logic X effects from Logic’s “Drummer” feature.

The song was produced and mixed in Logic X (v10.3.2) by me at home in my funky upstairs spare bedroom/office on a 13-year-old Mac Pro 3,1 running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) through a MOTU UltraLite-mk3 interface, in case you are interested in that sort of thing. If nothing else it proves that I am not constrained by not owning state-of-the-art hardware or software, as good or bad as the outcome may be. I’m old, my gear is old, and it’s a race between me and the gear to see who plays out first. I expect the gear to win. The vocals were recorded with an AKG C141ULS, an RE18, and the acoustic guitar was my Composite Acoustics OX recorded both with the C414ULS and the guitar’s pickup, a Seymore Duncan Mag-Mic pickup (thanks for the recommendation, Brian). And that’s about all there is to say about that stuff.

The song is, obviously hopefully, about the dark, decadent times we live in and the very similar times I have experienced all through my 72 years. From my early years of duck-and-cover exercises in 1950’s Cold War Midwestern grade school classrooms to the Vietnam War that commenced as I became a teenager to the collection of endless wars and invasions the country has mindlessly and arrogantly engaged in since Reagan’s gangsters and the host of faux-conservative, Republicans and Democrats, who represent the 1% of the country who profit from wars, who profit from ecological devastation and neglect, who wallow in the spoils of economic inequality that defines this country, and the despicable people who are profit by lying to a gullible public that is too lazy to read a book, who won’t bother with understanding history, science, or technology, and who imagine that complaining about their government is in some way “participating” in democracy. As the song says, we’d rather be lied to than to have to raise up on our hind legs and do something to make the country and world a better place.

One of my favorite 1950’s science fiction authors, Theodore Sturgeon, said something like “90% of everything is crap.” Since my years protesting the Vietnam War, I have been convinced that Mr. Sturgeon was an optimist. I doubt that more than 1% of anything is more than shit. So, keep lying to us and we’ll keep believing it. We’re Americans and “nobody ever went broke under-estimating the intelligence of the American consumer” (except Trump, of course, because he can’t even get that right).

The “I’m Gonna Quit” Story

There is a long, semi-funny story behind that song and the first recording and THIRD recording. We were living in Fremont, Nebraska at the time. I’d been laid off of my 1^st engineering job and had taken a position as tech services manager for an Omaha office equipment company, servicing Burroughs Corporation word processors and IBM Selectric typewriters among other electric and electronic equipment. It was a miserable job with a terrible company, but there weren’t many tech jobs in 1976 Nebraska. A few days before the song’s birth the owner of the company told me I had to lay off 2-3 of my newest, most capable technicians because they were “overqualified” and he wanted the money for raises for a couple of his bimbo saleswomen. The tech service department was not only making the company money, for the first time in the company’s history, but our service was attracting IBM customers and the sales commissions on those machines was better than anything a car salesman could make. Today, I would assume he was screwing the sales bimbos, then I was a pretty innocent/gullible 28-year-old.

Another insane Republican had driven the US economy into the dirt and times were somewhere between terrible and disastrous. We “sold” our house at a $5,000 loss (on a $20,000 original purchase), although on paper it looked like we broke even; I paid the “buyers” $5,000 under the table to make their down payment. I had arranged an Omaha apartment for us to move to, but at the last minute (before any money changed hands) Elvy wasn’t going to go. She’d asked a friend in Scribner, Nebraska for help and he’d offered her (and us) a house he owned that needed a lot of work but was livable and he would pay for the work and materials. $80 a month rent, which was workable on Nebraska’s unemployment. One morning, I called the office company owner and said, “I was sick when I took this job, I’m better now and I quit.” No notice, no two weeks, nothing. I hadn’t worked there long enough to damage my Unemployment from my engineering job so I had nothing to lose.

Before we packed up our belongings and gave away everything that wasn’t going to fit in our new far-smaller home, two friends (Dan Tonjes and Mark Von Seggern) and I hit the basement “studio” for one last blast of our past and we recorded the twanging electric guitar part, vocal, bass (Dan), and drums (Mark) to my new song, “I’m Gonna Quit” on two of my Teac 3340’s four tracks (drums ALWAYS get tracked in stereo). After we were sort of settled in to the house in Scribner, I wanted to add a distorted guitar part and an extended percussion into and outro. Dan and/or Mark knew the Scribner school music instructor and “borrowed” a wheelbarrow full of school percussion instruments. We used the other two 3340 tracks on I don’t remember how many percussion players gathered from our friends in Scribner and my guitar part and I had a song and a recording. I still love that original recording, as rough as it is.

A decade later, a Nebraska friend and one of the guys (a drummer) who we used in the studio occasionally was in a band being fronted by Barry Fey’s company. I’d given him a cassette of my songs back in the 70s and he’d played it for the band and they wanted two of my songs: “Down on the Beach” and I’m Gonna Quit.” By “wanted” I mean they wanted me to give them the publishing rights and authorship in exchange for . . . nothing. I declined, but they recorded the two songs anyway and the band dissolved and nothing happened to the recordings after a lot of money was spent and the usual 80’s rock and roll silliness ensued.

When I moved to Denver in 1991, I looked up the lead singer of that band and she gave me a cassette copy of their take on my song. It was . . .entertaining, but I could see how the band didn’t take with audiences or promoters. Too much Pat Benatar, too late.

Through my following studio years, I always wanted to redo “I’m Gonna Quit” with a little more fidelity, but recreating the attitude, energy, random-ness and creativity of the performance and percussion section overwhelmed me. Sometime around 2002, Michael McKern and I gave it a shot with the original recording as our “click track,” we recorded his drums, the clean electric guitar parts, some background vocal ideas, and a decent acoustic guitar part to his 24-track MCI JH24 deck and bounced that to Pro Tools. And . . . nothing. I was still stuck without a way to pull off the percussion section and that was a gumption trap.

Jump to August 2020 and I’ve been playing music, on-line, through JamKazam, with four friends: Harold Goodman, Stu Anderson, and Scott Jarrett since March. We’re messing with original music and covers and they’ve irrationally designated me “vocalist” because no one else wants to sing, including Scott who is an infinitely better vocalist than me and about 1,000 times the musician. Michael has been dubbing drum parts to my original songs via Dropbox and, when I tell him I can’t get into finishing off “I’m Gonna Quit” because my attempts at doing a percussion part either with real instruments or Logic X’s loops or MIDI just sucked, Michael knocks out six tracks of the percussion instruments you will hear on the recording. Hesitantly, I offer up “I’m Gonna Quit” to Harold and we fool with it for a bit on line and he, as usual, asks “Should we record it?”

This was the first time I had sung the song since 1978, other than noodling around with ideas with Michael almost 20 years ago. The vocal you hear on this recording, for better or worse, is my first take at the song in August of this year. I’ve sung it with the group on JamKazam a dozen or more times, since, and tried to overdub it with a “better” microphone in my office/studio and I still like this take the best. I musta been really pissed off at something (probably Trump) that day. Harold’s bass line was the perfect foil for the busy percussion and guitars and Stuart’s steel guitar and Scott’s organ and the rest was my problem. My wife, Robbye, suggested industrial, work sounds to go with the percussion intro and outro and that pretty much filled in everything I thought was missing. I did keep a lot of my last vocal stuff from the times we recorded the song on JamKazam for the outro. All of that “I don’t need this” and “I’m gonna quit” and the rest after the last chorus was cut-and-pasted from every other take of the song.

This is the final, newest, bestest version of my song, “I’m Gonna Quit,” featuring my friends Michael McKern, Harold Goodman, and Scott Jarrett. I can not express the obligation I feel toward all of them for making this happen. Not out of arrogance but out of personal history, I do love this song and I am really happy with this version. It is, finally, done.

Messy Exits and Revising History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Can't Go Home Again

In late-March, a friend from Detroit visited the Cities and we got together at the downtown St. Paul Keys Restaurant for breakfast Saturday morning. I can't remember the last time I was in downtown St. Paul and didn't run into someone I know, but that Saturday was a time when that happened (or didn't happen). I couldn't help look around the restaurant for familiar faces. From 2001 on, I ate a lot of meals in that place with a lot of friends and it was eye-opening to realize that they were all scattered to the winds because of the McNally Smith College debacle. St. Paul isn't the same place it was a few years ago. As a result of that hole in our visit, we decided to walk over to the former home of the school. He sent me a few of the pictures he took and those pictures inspired this essay.

For the first time since I turned in my last course grades in 2013, I returned to the scene of the McNally Smith College crimes. Not long after I retired, my wife and I took a winter-long camper trip west. When we came back, we got serious about downsizing our possessions, bought a house in Red Wing, sold our Little Canada house, and started our new life in small town Minnesota. Other than by staying in touch with former students through Facebook and a few of the school's instructors and administrative employees, I didn't think much about the school or its fortunes until in late December of 2017 when I received a flurry of emails from friends still working at the school; the school's owners suddenly decided to close the school a week before Christmas break.

There are people who claim they had no idea the school was in trouble when it suddenly closed the doors. I'm not among that group. There were multiple times during the 13 years I worked at MSCM when it was apparent the school's management was dysfunctional, uncommitted, and disconnected. In fact, pretty much every time I came in contact with either Jack McNally or Doug Smith it was obvious that they were incredibly lucky to have been owners of something like a music "college" rather than desperately poor marginal musicians trying to make a living teaching guitar in a music store closet. Unless you’ve ever met a “job creator,” you could be fooled into believing that all sorts of positive attributes contributed to their success. In most cases, the successful entrepreneurs I’ve known were just incredibly lucky and their real work behind their success had nothing to do with the owners’ involvement; or lack of.

All of the school's success was due to people McNally and Smith hired more out of accident than management brilliance. Somehow a few competent and committed people who found their way into positions of authority and management; mostly because Jack and Doug were busy admiring themselves in the mirror. Michael McKern, for example was exclusively responsible for the complicated and timely move from the Minneapolis Musictech facility to the abandoned St. Paul Science Museum building in 2001. Occasionally, Michael would shepherd Jack and Doug through the construction project, showing them where the money was being spent and describing what the school would look like when the contractors were finished (just in time for the beginning of the 2002 spring semester). The two "owners" were about as involved in that process as a pair of squirrels watching a house being constructed across the street from the forest where they lived.

I was in a few committees that included either Jack or Doug during the years I worked for MSCM. I was always amazed at how decoupled they seemed from what was going on in the facility they later decided to rename after themselves. One of my favorite fables about MSCM is pretty much the story about the school's name found on Wikipedia, "Formerly known as Musictech College, McNally Smith College took its new name in honor of its two founders, Jack McNally and Doug Smith, on its 20th anniversary celebrated in 2005." That is a pretty funny take on the fact that the accrediting organizations (to use that term loosely) strongly advised the school to lose the "tech" aspect from the original school name, MusicTech. The goofballs from National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) met with the accreditation committee members and told us that they had a problem with "tech" being associated with higher education. I wondered if they had the same problem with MIT, the three Cal Tech variations, Georgia Tech, Illinois Institute of Technology,

Florida Tech, Texas Tech, Virginia Polytech, etc? It was a rhetorical question, since I doubt any of those schools would bother with a low-life group of wannabe academics like the NASM characters. Nobody even tried to answer that question, though. In the end, the naming committee recommended a collection of music-related possibilities with the suggestion that "anything but McNally Smith College" would be a not-awful possibility. The "in honor" part of Musictech College being renamed to “McNally Smith College of Music” was purely inspired and demanded by Jack and Doug. I suppose, otherwise how would anyone know they had anything to do with the school?

In a Star Tribune article about the closing, Jack McNally was quoted as having sent an email "asking faculty and staff to 'consider finishing the term and issue grades as usual to avoid these horrific consequences for our students, even if it is without pay, simply for the sake of our students.'” That might be the first thing I ever heard of that Jack did "for the sake of our students." However, since all of the effort and cost of providing that service would be coming from faculty and administration personnel who would not be paid for the work, it's tough to cut Jack even a little slack. One of the last things the remaining administration folks did was on display on one of the school's doors: a "transfer fair." That must have been sobering, disappointing, and a slap in the face for everyone involved. It has been a well-known fact for most of the school's life that few credits were transferable to any real college. Often, no credits were transferable and sometimes no credential was allowed for a MSCM degree when a student decided to try to continue his or her education with one of the more traditional and substantial higher education facilities.

I admit I felt sad and disappointed when I saw the state of the school and when I took these pictures. A lot of effort and commitment went into creating the facilities inside this building and even though much of that work was done 16 years ago, it could have gone on being useful and valuable for a lot more years. Everything ends, but this particular institution ended in the most despicable way possible.

From the beginning of the semester in August 2017, there is no chance (other than gross incompetence) that the administration and ownership did not know precisely the day, or week at the worst, the school would run out of cash, based on the registration and tuition available. IYou’d think at least some regulatory agency would be taking note. In a decent world, you’d think the employees of the school would be owed a formal explanation and apology along with substantial severance pay for the interruption to their careers, the economic strain the sudden closure and unpaid work the owners expected from them, and their inconvenience and displacement.

Yeah, I admit it. I’m pissed off. I left a lot of friends at MSCM when I retired in 2013. I expected the school to slowly wind down and, eventually, either close or be absorbed by a competitor or just someone who either wanted the facility for a school or someone who wanted the real estate. At no point during the years that I knew them did I expect much from either Jack McNally or Doug Smith or Harry Chalmiers, but I expected more than this. If this turns out to be a ruthless cashout of the real estate and assets, I will not be surprised.