Bob Heil, one of the founding fathers of concert touring, the first audio manufacturer enshrined in Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and a 2007 Parnelli Awards Audio Innovator Lifetime Honoree, passed away Feb. 28, 2024 of cancer. He was 83.
This always-exuberant audio pioneer began his career owning a humble music instrument store in a small town in southern Illinois. There he built his first electronic crossover in 1967, using only a couple of transistors and two filters; built the first modular console (the Mavis); and developed the iconic Heil Talk Box, made famous by Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton. He was a pioneer of horn designs, and the first to make them in white as he “got tired of seeing green and gray speakers.”
In 1978, he published “the bible” of the business, The Practical Guide for Concert Sound, and dog-eared copies are still found shoved in the back pockets of burgeoning sound engineers everywhere. Other firsts include being the inaugural sound company honored with an AES “Pioneer Award.” Perhaps most significantly, he founded Heil Sound in 2006, creating world class microphones for not only live events, but for his other passion, the ham radio market. In addition to Walsh and Frampton, his long list of clients include the Grateful Dead, Pete Townshend, Jon Bon Jovi, Beck, and scores of others.
“Bob was a vital force and key founder of concert sound who improved how we experience live music from the earliest days,” says FOH senior writer and Parnelli Awards producer Kevin Mitchell. “His enthusiasm for life was contagious, and he brought a smile to all in his presence. He was also a St. Louis area legend and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Louis. He will be greatly missed by his hometown where he was a professional organist starting in his early teens and beyond.”
Music Store Owner
Heil was born in the coal mining and farming community of Marissa, IL (pop. 2,000), about 40 miles southeast of St. Louis. He took up the organ and, at 14, he was making good money at restaurants, playing “up to six or eight hours a day,” he said in a 2007 interview. His early mastery was discovered by one of the great organ players of all time, Stan Kann, who during the 1950s held court at the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ at St. Louis’ Fox Theater. Kann arranged for Heil to play there. It would prove to be his training in electronics, as learned to voice and tune those pipes. During this time, he also developed a love for ham radio and became an avid amateur radio operator, designing and building transmitters, amplifiers, and antenna systems.
He opened Ye Olde Music Shop in 1966, and kids started dragging amps to him for repair. His reputation as “a guy who could fix things” grew, and regional bands including R.E.O. Speedwagon and Michael McDonald’s early band, The Guild, started relying on him. When the store acquired some pro audio lines including McIntosh and JBL, Heil quickly established himself in that market segment. “Michael McDonald’s band was really my guinea pig I’d buy all this McIntosh stuff and use it on them when they were trying to fiddle around with their little Shure Vocal Masters.”
One day, while visiting friends at the Fox Theater, he noticed its huge old speakers sitting out in the alley. The theater was replacing them with smaller (and inferior) speakers. Being nobody’s fool, Heil took the ones they were throwing out. With those, he built an outstanding P.A.
“I Heard You Have a Big P.A. …”
One of the many challenges in the mid-to-late 1960s was getting a console to run the bigger systems. Heil bought a Langevin console, but even that couldn’t handle the input levels. By luck again, two kids from nearby Southern Illinois University who worked for him had this friend who was an engineering student. Heil called on him, and he masterfully rebuilt the console. The 19-year-old’s name was Tomlinson Holman, who went on to be corporate technical director for George Lucas, running the division that is both a reference to Lucas’ first film and an acronym: THX (Tomlinson Holman Xperiment).
Frampton was playing with Humble Pie in the late 1960s when he first worked with Heil. “Back then, things were mostly a regional affair, and he was always the guy that would help us out,” Frampton told FOH in 2007. “When we were just starting to headline, he would give us a super deal and look after us.” Frampton remembers it being a time of great improvisation — on and off the stage: “When I started touring with Humble Pie, speakers didn’t even have cases. And you’d just have two crew members take the gear to the airport and give it to the loading guy with an extra $50 to load all this big heavy equipment — it’s a wonder the plane didn’t go down!” (The two remained friends and in 2018, Heil presented Frampton with a copy of Frampton’s original receipt for his first Talk Box.)
By the late 1960s, the Fox Theater, first built as an opulent movie theater in 1929, was also being used as a rock ‘n’ roll venue. One night, during a Grateful Dead tour stop there, Heil received a call from Jerry Garcia, asking for help. The band’s gear — and sound engineer — had been “detained” in New Orleans (“detained” being a euphemism for arrested for drugs). Heil was asked to provide a sound system for the show. “Hey man, I heard you have a big P.A.,” Garcia said. Heil listed what he had, and Garcia said, “Well, get it over here!” The Grateful Dead loved the P.A. so much they took it on the rest of the tour.
It was Garcia who later suggested to Heil that maybe “Ye Old Music Store” wasn’t the best name for his company, and suggested “Heil Sound” — which Heil adopted in 1973. Meanwhile, back home, that little Ye Olde Store in that little town had become the largest Sunn dealer in the country. Heil started to offer some tips based on his recent experience on what a P.A. needed to be, and they told him to design one for them. This became the Sunn Coliseum, one of the most popular and reliable systems of its time.
Heil took the new P.A. on the road and was in Chicago when a Sunn executive called, asking if he could get that big P.A. of his to Boston for an English band in trouble. “I told them there’s no way I could get there in a day, but they told me to ‘just’ rent a 707 and get it up there,” Heil laughs. So he did, and he set it for a sound check. The system blew The Who away. Then in 1973, Pete Townshend called Heil over to London. “Quad sound was all the rage, and he told me he was thinking about this opera where he would move Roger [Daltrey]’s voice around the hall… could I build him something that could do that?” Townshend said if he could build it, he would write the opera for it. Heil built, Townshend wrote Quadrophenia, and that 300-pound board is currently on display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
A Passion for Microphones
Heil “hung it up” in the early 1980s. “It was a weird funky time,” he explained. “Bands were breaking up, punk was coming into being… so I just closed the plant.” He opened up a satellite TV dealership, and in 1989, it was named the top dealership in the U.S. out of more than 6,000. Heil also became the guru of the home theater movement and was providing high-end home theater systems. He closed that portion of his business, but not before providing more than 2,000 systems across the U.S.
For years, Heil had developed mics for ham radio operators and broadcasters, and coaxed on by his friend Joe Walsh, he went back to making products for musicians. Launched in 2006, Heil’s PR series microphones quickly gained acclaim in the live sound world, and they were also enthusiastically championed by ham radio aficionados. Heil also wasn’t above having a little fun along the way, such as “The Fin” — Heil’s take on a classic Turner mic, but updated with a modern dynamic element and four LEDs that create a glow when connected to a phantom power source.
Heil always had plenty of tales to tell of his experiences working with the Grateful Dead, The Who, Walsh, Frampton, J. Geils and scores of other major touring acts from the heady 1960s and 1970s. However, he never got caught up in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle — he doesn’t drink or take drugs, and his musical taste leaned toward his parent’s generation rather than his own.
In 2007, Heil was the fourth to receive a Parnelli Audio Innovator Award, joining the elite ranks of audio pioneers such as John Meyer, Bruce Jackson, Bill Hanley and Roy and Gene Clair. “To me, this is a bigger deal than getting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Heil said in a 2016 interview celebrating his 50 years in the business, “because the Parnelli’s are voted on by my peers. It is truly an honor.” In 2014, the University of Missouri-St. Louis provided him with an honorary Doctor of Music and Technology in recognition of his contributions to broadcast, live and studio sound along with amateur radio, and Heil spoke at the commencement.
After continuing to make microphones for amateurs, hobbyists and artists, Bob and his wife Sarah sold Heil Sound to two longtime employees, Ash Levitt and Steve Warford. Levitt continued as CEO of the company. Through it all, despite all the technologically advanced tools available to a pro audio professional since the 1990s, Heil still always relied solely on one: “A thing called my ear,” he’d tell you. “Hearing is a physical process. Listening is a mental process! And there are not many good listeners on the planet.”
A short documentary on Heil’s amazing life can be found at www.parnelliawards.com.
