As we muddle through the next few years, we are going to see a lot of anniversaries. We are 40 years out from the Summer of Love and the real beginnings of the rock sound business. And some companies are trumpeting their pedigrees from their various rooftops, while others just get up, load the truck and continue to do what they’ve done for decades. We’ll lump Scorpio Sound of West Bridgewater, Mass. in with the latter category, even though their pedigree is worth trumpeting.
Owner Gary King had been mixing bands since 1973 and took Scorpio full time 30 years ago. “We worked with James Cotton, The James Montgomery Blues Band, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band and others in the early days,” says King. “In 1980, we installed and ran a system at Uncle Sam’s in Nantasket Beach, Mass. It was a huge room, formerly The Surf in the 1960s. It was a rock room and we put in a 5-way stereo PA with an onstage monitor mix with biamped wedges and 3-way sidefills, which was quite decent for a regional company at the time. We worked with a lot of great acts and met many people there, similar to the various clubs on Lansdowne St. near Fenway Park in Boston where we worked for many, many years, including what became the final name of the premiere club, Avalon. We do some touring, most recently with The Pretenders, the Dropkick Murphys, The Boston Pops Orchestra and Meat Loaf.”
Weathering the Storm
That’s quite a variety, and one reason why Scorpio stays relatively busy even in a very down market. “We get a good mix of corporate, comedy, Hip Hop and rock at a wide variety of venues, which of course includes many of the huge number of colleges and universities in New England,” King says. “We have a rental install at a mostly heavy metal club called the Palladium in Worcester, Mass., which is housed in a former theatre. We are the in-house sound provider for the Bank of Boston Pavilion, originally Harborlights, a beautiful venue located on the ocean in Boston. We enjoy a good reputation in our region, and we have been around long enough and done enough touring and lots of work with high level artists and their production people, so we are a known commodity.”
But the economy has taken a toll even on the busiest companies around, and Scorpio is no exception. “This is the first time in many years that I can say that it’s felt like the economy has had an impact, as well as some changes in the regional venues, such as venues closing and others opening that went with an installed system.”
But tough times just make it more important to remember the basics that got you where you are in the first place. “We continue to give people what they want, and we really try to do that with consistent pricing. We are established and refuse to go into any type of panic mode. Price wars hurt everyone, and we certainly don’t go after other companies’ clients. It’s really Golden Rule, kindergarten stuff — being honest, fair, giving people what’s needed and not limiting it to what they paid for, maintaining and packaging the equipment nicely, keeping up with technological advances, paying bills on time, trying to keep consistent pricing and hiring a good staff.”
That good staff is at least as important as the right gear. “I think it’s important for our people to be able to think on their feet and deal with unknowns in a calm and professional manner,” says King. “Thinking up front about how to solve the what ifs, including failures, prepares people for solving those types of problems without getting totally stressed.” Having said that, King also points out that it also helps to bring enough gear, cabling and spares as practically possible so you can avoid getting into a jam in the first place.
As King looks back over the past three decades, it seems amazing that a hobby turned into such a thriving business. “I always had a bug for stereo gear and started accumulating pro audio gear and it keeps growing,” he says. But little time is spent on nostalgia. Scorpio and King have their gaze firmly focused on the future and know that the only constant in this business is change. And that shows when we ask him what is the most important thing he has learned in his time doing live event audio. And the answer is appropriately New England pragmatic: “We don’t ever think that there will come a time when our inventory and knowledge doesn’t need to evolve.”
