Some Truth

Now, our efforts went into trying to put a band together. We had a talent pool of musicians to choose from that was outstanding, and could probably be matched against the best talent available anywhere in the country, so the only problem would be in locating musicians with compatible personalities. Even our guitar slinging buddy, Jim McKee from Lima came to town and stayed with us for a while. We went through a trial and error period of auditioning potential players and settled on a guitar player and singer, who owned a Fender Twin Reverb amp, and a black 'fifty-seven Les Paul Custom that sounded sweet, by the name of Gary Markley, and a good bass player with a Fender Precision and a big Peavey bass amp, as well as a nice gravelly voice, named Dave Picard. This band was a new entity then, and we called it Sunspot. It truly was burning hot, too, but it transformed into Sailcatz when Gary's wife turned out to be too jealous for him to play in bars. That didn't last long either, and Brophy went on to play with Al Hill, that fantastic keyboardist, guitarist and vocalist of the Jeanne and the Dreams band, to form Al Hill and the Headlights. The problem with longevity in bands is based around original material and the public's acceptance of it. It is very hard to achieve public acceptance without the cooperation of radio stations, and the D.J.s are only going to play what their program director allows them to play, who won't allow anything to distract from advertising, and who don't really want to be bothered with any "community service" implied in the helping out of local musicians.

I had been to the local banks, inquiring about business loans to buy a P.A. system with, and they just laughed at the longhaired "hippie", and asked if I had any gold bonds to secure such a loan with. I had been into Ann Arbor Music Mart often, which was in the downtown business area of State Street, and usually had "Shakey Jake" standing out front panhandling and "performing" on the old guitar they had given him. There I had dealt almost exclusively with one of the salesmen named Tim Gordon. Tim quit the long hours at Music Mart to open up a music store on U.S. 12 in downtown Saline. He had sent me a postcard informing me of his change in status, hoping that I would continue to come to him for my equipment purchases, as he felt we had become quite close, and he would like to continue supplying my needs.

Tim was right, we had become close. He knew just what my situation was, and I could talk to him without the sham of trying to impress anyone, which I could never do well anyway, I'm just me, take it or leave it. He had opened up his store so he could be closer to home, and set his own hours for the sake of his wife and kids. He was a caring family man, and I respected him for that, as much as for his honesty in his business dealings. I went to see his new store, and bought a twenty-four channel Whirlwind snake off of him, and told him about my plight in trying to get a business loan to buy a mix board, amps and main speakers.

He sized me up and down, and said, "Keith, getting a loan isn't the hard part, paying it back is, and they want to make sure you can pay it back. You're just somebody off the street, as far as they're concerned, and they have no idea where all you have been and how many famous acts you've worked for, that you're a workaholic, nor the amount of extensive technical knowledge that you possess. The only thing they know about is money. What you need is someone respected in the community to vouch for you, and educate them on your capabilities. Very few people know enough about the music business to even be able to do that, but I can do that for you. What kind of board do you want? Lets get serious here, and list everything you ultimately want to have in your system, and then pare it down to what you have to have to get started with, so you can build up to your projected goals.

What I wanted would cost about a hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars, which I would never get the bank to go for initially, being an untried risk. What I could do though, which was my reason for taking the route I went, was build that mix board up, modularly into the console I would eventually need. The mixer of my choice was built by Custom Audio Electronics, and was the preferred console of most of the sound engineers that I respected, working for the national acts in our area.

It was truly modular and could be joined together channel by channel, out to as many channels as you needed, and it was built like a tank. Therefore it was completely roadworthy, and very unlikely to fall apart bouncing mile after mile down the highway in the back end of a truck. I started out with twelve channels, which fed into eight submasters. I couldn't afford all of the parametric equalization channels that I actually wanted, at a cost of twelve hundred dollars each, the bank just wouldn't stand for it, but I did get four parametric channels for vocals, with eight channels which had shelving EQ for drums and guitars, all of my channels feeding into eight stereo submasters, which then fed into a stereo master. The total price on what I did get was almost nineteen thousand dollars. The payments were three hundred twenty-six dollars, and eighty seven cents per month on a six year loan. It was nineteen seventy-six and I was in business.

Nobody tells you how to go about incorporating a business. Lawyers know that stuff, but I didn't have two pennies to rub together when I went into this venture, and I wasn't some slick businessman with social connections, or a Harvard graduate network to call upon. Hell, I hadn't even graduated from O.S.U. before life took over. I did however find an ad in the back of a magazine, for a book that would tell all. I sent for that book, and it did tell all, and had all the necessary forms printed out for incorporating. In the state of Delaware. Hmm, I had a second cousin of my Mom's living in Delaware, the state I was born in. A few letters and post cards exchanged, and she agreed to be my agent with the state of Delaware for the purposes of my incorporation. It turned out that she was retired from working for the state, and knew just how to go about taking care of the red tape. Looking good so far.

I had quit Midwest Natural Foods to take a job at the Ford Motor Company's Wayne Truck Plant for the extra three dollars an hour pay, so that my reported wages would satisfy the Bank's loan officers that my income would not be a problem in paying off the loan. With the loan in my back pocket, I quit Ford and went back to Midwest as their computer systems maintenance engineer, and the head of their inventory control department. Ford required all the overtime they demanded of their employees, and I needed as much free time as I could lay my hands on to build my company. I wasn't living to work for Ford. At Midwest, I worked a straight forty a week, with any time off that I asked for, and I had my own office, and could sit and work out all of the tedious plans for the various sizes and styles of speaker cabinets I needed, while I was waiting for all of my computer reports to print out.

You don't just put together a wood box with the right size holes cut in it for the speaker drivers. Cabinets that do the best possible job of projecting the frequencies they are required to reproduce must be engineered to formulas, and beside the findings that I worked out with my slide rule, I had a few ideas that I wanted to incorporate into my designs that would, I thought, help combat the audio Doppler effect you might sometimes notice at an outdoor concert on windy days, or in an area where the sound is reflected or reverberated off of nearby tall buildings that surround the concert area.

I believed, and later proved myself correct in doing so, that my ideas would also eliminate the "cannon blast" effect that I have noticed at many concerts that I have been to. Where the sound the audience is listening to is noticeably coming from that big stack of speakers on that side of the stage and also coming from the big stack on that other side of the stage, rather than just being transparently, magically in the air. I don't like being hit by sound, any more than I would like being hit by a car. This was the secret, if there was one, therefore of my success. Bands and audiences, both, liked the transparent audio quality of my mixes and P.A., although, as I became more deaf through the years, they may not have liked the volume.

Chapter 9

In Business

Meanwhile, courtesy of the guys at Aerial Enterprises, and them being booked up solid, I got a gig setting up the P.A. for the famous French violinist, Jean-Luc Ponty' at the University's Bell Auditorium, when Jean-Luc and John McLaughlin were doing the tour for their collaboration on the album "Birds of Fire" with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The system was set up and tuned to the room, with the band attempting to do a sound check with their hired New York engineer trying to control my board. I had yielded the mixer to him with a general starting mix set up on it that should have placed him well within the ballpark of an excellent mix.

However, it was quickly evident that he didn't have a clue of what to do. Jean-Luc laid his violin down, and rapidly paced back and forth for a few seconds, and then stepped up to the mic and said, "And you are the best engineer they could get me out of New York? Is there anyone here that can run sound?" I was by the stage wrapping up some extra cables and told him that I owned the equipment, and would be happy to operate it for him. He said, speaking into the mic again, and pointing at the hired soundman, "Someone please call that man a cab, and send him back to the airport." At the end of the show, Jean-Luc presented me with a Rolex watch for, as he said, "The sweetest sounding mix I have ever heard."

Word gets around quickly in the music community I guess. Before long, my little bit of equipment was booked fairly solidly, some of my time being devoted to my favorite local group, the Steve Nardella Band, who, by the way, still plays around the Ann Arbor area according to the internet and now has Dave Picard playing bass for him. I did a series of shows for Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, who was a coked out drunk, shouting obscenities at the audience through the P.A., Patty Smyth and Fred "Sonic" Smith, Lena Lovitch and Eight Eyed Spy, Iggy Pop, and the list goes on ad nauseam. I did Madonna, while she was still a student at U of M, in her group Nikki and the Corvettes, boy could I tell some stories about her, but I'll reserve that for another time, at the old Star Bar on Ann Arbor's Main Street before it was torn down. I became quite close with Stevie Ray Vaughn. I worked with Ten Thousand Maniacs and Don Was. I did Alice Cooper, Chic, with Lionel Ritchie in the group, Aretha, the Four Tops, and the Temptations, as well as Fishbone, Prince, Robert Cray, Lonnie Mack, Chick Corea and Buckwheat Zydeco. Pick a name, any name, and I probably worked for them. Steven Stills, Johnny Rotten, Seeger, Nugent, the Ramones with Black Flag, Commander Cody, another drunk, Asleep at the Wheel, whose sax player I gave my little prototype, clip-on sax mic and clip to before they left on a European tour, Roomful of Blues and the list goes on and on. I was struggling to find the time to buy the materials, speaker and horn drivers, reels of cable, etc. that I needed to expand. I wasn't, however, having any difficulty in attracting quite a few potential sound engineers who wanted to work for me anytime I need someone extra to mix a show for me.

One such person was a woman, by the name of Deb Saravolitz, who came up to me at a show and told me that she wanted to learn how to do my job. I tried my best to talk her out of it, as it IS a very stressful and arduous life to become involved in, but she was determined. She listened intently to all I could tell her, and watched, and helped me for several months at shows I was working, and finally bought my ex-partner's little C.A.E. mix board. Finally, I sent her out with equipment to do most of what I considered to be first choice shows, because she had proven herself to be very capable, and had a talented ear for the job, and I could trust her to represent Aardvark, and it's reputation by doing an excellent job. As well, she was a beauty, being very easy on the eyes, beyond being truly, sincerely nice, and a conversationally good companion, and also a very married lady, whose husband, Dave, was as equally nice as she, on top of being a sensitive and understanding, upright man. Debra was a true pleasure to teach, because she actually listened and comprehended.

Unlike most of the males I had tried to teach the business to, who already knew so much that they couldn't expend the brainpower to learn the approach and techniques that I offered. My feeling was, that if you would rather talk than listen to what I am trying to explain to you, then you would probably rather talk than listen to the frequencies you're supposed to be working with. You would do everyone involved more justice if you'd just take a job on an assembly line, where you can talk to your co-workers all you want to. Rather than learn from me, they preferred to let me know how much they already knew. As my Dad would have said, they already knew it all, and had their heads so full they didn't have space to store any more. Actually, they simply came to me with too many preconceived concepts, which would only interfere with their grasping a different approach to the science behind the duties of the job.

I mix the frequencies with the EQs on each channel, adding what I hear that is lacking when necessary, during the course of a song, rather than turning up the overall volume of that individual channel. To do this, you must have the aural capability, which is rarely natural in humans, of recognizing the frequency cycles that are indistinct. This is a capability acquired by long or intense experience. If you can't listen to verbal instructions, you probably will never be able to utilize concentrated listening to break out the individual frequencies of a given instrument from the total range of audio that that makes up the song. It takes a trained ear to do it, and that training can only be done individually. In other words you personally have to train your mind and your ear yourself.

I wasn't taking any personal wages out of what I was earning, but I was simply reinvesting all that I could back into more amps, speaker cabinets, microphones, mic stands, equalizers, electronic frequency crossovers, digital delays, and road cases to store every thing in for traveling. My partner, however, was taking fifty percent of everything earned, showing up to work for less than twenty percent of the gigs, and reinvesting nothing. Oh, did I not mention that I had a partner up to this point? Yes, but only in passing.

Well, that's because I didn't have him for long after I'd worked for Mitch Ryder. I had the accountant, Sally, at Midwest doing my books for me, as devoting the time to book keeping has always been my downfall. My partner was very thorough at going over the books with her to make sure he wasn't being cheated out of any of his money. Noticing this, after he had asked me if I was using the gas card for personal use, I let him assume that maybe I was using my credit card, which was my personal card and which I used only for company travel expenses, for personal use gasoline, as well as for gas used in the company van.

I had bought and paid for the step van out of my own pocket, and the company used it for free. That card only had company charges put on it, and the accountant saw every receipt, matching up the costs incurred, and the proceeds from, each job, in her red and black columns before she would pay the total bill, but I told Sally not to let him know that. It didn't take long, before his fuming over the imagined idea of being cheated out of his Due Proceeds by putting gas in my car, forced him to come to me and tell me he wanted out, offering to sell me his share of the equipment, consisting of a much older, small CAE mixer, two monitor cabinets and an amp. Two grand worth of very used gear, at best. Yeah, I bought him out, and good riddance, you selfish, lazy sod.

Chapter 10

Carnally Yours

Around in this period of time, my wife Deb and I were having issues. If I was at home when she should be arriving home from work, she would show up late. This went on for quite a while. Always with plausible excuses to soothe things over. Hell, I'm easy, and I tend to take people at their word, nonetheless, she wasn't coming home in her hospital uniform that she left for work in, but was often dressed a little too well to make me believe her, but other than that, everything seemed normal, and she was still jumping my bones passionately every night. Then, one night at a Sunspot gig in a big bar at a resort lake near town, a gig that all of our "Townie" friends had come to see, she was pretty much dressed to kill, well, as much as "hippie chicks" did back then, and flaunting it, and she disappeared for the whole third and fourth set. When the show was over and I had the equipment all loaded up an hour and more later, ready to go back home, she showed up.

She had parked her car right behind my truck, so to get her car she had to deal with me. Her long dark hair was wet and straggly with pine needles in it, her top was buttoned up one button hole off up the front, and she was out of breath from running up the hill from the lake. "Where have you been?" I asked. She told me that she had been skinny dipping with Shemmy. Shemmy was a friend of the band, and was the U. of M. football coach, Bo Shembeckler's adopted son, and was about our age. I said "For the last three or more hours? Great. We'll talk about it at home." and climbed in the truck and headed there. I had the truck unloaded, and equipment put away, which takes about forty-five minutes, before Deb got home.

When she got home, we went to our bedroom and got ready for bed. I was just about steaming and as Deb was undressing, I noticed that she didn't have any underwear on. I asked her if she lost her panties and she said yes, unless Shemmy found them. I asked her if that was Shemmy's cum streaming down the inside of her thighs. At first she tried denying it, but it was blatantly obvious it was cum, and she couldn't really. Her face was very red, and she attempted three times to say something and stalled each time before letting it out. Finally, she shook her head and started pushing me gently back onto the bed, her hands and lips all over me, coaxing me, telling me that she would more than make it up to me. In any and every way that we could think of, whether it was in punishment or in pleasure, if I please wouldn't be mad at her, and would relax and take it easy.

I said, "Look Deb, I'm not mad, I'm insulted. I grew up in the free love era, and I understand how passions can take over, but we are married, and so I think I am entitled to know where your passions are going to take you, before you let them run away with you. If you were going to be gone for more than three hours, you could have been honest with me and said something before you took off, instead of letting me be distracted throughout my mix with looking for you and worrying about you. When we lived up by Muskegon, and you were all hot and bothered for Brophy, and fantasizing about him every night for two weeks, we discussed it openly between us.

I told you then that you didn't have to ask for my permission to go fuck an army if you wanted to, and to quit driving yourself, and me, crazy thinking about Brophy, but just go for it if you had the nerve, just so long as you let me know in advance what was going on. Babe, that was honesty. We had honesty between us back then. I don't know, maybe you wanted me to be all jealous and possessive of you, and my response to you made you lose respect for me and for our marriage at that time, but my response was an honest answer to your honesty with me that you were brave enough to share with me then. You already knew that I wasn't the jealous, possessive type, and you found out then that I wouldn't have told you to do it if I wasn't willing to deal with the reality of it. Whether you did it or not was up to you, but we talked about it first."