“I always took things apart.”
That’s Dave “Rat” Levine describing his childhood, and his “taking things apart” would evolve into putting audio gear together for what was a decidedly underserved market — the burgeoning punk scene of Southern California circa 1980s, building an important and influential audio company and innovating all along the way.
Humble beginnings? How’s this: Rat Sound Systems started working the punk clubs of Southern California using a cassette deck as a mic preamp into a “Y” cable with some mics he acquired in a trade for a hookah pipe. By the late 1990s, the company had designed and built an arena-sized P.A. doing international tours. The list of acts he served, supplied, and/or mixed include Black Flag, Social Distortion, Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Blink-182, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His innovations include the Double Hung P.A., EAW’s MicroWedge and the 30” SuperSub, among others. His festival work includes almost every Coachella and decades of the Vans Warped Tour, among others.
“My first memory of Dave was him hovered over a Studiomaster console with his soldering iron doing triage 15 minutes before Iggy Pop was to take the stage at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach,” says Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman, who in the 1980s was a stage manager / promoter rep for Goldenvoice. “The crowd at Fender’s — to say the least— were not the most patient bunch, and I was worried about the ensuing riot if we had to cancel the show after the sound desk had caught fire during the opening act. This is when I ran out and asked Dave if he could fix it. In his typical nonchalant way, he looked up and said, ‘I got this.’ He ‘got’ it and also got my ultimate respect. As I moved through my career, Rat Sound has been my go-to company because I always knew ‘they got this.’”
“Some of the most successful touring bands in American music have been relying on Dave and his incredible sound systems for literally decades,” says Henry Rollins, who was fronting Black Flag when they turned to Rat to tour with them. “These are multi-platinum arena acts who simply can’t afford to ever get it wrong, and Dave is their guy. These are bands who can work with anyone, but they go to Dave. That’s kinda all you need to know. Any notice or accolade bestowed upon Dave is beyond well-deserved.”
Sure, I’ll Take Those Mics
Born in 1962 in Alabama, Rat would eventually move to Hermosa Beach, CA, where his mom was an airline stewardess and then an actress before working for Barbie co-designer Jack Ryan. At 15, the self-described “stoner kid” was working the night shift at Winchell’s Donuts. He would occasionally sneak donuts to an unhoused man who hung around. “One night he came up with a blanket and wrapped inside was a beautiful Indian hookah he was selling for $5,” Rat says. He bought it and took it to a friend’s house who offered to trade it for some AKG D200 and D190 mics. Not sure how his career would have played out if he had hung onto that hookah, but here’s how it unfurled when he got the mics…
“I lived near a former Baptist Church where Black Flag and all these punk bands rehearsed,” Rat says. “It was a punk rock / hippie haven.” He bought a cassette deck and hooked up the mics, taking his recording setup to Hong Kong Café where he would trade free entrance for a tape of the show.
After graduating from high school in 1980, he got a job at Mattel Toys fixing handheld football gaming devices. During this time, while doing some recording work, he was befriended by Tom Hodder who lived in an apartment below the studio. “He had this giant P.A. in his living room with two giant double-15” cabs and huge horns, and it was mind blowing,” Rat says. Hodder asked if he wanted to build some wedges with him, and off they went. He would ask Hodder to be part of a sound company, but Hodder joined Local 33 instead, so Rat turned to Brian Benjamin, a bass player friend he’d known since they were 12, to start building speaker boxes.
Origins of Rat Sound
Rat’s next day job was at Hughes Aircraft, where he would work in the Electro-Optical environmental lab. There, he was testing everything in the TOW anti-tank missile system except the missile itself. “We would shake them, bake them, freeze them, sweat them for seven days with humidity and then do hydraulic lift drop tests,” he explains. “It was everything needed to make sure the gear met military specs, so it was there I learned a lot about durability; what breaks and what doesn’t. We had a giant shaker we’d mount things like the rocket launcher on. The vibrations were audio frequencies, and they had a half a million-watt wall of tube power amps in parallel to power what was basically a giant speaker motor.” Between tests, one of the techs would connect that 500,000-watt amp to the headphone out of an old AM radio with a mini plug. “It was this weird lo-fi sound system that filled the whole building.”
However, at 18, Rat walked away from this “real” job with good money, health insurance and stability to start a sound company, resigned to be “an impoverished starving artist…By then I had a small P.A. system, so I quit in December, because I had a bunch of shows I needed to do,” he says. “I didn’t realize that the industry slowed down in January, which is when I promptly ran out of money and went broke.”
But he didn’t stop. Rat’s speaker designs stood out in two ways: the quality and durability, and that carried through to the first P.A. he built. “It was a Crown DC 300 on the bottom with a BGW 750 on mids, and a BGW250 on highs with a Furman crossover and Tapco EQ.” Trying to figure out a name for his new company, he thought about how he was always being undercut by the bigger sound companies. He mentioned to his girlfriend at the time that he felt like the rat in a snake cage at feeding time. “Why don’t you call the company Rat?” she suggested. It was a perfect fit, as Dave saw rats as smart, industrious, often disliked and often heard but not seen. (He would soon adopt “Rat” as his last name.)
Over time, the punk bands and promoters on the scene ended up gravitating to Rat Sound as the other sound rental companies didn’t appreciate their gear getting broken during a show. “Other sound companies hated the punk rock chaos, but we loved it,” Rat says, adding he was prepared for it. “We used full-sized twist lock AC power connectors for speaker cables. Our speaker grills were made of 12-gauge steel and our P.A. was hard to climb, and we bolted microphones to the stands and strapped down the P.A. boxes.” He had no doubt about his future at this point: his passion was designing and building speaker cabinets. Whatever money came in went right back into his company. Meat Puppets, Black Flag, Minutemen, Sonic Youth and others started hiring Rat Sound.
All new businesses are fraught with challenges, but the netherworld of punk came with additional complexities. One evening when he was living in Hawthorne, CA where he and Benjamin built their gear, five guys came up to them on their porch — one with a gun. “Two guys grabbed each of us, punched Brian and told us to get in the house, and hogtied us.” They ransacked the house, cut the phone line, and took off in their van with their P.A. gear. His mom’s response to this story was buying him a shotgun, which he promptly kept under his pillow. “I remember the hard lump under my pillow giving me comfort while I slept.”
There were more misadventures. “I’m literally living in a friend’s giant closet, fixing amps and mixers for local clubs, and got a call from the legendary Hollywood Starwood Club, which was to reopen as Club Hollywood. They needed a sound system, so we designed, built and installed it.” But then issues between the city and the incarcerated former owner Eddie Nash arose tying up the new owners, and Rat Sound’s unpaid sound system was held hostage inside. They were doing private parties to pay the bills, but they kept Rat out. So, one evening he broke in, climbing through the ceiling “Spiderman” style. With Benjamin waiting in a van nearby, he used a phone cable to rappel down an air conditioning duct and unscrewed the fire door chain to get in. “There was somebody upstairs watching TV, so I opened the door really carefully and we loaded out as much gear as we possibly could and then split.” Stealing back all the control gear inspired the club to negotiate selling all the gear back to Rat Sound after a few more private parties. “The money I was supposed to use for college went into buying back that gear.”
Meanwhile, he was building a team for his company. One of his early hires was Karrie Keyes, who he met at a Black Flag show. Keyes learned the business working for Rat including running monitors for even the most challenging bands before landing in the Pearl Jam camp for three decades. She would earn this same Parnelli Audio Innovator honor in 2020. Another early employee was Mark Smith, who today is Pearl Jam’s tour manager.
Established Success
In 1985, Rat got a call from Chuck Dukowski, one-time bass player, then manager for Black Flag. The band was frustrated playing through house P.A.s and tired of being told what to do. Most of all, they were displeased that many of their shows were being shut down by various authority figures. “We want to be self-contained,” Dukowski told Rat, who waffled for a moment, but agreed and went on a 120-day tour with few days off. “We all drove, we all loaded in and out, and we all worked all the shows. It was insane and wonderful in a camaraderie/misery way,” Rat recalls.
“Greg Ginn of Black Flag told us we were going to be bringing out a sound system, and Dave taught us what to do,” Rollins says. “Suddenly, I was loading out the back of a truck with a dolly and learning how to stack the speakers, hang the lights, and power up the system. After the show, I’d pull the stack down and put it back into the truck. I’d load in, soundcheck, do the show and then load out. That became the discipline of my touring life.”
In addition to his gear, Rat was pegged to mix the monitors. He helped Hodder put a lighting system together made of 16 PAR cans with no dimmers, just toggle switches and extension cords. But arguably Rat was most valuable at keeping the mantra “the show must go on” — punk style. Daryl Gates, chief of police at the time, targeted punk rock shows, often breaking them up and even sending faxes nationwide warning other cities of Black Flag performances, causing multiple instances of getting shut down. Rat quickly adapted. He would go into a venue and “hot tap” the power, tying into the lines before they reached the main shutoff switch. When the cops came in and shut the main power switch off, the building would go dark; but the sound, lights and band stayed on. “They wouldn’t know what to do,” Rat says with a laugh.
During the late 1980s, Rat had a steady gig at Fender’s Ballroom, where he took care of many bands coming through, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers. One day in 1990, he got a call from RHCP tour manager Mark Johnson saying they had just fired their sound engineer, and asked if Rat would mix. “The band had gotten clean and sober, and the engineer was still partying” and thus no longer welcomed. Rat, a friend of the engineer, said he would “fill in” — which he did for the next 27 years.
Another big client would be Pearl Jam, who opened for RHCP in 1992. Also on that bill were the Smashing Pumpkins, who were replaced by Nirvana on the West Coast leg. “It was a legendary tour,” he says. It was there that employees Keyes and Smith, “fell in love with Pearl Jam, and so they came to me asking if they could take our gear out and support the band on future tours,” he says. Rat Sound still supplies their tours today, with Rat winning a Parnelli Award in 2005 for best sound company for their work with them.
Festivals
By 1983, Rat Sound had worked its way up to a gig at a sideshow during the US Festival in San Bernardino, where Rat used his company’s entire system at the time: four single-18 cabinets, eight 2×12 enclosures and four horns. In 1995, Lyman turned to Rat to supply the sound equipment and engineers for that first Vans Warped Tour, and he continued to be part of it for two decades.
In 1993, Rat met with producers Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen who were kicking around the idea of a California desert festival. Starting in 2001, Rat Sound provided gear and engineers for three of the five stages. Since 2007, Rat has supplied sound for all five and remains the audio vendor for the festival’s numerous stages. “Coachella is amazing and has been wonderful helping us push for further innovations,” Rat says. “We’ll design wind clamps and other innovative solutions, and will continue to do so.” Rat now has a long list of high-profile festival clients including Ohana Festival, Portola Festival, Camp Flog Gnaw, and others.
Today, Rat is more of a sound consultant, helping venues with noise mitigation. “I’m well positioned to assist venues in audio challenges.” Clients include the Hollywood Bowl, Great Park Live and Forest Hills. Rat is also active in the installation side of the business, where recent clients include The Roxy, The Troubadour, the Fonda Theatre and the Bel Air Church.
Innovations
As for gear, Rat’s first “big” P.A. was the Rat Trap 5, a heavy 4-way trapezoidal enclosure that was punk-rock sturdy. In December 2005, Rat innovated a sound system design based on a dual side-by-side speaker system called the Double Hung P.A., which improved sound clarity without hindering maximum array hang limitations. He designated the outer speaker array for guitar, bass, toms, cymbals and kick, while the inner ones had vocals, kick and snare. “The fundamental sound theories that I believe are critical to sound reproduction are that nowhere in nature does the same sound radiate from multiple places in space, but with sound reinforcement we do it all the time. Also, nowhere in nature do multiple unrelated sounds radiate from the same point in space; yet again, we do it all the time with audio reproduction.”
RHCP took the Double Hung P.A. on their 2006 Stadium Arcadium world tour and then deployed it on the main stage at Coachella in 2007. The next year, it was used at Rock in Rio, and other sound companies duplicated this approach. In 2009, Rat came up with several steerable subwoofer array concepts which he sent out on the Blink-182 reunion tour. His Vortex, Slotfire and V-Fire configurations show methods of arranging and delaying conventional subwoofers so that low-frequency sound bleed onto the stage would be reduced and allow horizontal subwoofer coverage to the audience to be steerable.
As far back as the 1980s, Rat felt there was a major deficiency in what manufacturers offered in stage monitors. He set out to build a small, loud, great sounding and visually appealing design that was resistant to feedback. “I saw that floor wedges tended to be an afterthought for manufacturers, so I worked on designing the ultimate stage monitor system.” The first version of MicroWedge was built for Sonic Youth’s monitor engineer, Luc Suèr. “He wanted a two-way passive wedge, and I had the drawings for the new wedge that would be a perfect fit.” Rat then took those cabinets to Radian Audio and worked out a licensing agreement. When that ended, he worked with the EAW team to design improved versions (12, 15, and then the 10 and 8). He also holds a patent on his Sound Tools Sniffer/Sender Unit, which tests XLR cables and mic lines on the fly.
Engineer
In addition to mixing RHCP for nearly three decades, Rat was also a touring engineer for Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Blink 182, Offspring and Foo Fighters. “I enjoyed taking on low-level bands and growing with them from clubs to arenas. Then when they got big, I got bored and started over with another band.” The reason he could stay with the RHCP was they had a lot of time on the road and off, a lot of personnel changes, and frequent pivots in their music direction. “They weren’t consistent. They would have a bunch of drug issues and then suddenly there was a new guitarist, and they’d go out again.”
He left in 2017. “I used to love waking up on the bus in a new city every day, but I’ve always been conflicted about that taking me away from designing and building things.” The money he made on the road helped him build his company, yet took him away from it at the same time. He adds that the disparity of the big corporate touring world was a turn-off, and touring lost its luster for him. And he had plenty to do.
Generational Influence
Rat is influencing a future generation through his seminars, article writings and most of all, his YouTube channel, where he has over 85,000 subscribers watching over 500 tutorials. “I love it — I love the responses I get and the comments on the YouTube videos.” He adds that it’s good for him as well. “When I have an idea about something, I have to test it more thoroughly than I normally would; the comments and responses bring up new angles and ideas and find any flaws to my logic. It’s a wonderful loop.” He is dedicated to educating, as his motivation is certainly not financial (“I make tens of dollars,” he says, not-so-jokingly).
“I believe he helped the touring world by innovating the culture of the crew guy,” says Pearl Jam’s Smith. “He showed many of us to be respectful and caring to everyone at every show; the local crew, the road crew, the fans and the bands. I am forever grateful to him for instilling in me to always take care of the opening band. This may be their only tour, or they may be your next boss. Congratulations on being recognized for your lifetime of innovations.”
“What I remember of Dave is his incredible knowledge of sound and how he’d be able to adapt to any venue we were in,” Rollins adds. “Also, he is scary strong. He was like a wiry Tarzan, inexhaustible. I was young and in very good shape and it was all I could do to keep up with Dave. As well, he’s a very funny person and seemingly without fear or need for sleep. That he’s gotten to where he is now is absolutely no surprise to me whatsoever. We were so lucky to have been able to work with him.”
“I’m honored and a little shellshocked at receiving this [Parnelli] award,” Rat says. “I’ve always felt like I’m on the outside of the good ‘ole boys club, bucking the system and still a bit punk rock, so I am a bit apprehensive, but also very honored.”
Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard on Dave Rat
“From the moment we met Dave ‘Rat’ Levine in the early days of our first real tour, we experienced his innovative radical punk optimism — ‘There are no problems, just solutions waiting to happen,’” recalls Pearl Jam guitarist / co-founder Stone Gossard.
“Dave was a P.A. owner/designer and soundman extraordinaire. He designed our P.A., built it, and then built one-of-a-kind subs. He was the most generous person and mentor you could imagine. Dave was not only a dreamer and builder, but a leader. His openness to sharing was creating family and community that was mightily tangible to a bunch of wet-eared grunge rockers from the Pacific Northwest,” Gossard adds.
“To this day, Dave continues to express the childlike joy for invention and problem-solving with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang charisma. He continues to do it all with joy and love and a wonderfulness that defines true genius. Thank you, Dave, for all of it, as you are one of a kind in this beautiful world of sound.”
Dave Rat will receive the Parnelli Audio Innovator Award at the 23rd annual Parnelli Awards, set for Jan. 24, 2025 the Anaheim Hilton during the NAMM Show. For more information and tickets, go to www.parnelliawards.com.
