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?
