A long time ago in a non-descript office far, far away, your intrepid FOH leader dude was the editor of a local weekly newspaper. It is where I cut my journalistic teeth and built the foundation for a fabulous career in magazine publishing. I have fond memories of the people and the stories we broke and the awards we snatched from larger and better-funded news organizations.
But truth is that like most endeavors of this type, it was largely a labor of love. Yes, I made a living and got a paycheck, but the hours-to-dollars ratio was wildly out of whack (the norm for local newspapers as anyone who has ever worked for or around one can attest).
One of those fond memories was of Tuesday nights — production night for a newspaper that hit the streets on Wednesday. Every Tuesday night was a late night, and the publisher had dinner brought in for the crew. It was during one of these dinners that my publisher, Jim Laris, first made the astute observation that newspapers were a lot of work, and life would have been simpler had he opened a hat shop. It became one of those refer-ences that came up regularly to the point where we all knew that if Jim said something about a hat shop that things were going to get crazier than they already were.
So blast forward more than a decade and I am still in publishing, still doing some audio and band gigs on the side, and still thinking about hats, but the context has changed a lot. It has become more of a way of looking at how many things I — and you readers and readerettes — have going on at any given time.
Not all that long ago, the norm was to go to work for a big company and work your way through the ranks and retire eventually. When my father-in-law retired from Polaroid, it was the only company he had worked for in most of his adult life. Today, the very idea of working for one company and doing one job for a career seems downright freakish. (If you want to get just a little bit of a handle on how much things have — and are — changing, Google the term “Shift Happens.” There are at least a dozen version of this short video that was originally done by a college professor trying to explain the “new reality” to his colleagues.)
Funny thing is that even if you own your own company or work for the same one for a long time, the multiple hat thing will still come into play. I mentioned it last month, but as a reminder, our most recent reader survey shows that nearly half of FOH readers make half of their living in live event audio and half of their living doing installs. Once upon a time those were two totally different job functions, but… that hat thing again.
In fact, no surprise to most of you, but all of the big touring soundcos have an installation department or division including, Sound Image, Clair and Audio Analysts. Not sure what the split is for them, but installs make up a substantial part of their business.
You know I am one of those suckers who still admires the purity of purpose of the guy who just wants to do live audio and won’t do installs. But I only know a couple of those kinds of guys who are making a good living. And the economics of the touring industry are pointing to more and larger installs as it becomes more expensive to truck around gear and more large venues are installing their own state-of-the-art racks and stacks.
It’s not like every corner bar is going to install a system worth using for most acts, but as someone else once sang, “you don’t need a compass to know which way the wind blows.” Might be time to invest in at least a couple of hat boxes. If you are gonna have to wear more than one, you might as well keep them looking good.
