On a cold Dec. 31st at 5 p.m. in 1997, Bob Goldstein stepped off the streets of Times Square, went to his hotel room and told his wife Vivian he was finished as a sound man. He had taken on an impossible assignment, one that others had turned down. And one who did told the Times Square Business Improvement District fella that “there’s a crazy guy in Baltimore that might be able to do it.” Goldstein had agreed to put sound in the square for New Year’s Eve — something that had never been done. There could be no support structures, no wires, no generators, no testing and adjusting and… well, another 146 restrictions.
But he had just walked through the area, and it was barely audible. Goldstein had failed — but he didn’t give up. Thinking through it all, he realized a solution, went out and adjusted the microwave system, and smiled: his personal favorite, Quincy Jones’ Soul Bossa Nova, now filtered through Times Square perfectly… and many in the area started dancing to it.
Turns out he wasn’t finished as a sound man — and today, he still has that gig (“I know what I’m doing every New Year’s Eve,” he quips).
Bring It On
“I think he relishes these big, complicated gigs,” Ken “Pooch” Van Druten, long time MSI associate and FOH engineer, says. “The touring stuff is easy for him. What he loves is someone to give him a blueprint for something like a presidential inaugural and says that 2,000,000 people will be there, including the president, and all that entails [security-wise].”
But it all started with the teenager behind the mixing board. Early on, he mixed sound for Frankie Valli, and that relationship is on its fourth decade. Other acts MSI has supported include Santana, Mariah Carey, Parliament-Funkadelic, Steve Miller Band, Manhattan Transfer, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Pink Floyd, Whitney Houston (a personal favorite), Steve Vai, Josh Groban, David Bowie, and thousands more. He fitted audio for Universal Studio Tours, Disney, Six Flags and other theme parks. MSI built bar-setting bass cabinets, created one of the first mobile stages, built the Superboard and Paragon consoles and pioneered quality stadium installations and live concerts in quad sound. Today he holds multiple pro audio-related patents.
“Goldstein is always the kindest guy in the business,” says Mark Hogue, who worked with him in the early days. “He’s caring to a fault — sometimes to the detriment of his business! He did stuff for people below his own cost sometimes. And he always stood behind his folks as well.”
“What appeals to me the most about Bob is that he’s a straight-shooter,” Druten says. “He tells you like it is. He’s been around 40-plus years, and the guy knows what he is talking about. But what I enjoy most is he really cares about audio. He needs it to sound great no matter what it cost or how much time it takes. I’ve seen him make decisions that might not be great business decisions, but sure gets people the highest quality audio, and I have a lot of respect for him because of that.”
“We did acts who demanded great sound and would never accept anything less than great sound,” Goldstein says. “And no matter how good we were, we had to be better. We had to spend a lot more money, which is why I’m not worth more today [laughs].”
Bass-ics
Goldstein is Baltimore proud — today he sits in an office that is a mere mile from the house he was born and raised in.
His mother Jean was a child prodigy pianist who would attend Peabody Conservatory. Today there is a scholarship in her name. His father Sol owned a bar, The Fulton Café, that would host the cool jazz stylings of Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, where the young five-year-old Robert would get an earful.
“My mother gave us kids piano lessons, but I wasn’t very good at that,” he says. But he would become infatuated with a “big violin,” and played that plus other bass clef dwelling instruments like the sousaphone and tuba. “In 1960, my grandmother bought me a Fender Precision bass and a Silvertone bass amp, and I was off to the races!”
At 13 he was playing around with a Dynaco stereo preamp, and that “thing sounded awesome,” although he blew so many speakers he started tinkering with those cabinets. At 16 he picked up a job at The Electronic Center, a retail operation that peddled hi-fi systems and P.A. systems. He would become sales manager and continue to wonder if this stuff couldn’t sound better and be more reliable.
He hit upon a winning combination in building high-end bass amps and enclosures, and Jim Gilreath took notice. Gilreath was running an ongoing party on the Baltimore’s Pier (you know, past the banana boats, where only the rats in the nearby warehouses might object). “I hear you have a great sound system,” he told the young man, then just turning 17. “And I’d like to hire you for the midnight to 6 a.m. stretch to mix bands.”
“Club owners came by and liked what I was doing, and soon I started installing systems into nightclubs.” Um, school… the job at the shop… doing sound for a graveyard shift… sleep? “Never — and I haven’t slept since then!”
Two key relationships began during this period: One with Roy Clair of Clair Brothers, and one with Valli. “I became friends with the guys from Lititz [Pennsylvania, where Clair is based], and I met Frankie mixing at the Club Venus,” a popular club in Baltimore at the time.
The young man also hit the road for the likes of Santana; Peter, Paul & Mary; The Young Rascals and others when Uncle Sam came calling. “In 1967 I was 18, and I went into the Army, where I played tuba for the guys who graduated basic training,” Goldstein says. “But I had the ‘good fortune’ of being stationed at Fort Dix [NJ] which had a winter that hit minus 56 degree wind chill.” His dedication to doing his duty got him frostbite, followed by a 4-F when he finished basic training himself.
“Instead of going to Vietnam, I went to work for Clair Brothers,” he wisecracks.
While Roy Clair and Goldstein had a lot of respect for each other, they didn’t always see eye-to-eye. It came to a head in 1969 when Goldstein had on his schedule to do a lot of dates with Valli, including an especially important New York City Central Park gig. Clair said he was needed in Cincinnati to do a Dick Clark event featuring a new band called The Jackson Five.
In what would be a trademark characteristic of Goldstein, loyalty to Valli won out over the boss’s orders. “They were going to send a guy who wasn’t very good, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that,” he recalls. “Frankie has nuances, and deserved an engineer who understood those nuances. So we parted ways and I re-established Maryland Sound.”
Maryland Sound
Maryland Sound Inc. was actually founded in 1966 when Goldstein started doing sound for clubs, but took a back seat to his other projects while he was with Clair. By 1969 MSI was his sole focus.
Goldstein befriended Stan Idzy, who had a professional wood shop and let him park a 45-foot trailer on his lot. “I’d go in at midnight after a gig and build speaker cabinets until 7 a.m., when he came into work,” Goldstein says.
In 1970, he had a Madison Square Garden show that featured Valli, Jay & the Americans, Martha and the Vandellas and The Four Tops. Now for years he had tried to become a JBL vendor, but the company had waved away the kid like a hot August bee. But for this event, he needed their speakers, so he bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles.
“[JBL’s’] Pete Horseman kept turning me down, so I flew out there with a bag of cash, rented a truck, and drove to his office,” Goldstein laughs. “I walked into his office, said, ‘I’m Bob Goldstein,’ and threw the money on his desk.” Horseman looked at the money, then up at the young man and declared, “You got yourself a franchise!”
Early on, Goldstein’s innovations and ingenuity distinguished MSI. Once he got a call from Monticello Raceway in New York where management wanted bands to play between races. The catch was there was no time for set-up. “We were one of the first to design a trailer sound system,” he explains. “I built two 10-foot truck bodies on heavy duty dollies and put all the amps and speakers in it and created a rolling stage, the first ‘mobile’ flatbed. We’d have the band set up, roll it out, hook it up to the two trailer speakers, have all the cables and mix monitors, all in about six minutes.” Making that happened caused the Maryland Sound team to develop break away cables and “focus on being efficient.”
These years were the Wild West days of pro audio. “Things that today are commonplace, we couldn’t buy,” he says. “We had to figure out power distribution systems — there was no Motion Labs. We had to come up with different ideas to keep improving sound systems. The good news is that we had plenty of time to talk through these challenges driving to gigs. I’d say, ‘Gee, I wish we could do this’,” and after a few hours of brainstorming, the idea would pop up while pounding down those highway mile markers.
Superboard, Super People
In 1971, Goldstein hired Baltimore studio engineer Dave Smith to design their first console, a 24-channel beauty. “It cost us so much we couldn’t afford a case, and I transported it myself wrapped in shipping blankets,” he says. Next was the Superboard, a 48-channel, 16-mix console that they built for Andy Gibb in the mid-1970’s. “The monitor needs were heavy and we needed a lot of mixes, and I told Dave if he could build it in one month, I’d buy him whatever he wanted!” he laughs. Done and done, costing Goldstein a Kawasaki motorcycle but gaining him an advantage in what was just starting to be a competitive business. Then came the Paragon console in the 1980’s, created at MSI’s Northwest Sound office, which was a console eventually sold to Audio Toys.
“We always built bass speaker cabinets, and while I’m not a talented speaker designer, I knew what sounded good and had people around me who did good work,” Goldstein says. He says there were other good cabinets out there, but quoting the Commodores, “a lot of people have bass, but MSI has the thunder!”
In 1973, he moved into an historic textile mill in a park in Baltimore, and with room to spare, he advertised to rent some of it out. Matt Polk of Polk Audio would call and he and partner George Klopfer became a tenant. Goldstein bought the place in 1984 and he’s still there (Goldstein and Polk are partners in a venture today).
Maryland Sound was quick to adopt paradigm-shifting gear. They were the first company to use Technical Audio Devices (TAD) beryllium products, Bob Carver-designed Phase Linear amplifiers, and Cal Perkins-designed Marantz amps; Crest Audio and Powersoft K series amps; Yamaha PM1000 and PM2000 mixers; Studer Vista 5 SR consoles; JBL VerTec speakers; and JBL VTX Speakers. “We always got better sound as a result of stumbling onto a good combination.”
Mark Hogue started working with Goldstein in the late-1970’s while he was doing sound for Manhattan Transfer. Hogue was one of the many “Indianapolis guys” who ended up at Maryland sound. “We called ourselves the Hoosier Mafia,” he laughs.
“Their gear fit our purposes better than anything else out there, and it was a nice family of people,” Hogue says. “When Bob left Clair, he assembled a group of talent that was amazing — he had a lot of other really talented engineers from the very beginning.”
Spinal Tap Moments
For an infamous Parliament-Funk show at the Los Angeles Forum in 1977 (infamous because three other Parnelli lifetime honorees have called this particularly gig out), Goldstein realized they didn’t have enough equipment to cover it, and he looked up Bob Sterne at Northwest Sound. Sterne brought down three tractor-trailers of gear to supplement what he had.
“This was his ‘Mothership’ show, and there were a lot of great people involved,” he says. “Tony Mazzuchi from See Factor and a lot of other great people trying to put on this show. But [George] Clinton kept adding lights and props and staging elements, and of course, the ship itself.” The weight being suspended from the roof was much higher than anticipated. The Los Angeles inspector insisted a crane be brought in immediately to support the roof. “There was Joe [Branam, rigger and 2012 Parnelli Visionary Honoree] on the roof, attaching the last of four points to the crane, and I hear a crack. The roof drops 10 feet, and there’s a bounce, and all guys below would have been killed if Joe hadn’t been so fast and made that last attachment point, which kept it from falling further. Joe is a hero.
“So they removed the roof altogether and used the crane to land the mothership on stage at dusk, and we all laughed. The show was sold out, and I stood there watching as this crane moves the ship on stage and, thinking back, I have to say this was my stupidest Spinal Tap moment ever. But I decided at that moment that I love this business and the people in it!”
Goldstein is among the many who didn’t get paid for that gig — but true to his character, he paid Sterne the $15,000 that was owed him out of his own pocket. Soon after, Goldstein purchased NW Sound, thus giving him a heavy West Coast presence, with Sterne becoming an important member of the Maryland Sound team. In 1986, he bought Stanal Sound from Parnelli Audio Innovator Stan Miller, further expanding.
By the time the 1980’s ended, MSI was an international company. “We were going to Europe with a lot of bands, and we were having a hard time finding the stuff we liked, so we did a strategic alliance with the Pink Floyd audio team and sent over our systems. The result was ‘Britannia Row.’” They were on a little street in London’s Islingtion borough. Britannia Row/MSI Europe grew to be one of the largest sound companies in Europe. And while it was much harder, he eventually opened MSI Japan in 1992 and MSI/Hong Kong years later.
In 1983, MSI installed the first packaged sound system into an arena. The Baltimore Civic Center manager called on him, and when Goldstein and team reviewed the design for the new system as proposed by a consultant, they saw a pile of horns and single-15 bass cabinets that would be “okay” for speech but lousy for music. The Civic Center would also have to lose a dressing room to house the racks of low-wattage but large amps. “John Meyer had just come out with the MSL-3s, and that’s what we installed, flying the amps on the catwalk and making it so the entire system could be lowered and serviced. It was a novel idea at the time, and not only was the building manager thrilled to get his dressing room back, he was thrilled it cost a fraction [of what he thought it would].”
Stadiums and arenas all over the country started calling on MSI, from Anaheim Stadium to the Sharks Arena to Camden Yards, among others.
Touring Innovations
Bootsy Collins went out on tour and called on MSI to support his outrageous show. “His band was ‘the Rubberband with the Horny Horns,’” laughs Goldstein. “And he got it in his head to do something special, and we thought we could build a ‘space’ pod half way out into the audience that he could play his bass through — a ‘bass station.’ It was flying overhead, and had bass amps on it — a 360° speaker cluster that required some interesting delay [treatment]. It was a pretty cool device.”
In 1985, MSI was supporting Stevie Wonder’s In Square Circle tour. “This was his next big tour, and it was shortly after we bought Northwest Sound, and Bob Sterne was a great asset to have.” The team needed all hands on deck because Wonder wanted his revolving stage to look like a giant CD player, and he wanted all the band equipment under the stage in addition to a quadraphonic sound. “It was a cool looking show, and while quad had been done on tours a few times before, this was quad on steroids.”
For the Wonder tour, he mapped out the sound of a jet landing. Goldstein, never afraid to ask, got Baltimore Washington Airport to let him set up mics along the runway to record takeoffs and landings in 16 track. Then he mathematically figured out the mapping of a jet landing inside an arena. “It was so effective 20,000 people in the audience ducked when the jet landing was played… that was an example of one of my stupid ideas being pretty cool.”
Other Unusual Gigs
Goldstein diversified before diversifying was in fashion. In the 1980’s, he partnered with a Defense Department training group who were putting pilot simulator and training kiosks into malls for the military recruitment. Maryland Sound came up with a convincing audio, video (using the then-new Pioneer laser disc units) and packaging concept and the military ordered 2,500. Work for Uncle Sam continues to this day.
If you don’t go to MSI first, you apparently go to it last — as in no one else can figure out how to do it. That New Year’s gig in New York’s Times Square, for example. There could be no support structures, so he went knocking on doors and secured agreements with 60 property owners to drill holes in their building and hung speakers all over the area. (There could be no scaffolding or towers for fear that a raucous crowd would climb on them.)
For power, they turned to what would typically power the air conditioning units, which, of course, weren’t needed for A.C. in December. They dropped power from the rooftops so the streets were clear of any sign of generators, support structures or a pro audio system. “Then we had to get the signal from FOH to various speaker locations and used a NSA-approved microwave transmission system, which utilized shifting algorithms,” he says. MSI was granted intellectual property rights on the method it came up with to support the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square.
“We did sound effects and meticulously went over the 18 tracks of sounds. Each one of the 24 clusters got its own signal,” Goldstein says. “You’d hear crickets, lion roars, rain — creating an almost tropical feeling in the square — which warmed up the crowd. It was a formula used for the next three or four years, and then they switched to doing entertainment.” Today, for announcers and acts featured on multiple stages within Times Square’s “bow-tie” shape, packed with close to a million people in a half-mile stretch from 43rd to 48th Street, with multiple stages and fiber optic connectivity, and the stages’ FOH are run off one console.
In 1998, a guy came in from the aerospace industry and asked if he could simulate the acoustic signature of a spacecraft taking off. Goldstein shrugged, “sure.” “Then we tried it, and we blew up a million dollars worth of audio gear, but we kept trying, because I wasn’t going to walk away from a challenge,” he laughs. They would develop an extremely sophisticated system that did the trick — you could hear it from two miles away — and would test the ability of spacecraft to survive a launch. This led MSI to filing multiple patents and has created an entirely new structural test method approved by NASA.
From Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to Pink Floyd to Times Square New Years Eve to Whitney Houston to the Mars Rover, MSI has been solving audio challenges.
And, of course, MSI has provided sound for the past five Presidential inaugurations and the many inauguration-related events, including Barack Obama’s record-breaking first inaugural in 2008.
MSI Today
Today Goldstein surveys a pro audio scene vastly different than when he was coming up. “It’s a mess,” he says bluntly. “And it’ll probably be messy for a while. There are too many manufacturers shuffling too many products in too small a funnel. Everybody wants to get his or her stuff on tour, but the touring business can only accept so much stuff. And when systems cost upwards of $2 million, the touring industry doesn’t demand the price that provides a reasonable return on investment.”
MSI has some 80 employees and pulls in another 75 for the large events they land. Goldstein’s son Todd is in the business, whom he sent out with Hogue in the 1970’s with the directive “take my kid out on the road and beat him up,” Hogue laughs. He has a daughter, Meredith, and three granddaughters.
Goldstein handles anything, but as Hogue points out, he’s especially suited for the pop client. “Those clients tend to need high-fidelity more than, say, the metal or hard rock acts. So while everyone was buying Yamaha consoles, Bob was buying Harrison consoles,” which were better suited for the nuances of a vocalist like Whitney Houston. He had a unique mic collection more suited to that and for orchestras. But most of all, Goldstein always held his price down. “He would allow newer bands to take high-quality sound gear on the road with them,” adds Hogue. “It got to the point where you couldn’t afford Clair, but Bob would make a deal with you because he really cared about the music.”
“Bob has a passion for uncompromised sound quality and is always searching for ‘the next best thing’ and in many cases, if it didn’t exist, he would develop it,” Bauman says. “His DIGMO monitor system was ahead of its time and is a great example of this philosophy. He appreciates clean, clear high-end, and while developing products at MSI, I always remember him challenging me. ‘Yes — but is it as good as a TAD?’ These days it’s nice to say that we have finally found a response to Bob’s challenge with the JBL D2 drivers that are employed in the VTX V25 and V20.”
“He’s very opinionated,” Van Druten adds with a laugh. “And some people take that the wrong way. But my experience is, if he’s wrong, he admits it, and I credit him for that. But most times he’s right! I’ve completely disagreed with him right up to the very end when it turned out he was right. I trust him as a mentor and somebody who has been around, and I still learn from him every day.”
Goldstein was honored for his innovations and continuing career on Nov. 22 at the 14th Annual Parnelli Awards, held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. For more information, go to www.parnelliawards.com.
