Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474752
Fall 2022 – LOCAL695.ORG 49 outboard stuff like Lexicon and TC. and 2" 24-track tape machines, Studer, Ampex, 3M, and Otari. I learned about 1/4", 1/2", 1", 2" tracks, 4 tracks, 8 tracks, 16, and 24. A few weeks after that first studio opened, I found a drummer I knew from the club scene in Hollywood just walking across the patio where I ate my lunch. "Hey Steven, what are YOU doing here?" I asked. "Dude, I got a $120,000 record deal, can you buy me and my friend Slash lunch?" They were penniless local kids from the Hollywood club scene with a little-known local band called Guns N' Roses. They had the studio for a thirty-day lockout to do guitars and vocals for their debut album, Appetite for Destruction. I will never forget when the studio owner, Steve Smith, found me outside and pulled me in a week later so he could play play me rough mixes of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City" through that Trident 80B from the MTR90 2" Master. "Wow, this room sounds good!" Well, the mojo was there and the acts that followed over the next four years included Heart, Cheap Trick, Billy Idol, Jason Bonham, Roy Orbison, and so many others. Subsequently in another studio there called Red Zone, in which I installed an AMEK Angela mixing console, we saw Green Day's debut Dookie, LA Guns, Steve Lukather, Warren Zevon, Slaughter, Kenny G, and Vanessa Williams fresh from her Miss America falling out. Around this time, I joined the Orange County Stagehands Local 54 so I could take gigs working with my uncle down at Irvine Meadows. I only worked on shows I wanted and only if they didn't interfere with my job at Pro Audio. It was a fun few years. Then it happened. My father asked me if I was ready to make a little more than $8 an hour. Some years earlier, his local had merged with a small group of sound folks who recorded actors on sets of features and TV. He took me to meet Mr. Wacter and, with my experience and some entrance dues paid, I was allowed into IATSE Local 695 and was looking for new work. The next two years went by fast. I was playing ping-pong with Ann Wilson and drinking beers with Slash but still only up to about $8.50 an hour when Bill Harrington at Paramount needed somebody to make fifteen thousand feet of mic cables in a hurry. He and Dan Brewer at Tech Services on the Paramount lot had been providing sound and video tech to Cheers and a few other sitcoms when they picked up another and had to scramble. I called in sick to Pro Audio on a Wednesday in December of '89 and reported to the base- ment of Paramount's Stage 31. I made a boatload of cables that day with Canare Star Quad and a few hundred nice new black Neutrik XLR's with gold pins. They liked my output and asked me to come back the next day, and the next. Then Bill asked me if I could be a maintenance person on a sitcom. My mind flashed to the day my parents had taken me to the stu- dio to see an episode of the I Love Lucy show, the one where Lucy worked at the bank with Vivian Vance. I still remember looking up and seeing the Boom Operators waving their arms around up in the green beds and thinking, "hmmm ,that looks like fun. I bet I could do that." I think I was about twelve. However, I had never seen inside the sound booth. He took me to Stage 25 to see the booth on Cheers. What looked like a little baby console to me, a Yamaha 1516, and a pair of reel-to-reel decks? Otari B2 1/4" and a 1/2" MRKIII4. I could fix a couple limiters I had installed dozens of and a patch bay I could wire easily. Oh, and there were some of my new XLR cables on the floor standing by. All I said was, "Well, I am a warranty repair trained tech on both of those machines and this console looks like a toy to me. Is that it?" I was in, he was down. I was on Dear John for two nice twelve-hour days a week and would make more than a week's pay back at my soon to be "old job." I had to break it to my boss in Burbank that I didn't have the flu for three days like I had said I did. I went in on Monday to give my notice. He asked what my new rate was and thought maybe he could match it and keep me …. I told him. I think he actually spit out his coffee and said, "I'm gonna miss you, Doug!" I stayed there at Paramount, installing and maintaining the sitcom packages for seventeen seasons. In the process, I learned how to wrangle cables on cameras, what a PL sys- tem was, and how to install and repair that. I learned how to string Fisher booms and move perambulators around, how to run four channels of microwave video assist transmitters and monitors, how to install mic lines and PL's and effect speakers in the green beds and how to install a dozen little shotgun mics to capture audience reactions. I saw ways to make installation and un-installation more efficient by replacing hundreds of single-line mic cables with multi-pin snakes and I re-wired the packages, a couple a year, for a couple years till I had them all the way I liked them. Most of this work was done in the summer when the shows and all the freelancers were on hiatus. The stages got new patch bays and new mic lines and eventually, we replaced all the reel to reels with High 8 Digital DA98 and the Sony version, which I liked better as it had separate XLR ins and outs over the "D" connector fanouts on the Tascams. I got derailed a year after I started at Paramount when the unthinkable happened. Dan Brewer had a heart attack and died while playing tennis with his cardiologist. By then, we had our new packages at Paramount, Universal, Fox, and Disney. Dan had been the keeper of those sweet rental deals and most of them went away when he died. Our department lost half its business and I got laid off. I think it was about eighteen months before Randy Dixon told the new guys, Tom Bruhl and Frank Estrada, about me. I was working with my friend Jamie Sutton out of a storefront in Burbank, installing and repairing music studio gear for about half