Insights In Sound 199 Dave Shadoan, Founder, Sound Image S20 E9

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Welcome to Insights and Sound, where we talk to the people behind the scenes, behind the technology, and behind the
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music. People you may not know, but you should. And please check out
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insightsandsound.com for a full list of our podcasts and YouTube series.
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Insights and Sound is made possible with the support of our friends Obs Roland
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A.EA Ribbon Mics, Solid State Logic, Session Wire, Pantheon Media.
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[Music] I’m here with the illustrious
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Dave Shidan, the founder of Soundage. Sound Image,
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prior known as Silverfish Audio. The company was founded by Ross and Joel Silverman. And you know Joel Silverman?
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I do know Joel Silverman. I did not. That’s why it was called Silverfish. But it’s funny because that’s how it all
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started in Rochester, New York. Some of the original guys were actually the guy
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who went on to make Whirlwind. Michael Mhm. Uh and also the Billy and David from who
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went on to make Ashley Audio. Joel didn’t want to tour. I didn’t know Joel had anything to do
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with this. He was Bonnie Ray’s first soundman ever. 1971. Really? Yeah. Wow.
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I saw pictures, I think, of the last tour he ever did, which was in 75. I had no idea. Interesting. Okay.
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I like Joel. We had a we had kind of a a interesting beginning because he was not with the company
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anymore. He was actually I think he went to MXR or something. The first reverse Millennia Millennium Media.
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He did. Well, yeah. Before that, he was a lexicon from inception until Harmon said, “You guys have to
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come to Utah.” Uhhuh. And he said, “I’m not going to Utah.” And then he went to Millennium, which
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he’s still doing something kind of sort of. Yeah. Yeah. If he’s working at all.
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Well, I stay in touch with him, you know, cuz I It was actually literally his part that get got funded by me.
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There was some kind of curvy stuff, you know, somebody had some and whatever. And there were a couple other guys who
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gotten involved with Joel and I slowly uh paid Joel’s share.
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Funny. I had no idea he was Yeah. We changed the name from Silverfish Audio and became a DBA sound
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image because we built a studio in Laccasta for MTV videos
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which is about basically around the time you got on my radar. And then I was um I
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did artist relations for sure. Mhm. Back in the um late 80s, early 90s. Same time as Jack.
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Actually, I worked with Jack. Okay. Um in fact, I was Jack in Europe. Oh.
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So, I’m the one that brought them to the Montro Festival and whatnot. And I actually um I came in through u I was
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hired by a guy in Germany uh who was sort of their um troublesome general who had been exiled to Germany.
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Oh, I see. And then um I basically did something there where um they did they
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weren’t interested the Germans weren’t interested in doing the Montro Jazz Festival. They thought it was just another little Swiss festival.
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Messed that one up, didn’t he? Well, I was um I then immediately said something along the lines of, “Are you
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out of your minds?” And I went directly to Jack and that’s kind of how we connected. Um so I was
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within the space of 24 hours fired by Shore Germany and hired by Jack. you.
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Well, it’s funny because, you know, Jack was always very kind to us. You know, he say, “Hey, you got an
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artist. I’ll give you a, you know, have them do this or whatever new products.”
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And u it must have been about 1985. Uh, buyer dynamics, which I was a big
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fan of the M88 pre-kick drum, right? When actually s people sang using it for
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vocal mic. It was a great vocal mic. If you put it on a kick drum though, you could never sing into it again.
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Yeah. But Phil Collins used to sing into them and Phil Collins had an endorsement. This is a funny thing, right?
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Phil Collins, someone else and me. Really? Yeah. So anyone I mix, they just give me
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a boatload. And Jack Jack kind of was like, “Dude, you know what’s going on
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here?” Yeah. I mixed f I mixed five years of Robert Cray and there wasn’t a
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microphone up there that wasn’t either experimental never happened or or became
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a a industry standard. Too funny cuz when I came to Montro that was the old silverheaded ones.
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Yeah, exactly. that when I came to Montro buyer was basically the only microphone they were using
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and I came in there with a bunch of shore stuff and you know they ate it up right away and I I ended up calling Jack
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from Germany which is where I was living at the time. Yeah. And uh I called him up and I said, “Jack, how do you feel about the Montro
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Jazz Festival?” It’s like a 3se secondond pause and what do you need? You know, and the next thing I know I’ve
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got like nine crates of microphones shipped to me the next couple of days, you know. Yeah. Well, Helen and John Meyer did a
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great job of hanging on to that. Absolutely. And they are they are godlike. We um I mean we used to spend every
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summer I used to spend there with remember Mark Johnson who used to do their uh their PR. Yeah. And uh Greg
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McVey he and I connected and Greg two days ago. Well, you know, I’m in I’m in his book
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as part of the uh the brain trust in the intro. U Yeah, me too. Yeah. Actually, I’m the first number I was the
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first one single question. He calls he calls me up. He says, “What do you think about this?” And I said, “I
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think it’ll be fine.” Mine was about what’s it feel like to not be on the
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road anymore? My question was and uh how do you feel, you know, what’s the
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difference of being just an office jockey or when you mix for 30 years?
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And I said, “Well, the one thing I miss, I don’t miss a bus. I don’t miss anything about these 18our days except
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the show.” Right? And I said, “When the lights went down, if my palms didn’t sweat,
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I wasn’t doing something right because that’s that moment of clarity where everything has to be right.
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Everything clicks into place.” Yeah, that’s right. And he was So that’s my that was my answer to his question.
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I love it, man. Yeah. McVey, uh, he and I go way back to Montro, like I said, you know. Well, I met him at QSC. Actually,
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Soundcraft. Wow. Yeah. He was he was at Soundcraft and then he went to QSC and he’s the guy who
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convinced Soundage to go there and then all those years he would go out in the summer and play with Jimmy Buffet at the
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road was uh us putting him out there. Oh, I love it. Cuz it was a tiein. And here’s this funny story about QSC. We live in
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Prescott, Arizona now. It’s been 2 and 1/2 years. We come, we go mostly winter.
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Mhm. Well, we got out there. I find out that Barry Andrews lives there. He does.
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Yes. way to Santos. Uhhuh. And Prescuit. I love it. Matter of fact, God, we’re going to have dinner
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next week, but I hadn’t seen him in 15 years cuz, you know, he stepped away. Yeah. And then they sold the company, as you
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know, last year for 1.6 billion or something. Wow. Yeah. You read that? Well, yeah. Well, the brothers um when I
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first started working with QSC, it was, you know, the three of them basically, John and Patrick and Barry.
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Yeah. Exactly. and and um I worked with this was like when they were just making
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amplifiers of course you know well that whole speaker thing was me why does that not surprise me
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that’s we we formed a separate company to make speakers because a and it was
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mainly Barry and John some because John was the CFO so financially John was the money
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he’s looking down the road and they all said well this meer company they’re putting my amplifiers in their
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speakers and if we don’t get out in front of to this. Nobody might buy an amplifier. It goes in Iraq anymore.
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Well, of course, it never really really happened cuz this was in 2001.
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Yeah, that’s about right. And we had this little separate company in the middle that managed the speaker manufacturing.
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So, Sound image and QSC were autonomous. That’s interesting. And I built a 200 something thousand
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square foot factory down the street from me. We made JBL, Yamaha. Everything we did
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was OEM, though. That explains a lot. I see. I mean, this is one of the reasons that I definitely wanted to interview you because you’ve
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had your finger in all these little things here that you know, well, it’s creative. Yeah, that stuff is creative. And before that,
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I was I worked on the PM 30000, 4000, 4000M, PM1D. I was actually
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You did the PM1D? Yeah, I went to work there uh once a month. Oh my god. They would come back.
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Well, I can tell you it was Stan Miller uh was one of them. Uh, Trip Caiff was also part of the
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Yeah. And we weren’t, you know, building the interior. We were trying to figure out how to make
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the exterior interface because no one had push buttons to get around on the console yet except for that French board
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called a Nova. And that was the whole challenge for everybody was like, how are we going to get people to actually adopt this
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technology when they’re all analog based and everybody wants faders in front of them? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And if you look at a
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PM1D, you’ll see analog guy technology because it has an input section over
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here with every knob and one over there. So you can go over here and say, “Hey,” and it’s up here.
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And now you operate it as if it’s in the strip. It’s workflow. Yeah. And now there was a
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I was always a monitor engineer. I was never uh a front of house guy.
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That explains a lot. That explains why you had to have the urgency factor. Yeah. Well, by choice, you know, I I
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always felt that the relationship with the artist was better served by the owner of the company if I was with him
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because you remember in the early days, you know, nobody had a thousand employees. Nobody had, you know, if you had 12.
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Yeah. So, you know, we have three tours out and we had to all go mix them. You know, Adams is doing Jackson Brown and Ros is
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doing Jimmy and I’m off with somebody else. you I had a few years there with Warren back in the uh late ‘7s, early
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80s. Um so, you know, it’s just interesting
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because we had no choice but to use what we had today. The kids, they go on tour,
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you know, they want eight spare speakers, two-way amplifiers, whatever. We had no spare. We just pulled out a
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soldering iron and fixed it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the other thing about it was in those days, you didn’t have systems. Everything was cobbled
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together, right? You know, you had you had speakers from one company, you had No, no, we built everything off. Never
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bought anything crossovers that you built yourself and stuff. Well, yeah. Partred up. I got AAC to build me my
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first set of really like hot rod and they were in a three space rack and they
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were cards and every card could be, you know, 1k, 10k, whatever, you know,
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and they had a built-in compressors and they came right off of the AX studio console,
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the Scorpion or No, no, not the live the recording console, the big one. Really? Okay. Because and they also, by
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the way, made compressors that came out of that board and we had those 10 of them in a rack in a row, the same exact
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comp on the on the studio board. So, was your background studio? No. No.
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You just knew enough about what was going on in studio. I got to know the AAC buys because John Penn who went on
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to built SSSE hire in England, right, was working for AAC because he as they
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used to say in the days it’s a garden company and he literally every you know PenFab.
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Yeah. John Pen. Yeah. They were building it in his uh like the way he puts it, I hope I
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get this right, John, is it was in his garden and the guys were out there making all that metal plates and
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everything and at the same time he was running SSE and at the same time he was
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working for Amech who brought me there was Arie Toshner.
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You know Arie, right? I I know the name but I can’t place it. Oh, he’s still around. He’s a character. And then the reason I
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think um there was some uh interaction with Yamaha on the first digital stuff
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because remember they came out with the Promix01 first, right? Which was a little rack thing like for a
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keyboard player in a way. Mhm. Like a a fancy Mackie. Yeah. Yeah. And that was really where it all started
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from. Somebody said what? Well, I want to give credit words to I believe it was Stan
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Miller who took um uh Neil Diamond and he put like six of those things in a
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row, strapped them together and missed an entire world tour on it. Damn. And so
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that’s impressive. Yeah. Well, Stanley doesn’t get his due in my opinion. A lot of people forgot
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about Stan because he just became an engineer again when he sold Stan El Sound back in the mid 80s. He was one of
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the bigger guys. He had sound was huge. He had the universal amphitheater. He
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had the the the the uh Greek all those things. He had systems in them.
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I bought a What were those big Yamaha amps? The Oh, I bought Yeah, I bought one of those
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from from an auction at SIR back in the back in the 80s. Yeah. Stanley sound sticker on the back.
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Yeah. He loved anything Yamaha. Yeah. Matter of fact, there were two things because, you know, I did Neil
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after, you know, he sold off and then Neil came to Sound Damage uh
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probably I’m going to say 15 20 years ago and then of course in 17 he got
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Parkinson’s. That was it. Yeah. The stuff was on the boats going to Australia literally the whole show cuz
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he took a show everywhere. Uhhuh. And so he had Oh yeah. I mean they used to
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No renting back lines for him, huh? Nothing. the stage, everything went light, light, sound, everything went
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and uh it’s expensive. Yeah. Well, he was a very popular man. Sure. So, and sell out anywhere.
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Yeah. And Stanley was just with Stan Miller mixed every show he ever 50
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years. Stanley job security right there, man. Yeah. Wow. And you know, I’ve always, you
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know, when I first met Stanley, being a Midwestern boy, he was a bit um
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um you know, I just didn’t know him how to take him. Mhm. And once I got to know him, man, I love
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that guy. I we talk sometimes. I just call him up to hear his voice. I’ll say, “How you doing?” He goes, “Hey, kiddo.”
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Doesn’t that feel great? If he sees this, he’ll laugh. Well, you know, it’s funny. I was just talking to uh um Bob Margoliff the other
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day. I called him up and he answers the phone. He says, “Hey, young man.” Thought to myself, anybody calls me
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young man at this point in my life, you know? Yeah, you’re okay. I’m happy with that. Exactly. So, I want to talk to you a little bit
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about the about the beginnings about the humble beginnings of sound. They were very humble.
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I know they were. All of them were though. Make no mistake, Roy and Jean, we were all struggling. Well, absolutely. I mean, Claire
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Brothers too, you know, everybody started everybody started. I mean, the industry was in its infancy.
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Well, and there wasn’t one. We made it up, which was why you should have come last night cuz you would have heard from
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every one of them. Tape company people, everybody mostly they were more of a
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production and lighting sound, but Mike Abbott and I were there to he talks
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about television production and audio and designs for Grammys and all that stuff. And you know, I’m there as the
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live guy. And you guys built the industry, man. And that’s what they were talking about last night. Jake Barry, you know, one of
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the most prolific production managers ever. Barry. Yeah. And it was good to see I had seen Jake
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about three or four years. He lives in Phoenix now in East, so we’re not too far apart. Uh but uh Scott
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Devos, one of the old Obie guys, uh Michael, I mean it was 16 literally guys
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who as you said were there in the beginning and and that’s the thing man is you know the industry kind of developed around
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you and you developed around the industry because the you know I mean you guys kind of directed the flow of I mean
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it’s funny like the thing to me is you get that old argument all the time of did the technology create the art or the
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art create the technology and you guys it it all really evolved in parallel. So it did and we and we had to create
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anything we really if if we wanted to get out in front of Claire Shokco Tasco
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A1 I mean think of all those legendary names that are no more. They’re gone. Yeah.
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The big five as we used to call them. There’s only one. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And actually my name lives on because
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they’re you know it’ll go in the buildings now. Claire Global Sound Image. I know. Of all the things they’ve done, I
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believe that’s the only name they kept because they wanted the brand.
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Well, and the brand said so, you know, come on, man. The brand was, you know, I mean, you really, you guys
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put it on the map, you know, and I think some of the stuff that you were doing in terms of innovation, I think, was so
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like I said, man, I mean, you had to you had to make up as you were going along. You were basically like paving
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the road as you drove along. Paul had to because nothing was coming off the shelf. Not even amplifiers really. I
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mean, even Crown DC300’s, you know, you had to change you had to change the uh output section otherwise
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they catch a Those are the ones that always used to catch fire. That’s why they called them DC. Now,
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here’s a funny story. I know it because I knew all the Crown guys, even though I never really was a Crown guy till 2005.
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And when they came out with that big HD uh DSP controlled amp, we bought thousands of. That was the first one you
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couldn’t weld with. Yeah, exactly. It worked. Yeah. But the DC 300 and DC-150s we would use.
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And in those days, you know, the one of the things people don’t talk about anymore is now you want 4,000 watts of
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channel, right? Back then, if you got 250, you were happy because the sensitivity of the
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driver was 102. So now they’ve brought the sensitivity down to 92 or whatever
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because you’re going to throw all the coals to it. If you had an old 2220 on that ground, it’d be across the room
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when he hit the kit round. Yeah. And that’s the thing is you weren’t driving, you know, 80 acres of subs at that point either like you are
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now. No. You know, and I got to say, has it gotten better? Absolutely. But there are shows I saw in
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the 70s and 80s that I have never seen anything like. And I love line arrays for controllability,
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but there’s just something about a big old box PA S4S phase lock my system uh
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show even before Prism. I actually liked a rig before which I think was called
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Axe or something. It was pretty cool actually at the time. Talk about innovation. Here’s another way we innovated. We
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always spied on each other. I was going to ask you about that. So like when Bob Spur was doing the
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Eagles, right? Uh-huh. You know, we’re all out there cuz in my opinion, Bob Stern was the innovator of
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all of us at his time. Okay. Like Bob was the one that said, “How do you make a million dollars in sound?”
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And they go, “What?” He goes, “Start with three.” Yeah. Studio, too, of course. But he said, I remember it. And Bob had
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made his own Northwest horns, Northwest Audio. Mhm. and Bob and actually my first full
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range all allin-one box system used his horn and I asked him would you please
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sell those to me and he said absolutely then he ends up selling in uh 84 to Bob
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uh Bob what’s his name Marilyn Sound Goldstein he sells to Goldstein about
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the same exact time as there was a company in LA called Audio Techniques y
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there was which was David Beichum and his partner who started Third Encore and
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then uh there was uh you know but Bob like was the first guy I ever saw now it was
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massive but he actually had a multi-pin splitter because remember in the old days you just plugged in XL
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plugged in everything Yeah. Right into the other Yeah. You know a split was called a Y cable. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But uh so you
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know we would always like cuz you know a lot of in those days the musicians and
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the guys were friends. Yeah. per se. I mean I’m not saying you’re breaking bread every night but you know
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you you got your numbers you talk. One of the things when he was doing the Eagles I saw the Eagles in 75 and he had
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all these Morance gold fa goldface amps that he hot rodded. He had built this
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consoles which later by the way the same guy uh ended up Richard Irwin who makes
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the Eagles ended up creating the ATI Paragon with Chris Strong. That makes sense.
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And they basically did it on Bob’s watch. So the deal was
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uh when they departed and called it ATI. Okay. Because it was was a really MSI
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was a money behind it in the beginning. Those two guys were building it. Mhm. And the I think the reason Richard was
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involved is that because he was the Eagles front house guy and when Bob Stern sold Northwest to Bob Goldstein,
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he was just kind of like, “Okay, I’ll work over here. We’ve been dear friends all of our life.”
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Uhhuh. Yeah. And I I I would say, you know, Boba has passed away. Uh but man, he
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came out of the I believe it’s all military background. So that was the beginning of multi-pens. That’s funny
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because most of these guys, they were either military background or they were phone company background, you know, most
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of them. I mean, Bell Labs guys and stuff and that’s one of the things that I always loved about it is, you know, you guys did always pour more back into
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R&D. You created, you know, Yeah. I mean, because that’s that’s really what built
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this industry, man. You know, line race, you I used to talk to my partner and I go, “Geez, man. Can we
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tour one year without making a new this or new that or whatever. Maybe we could
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actually make some money if we’d stop throwing it back in.” No. What’s the point of
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No. And you’re young and you’re, you know, and that’s just it, man. You’re young. You’re full of piss and vinegar and all
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you want to do is just do new things and be the first on your block to try and try to make it better. One of the
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reasons I believe is most of the guys in that day, Jean Claire, mixed Yes. and Moody Blues
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and all this stuff and I both my my partner and myself and our closest
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employees, Mike Adams, people like that, we never we always worked.
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Yeah. That’s the thing. You guys were always out on the road and that’s how you always knew what was really needed.
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Yeah. And it’s also Yeah. That’s also how we figured out how to not make the same mistake twice.
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Well, you got to make We had a lot of those. Yeah. Yeah. And I thank God for Jimmy Buffett
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because Jimmy was always our test ground because we really were friends. Ross and him were very close. I was close. Uh
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Mike was close. All of us. But the one great thing about Jimmy is, and it’s
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going to sound funny, but it’s true. We always used to say
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uh like Mikey likes it the old commercial. Uhhuh. Jimmy won’t care. He won’t fire us. So
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if it like catches on fire, you know, we did the first fiber optic all
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transmission system in the world in 1995, I think. Uh-huh.
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And we were like, so what are we going to do with this stuff? Cuz you know, it’s been like a year and we we’re not
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using any copper. It’s all fiber to the amps to the processors. Right. Nobody ever done that. And so we’re
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like, what happens if it doesn’t work? And I swear to God, it was either Ross or Mike that said, “We’ll just put it
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out on Jimmy.” He was kind of the test guy. Yeah. Because you have to test it.
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He knew. He wasn’t oblivious. I mean, it wasn’t like we’re cheating around, but at the same time, we had latitude there.
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See, if I do that with some new pop artist or someone else, well, if the PA
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shuts off for 15 minutes in the middle of the show, you’re fired. Uhhuh. With Jimmy, he just go, “Hey, let’s make
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margaritas.” Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I mean, he was definitely uh he was your test ground for a lot of stuff. No doubt.
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Oh, absolutely. Anything really, we were reaching out and going, could this work
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or not? you know, maybe he was definitely the first guy to get tried
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out. Mhm. Always. But I love the fact that you guys were really I mean, you were creating a lot
25:05
of this stuff and really kind of, you know, running by the seat of your pants on so much of this, man. Absolutely. It’s like financially, intellectually,
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everything. We were we were going by the seat of our pants for probably 20 years. Yeah.
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And then all of a sudden, it it kind of just kicked in. It turned into an industry. Well, it did. And you know, I’ll tell
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you one thing, and I believe this wholeheartedly. We created an industry not only how it
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gets done. Manufacturers never cared anything about us. We were buying
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products that were not made for what we do. Now, anybody with a million dollars can
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buy a line array, two Digo consoles, two Midas cons, whatever. Start a sound company.
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Start a sound company. Yeah. In that in those days, there was no place to go. None.
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No. I mean, that’s the thing is you created the work for a lot of these companies. If it wasn’t for people like Sher
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Brothers, we’d had to make microphones, you know. I mean, because honestly,
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David Thompson, you know, Ashley Audio Yeah. were part of the Silverfish family in
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Rochester and they made the Ashley 40 channel consoles for Sound Image. We had
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three pair uh that were built the back of the shop in Rochester by David and Billy
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Thompson. And it kind of they were already calling themselves Ashley, but
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at the time they were making parametric four band parametric stereo EQs. That’s what they were known for.
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Oh yeah. And they were good. And matter of fact, that’s how I learned to mix monitors. when these things came along,
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I was like, “What is that?” Because, you know, we’re pinpointing, you know, right? And the good thing
26:49
about a parametric with those things, you know, the spectrum of the like you’re not just cutting one K. You’re
26:56
cutting down an octave and up an octave, it it looks like this. If you just pull one with a parametric, if you put it on
27:02
there, squeeze a queue and then use the gain like when I was
27:08
doing monitoring, I could hear something on the edge, I’d go, sounds like around one and a half. So, I go like this and I
27:14
boost it and if it squealled, I’d cut it and I was done. It was it was pretty much Ashley and it
27:20
was who was the other one? Orban. Well, and uh George Massenberg. Massenberg.
27:25
But, you know, that’s the big argument, right? George still swears. He made the first parametric EQ, which is fine. He
27:33
can swear all he wants. I never saw a Massenberg EQ myself because it would
27:39
have probably been a little out of my budget at the time. Mhm. But I saw the Ashley parametric EQs
27:45
before anybody. Well, Ashley stuff was ubiquitous, especially in the early days. And they made some good amplifiers, by
27:50
the way. Yes. MOSFET 500. I still remember that. I wish I had one.
27:55
Well, they’re they’re still around. Well, I know I talked about the warehouse. Well, when Ross died, see, uh Ross used
28:02
to have a band called Joshua and uh his band was recorded and that’s how these guys all met. When in ‘ 69
28:09
they met and uh Billy had uh did a two
28:14
track or four track, I can’t remember, of the band Live in 1968 or nine. And
28:21
when Ross died, my phone rang one day and they said, “Hey, it’s Billy Thompson.” I hadn’t talked to him in years. Matter of fact, the last time I
28:28
had talked to him before that was I had one of the 40s left and when they built
28:33
their new automated factory, the new plant, everything, he wanted one of
28:38
those consoles in the lobby, so I gave it back to him. I just said, “Here, take it.” Wow. And it was funny cuz it’d been the
28:45
corner for 15 years. I pulled it out. I flipped it up. I put the power supply on it. It fired.
28:50
Still worked, right? Oh, yeah. Of course. Of course it did. Of course. No, I didn’t have audio. I didn’t put any audio in it, but you
28:55
know, those those guys um were but they were again they were music
29:02
guys. Yes. They weren’t like they didn’t none of us I don’t think any of us really knew what
29:07
we were building. See that and that was the end result. Yeah. And that was the thing that I really wanted to stress here was the
29:13
fact that every single one of you guys you were kind of like figuring it out by
29:19
how does it sound. It’s not like you were, you know, like Oh, yeah. drawing schematics and figuring stuff
29:24
out that way. It was like, you know, just kind One of my favorite lines was the engineer, uh, I won’t say his name cuz
29:30
he’s still around, but I used to say, “Hey, how do you tune the rig?” He says, “Well, I take the grill cloth and I
29:36
point it towards the people.” Oh. And he was a very good engineer. Uhhuh. Uh, but it’s just those were the types
29:45
of ways we spoke back then. Well, um I I had a conversation recently with uh Dave
29:51
Morgan, who I know you know. Oh, very well. Known David all my life. Yeah. And well, Dave and I are good
29:56
buddies, too. You know, we met I think the first time we met was in the ‘ 90s back in Montro, you know, or late ‘ 80s,
30:03
early 90s. And uh you know, we were talking about that too, how the systems have really I mean,
30:09
it all evolved based on like need. Well, when you go back and you look at some of
30:15
the first one box systems, especially S4s, if you look at an S4, and I know
30:21
they didn’t know it, cuz I know cuz I Jean and I were good uh talk buddies. Uh
30:27
Roy was more of a businessy guy, which I ended up being the the same more or
30:33
less. But um I would talk to him. And then originally, remember they when they
30:41
flew them originally, they had these metal enforced handles, one on each side of the box, so it could go on any way.
30:48
And they made these big straps that came down off these big bumpers. And what
30:53
they did, they dropped the box down on the other box and put them in and lock them in that way. Yeah.
30:59
That they were held by gravity. That’s all. It was a big metal thing that went in the handle like this on a like 4-in
31:07
strap like a rig uh like a load strap. And that was the first way they hung them. Then they took the S4 and they put
31:14
these things called numbum checks in them. So the corners were cut off and they had chain and metal and you could
31:20
move them around. And right about that time, I think everybody discovered there was no lineer,
31:26
right? Yet, of course. And now, but but if you ever look at NS4, it’s four 21 18s, 410s, two highs,
31:35
two tweeters. So, if you think about vertical and horizontal dispersion, if
31:44
you augmented them up, you would get more horizontal. But actually, I hate to
31:50
say this, Roy, but it might have been the first actual concept of putting
31:57
things in a row because once they came up with the rigging and I don’t know,
32:03
you know, all the inside. Sure. But, but as I said, nobody didn’t look at anybody else’s stuff.
32:09
Well, sure. We’re all peeking in. We’re lifting up the hood. Mhm. And it was, you know, here’s another
32:15
funny thing about people that did it. These similarities that you would see
32:21
with something nobody knew anything about or whatever were close. I mean, in
32:26
other words, this guy is thinking like you are and that guy is thinking like we are. And you go there and and they were
32:33
subtly more improved every time. You know, there’s only so many ways to do things if I mean there’s the right
32:39
way and there is, you know, Yeah. And there’s also the waiting for technology way. Sure. Which which which thank God, as I
32:47
said, you couldn’t really buy anything off the shelf, a microphone or whatever, but you made mic cables, you bought
32:53
Switchcraft connectors, all that stuff. Now, we used to have, you know, sneak building
32:59
evenings basically, you know. Well, your whole your whole life now is based around uh POS. Yeah.
33:04
See, a PO back then, man. Hey, let’s go let’s all go back in the back. They were going to go and build. Let’s
33:11
go cut some wood. Exactly. Exactly. It’s funny. Ross did all the electronics. Michael did all the design
33:16
and I was the painter in the old days. Oh, yeah. I painted. That was my job. I see.
33:22
People would come in the parking lot and I’d have, you know, 24 tops laid out on cardboard and I’d be out there at 2 a.m.
33:29
And the funny thing was, you know, it’s cuz we’re painting it black and it’s dark and I have lights. I’d come in the
33:35
next day, you know, noon, pay till 4, come in at noon, and I’d look and I go, I missed the
33:41
spot. I was going to say, saving at that time of day, you know.
33:46
Well, and sometimes, honestly, we were like a day away from a truck coming. Sure.
33:52
I can still remember it, too. And we came up with this brilliant idea, which which did take off by the way, but we
33:58
were the first guys to use truck bed liner to put on the cabinet cuz it was
34:04
rigid and tough and and it stayed and it stuck and been tox. Yeah. Yeah. And it was it was called Dura
34:10
something. And we found this out from some friend of ours who had a hot rod shop and used this to spray
34:16
that sprayon stuff, right? Yeah. Well, we caught up. We got the wrong one. We got the undercoat. Oh.
34:22
From the same company. They made them both. That was nasty though. No, they stuck together. We got to the
34:27
show. They went all They went all the way across America and we and then those stage nobody used covers.
34:34
Uhhuh. So they got all the way across the country. We had to pull and we double stacked them. So they were four by four
34:41
by two. I think they were 26 in deep. Double double traps. And we flipped the
34:48
subs which were 418s on top. Oh. And then you just roll them in four across. Right.
34:53
We couldn’t get them apart. So you have to just pull them apart. You had to pry them apart or did you have to have to load them all as one piece?
34:59
They literally tore the wood. And it was all been landic birch of course.
35:04
Really? And and we had I would say probably about 50% of them
35:10
stuck together. So we had to like use a pry bar and guys would push on them
35:16
against the wall while he pried and then finally they would snap loose. But, you know, two or three pies would go with
35:22
that box. Sure. And we were like, “Oh, God. We just spent all this money on wood and labor
35:28
and and we bought the wrong stuff.” So, now you got to know which ones to stack on which ones cuz the pieces of
35:33
the wood from one are Well, actually, what we did is we got to we got to two or three shows or
35:39
something like that. And I actually flew out there with the right Okay. And I just stood behind an
35:45
amphitheater somewhere in America going like this with the real stuff that wouldn’t stick.
35:50
Uhhuh. And and we did manage to save that because in those days I mean that was a lot of money.
35:55
Well, sure. Uh probably I’d think 4×8 was probably 35. Two pair
36:02
of 70. So probably literally that was probably
36:08
about $25,000 worth of birch. Birch of lumber. Yeah. Exactly. And and we were all like, we’re freaking
36:14
out because, you know, that might have been our whole profit, right? And then what are you going to do? Rebuild the things behind an
36:20
amphitheater somewhere? No. You know. Yeah. But we made it through it. I mean, it was another one of those by the hairier
36:25
chinny chin chin. Right. Right. I love it, man. So,
36:32
in watching the industry evolve as you have over the years,
36:38
give me your unvarnished opinion. the industry has gotten in my opinion
36:46
um so good that the new people coming up don’t know how bad it was and I don’t
36:54
mean bad cuz you know we were young and we were full of as you said piss and vinegar and but what I see now is
37:02
someone who goes to a school walks in your door and says hey where’s my company car and how do I how can I mix
37:09
the stones next tour, right? We don’t have that. They don’t learn the hand. We don’t have that grassroots
37:16
hard. You know, my favorite employees as we grew came from nightclubs
37:22
because they had to make it work every night because that owner ain’t giving you a nickel.
37:27
Mhm. So, if the mic cable, you know, you know how to solder. So by the time I would get these guys out of these midrevel
37:35
nightclubs that had, you know, maybe two national acts a month and the rest were local
37:40
bands. But they learned, oh that p that speaker is not working. I only have
37:46
two amplifiers. And then they, as we used to call it, maggyver it. Yep. Which means get through the night. Yep.
37:53
And there was a lot of nights in the 70s, 80s, all through the 80s where it was, hey, let’s just get this through.
38:00
Yeah. And and well, and power was a huge issue in those days, you know, having uh uh
38:07
voltage between neutral and ground. And every place you went, every day you you had to go lift another ground switch and
38:14
somebody go, “Hey, stage and house is quiet.” And you go, “Okay, now you what’d you do?” I go, “I don’t know. I
38:20
just don’t I just kept pulling ground wires. Whatever it is, don’t go near it.
38:25
You know, you turn on the monitors one day and they were like and the next day, same stuff, nothing
38:32
changed. House goes, “Yeah.” Yeah. And and we always managed Well, one time
38:39
with a very famous artist and I had to put windcreens on all the vocal mics cuz I had to pull the ground right out of
38:45
the uh uh service. And you wanted So we ran stayed alive. At the end of the show,
38:51
we ran an ungrounded system. I said, “Don’t touch your amp.” Yep. And they’re like, “Well, what do you
38:56
mean?” I said, “Don’t touch it. We can do this.” And I put it back in the wall and it was like
39:02
or you can just not touch it. Just don’t touch it. And and we put mic we put wind screens on all the mics
39:09
because literally because I was a monitor guy. So after I did all this, I was so proud of myself
39:15
that I cleaned it up. I knew it was wrong, but I was like, “Okay, they’re coming in. They’re No, they were coming
39:22
in for sound check like five minutes, and I finally got it away.” And so anyways, I’m I walk up to go check one,
39:28
two, you know, and put my lips in. Oh, wait. Yep. And I And so I had to find and you know, we didn’t
39:34
always carry a wind sock for every mic back then, right? So I’m walking around finding wind
39:39
socks. There was a stage hand guy that had actually won and and we made we actually got through that show. But I
39:46
was very honest. I just said, “Look, you guys, it’s either going to be uh horrible for the show or we can just get
39:55
through this.” And that’s sometimes that’s what you had to do. Just had to get the show done
40:00
and the next day figure out something else. Well, you know, and to your point, I mean, that is something that happens
40:06
with a lot of uh, you know, a lot of uh, people coming into the industry today is
40:11
that they didn’t learn some of the basics. They haven’t learned the hang, you know, just the whole idea of like, I
40:18
can teach you how to run a compressor. I can teach you how to run a console. I can’t teach you how to not be a dick,
40:23
you know. Well, there was always plenty of that going on. Well, yeah, exactly. But, I mean, that’s the thing is, you know, you learned a
40:29
lot of that stuff on the road. You learned how to get along with people. Well, here’s this true story I told I
40:35
used to tell guys coming up. They say, “I want to be like you and Ross.” Meaning monitor. We were always monitor
40:40
engineers for our artist. And they go, “Well, we want to be like you.” And I said, “Well,
40:45
first thing you got to do is do you know how to do this and make it not feedback.” Once you learn that, that’s
40:52
only 10% of your job, right? The other 90% is getting along with him.
40:57
Yes. Or her or whatever. And and your surroundings, your people. Yeah. You know, guitar attacks, everybody.
41:04
Everybody, the whole, you know, it’s a whole infrastructure of people, you know, and it’s like, and and that’s the
41:10
thing, too. You know, I did a I did a panel at the NAM show a few years ago um with uh
41:17
Scoville and um Chzn’s monitor engineer and harmony, the bass player. Right.
41:22
I called it Do You hear what I hear? Because it was the the whole concept. I saw that. I Well, I heard about that. Okay. But the whole concept to me was,
41:29
you know, here you got people who are in completely different places in the same show and they have a completely
41:36
different paradigm of what that show is about. You know, it’s like, and I think that’s the thing is like when you’re
41:41
sitting at Monitor Beach, you don’t know. I mean, you do know, but you don’t you don’t experience it the same way
41:47
that somebody does in front of house or, you know. Well, and actually in all honesty before in ears, you know, if
41:55
somebody had stereo pair of wedges or two wedges in mono or whatever, I could queue them up exactly the same way. But
42:03
I always reminded myself I’m 40t away from that microphone.
42:08
I have a completely different environment over here. Yeah. Cuz I’m not up there. Yeah. And so you
42:14
have to find a way to translate, which was why I would always go up on
42:21
stage during soundcheck, walk everybody’s mixes and everything, say, “Hey, how we doing here?”
42:27
Right? We good. But even then, you couldn’t do like what what you can do now. You couldn’t walk up there with an iPad. No.
42:32
You know, you still had to be guessing and then run back over here and do a tweak. Hell, I thought it was big time when I
42:38
got an assistant so I could go do stuff and go, “Hey, how’s it cut 1K on this?” Yeah.
42:44
Yeah. Exactly. You know, that was the beginning of automation, right? Exactly. Yeah. My my assistant
42:50
will automate. Yeah. But some some of the stuff that comes up now, I think uh it’s going to be one of
42:58
the most difficult parts of our future is people. I would agree with you.
43:03
It’s going to be people. And it’s not just like saying roadie guys or sound guys or whatever. I mean just you know
43:10
people that want to do a studio recording whatever. Yeah. Because now everything is instantane.
43:16
You look at Billy Isish, right? We did her first tours when she came out and I mean it just I mean it was almost
43:24
like New Kids in Block, you know, 30 years ago. I mean it went out with two trucks and by the fourth show we had nine.
43:32
Uh-huh. They came to San Diego with doubled to PA. I love it. Another truck. Yeah. And she just exploded and every
43:40
bit of that was done in her bedroom with her brother and her. Yep. What’s his name? Phineas. Phineas. Yeah.
43:45
Yeah. Yeah. And she’s very talented girl. Absolutely. And respect to Phineas, too. You know, the fact that that that
43:50
anybody can sit there and cut a vocal, a a a plausible vocal performance out of
43:57
what 120 takes, you know, cutting it down to the syllable. I mean, that’s talent, too. Well, I believe he wrote some of that
44:03
stuff with us. Hope they wrote it or he wrote it or whatever. And it’s two different schools of thought, you know, it’s that versus um, you know, doing it
44:11
all in one take, you know, that that kind of thing. And I mean, it’s not that one’s more valid than the other, but
44:16
you’re right, it’s changed the way we do stuff now. Yeah, it has. And it and it’s going to get harder and
44:22
harder if we can keep condensing it down to that. When a guy wants, and I’m not
44:28
picking on this stuff, but I’m going to say when you want to make a real
44:33
recording, right? Who’s going to sit here? who’s going to do this? I mean, you know, whatever.
44:38
We’re get the herd’s getting thin. Well, I think anyways, well, I think, you know, also it is more
44:44
of a challenge now because you’ve got artists who are playing to tracks or are playing even even worse, playing to part
44:50
of tracks and then part live and locking that stuff up, that’s a whole another a
44:55
whole another nightmare. Well, that’s a Robert Scoville question right there. It is. It is. He and I have talked about that.
45:00
He’s a he’s a he is a very
45:06
uh smart guy. He’s driven and I give him all the credit in the world uh for
45:12
staying on the top of his game. Yes. He is not a quitter. No. And that’s the thing, man, is you
45:18
know to be to have come in to have come from roots that far back and still be
45:24
hip now on what’s working now. Yeah. Well, I think part of that was when he kind of divided his time between
45:30
a manufacturing representative Yep. and also still keeping his hands deeply in
45:36
mixing. Well, I was part of the crew that rolled out the Avid console, the the venue console. You know, we did the campaign
45:43
for them. And to his credit, man, you know, he really he helped them understand how to design
45:49
something that people could use and that people would want to. Oh, yes. You know, and that’s a big
45:55
Well, it’s like if engineers design stuff, you know, as opposed to end users, it’s never going to work right.
46:01
And the funny thing is I’ve had I’ve known Robert many many many many years.
46:07
Uh worked with him, not worked with him, whatever. Never really mattered. People
46:12
would always say, “Is he as good as everybody else?” And I said, I would
46:18
always say he will work on something until the day that tour stops to make it
46:26
that much better. And he does it. Yes. He’ll squeeze something out from one show to the next and you just stand
46:32
there and you’re like, “Well, the last time I saw Robert Mix was with Tom.
46:38
I was at House.” Oh, you weren’t to the Sphere when he was working at the Sphere. That was Kenny. No, I went to see the
46:43
Eagles because of my old but I have not I saw mixing at the at the Sphere. Yeah, I have not seen that. I saw the
46:50
original YouTube show way back. Okay. Two and a half years ago. Well, to your point though with Robert,
46:56
he’s doing the same thing even with that hollow plot system there. Yeah. You know, and that’s I think that’s an
47:02
art form in itself, man, to be able to keep up with that technology, you know. Well, that’s a very complicated thing to
47:08
do really. I mean, it is. You You’re transposing left, right, maybe center, right into what is it? 40,000
47:15
48,000 48 channels of Yeah. Well, channels, but how many transducers
47:21
are there? I mean, thousands. Thousands. Yeah, exactly. And it’s all it’s all object based, which is another
47:27
complete ball of wax there, you know. Yeah. And my dad was just out here. He flew out today. So, we went to see The Wizard of Oz as
47:33
well. Uh-huh. Uh we had Miss Steer the next night. Okay. So, we’ve had four nights of,
47:39
you know, we come behind my dad’s birthday. Uhhuh. And he flew from Ohio and then his new
47:45
girlfriend, my mom, passed away some years ago and Jill. And so we had a really nice
47:52
It was kind of a vacation slash a little bit of like you and last night and stuff
47:58
get a get a few things done R&D. Yeah. Yeah. And I got to see some really dear old
48:03
friends like Oh, Eddie was there. Wannabo. Really? Okay. Yeah. The production manager for Kenny’s.
48:09
So he was there which I He knows what’s going on with that. Yeah. Oh yeah. I met Ed probably
48:16
early 80s probably. Okay. I think he was Hall of Notes at the time. Wow. Then he went to Richard Marx and then
48:22
and actually we put him on Jimmy Buffett. I believe it was my suggestion actually uh to because Jimmy’s
48:29
production long ter long time guy wanted it off the road
48:34
20 25 years and so Ed came out he did a couple years and I don’t remember where he went after
48:42
that but it might have been Kenny because you know we sound image the company opened an office in Nashville in
48:48
’89 so when the country music explosion happened we had it all
48:54
we knew everybody Oh, I know you were out there. Yeah, we we had Well, at one time, I’m going
48:59
to say in the mid 2000s, maybe up to 2010 even, I think we calculated every
49:07
artist on the road, about 85% of them were using sound image. Doesn’t surprise me.
49:12
You know, Brooks and Dun, Toby Keith, you know, on and on. Matter of fact, Kenny Chesny was his opener.
49:18
Brooks and and Toby was Brooks and Dun’s opener. So they kind of kept spitting out clients, right?
49:25
That’s why half the companies opened offices out there. Well, and we were the first ones to go because I had Barbara Mandrel.
49:31
Okay. And Barb had her TV show and the sisters and the whole schmick. And
49:36
and you know what? Here’s the funny thing. Uh when Verily first came out, mid80s,
49:42
Genesis had I think it was 32 moving lights. Babs had 48.
49:48
She had a bigger lighting system than they did. Oh, we played nothing but arenas. And there were only two in 1985.
49:55
There were only two real production carrying uh accounts down there, which
50:00
was Kenny Rogers and and Barb. And I got to know Barb because of uh Bob Seager’s
50:07
production manager when Bob took all those years off like a rock. Remember the commercials?
50:13
He didn’t need to work. So he he just kept not working. So, uh Craig Blazer
50:19
was his name. and we called him CB. And somehow he he he knew the truck driver,
50:25
believe it or not. And the truck driver told them, “Hey, you need a real guy. You know, you’re getting too big.” So,
50:30
they brought him in. And then he called me and you know it’s kind of funny because it’s really uh you know we
50:38
talked a lot about technology but if you really want to uh really excel I believe
50:43
in this business uh you have to uh be nice and network with people you do cuz
50:50
your next job especially in the old days you never knew what the next job would be and somebody would say hey you should
50:56
get you know let’s make an example uh Jackson Brown says Hey Crosby, you
51:02
should have Dave because I’m not touring and he should work with you guys, right? And then you get a call from somebody
51:09
Elliot or anybody like that and they they say, “Hey, are you available for and then you had a gig?”
51:16
And it’s always been a business of relationship. It is. But course, you know, guitar techs would call you and say, “Hey, I’m out here. This guy’s he’s he’s going to
51:23
get fired. Can you come out?” Uhhuh. And then next thing you know, you’re on an airplane. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it was
51:30
happen stance, but I do believe, like you said earlier, treat people kindly,
51:35
be nice, fit in. You know, everybody’s not going to be the same, but don’t be a dick.
51:41
Exactly. You know, learn how to get along with people because that’s I mean, really, technology changes, but
51:47
relationships don’t, man. No. Their lifetime. And I saw that last night. I wish I I you know, I didn’t
51:52
take a picture. Oh, yeah. I’m sure it’s all in videos. I’m sure it is, you know, but I mean, that’s the thing, man. And and that’s
51:58
one of the reasons that I I I’ve been saying for months now, man, I got to get you on this on this podcast because you
52:04
understand that and you really uh I mean you your guys have always been the
52:10
epitome of that. You know, everybody has come out of South Image. Yeah. Has pretty good people.
52:15
Yeah. Yeah. They still are. They’re still launched a lot of great careers and and a lot of them went to production
52:21
believe I mean to corporations. I believe it. Michael McDonald in the 70s goes and leads Yamaha and then
52:27
president of JBL. Half a Harmon is is all you know exounded
52:32
at one time or another. Yeah. And then Larry Italia worked for me after Yamaha. Now he’s a president of
52:38
DNB electron a D&B Audio Tech in all of the Americas. Yeah. Yeah.
52:44
And and actually that’s a funny story because you know he was doing a great job and I I loved having Larry and I
52:50
think it was 17 or 18 and he just said and it all started because he was leading my integration department. He
52:57
was the president of installed sound and I was like and we were having huge
53:02
problems with them because they didn’t even have price sheets back then you know and they so you bid a job and then
53:09
you’d ask okay is this charge for this? No. And then they change a bit. I lost a substantial amount of money on
53:17
an amphitheater in LA because it got pushed back like two years because of
53:23
politics and fundings and and everything. Oh, that never happens. And and and because of that, I lost a
53:30
substantial amount of money cuz DMV wouldn’t hold my prize. Uhhuh. And I couldn’t get the city to pay
53:36
because it was LA County money, right? And I was like, “Okay, I guess we’re just going to do it.” didn’t need it.
53:42
And that’s what happened. But that led to the structure of uh cuz the Germans
53:48
were coming to our conference room having meetings with Larry. First one was me and Larry. Mhm.
53:54
By about the third or fourth meeting, he comes in, he goes, “Hey, hey boss, uh you know, can I talk to you about
54:00
something?” So he lays it out cuz now they want him. They want him to do that. And and of
54:06
course he had told him apparently the previous time, “No, no, I’m commit I’m going to commit it here.” So when he
54:13
asked me about it, you know, as I’ve said, never hold anybody back, you know, because if you do,
54:19
they’re going to get more unhappy. Yeah. And and he’s went on to lead that
54:24
company now for nine years. And I and I would say they’re kicking ass right now. Conservatively, he’s probably increased
54:31
our sales by 3 to 400%. Oh yeah, they are. They are definitely they’re one of the top two or three at
54:36
this point. No question about it. Yeah, for sure. And they have good products and they have good engineering
54:42
and it’ll it’ll be interesting to see how these companies stay focused because, you know, they keep flipping
54:47
themselves. Yeah. They flip themselves. Consolidation. Yeah. Yeah. Well, DNB, I believe, has been sold
54:52
three times since I first met the two original Germans in 1985 in Amsterdam.
54:59
And they had these two wedges. Uhhuh. And they brought them out. They said, “You have to try this.” Well, they had
55:05
trapezoidal sides. So, you know, all monitoring engineers, here’s a mic stand. There’s one and there’s one.
55:11
Well, these went in front of the mic stand and went this way. A good angle of Yes. Exactly. They were actually cut. So, you put them
55:18
together and they married the butts together and the wedge, the grill went this way,
55:24
but the horn design summed right on the mic. Uhhuh. And I was, and here’s the funny
55:29
part, because everybody always says, “Well, that D&B stuff is so expensive.”
55:34
Well, back then, those two monitors and they had an amplifier, a twochannel amp.
55:40
Said DNB, they made it. Yeah. Was $8,000 in 1985. Wow.
55:45
Yeah. Veritable bargain. And they sent me a pair, you know, cuz they had we we had used it. I think it
55:51
was one of the big festivals up in uh outside Amsterdam, I believe. And the
55:57
sound company was called Ampco and they are still around I believe. But anyways,
56:02
uh it was just uh one of those things where you see something and you go, “Well, this goes against how we’ve
56:09
thought forever.” And actually, to tell you the truth, I tried to cobble a similar thing
56:16
together, but I never could get it right because whatever they did with that horn, cuz it wasn’t made to shoot that
56:23
way, it was supposed to roll back around. And uh whatever they were doing was magic. And they sent me a pair of
56:30
them to show Americans, right? And so I put them out and did stuff and put them
56:37
in front of people and and and in the end, I believe it was Emmy Lou Harris uh bought them for
56:44
herself. Wow. And uh but that was my first experience was DMB. Didn’t hear much again for 20
56:52
years. I mean, they were not, you know, they weren’t eloustics. They weren’t JBL.
56:57
No. And they they really went from like relative obscurity to, you know, leaprogging to the top pretty quickly.
57:04
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably within 10 years. Yeah. You know, from soup to nuts. Yeah. And they’re a world leader.
57:10
Oh, yeah. I mean, right now, I would say they’re probably
57:15
might be ahead of L acoustics, especially in installed. I would say that either way, they are
57:21
the top two right now. Oh, absolutely. Well, you know, JBL’s numbers are probably bigger, but their presence is
57:27
in large. But JBL’s numbers are bigger because they’re also in different markets, you know, so completely different.
57:33
Yeah. They got consumer, they have all these. Yeah. But uh you know, well, my company designed and uh we were the people that
57:40
built the Vert. 4889. Oh, you guys in JBL I mean that that’s a history that you know. Yeah. Yeah. I
57:47
mean, well, a bunch of them, as I said, though, but it wasn’t like we were trying to gro each other or anything. We
57:53
needed each other to make stuff better. Yeah, it was all synergy. Yeah, it was all Jerry Hogersonship.
57:59
Jerry Hogerson way back in the 80s was my district manager for JBL.
58:05
Oh, I love it. And he had a really good relationship with Stan Miller at Stanell Sound. So,
58:10
this has been 788 somewhere in there. And he would not open me as a dealer.
58:16
We still laugh about it, so I can say this publicly. And so, uh, you know,
58:22
Jerry just wouldn’t he wouldn’t give us a dealership. So, there was a company in Philadelphia called Short Sound Systems,
58:28
and they were a JBL distributor. So, I could buy from David. His name was David
58:34
Short. I could buy from David, you know, 2415s, 2418s, 2441 drivers, all this
58:41
stuff at dealer cost. Ah, so finally Hogerson realizes we’ve we’ve outplayed
58:49
him, right? Well done. And he comes in one day and he goes, “All right, all right, all right.” You
58:54
know, you hear sign and then uh but it was probably two or three years before
59:00
he would do it. Well, you know, and he was fiercely loyal to Stanley and I don’t I mean at the time I don’t blame
59:08
him. Well, but again, this points to the way that you guys did business. You know, you did what was necessary to get
59:15
done, and I applaud you for that, man. Oh, we borrowed money from weed dealers. Sure.
59:21
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You mean drugs funded our industry? Yeah. Well, no. See, it ain’t so, man.
59:27
Well, when we built the studio, uh, and we we were running out of money. We were
59:33
buying the best of the best, you know. We had two 32 track digital MCI machines
59:39
for recording. We had a board up in the thing. The studio was 10,000 square foot
59:44
with a hide hard sight, train trails, everything, uh, curtains,
59:49
uh, the first digital patched lighting system, I believe. You know, it was a pin matrix thing in
59:55
the room, but you didn’t have to move that light to make it uh, to make that one come on. You just go boom, too.
1:00:01
Nice. No. And um we were $ three and a half million dollars into that project and it it was actually hurting our
1:00:07
touring division because we had no money. We had new clients coming in and we’re like can’t do it. Sorry, we have
1:00:15
no money. Yikes. Yeah. And the the just by the sheer way
1:00:22
things work, uh, luck would have it, one of our neighbors in that industrial park wanted it to make how-to videos,
1:00:30
you know, VCR tapes. Remember, you’d buy like something have a tape. Sure. Yeah. And he wanted to do that. And so his
1:00:36
name was uh, well, I called him Mr. Hunter. I don’t really know his first name, but he invented the pop-up
1:00:42
sprinklers and the pool sweeper. Think Polaris Pool Sweep. Damn. Okay. He was our neighbor. He’s doing okay. Oh, yeah. And he was
1:00:49
very eccentric. Uh, can you think? Well, he kind of looked like Doc on Back
1:00:55
to the Future. Oh, I love it. Okay. So, so and one day he just walked in and he used to call Ross and I the boys.
1:01:02
Hey, how’s the boys? Cuz in the summer he would put his Porsche and his Citron Maserati in our warehouse because we had
1:01:09
no equipment. Uhhuh. So, he’d just come over and he say, “Hey, is it time? Can I put put my cars
1:01:14
in there?” “Yes, sir.” And one day he walked in in 1986 or seven I believe and basically said,
1:01:22
“Hey, how’s it going? You know, how are you guys doing?” I said, “We’re dying. It almost killed us. You know, we’re cuz
1:01:28
all the money is going over here. We’re not really making money here.” Yeah. So everything we made on the road, which
1:01:34
we used to reinvest, we’re sending over here. Mhm. So when he said, “You know, I really
1:01:40
could use a place like this.” and done, right? Done.
1:01:45
Uhhuh. And so, uh, within 6 months, we were out of there building a new purpose purpose
1:01:51
production facility, uh, about four or five miles away. Nice. And it it worked out fine.
1:01:58
Yeah. You know, as I I have a rule, do what you know. So, we got off our path. We
1:02:06
path going along fine for almost 15 years at that point. And somehow we we
1:02:13
got sucked into this idea and we did in the beginning it was great but then
1:02:18
Michael Jackson did this little thing called Thriller. Yeah. And it changed the performance base into
1:02:24
a movie. Sure. Exactly. You know, and you had to invest three times the money just to do the same show.
1:02:30
And we couldn’t get directors to come south. They worked till 4 in the morning at Sony Uhhuh.
1:02:35
or or MGM Grand or what MGM Studio, whatever. Right. But they wouldn’t drive that 100 miles cuz they couldn’t go home. They
1:02:42
didn’t matter when they went home, right? They just wanted the directors. Yeah. So really, it was a it was a bad timing.
1:02:48
And and and also um just stay in your
1:02:54
lane is all I can say. Stay in your lane. Do what you’re good at. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And once that happened and we learned
1:03:01
that very very valuable lesson, we never departed. I never had a light. I never
1:03:06
had a video thing unless it was integration, but we never tried to
1:03:12
pedal. We never tried to do that. No. For a Yeah. No. Yeah. Well, that brings me to a great question
1:03:19
to wrap with. Okay. What’s your advice to 15year-old you coming into the industry now?
1:03:28
I I I guess it just comes down to work hard because
1:03:33
opportunities are always out there. It’s the ones that want to work hard enough
1:03:38
to get to it. Uh and most don’t. That’s the problem. Most don’t. We don’t have
1:03:44
the same values as people born in the 50s or 60s now. It’s just not. And I I
1:03:50
mean I have kids. You know, my daughter works at Sound Image. She does uh contractual
1:03:57
legal stuff for the integration thing. So when they’re bidding, if if they have union labor or uh scale or whatever,
1:04:05
they have to know how to bid the things. So she will do the what’s it called, Linda? Pre-quall.
1:04:11
She does pre pre-qualification and then when it’s done, she does contract that goes back from the
1:04:16
president to the client. Uhhuh. And she’s worked hard and she’s Was she
1:04:22
trained to do any of that? No. If you’d asked me when she was 16, would she do that? No. But she’s just
1:04:30
uh she’s good at it and she’s coming up and she keeps her head down and she
1:04:36
works. But you got a point there because yeah, a lot of a lot of people coming out of school now don’t want to put in the
1:04:42
10,000 hours, you know. No. And I don’t know if you could build something like we did, you know. I I
1:04:48
always called it the Wild Wild West. I don’t think I could as an I was an 18year-old boy went to California had
1:04:54
300 bucks in my pocket. Sleeping on the beach. But you didn’t know what you didn’t
1:04:59
know. Exactly. That was the whole thing I think, right? Yeah. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And so it wasn’t fearful. It wasn’t
1:05:07
scary. It was like, well, I’ll do this until something else comes along. Yep.
1:05:12
Because we really, we talked about it last night on the panel that all of us
1:05:17
believed when we started we’d have to get a real job someday cuz we’re having
1:05:23
too much fun. We’re making a decent living, you know, good times are bad,
1:05:28
but nobody was getting rich. Nobody was getting rich, but we were making a better living than our parents.
1:05:33
You know, I bought my first house in California three and a half years after I got here. And even back then, they were expensive.
1:05:41
Exactly. I paid 160 grand. My parents house was 20 20,000 they paid.
1:05:46
Yeah. Yeah. Back, you know, back then, man, that was a lot of money for a house. I don’t know if it’s po Well, I
1:05:52
shouldn’t say anything’s possible if you work hard enough. So, could somebody
1:05:58
start off with two speakers on a stick and and
1:06:03
come up with a band and maybe make something like what we have now. It’s
1:06:09
possible, but it would be damn tough. The money isn’t even sequentially close.
1:06:16
You know, back then we put a whole touring system, consoles, microphones, everything. Cost us maybe 90 to 110,000.
1:06:24
Yeah. In the 70s from scratch. That won’t even get you one gig now. No, but I’m saying now if you needed enough
1:06:30
speakers, let’s say to do a tour for Pop Star, you’re going to need say 64 tops, 32
1:06:38
subs, you’re going to need consoles, all this stuff. You’re looking at $2 million minimum. Y
1:06:43
and and not to say that it it it wasn’t easy to come up with the 100 grand. It
1:06:49
wasn’t, right? But that’s not sequentially following the 40 years, right?
1:06:55
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it should be more like 1 million. Well, and that goes back to what you were saying earlier. You know, the whole
1:07:01
idea of how you make a million bucks, invest two million. Right. The the lovely Bob Stern. Ah, indeed. Indeed.
1:07:07
Did you ever meet Bob? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He’s a really good guy. And he was always giving. That’s one of the things
1:07:13
I liked about him. Even he wasn’t trying to put a sheet over something so you couldn’t see it. you know, the people
1:07:19
who founded this industry, you know, I mean, I think um I will quote my buddy
1:07:26
um John McBride when I say we need a bigger Mount Rushmore. Yeah. You know,
1:07:32
cuz there were a lot of really really great people who started this industry who really
1:07:38
truly were just giving people, man. Just really love what they and he’s a good one. I mean, he’s very
1:07:44
passionate, you know, his Blackbird stuff and everything he does now. Oh, yeah. Just an amazing amazing
1:07:50
Absolutely. Absolutely. And now I met John in happen stance on an airplane. He was connecting in
1:07:57
Dallas. I was connecting in Dallas to go to my office in Nashville. He was going to Nashville to find an office for MD
1:08:04
Systems. I love it. With Gh. And we met on the airplane. Yeah. That’s been friends ever since.
1:08:10
He’s a hell of a guy. He is really a buyer of the eye and he’s built you know and I think when you look at people who
1:08:17
have built these things like everyone we’re talking about in this discussion
1:08:22
they were driven they were passionate about this business and again they didn’t know what they
1:08:28
didn’t know so it was it was fearless you know it was just like just jump in because what else are you going to do
1:08:34
you know what was the deal John and Martino were on tour with G and he was a production
1:08:39
manager and I believe she the swag girl, right? Yeah. Is that the story? That’s the story.
1:08:44
Yeah. And then then she became singer. Yeah. And then they were married. Mhm. I met John Well,
1:08:52
when Martina and John moved into their house probably 25, 30 years ago, right
1:08:58
up by uh the president of RCA Records, actually, uh Joe, what’s his name? The
1:09:04
old the uh I can’t think of his name right now. Anyways, uh I went up there
1:09:10
to see him and everything and it was it was lovely because it’s a beautiful home, right? And when I walked in, I was
1:09:16
like, “Damn, John, Gar’s been good to you.” But not just Gar, you know what I mean?
1:09:22
But it was a beautiful house and and uh Joe Galante.
1:09:28
Oh, sure. Sure. Uhhuh. And uh but it was, you know, I’ve
1:09:34
I’ve never felt adversarial with my competitors. I don’t know one that I
1:09:40
would say was really a bad person. No. And you guys have all maintained
1:09:45
really good friendly relationships, every single one of you. And you know, again, we go back to the same thing,
1:09:51
man. It’s about relationships, you know, and that’s to me that’s the foundation of this industry.
1:09:58
Relationships. Yeah. It has to be because like I walk in here, I’ve never seen this place in
1:10:03
my life, but obviously it’s functioning. Yeah. I mean, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful place. Definitely is.
1:10:09
And thank you to the Hideout Studios for Yeah. Thank you, Hideout. Yes.
1:10:14
And on that note, Dave Shidone, thank you for being my guest. Thank you, Daniel. Been a pleasure. It’s been my pleasure. Say hi to all my
1:10:20
friends. You can say hi to him there. Are you coming to N? I am. Of course. In fact, I’m doing panels
1:10:26
there. Panel with Scoville.
1:10:31
Hey, I’m Daniel Keller. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and join us each week for Insights and Sound