From P.A.'s for The Who and The Dead to Talk Boxes for Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton, to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is All Based on a Love of Music, Between Hearing and Listening.
No one seems more surprised at Bob Heil’s success than Bob Heil.
Wide-eyed, a face pre-amped with a perpetual smile, the over-caffeinated Dr. Pepper-swigging Heil is that rare breed who is as liked as much as he is admired. Peter Frampton calls him one of the most sincere guys in the business, and in a business that is often short on sincerity, it is perhaps the highest compliment.
Despite his impressive list of achievements, rather than developing a big ego, he instead frequently sprinkles his sentences with phrases like “…and nobody expected this little freak from Marissa, Ill., to do that” and “then there was this snot-nosed organ player from Marissa following Pete Townshend around,” etc.
A self-deprecating sense of humor aside, Heil has been wildly successful in several careers, and his achievements in pro sound are astounding: He built the first electronic crossover in 1967, using only a couple of little transistors and two filters. He was a pioneer of the horn (and the first to make them in white: “I got tired of seeing green and gray speakers.”). He developed the first modular console (the Mavis), the first quadraphonic mixer and is the father of the modern Talk Box, which friends Frampton and Joe Walsh, and most recently Bon Jovi’s Ritchie Sambora, used to great success.
In 1976, he wrote “the bible” of the business, the Practical Guide for Concert Sound, Volume Two, and dog-eared copies are still found shoved in the back pockets of burgeoning sound engineers everywhere.
Other firsts include being the first sound company to be honored with an Audio Engineering Society’s “Pioneer Award,” and the first manufacturer to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Heil, fond of wearing bright colors and Converse shoes, does like to tell tales of his experiences working with the Grateful Dead, The Who, Walsh, Frampton, J. Geils, Jeff Beck and scores of major touring acts from the 1960s and 1970s. He never got caught up in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle — he doesn’t drink or take drugs, and his musical taste leans toward his parent’s generation rather than his own.
Despite all the tools available to a pro audio professional, he still relies solely on one: “A thing called my ear,” he’ll tell you. “Hearing is a physical process. Listening is a mental process! And there are not many good listeners on the planet.”
Most important, Heil has returned to developing products for the pro sound industry and is not done innovating.
“Just look at this mic line he’s come up with — he’s a supreme gadget freak like me and always improving stuff,” laughs Frampton. “I love sound. It’s so important to me, and he’s always been on the forefront of trying to improve it, like with his new mics. Every time he comes up with a new model, he sends me one to try, and they are fantastic.”
“I Learned to Listen”
In 1940, Heil was born in the coal mining and farming community of Marissa, Ill. (population: 2,000), which is 50 miles south of St. Louis, Mo. His dad owned a clothing store there and encouraged his son’s interest in music. Heil began playing the sax and accordion, but moved over to organ. By the time he was 14, he was making good money at restaurants, playing “the popular music of the time, up to six or eight hours a day,” he tells.
Heil’s early mastery of the instrument was discovered by one of the great 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 the very young Heil to play there.
“When I started at the Fox at the age of 15, the organ hadn’t been serviced very well, and I learned to voice and tune those pipes,” Heil says. “That blessed Stan taught me to do that, and it’s one of those thing you do, but at the time you don’t realize how important it will be. My God, it set the path to my entire life — I learned to listen. Who the hell would think that tuning these organs would be the basis of my life? But it was.”
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 — all of which would play a critical role in his journey as a pro sound pioneer.
A man of many talents, he had many choices. He was so in demand as a performer, he could have well pursued that vocation and been wildly suc-cessful; but the organ fan’s loss is pro sound’s gain. After eight years of playing six nights a week, he decided to open a music retail operation in — of all places — his hometown of Marissa.
In 1966, he opened up Ye Olde Music Shop, even though “I never listened to rock ‘n’ roll. I barely knew who the Beatles were, and I didn’t know a Fender guitar from a Gibson.” But kids started dragging amps to him for fixin’, and he would take them apart and not only repair them, but make them better. “One kid had a little amp called a Fender, and shit — it wasn’t anything more than a modulator for a ham radio, and I fixed it in 15 minutes.”
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 calling on him.
Ye Olde Music Shop became a dealership for Hammond Organs, Fender, Martin, Gibson and all the top-of-the-line music instrument products, but it was his pro audio lines — McIntosh, JBL — where Heil quickly established himself. “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 Vocalmasters.”
He got a call one day from Gordon Gow, president of McIntosh, asking why Heil ordered 50 of the 2100s amplifiers. Then Heil bought half a dozen 3500s, and “McIntosh became really excited.” Soon he was doing a lot of the bigger live events for bands in the area.
Heil is the first to admit that sheer luck has figured into his audacious career more than once; by happenstance, he was visiting old friends at the Fox Theater when he noticed its huge old speakers sitting out in the alley. The theatre 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.”
But 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).
Peter Frampton was playing with Humble Pie in the late 1960s when he first worked with Bob Heil. “Back then, things were mostly a regional af-fair, and he was always the guy that would help us out. When we were just starting to headline, he would give us a super deal and look after us.”
For most in the business today, it’s hard to image those early days, but 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 Fox Theater by then was also being used as a rock ‘n’ roll venue, and in 1969 Heil got a call from another friend there about this band on tour, which was scheduled to play that night, but had a problem. Their sound guy and equipment were detained the previous night in New Orleans be-cause the guy (“Bear”) wasn’t suppose to leave California due to pending drug charges. Heil was asked if he could talk to one of the guys in the band.
“Hey man, I heard you have a big P.A.,” Heil heard Jerry Garcia say. Heil had to list off the components of his system, and Garcia was duly im-pressed, ending the conversation with a, “Well, get it up here!” The Grateful Dead loved the P.A. so much they took it on the rest of the tour. Gar-cia later suggested to Heil that maybe “Ye Old Music Store” wasn’t the best name for his company, and that he should consider naming it “Heil Sound” — which Heil did 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 he got a call from a Sunn executive who asked 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. It turned out to be The Who, who were in a bind: They had just started their first American tour in years, “The Who’s Next” tour, and had suffered a couple of embarrassing shows because they were using a completely insufficient sound system.
The system blew The Who away, “and the rest is history,” Heil says. “It really changed live sound.” He wasn’t done with working with The Who — but first he had to make a detour to Hope, Ark.{mosimage}
Paul Klipsch, one of America’s most celebrated audio pioneers, got wind of what Heil was doing and flew up to see him in 1972 — he landed his private plane in a cornfield near Heil’s plant. “All day long, this 6-foot 6-inch guy was looking over my 30,000-watt P.A. system asking why I did this, why I did that. Then he invited me back to his plant in Hope.” For two days, “He taught me about phasing, frequency and response proximity — all these wonderful things nobody talks about because they are afraid they don’t really understand them.
“He was so gracious to me. He really helped me take what I learned and apply it to speakers.”
Heil would need all the information and education he could get.
“In 1973, Townshend called me over to London, and he sat me down in his studio. Quad sound was all the rage, and he told me he was thinking about this opera where he would move Roger’s voice around the hall…could I build him something that could do that?” Heil told Townshend he could build a live quad sound system. Townshend told him if he could build it, he would write the opera for it.
Heil built, Townshend wrote Quadraphenia, and that 300-pound board is currently in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Back in Business
Then, in the early 1980s, he “hung it up.” Heil says, “It was a weird funky time. Bands were breaking up, punk was coming into being…. so I just closed the plant.” He opened up a successful satellite TV dealership, and in 1989, was named the number one dealership in the country out of more than 6,000. Heil also became the guru of the home theatre movement and was providing high-end home theater systems — really high end, as in the $100,000 to $200,000 range that came complete with ticket booth for customers. He just recently closed that portion of his business — but not before providing more than 2,000 systems across the country.
He never stopped playing the organ, either, and still records and performs (in fact, occasionally Walsh will come with him and introduce him to the silver set that tends to be attracted to concerts featuring such great standards as “Everything’s Coming up Roses,” “Misty” and “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”…likely an audience who has no idea who he is).
But Walsh has done more than be a client and friend to Heil. He has, in part, spurred Heil into returning to pro sound by calling him up and asking him, “Everything from toilet paper to skyscrapers has had improvements made to it in the last 30 years — why are microphones still the same?”
Heil had been developing mics for ham radio operators and broadcasters, but inspired by Walsh, he has returned to making products for musicians. But this time, he had a formidable partner in wife Sarah — a woman from his hometown he met again in the 1990s when she called him after hearing him on a radio show. “She turned this mother around — she kicked me in the ass, and I have been inspired by her passion for life.”
So now, with a vengeance and then some, he is back creating innovative new products. His PR series, especially, has gained instant acclaim in the live sound world, which doesn’t surprise Walsh. “Hey, I have known for two years how great these new microphones were — now the whole world is finding out!” he says. Heil recently worked with Walsh on a short tour, and at the same time, he’s also working with ZZ Top, Velvet Revolver, American Idol, Tool and others “all of whom are using our microphones.”
For everything he’s done so far, and for what he will contribute in the future, Heil will be honored with a Parnelli on Nov. 16, 2007, in Orlando, Fla., at the LDI show.
“I can’t tell you how blown away I am by this,” says Heil about receiving a Parnelli. “To me, this is a bigger deal than getting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because the Parnellis are voted on by my peers. It is truly an honor.”
“Bob is one of the nicest guys in the business, always has been,” says Frampton. “He’s the same guy I’ve always known, and a guy who doesn’t think of the money first. Yes, it’s a business, and we all have a mortgage to pay, but he’s always there to help you if he can.”
For more information on the Parnelli Awards, go to www.parnelliawards.com.
[Sidebar]
Headline: Talk Box: “Bob, how are we going to do this loud?”
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Cap: Pete Frampton and the Talk Box
The “Talk Box” goes back to the 1950s when steel guitarist Alvino Rey experimented with the idea of reproducing sound from an amplifier and directing it into the mouth of the performer. The performers lips and vocal cavities further modulate the shape of the sound. It showed up in a primitive unit in Nashville in the hands (and mouth) of noted pedal steel player Pete Drake.
Joe Walsh had gone to Nashville to record Barnstorm where he crossed paths with Drake. “Joe took this funnel with an eight inch tube and said, “Bob, how are we going to do this loud?” Heil took him out to his plant in Merissa, took a big JBL driver the size of a paint can, put tubing on it, and “Joe said ‘ummmm.’ I thought I could build one, and sell a lot of them.”
Drake’s path would also cross with Peter Frampton.
“I had done All Things Must Pass with George Harrison and Pete Drake was on that session,” recalls Frampton. “He sat opposite me and got out this tiny box — I swear it was a little wooden box and had this pipe. There was another one made by Kustom, called ‘The Bag’ which looks sort of like a Native American peace pipe [laughs].” Alvin Lee and Stevie Wonder came out with songs using it, but it wasn’t until Joe Walsh’s Rocky Mountain Way when Frampton was especially taken by it. His girlfriend got him one of Heil’s and gave it to him as a gift. Of the first Heil Talk Boxes: “They were really road-worthy. You could run a truck over them. I still have the original box from the one I used on Frampton Comes Alive.”
Fast forward to 1986 when Bon Jovi was looking for a hook for their premiere song, so Heil helped them build a new voice box, which he hadn’t built in ten years.
In 1988 he sold the rights to Dunlop as “Jim Dunlop is a friend, and he still builds it exactly the way I build it.”
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“They were really road worthy. You could run a truck over them. I still have the original box from the one I used on Frampton Comes Alive.” — Peter Frampton
