The Buccaneers - Part 1

    In this ongoing series, exclusive to TPi, he attempts to weave some of the disparate strands together and piece together the story of the birth and evolution of live rock’n’roll production.

    Likely to run for at least a year, our Chronicle series starts with the first of several episodes dedicated to the people we can best describe as genuine pioneers.

Many of those who embarked on this industry’s empirical journey back at the beginning of the 1970s, when the PA hire business was effectively born, are not only still active, but continue to drive the state-of-the-art forward.

    Go back even further and there is an earlier generation who truly laid the foundations — pioneers who are more likely to have either passed on to The Great Gig In The Sky or are now leading a quieter life. One of the latter is Bernie Weaver. Now aged 87, he is probably the UK’s oldest surviving sound engineer.

    Around 12 years ago, when I started out on this research odyssey, Weaver paid a visit to old friends Chris Gilbert (ex-BBM Electronics) and Bruno Wayte (now with Sennheiser but then with Harman) and over a couple of lunchtime beers, he unveiled his remarkable story, which has never been published until now.

    Weaver provided anecdote after anecdote about his days spent working the Rank Organisation — from the very birth of cinema in the mid-1930s. This effectively sets the scene for the investment in touring technology that would take place at the start of the 1970s, when many of the UK’s emerging ‘prog rock’ bands funded the development of bespoke sound and lighting equipment for touring, and subsequently set up rental companies to keep the kit rolling once the tour broke.

    Some of the stories and claims that today flood the industry lean towards the apocryphal — memories tend to be, at best, selective — but we have attempted to retain high fidelity wherever possible.

    Clearly, there were direct relationships between Genesis and Vari-Lite, The Who and ML Executives at Shepperton Studios, and Delicate and Supertramp, while Welsh band Man were instrumental in setting up Concert Sound (the last three partnerships all favouring Martin Audio systems).

    Pink Floyd were the founding fathers behind Britannia Row Productions and the Scope Hire PA system that Police/Wishbone Ash manager Miles Copeland and agent John Sherry (JSE) owned provided the basis of the Entec rig, during the early days when Pat Chapman (who had run the Crab Nebula lightshow at the Marquee) set up Entec Lighting.

    Entec was a real tour de force, and John Denby and Jan Goodwin inherited the legacy started by Harold and Barbara Pendleton with their seminal open air festivals of the late 1960s, in Windsor, Kempton Park (and later, Reading).

    While many companies in the 1970s bought equipment in order to tour it, some loudspeaker developers like Martin Audio set out to be bona fide manufacturers, while Turbosound likewise developed from being a production company into a corporate manufacturer of international repute. Martin Audio and Turbosound have played dominant roles in the concert touring scene (and a sizeable chunk of the contractor market) on this side of the Atlantic for the past two to three decades.

    Other mixer and processor manufacturers were also making their mark, such as Stephen Court (PA constructer and inventor of the GE60 graphic equaliser), Geoff Byers (Midas), Chas Brooke and Stan Gould (Brooke Siren Systems — BSS) with the crossover, and Nick Franks (Amek) to name but a few. All the amplifier output had been whacked straight into the speaker before Brooke Siren Systems produced its first crossover.

    Every PA company has its own story about how it came into being but it’s hard to resist including, as an anecdote, the transfer of Man’s PA into the company now known as Concert Sound.
    Man were managed at the time by Barrie Marshall (Marshall Arts), while Tim Boyle, the current ‘father figure’ at Concert Sound, was their agent at the Arthur Howes Agency. Tag Hall was their tour manager, Robert Collins (Eric Clapton’s FOH engineer) was their backline roadie and Geoff Hooper their FOH man.

    After a short period the band decided to sell their PA, so Marshall and Arthur Howes stepped in and bought the WEM PA to service the band... who then promptly split up.

    Concert Sound duly set up in Watford with all the aforementioned people (plus Jenny Marshall) forming the co-operative. They soon bought a Midas desk, with the two-way crossover built in from Martin/Midas in Covent Garden and replaced the WEMs with a Martin system, including the classic 115s and four wedge monitors before moving up, like so many people, to the legendary Martin Phillishaves.

THE WEAVER STORY
In Bernie Weaver’s day, things had been much different. The emerging festival systems were a far cry from the old cinema sound — the RCA W, Vitavox Multicell and Altec S9, a huge folded horn bin that Weaver would power with 5W-10W Vortexion amps and mixers in the days when the package tours that characterised the beat idiom arrived at the local Odeon.

    Weaver had started to work with Rank way back in 1935 and remembers the Odeon in Birmingham’s New Street as opening up the idea of promoters renting the venues. “They had a 5W PA system, and you put the sound through the projection,” he recollects.

    However, when Bill Haley toured the UK in 1957, Rank needed not only some auxiliary sound but some specialist knowledge, and Weaver was co-opted as sound engineer.

    “Most places had a four-way Vortexion mixer, with large knobs, while you would still run your sound through the projection amplifiers and switch over to your PA speakers. Your mixer could be situated anywhere. There were a lot of Westrex speakers and we used crystal mics that would shake as they output 3W of sound. Not much sound came out of the house system but you could actually extend that with the addition of a couple of Vitavox horns and Grampian amps.”

    Shure, he remembers, provided the first complete system (supplied with a pair of column speakers) and Sammy Davis introduced him to the concept of foldback. Weaver experimented a lot with microphones: the Reslo ribbon mic was the classic and he also tried the AKG E12 — “a lovely mic but delicate” — as well as products from Shure, Grampian stick mics and the moving coil, highly-durable ST&C.

    But by the early ’60s he had discovered Shure’s seminal Unidyne III (the 545) and 55S/556S studio mic, which was later known as the Elvis or ‘skull’ mic. The Unidyne, he says, was the first tough, good sounding mic — and priced very competitively.

    At one Rank cinema, around 1963, Weaver tried to reinforce The Beatles, which proved impossible because of the overbearing audience pitch. When the PRS tried to impose additional tariffs, for performance of other artists’ material, he appeared before the Tribunal in a celebrated case on behalf of the promoter to say that no one would physically have been able to hear a word. He had recorded the ambient level from the roof, which was played at the Tribunal — and the promoter won his case, since the 120W Vitavox system had been able to make little impression.

    Weaver worked through the valve era, as names like Selmer, Vox and WEM slowly graced the concert stages. In November 1966, he did the sound for The Beach Boys at the Finsbury Park Astoria (before it became the Rainbow Theatre, the subject of a separate, future Chronicle feature), using a BSR mixer — again through the projection amps.

    The following year, at the mighty Hammersmith Odeon, Weaver, complete with Grampians, Vortexions and three separate mics, discovered that The Beach Boys’ sound man was carrying independent production.

    “He came in next day with a 20-way mixer and a VU on every channel and he could switch from any channel. He had these big speakers which he was having flown, producing 2500W of proper sound — and a foldback system. But he kept me on for the rest of the tour.”

    With the aid of a gold-plated Shure 545 handed to him by Frank Sinatra’s sound engineer, Weaver was then expected to mix Ol’ Blue Eyes, without so much as a soundcheck.

    Then Shure produced its new Vocal Master — a six-channel mixer amp which sold in droves in the late ’60s (and which Weaver debuted with Hayley Mills in Peter Pan). Rank later loaned Weaver out to Tom Jones, who used 16 of the half-size Vocal Masters, and he got paid the princely sum of £150 for doing 32 shows.

    In fact, according to Bruno Wayte, to this day on the walls of the Hammersmith Odeon (or the Apollo, as it is today) can be found old Vocal Masters and Altec Voice of the Theatre enclosures that have never been removed — memories of a bygone time.

    Around 1984, Weaver eventually left the Rank Organisation at the age of 63 after 49 years with the company. “I needed a lot more energy and knew I was getting past my sell-by date,” he chuckles.

    But he harbours fond memories of the vocal amplifiers that were always louder than the threshold of the house PA, and typically, when it was necessary to import more professional sound, the JBL 4560 cinema cabinet, adjusted for PA purposes, was the primary option.

    Weaver used to carry a large Variac transformer and to lower the sound level from the guitar amps was to turn the voltage down without the band knowing. That gave them less output but it ‘detuned’ the guitar sound and only one band noticed that — the Rolling Stones, in the early 1960s.

    Chris Gilbert, an expert on early microphone technology, remembers the Shure Unidyne III as providing the real breakthrough after the company in the UK had been perceived largely as a hi-fi pick-up and stylus outfit. “I remember the Reslos in use on the first episode of Ready Steady Go,” says Gilbert. “Ribbon mics were fine for broadcast but as soon as the sound went live all you got was feedback.

    “By the second show they had the Shure 545 — and that really became the standard until the SM58 took over. The 545 changed mic design for everyone, whereas with the cardioid pattern of the 58, produced by the dynamic moving coil, you could get it quite loud but without feedback.

    “Curiously, the SM58 had been available for some time — but no one was sure of its application until the Rolling Stones’ keyboard player Ian Stewart stumbled across it in Shure’s Blackfriars warehouse.

    “For all the things that have changed in audio,” Gilbert declares, “the only things that have remained constant is how the loudspeaker works, and the fact that after 1966 everyone wanted to use an SM58.”

Jerry Gilbert
TPi

Beach Boys image by Jan Persson/Redferns.
Other images: Chris Gilbert, Shure Incorporated
& the TPi Archive

NEXT MONTH: THE BUCCANEERS Pt.2
featuring Charlie Watkins & WEM