How did you end up working on recording gear for MCI [Music Center Incorporated]?
My pal Steve [Beverly] went over and applied at MCI. He had worked for a short time at Ampex, and because he had some experience they hired him right away. I got an interview, but they didn't hire me. But I'd already quit Motorola, I'd quit immediately, and it wasn't a smart move to make, no unemployment or anything else, I'd just quit. I then proceeded to try and get a job at MCI for the next eight months. Meanwhile, I was making ends meet by being a roadie in a rock band called Uranus. We were a glitter rock band at the height of the disco scene in South Florida. We were playing bars when we could get a gig, but we couldn't a gig south of Jacksonville. I did the sound and I was a roadie. I had the car, basically. That was where I started in live sound engineering. But I was still applying at MCI. The receptionist took my job application, once a week, for eight months, before MCI hired me. I think she was throwing my applications away. I found that out because when I did finally get hired, I'd gone in and filled out an application on Monday. I then saw an ad for electronics technicians at MCI in the paper on Tuesday, and went back Wednesday, only to find I needed to fill out an application again. This time they hired me. I started in 1974. MCI were still selling 16-tracks. I was put into the console check out department, and I worked for a guy named Wally Watkivs, who taught me a lot. We were doing the final test on brand new consoles that had never been working before. We made sure everything worked and took specs and packed them up. The console was called a JH-428, and its predecessor was a JH-416, which was a black version. The JH-416 was the first inline console on the market. Before that, recording consoles were split — inputs on the left side, outputs on the right side, making them twice as long as they should have been. Whenever MCI made enough changes that it was significant, they would change the color of a unit. This made it easy troubleshooting a problem on the phone. You would just ask the customer what color the unit was and then you knew the version. They were selling them to all the kinds of recording studios, around the world. We were one of three commercially popular manufacturers of the time, the others being Neve and Trident, both from England. But we made tape machines as well as consoles. Jeep [Jeep Harned, founder of MCI] started by going down to Criteria Recording Studios and he fixed up Mack Emerman's studio, and Mack said, "Hey, can you make some electronics for this tape deck over here, because this sounds horrible?" Jeep designed some audio electronics for a Scully tape deck, which improved the sound and reduced distortion. So then Mack told him, "If you build a tape deck, I'll buy it." Jeep went back and he and Jim Strickland designed the JH-10 16-track, which was the not the first multitrack on the market but it was the first one that MCI had built. It was the first tape deck to have a constant tension for tape handling. They sold them to Criteria, and then to Atlantic, because the two companies were closely affiliated at the time. Those were MCI's two major clients. Criteria was like home: we could take new products to them, to test out in the real world. As far as Atlantic, we had Tommy Dowd, who had been with the company practically from the beginning. Tommy had great input about what Atlantic needed in tape decks and consoles. Jeep always listened to the end user ideas. I try to keep that in mind when I talk to customers on the phone or at tradeshows. These are the people who have the needs that become tomorrow's new products. We also sold to Record Plant, A&R, RCA, Sigma Sound — a lot of New York studios. Some of that came later, when Ham Brosious and Audiotechniques started selling MCI. The tape decks that MCI competed against were Ampex, Studer and 3M. MCI could package the console, multitrack tape recorder, and the 2-tracks, all at the same time. We could sell everything that you needed in a package deal, making a better price and you had a studio.
Any memories of working with Jeep Harned?
I remember working in the console check out area at MCI one day. Consoles are big and you get down inside and you're looking for where the problem is, and you have your head down in there. There's a part called an electrolytic capacitor and it's got a polarity, so if you turn it around backwards from what it should be, it'll explode. Jeep had come in to talk to Wally and they were over in the corner. I have my head down in a console, and one of the modules had an electrolytic capacitor in backwards, and it exploded, which like a gunshot — BOOM! It sprays paper and gook all over, and was all in my hair. I jumped up and turned around and Jeep and Wally were rolling on the floor, laughing. Jeep had what I call "the recording engineer's touch." He would come into the checkout area walk up to a console that had a couple hundred switches on it and push the one switch that wouldn't light up the LED. I used to think he came in at night, and went up and down the whole thing, to find out which one wasn't working, because there's no way he could have known. But he did, and he did that more than one time.
Where did you travel for MCI?
In the beginning I was travelling domestically: New York, L.A. and Nashville to A&R, Atlantic, and a lot of other studios. The dealers had tech staff but they weren't intimate with the product. The dealers had a lot of lines, so when they had a problem that was out of their hands they would call the factory. The deal was, "You pay the expenses, we supply the labor" and I was the labor. One day the [MCI] service manager, John Shepard, came to me and said they were having some trouble in France. So off I went to the Honky Chateau, a very big client. I was at Château d'Hérouville, fixing the console when The Sweet were recording. They would come up after I had the console completely apart and say, "Can we get started?" I would say, "Give me 15 minutes." They would look at me like I was crazy because the whole desk was apart, but I had it back together for the session. I was there for a week while The Sweet were there. During that week, I was working at night and I would start about 11 pm or midnight, after they had recorded all day long. I would work until 8 or 9 am, until they wanted to start working again. There was a problem in the console. I could get it to work, but it wouldn't last, it would blow out. It was annoying and I was having a terrible time trying to figure it out. I was working one evening at the console, and the way the room was set up there was a rack of Dolby's [noise reduction] to the left, and behind that was where they kept the amplifiers for the speakers and the power supplies. It was a small room with a cubbyhole that you crawled into, like a trapdoor, but that door was in the studio, so the big window for the control room was in front of me. I don't know what time it started, but I started hearing what sounded like human heavy breathing from behind the Dolby rack. And it continued. And nobody had walked past me, because the control room window was right in front of me. No one had gone over to where you entered that amp room. I kind of just focused on working on the console, and I didn't look up. I didn't know what was going on, honestly. When the sun came up, it just stopped. It stopped way before anyone came up to ask about, "Can we get started?" or anything. I didn't say anything to anybody, because I thought it was a joke, and I thought somebody was going to come up to me and say, "Hey, did you hear the ghost last night?" But nobody said anything to me. And it never happened again, after that. It was only that one night. Honest to God. That was probably 1977 or 1978.
Who was buying all this recording gear?
We were selling to TV broadcasters. Houses of worship were big clients too. Anyone who needed to record something. But recording studios were the thing. I want to say we were shipping probably eight to ten consoles, maybe ten 24-tracks, and up to one 120 2-tracks every month. We were moving gear!
It's been said that at that time, one third of the albums on the Billboard top 100 were recorded on MCI equipment. Is that so?
MCI sold to Criteria, who did all the Crosby Stills Nash, Eric Clapton's 421 Ocean Boulevard, all the Lynyrd Skynyrd stuff, the Eagles' singles, Foreigner, Carly Simon, James Taylor and the list goes on. Criteria had everyone coming in. Later on, AC/DC, Queen and Led Zeppelin albums were recorded on MCI gear. Neil Young even had us make a small 4-channel version of the JH-528 to put on his boat.
