A Chance Musical Encounter

I just had a chance encounter and long conversation with a fellow that I met at the Saugus Swap Meet. It was hotter than a biscuit out there and we had both ducked under a vendor’s EZ-Up which offered an oasis of cool in this Saugus Sahara. The item that caught both of our attention was a three-channel National Electronics Microphone Mixer, which I’m guessing was about a 1937 model. It was the earliest mic mixer that I had ever seen.

I don’t remember if he or I made the first comment, comparing this ancient audio tool to a modern mixing console, but that first comment was the opening kickoff in a half-hour conversation. A conversation in which we quickly recognized that we had intertwining roots in the Hollywood recording industry of the seventies and eighties.

We each name-dropped to the other, searching for that facial illumination of recognition. We both realized that while we had not been acquaintances, we had trod the same paths through the L. A. sound scene during the Golden Age of Rock. He talked about giving Jim Morrison rides from college to Laurel Canyon. I spoke of Ike and Tina at the Cinnamon Cinder, in Long Beach. He’d done sessions with Ike in Lala Land and we had both owned beater cars that wouldn’t make it fifteen miles without overheating, but when you were jumping from one session to another in the town’s recording studio scene, well fifteen miles was more than you usually needed from end to end.

We discussed the surge in studio building at that time and we reminisced about the great sounding rooms and the ones with acoustics from Hell. Tom Hidley was the god of designing recording studio acoustics. He had been the engineer on Frank Zappa and the Mother’s “Freak Out” album and was co-owner of TTG Studios, at Sunset and Highland. Jimi Hendrix raved about TTG’s sound and I’d done sessions there, playing the bass. We both agreed that Hidley wasn’t god, he was Moses, leading us to the promised land of great sounds and the owners that didn’t want to go the fee for a Hidley design, paid the price sonically.

We chuckled over the fact that we were both hot rodders when we were mixing sessions, slamming the fader/pedal to the metal and enjoying the warm, slight distortion  that an oversaturated, analog multi-track machine running Ampex 456 Grand Master tape made. I spoke of my love for Spectra Sonics consoles. He hadn’t liked their EQ because the High Frequency was 10 KHz and he liked boards with 15 KHz units for that bright top-end sound. Personally, I had never noticed that equalizer lacked highs because; A: I wasn’t a dog, and B: Because, after sticking my head halfway down a PA speaker during a Jimmy Page solo at the Rose Palace, I don’t think that I ever heard anything above 12 KHz again. Page had loved and wanted to buy his Gibson ES345 guitar, but he told him no and said that he had willed it to his best friend.

We glossed quickly over passive EQs that didn’t introduce phase shift into your record pressing. And, again we laughed at Neve getting the reputation as the hot console, when we both found its celebrity hyped and its sound brittle. Of course, we’d been mike junkies, what engineers weren’t? Microphones were our paint brushes and we spent three or four minutes recalling the alchemy of drum miking. We’d both loved the Sony C-37P, him on the high hat and me on the snare.

He liked EV RE-20s on the kick while I preferred an old EV 666 most of the time. To a bystander our conversation must have sounded like weird mathematical jazz as we threw mic model numbers back and forth in a special engineer’s verbal shorthand. We both hated near field monitors and we slid into the bottom line as we solemnly acknowledged that the best engineering was powerless in the face of performance. Bad engineering could ruin a stellar performance but the best tech work in the world could never polish a turd of a track. He said it best when he commented, “Take Neil Young, I could put an SM-57 in front of him and he would still sound great.”

The political situation of those times extended our discussion. I’d been the photography editor for the Long Beach Free Press with a III A draft classification. He’d been in the 101st Airborne Division, the same one that Hendrix had been in. We both bemoaned how cheap China White smack and then crack had taken its toll on the music scene. As our conversation started to move towards babes, my cell phone rang. Dammed electronic cowbell. We said a hasty goodbye and parted.

After my call I reflected on our half-hour word fest. It had felt like when two musicians meet on stage during a jam. They feel each other’s abilities out, they test the other’s musical vocabulary and then they discover what scales they mutually enjoy and can explore together and, much like an improvised jam, our conversation was just sounds echoing into the atmosphere. These written recollections of mine are a poor representation of the points that we leapt to in staccato fashion. But it sure felt good and I just had to tell you about it.

P.S.  I bought the old mixer…. And for only $5.