Chapter Two - "Launch"

First of all, I want to thank everyone who read and supported my first column.  This endeavor has been more successful than I ever dreamed it would be and it is my readers who have made it so.  Keep it up, by all means!  I'm having fun and I hope you are, too.   I want to thank Andy Peake, Bob and Suzannah "Thana" Harris, John Manikoff (RIP), and Craig Roush for their help filling in the missing pieces, for this column as well as ones to come.  All of them have been more than patient and generous, especially with their hectic schedules and my deadlines.

Launch
- I remember the day I came up with the dream of engineering as vividly
as one might remember a significant news or family event.  Where I was, what I was doing, the whole thing.  My
first husband and I and some friends were sitting around on a clear
weekend afternoon, looking out of the window of our aerie near the top
of Bear Mountain in Evergreen, Colorado.  All 14,000 feet of glorious Mt. Evans was framed by our picture window, which we watched like a TV.  You had to be there.  I
was sprawled out across the couch and partially on a foot rest and
partially on our huge cable spool coffee table (didn't everyone have
one?).  We had a pretty good stereo, music being our lifeblood.  It wasn't, I know now, an audiophile system, but we had those huge, washing machine JBL studio monitors.  I know a lot of you know of what I speak!  We
hanged our Thorens turntable from the ceiling so there would be no
skipping as we tromped across the floor in our hiking boots, and we had
some brand of good receiver, or an amp and separate receiver, and some
graphic equalization (EQ-like adjusting bass and treble), which drove me
crazy and still does (the graphic type) unless it is used to tune a
studio control room, then locked up in a plastic cover (the EQ, not the
room!).  So I think I kept turning it off, much to the exasperation of my then husband.  Anyway, I had the sound system to hear exactly what was happening with the sound on albums in those days.  And to think about how I would make them sound.  I had no idea how hard it would be.  Not just getting a lowly job at a studio, but how hard good engineering really was and all that went into it.

I
won't say what LP I was listening to, but it just hit me that there was
some not great engineering going around, and it was ruining some great
bands, or at least ruining my listening experience, and I thought I could do better and I thought the music deserved it.  I
had no idea how to go about achieving this or that females weren't
engineering, but I knew I wanted to do this thing, get good at it, learn
everything I could, and at the end of the rainbow would be a gold or
platinum record or a hit or maybe even nothing but studio magic and
creative satisfaction.

But at that moment, I just wanted to lie there, look at Mt. Evans, and have it sound good, because the music was too wonderful for mediocrity.  So my dream was selfish, at first.  And not being terrifically musically gifted, like my parents, it was a way to be involved with the thing I loved the most.  My life had a soundtrack, and I wanted to control it.

Over the next year, I separated from my husband, crossed the Atlantic, received thirty, count 'em, thirty, rejection letters in Great Britain (I bought an APRS directory (The Association of Professional Recording Services) and wrote every studio that was listed).  Then it was back to the States to stay with a dear friend for a while and get my head together.  There, I got a very unexpected initiation into the music business (a friend's embryonic lighting company, a DJ's connections).  So I got backstage sometimes.  I
rode in that damn 18-wheeler lighting truck, bobbing up and down one
hundred miles to and one hundred miles home from the concerts.  If I was lucky, I got to ride in my friend's old clunker.  But I had some pretty amazing experiences during this time, which set me up for what was to come much later.

I
 wasn't very interested in most of the bands we went to see, although
the rest of the world was, and I won't list them in the interest of 'to
each his or her own'.  The most memorable concert, to me, though, was the Rick Wakeman gig.  He'd left Yes and was doing his solo thing and was very, very hot at the time.  And being a young progressive-rocker, I was in heaven.  Some friends knew him really well, so I got more access to him than I would have normally.  I got to chat with him before he went on stage.  He was terrified and talking about his stage fright, which, with his experience, kind of threw me.  Being the mother savior that I was, I tried to help, but I doubt I did.  However, he had someone to babble to who would babble back, which is half the game when you are afraid.  So at least I was there for that.  I
noticed that it was very quiet back there and low key; he wasn't one
for a huge entourage or all kinds of people hanging about, which was
interesting for me to see, that concerts and the music business were (sometimes!) just business as usual.  Work.  By
the time he went on, I felt comfortable enough with him to go plop my
elbows down on the top of one of his keyboards and watch this genius at
work, not but a couple of feet away.  I kept thinking he would wave me off, but maybe my presence further comforted him, I don't know.  Or maybe he was so into his performance that he didn't notice me.  He was in kind of a wizard tent thing off to stage left from the rest of the band, so was a bit isolated.  It
was probably hard being the focus of the whole show after his stints as
a sideman, albeit a famous one, with The Strawbs and Yes.  The audience must have seen me and wondered "who the heck is she?"  Oh, nobody, just a cheeky little girl with big dreams.  (BTW, I'm 5'6", I'm not really 'little'.)

After performing, he joined his band and his friends and I in the hotel bar and we were about the only ones there, I think.  We had the lighted disco floor to ourselves.  Wow, cool!  Gosh, forget Wakeman, how lucky can you get?  I didn't really have another chance to talk to him that night.  I think I tried one time when having a rest from my wondrous disco floor dancing, but he was done for.  He did give me his office address in case I should want a reference, as I told him of my goal.  How nice was that, even though he probably wasn't a believer, along with all the studios in the UK!  But, his name does appear as a reference on my very old engineering resume!  Like he would have remembered me!

Yes, I know he is not from Colorado.  Besides a good 'rock star' story (how I hate that term when speaking of musicians!  There has
to be another.), I'm trying to give a little background on my
progression and how he showed me, more than the rest of the 'rock stars'
I met back then, that they were just people and above all else, to be
treated as people.  No cameras, autographs, or fawning.  I never would have had conversation one (or it would not have lasted long) if I had whipped out any of that with Wakeman.  Or he might have loved it, but I got the feeling that it wouldn't have gone over, right before a gig.  It was just understood.  Professionalism at all times, even though I wasn't working, I was sometimes with people who were.  I can't tell you how much that probably helped me later on when I had to work with some of my favorite musicians.  'Had to', gosh, what a tough job!  It could have been a workman's comp issue and you had to be prepared for these things or you wouldn't be able to work.  I almost cut my finger off in the tape machine when working for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer at Caribou Ranch, much later; imagine if I hadn't been somewhat prepared!  I might have fallen down the elevator shaft trying to keep from fawning while stuffing my autograph book into my pocket!  But
seriously, I also learned a lot when I tried to comfort Wakeman. You
have to be able to talk to artists and coax them and encourage them,
famous or not, to get something special out of them and onto tape/disk.  And respect them. So I started off learning to do that even before seeing the inside of a studio.  So
even if the client was, say, Tom Smith's Bad Bar Band, I tried to
encourage them and have the same respect for them as I had for Wakeman
(sorry, Tom, whoever you are!).  I have to say that I learned a lot of this from my future mentor, too.  If a vocalist had throat problems, out came the tea and lemon.  It was just done.  And it was as important as any piece of equipment in the studio.  In
those days, if the performance wasn't there, there was only a limited
amount of things that could be done to fix it, unlike our current
digital world.