He’s worked for John Denver, Johnny Cash and Stevie Wonder. He built the wall of speakers for Pink Floyd’s The Wall concerts. He provided sound for Bob Dylan when he performed at Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, Germany. He’s also been called on by the likes of the Pope and the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
And since 1967, he’s been behind the board of one of pop music’s greatest stars.
Stan Miller’s long association with Neil Diamond, behind the scenes of all of his greatest concerts and live recordings, would alone mark him as more than worthy of receiving the Parnelli Audio Innovator Award. But it’s his pursuit of sound evolution through digital technology that defines his legacy.
Miller’s technical achievements are dazzling: He was one of the first to hang speakers, through a steel cable/drum winch system of his own making, and he was the first to use multi-core snakes allowing for easier cable hookup. He was the first to take a graphic EQ with third-octave Altec passive filters on the road. In the 1970s through the 1990s he was also an audio product manufacturer, owning Stanal Sound where he created the high-powered, high-end Stanley Screamers for Altec. Later, he consulted with the pro audio company JBL to create advanced speakers and rigging for touring as well. He pioneered the used of fiberglass covering for road cases and loudspeakers, making them so reliable that many of his boxes are still on the road 30 years later. His work with Yamaha led directly to the PMD1 and PMD5 digital consoles.
“Stan wasn’t on the cutting edge, he was on the bleeding edge,” states Larry Italia of Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems Division. “He is fearless, has remarkable instincts and possesses a wonderfully curious mind.”
“Stan has his own take on technology,” adds Patrick Stansfield, a Parnelli honoree himself who worked with Miller for Diamond for many years. “He has his own personal way of doing things that marked him as different. Some would discount him as an odd duck, which was an obvious mistake.”
Longtime industry professional Sam Helms recalls going to a multimedia presentation at an Audio Engineer Society show 25 years ago that featured Miller and his work. Impressed with everything Miller was doing, especially his flying speaker system, he asked for a meeting with him, and they’ve been collaborators and close friends ever since. “He was able to get so much high fidelity out of his speakers, and he built the cabinets so they not only sounded great, but were easy to load in and load out,” says Helms.
Helms, who today is president of Sigmet Corporation, a manufacturing rep firm, was consulting and supplying gear for many of Miller’s first, including all of his forays into digital sound. “He’s always been on the digital edge.”
With Diamond, Miller designed the sound system and worked front of house for all of his historic and record-breaking world tours. He was also behind the recording of Hot August Night, recorded at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in 1972. Miller was audio designer/consultant for what The New York Times called “a milestone in rock’s history,” Pink Floyd’s The Wall — Live concert in 1981.
“He knows what Neil is looking for, and Neil relies on him,” Michael Weiss says. “And they are friends — it’s not all just about the sound and touring.” Weiss has worked with Miller since 1981. Currently he’s Diamond’s production manager.
Lighting designer and Parnelli Lifetime Achievement recipient Chip Monck met Miller in the early 1970s and worked with him in the 1980s as well. Monck and Miller became good friends and neighbors in LA. “The man is a bitch of a taskmaster, and I must say, my dearest friend,” Monck says. “He took Diamond digital, developed rigging systems that flew audio, and today has a system where each musician mixes their own monitors. This tribute is long overdue.”
“Neil allows me to be creative and experimental,” Miller says. “He didn’t put me in a box. That is so unusual in this business — for someone like me to be allowed to try things. He allowed me to dream … and as I always say, I’ve always been out on the end of the limb with a saw.”
Beginnings
“I’m a Nebraska farm boy, and to this day, my favorite thing is driving around on my John Deere [tractor],” Miller says.
Miller was born in Lincoln, his father was in the agriculture business and his mother was a teacher. Work had his father moving around, but mostly within the Cornhusker State borders. In high school, Miller played trombone, but it was audio that caught his ear. When his music teacher was building a loudspeaker, Miller brought him to his father’s garage workshop and helped him cut the wood for it. Several students and the teacher built a “hi-fi” system. “I was blown away when I heard it in the gym, and that sparked my love for audio,” he says. He proceeded to build amps and speaker boxes, and suddenly he was the go-to guy when a sock hop was planned, as “nobody else had an audio system.” Armed with two eight-inch Jenson loudspeakers, two seven-watt Heathkit amps and two RCA turntables, he would start on his professional sound career — as a DJ spinning records at local parties and school functions.
In 1958 he moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, and became a “ski bum,” though there he continued building and experimenting with sound systems. “I had the first stereo cartridge in the area that could play a stereo record!” he laughs. He would return to Nebraska and attend college. “My original intention was to be a teacher, and I got a degree in teaching, but I also got an Altec franchise and opened up a small commercial audio store in 1962.” He would provide sound for acts like the Smothers Brothers and the Carpenters when they toured the Midwest.
A company out of Duluth, Minn., called Variety Theater International was touring Midwest colleges with the Christy Minstrels, and the organizers determined that they could make more profit if they offered the group complete with their own sound system. That’s how he began a life on the road that would continue through today. “I kept building more speaker boxes, more amplifiers, and used to haul my stuff around in a station wagon. I had a lot of wonderful experiences — I worked with John Denver when he was just starting out.” During this time he hooked up with the Young Americans and got his first taste of international touring with them to Australia, Thailand and Japan.
In 1967 he found himself in Vermillion, South Dakota, working a double bill that included a young singer/songwriter out of New York named Neil Diamond. Forty-two years later, they are still working together, and in all that time, he has not missed a single show.
Audio Pioneer
Patrick Stansfield joined the Diamond crew in 1976. In what is quite an anomaly, the future production/tour manager for Diamond had to first be interviewed by the sound guy. “It was made clear that I had to pass muster with Stan Miller,” Stansfield recalls. “Neil so trusted Stan that if someone couldn’t get along with him, there was no need to go further.” Stansfield passed the “Stan Test” with flying colors, forging a lifelong friendship.
Miller kept to his humble roots. Even when Diamond was engulfed in superstardom, Miller would drive the truck to gigs from his Kearney, Neb. headquarters, Stansfield tells. He also mentions that many of Miller’s side projects made use of a Radio Shack franchise in Kearney. “The Radio Shack franchise in Nebraska was amusing but also helpful. Whenever we needed something, he would locate the local Radio Shack and get a 20 percent discount.”
Meanwhile, he would contract with others between his tours. One group was Sonny & Cher, and on that show, he was told that he couldn’t block any seats. He had done a little rigging and decided to hang the speakers, one of the first to do so. While Clair Brothers’ Bruce Jackson was experimenting with hanging speakers for Elvis at the same time for the same reason, Miller couldn’t get that system to where it needed to be and spent six weeks developing his own system. “I was in the middle of Nebraska and chain motors weren’t around,” he explains. “There were no [professional] riggers, and we had to get it up there. But we figured out how to get up there fairly fast … of course [Stansfield] called it ‘the flying junkyard.’”
Stansfield adds, “He had two cabinets per basket — it was a funny system but he swore by it.”
During the 1970s he founded Stanal Sound Ltd., which eventually had scores of employees, including Miller’s father, as business partner. He also continued building a lot of equipment for bands because in the Midwest, he was one of only a few in the area who could fulfill their needs. Not that he was limited to small spaces by any means. “I had a number of agreements with facilities [in Los Angeles] like the Greek, the Universal Amphitheatre, the Wilshire, Pantages and others in Chicago and Denver,” he says. “I’d supply the hardware and the people to run it.”
It’s hard to imagine what it was like in the early days of professional sound, but Miller tries to paint a picture: “We moved all our equipment by air with bag tags hanging on the [speaker] boxes. We’d drive up to the airport, give the guy a $20 and have him throw it in the plane.” He recalls that once his speakers were riding on the luggage carousel in St. Louis’s Lambert Airport for days before he drove in from Nebraska to pick them up. “I just rented a wagon and strapped the stuff on top.”
As a company owner, he was tough. Weiss says they joked that he never put wheels on any of his equipment and never produced SWAG. “T-shirts and casters will break a company,” was Miller’s mantra. “But he did eventually put casters on all his equipment — only to sell the business shortly after that!” laughs Weiss. He sold the company in the late 1990s.
Award-winning lighting designer Marilyn Lowery remembers well her first meeting with Miller. She had been hired to work on Diamond’s performances to support his movie The Jazz Singer. Already nervous about the gig, she was introduced to Miller, who shook her hand and bluntly informed her the road was “no place for a woman.” “That was my, ‘Hi, how are you doin’,” laughs Lowery. “We still joke about that today, though he’s embarrassed about it!” (So close are the two that when Miller had a wedding ceremony with his life partner, Lowery was the “best man.”)
Into the Digital Unknown
In 1972, when Diamond recorded his historic Hot August Night at the Greek, Miller had no mixing console, so he took parts from multiple sources and built one that had 24 inputs and 12 outputs. “I had to figure out how to patch it together, and I used a pin matrix system with multiple wires to rout the signal to multiple speakers sources. Also, how to connect all those amps without excessive buzzing and humming was a challenge.” Of course he had to be concerned for the audience as well as the recording, and this involved everything from putting speakers in trees to choosing mic placement. “When I go back and listen to that recording, I’m still amazed … sometimes something magical happens.”
Miller was also one of the first to take a graphic EQ with third octave filters on the road. He says he spent a lot of time figuring out how to apply permanent fixtures to the rock and roll touring world.
The Stanley Screamers speakers were a major breakthrough. Produced by Stanal Sound in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were a three-way system. What made these high-end, high-powered speakers so popular was their use of 604 Duplex loudspeakers. Miller would hand pick and test the individual drivers for the system. These were the speakers that were used in Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour.
Later, he moved from an alliance with Altec to JBL. Through a joint venture, he designed and built the JBL Concert series, which was one of the first systems that could be rigged and hung as a complete component and developed the rigging for it.
Another time he confronted the problem of multiple mic lines and cables. Typically these would just be taped together, but Miller discovered he could make use of a Multi Box with connectors on the other end, which was the beginning of the snake. This helped with hanging speakers and cut time with setup. “I was just always dreaming stuff up.”
When the first Yamaha PM 200 mixer became available in the states, Stan jumped on the Yamaha wagon and developed a life long association. Touring Japan with Stevie Wonder, he visited the Yamaha facilities. His relationship with Yamaha from the first PM1000-16 prototype mixer is a milestone.
In the mid-1980s he started experimenting with digital sound and created analog/digital hybrids. He wanted the ability to recall settings, and he used 14 small Yamaha 01s and the outputs were all fed into an analog PM 3500 console for final mix. “People were looking at me going, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ But this allowed me to call up all the console settings without dialing it up every time.”
Miller was the first to insist on digital overall system control, and he helped pioneered the technology that allowed him to set amps remotely. “It was unheard of at that time, but he got a pure digital signal going from the mic to the speakers,” Stansfield says.
Larry Italia of Yamaha treasures his company’s long relationship with Miller. The two have worked with each other for at least 20 years. “He saw the advantages and ultimate improvement that digital technology offered before anyone,” Italia says. “He saw that it would be the difference between a computer and a typewriter.” He credits Miller’s early confidence in Yamaha’s technology with putting their digital mixers on the map. “Now you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone with a digital mixer, but Stan was the first to use [digital technology] on a major tour.”
Yamaha’s groundbreaking PM1D was the beginning of a paradigm shift, Italia says. “A lot of the things we saw Stan trying to do inspired us to create the PM1D … but he’s done so many different things — at one point he was out there without a console, just running sound from his laptop. Everybody talks about that, but who actually does it?”
Over the last decade, Miller has achieved his digital dream, including the final battle, which included getting everyone on stage — including Diamond himself — personal monitors and thus eliminating the stage wedges. The result is that the last two Diamond tours he’s done have been 100 percent digital sound. “Entertainers on stage don’t always understand that by getting rid of all the speakers on stage, you can dial the sound system to the environment better and easier. You have control over things.”
“Pushing the envelope” is the road less traveled and solid footing is not assured. “It’s a process that is very painful for everybody,” Weiss says. “But it always seems to work in the end … though let me put it this way: Things went wrong [during a show], but nobody knew but us. Then we’d all sit around for days trying to fix what went wrong.”
Lowery agrees: “There was a fair amount of hand wringing. He was always trying new things, and they all worked out eventually, but there was always a huge learning curve.”
Being in a completely digital audio world has made him a better engineer, he says. “When you have 100 percent recall ability of channels, all of a sudden you think differently. I believe that’s one of the reasons others fought it — they didn’t want to think differently! I’d say I’m a lot older than most of these guys, and they ought to be hipper than me! [Laughs]”
“Every year he would up the ante!” laughs Italia. After every tour, he and his team would come back and tell Yamaha they wanted to try something else. “He would always throw a new wrinkle at us, and say ‘Can we do this?’ We’d say, “Yeah. Maybe. Possibly. But why would you want to do that, Stan?’” Italia pauses and adds: “I think ultimately he wants to get to the point he can run a tour’s sound system from his bed & breakfast!”
A Life in Sound
Stansfield has a trunk full of anecdotes of life on the road with Miller. “Every morning for breakfast, wherever he was in the world, he’d order ‘two eggs basted and six strips of bacon burned black. He would send it back to the kitchen if the bacon wasn’t black enough. Once in Australia, he sent it back, and suddenly the door to the kitchen opened and out came flying his plate like a Frisbee.”
The plate missed him, but not the effects of life on the road: In 1978, at the young age of 37, he suffered a heart attack. Among his many “firsts” here is one he would rather not boast of, that he is in fact one of the first in the country to have undergone 5-way bypass surgery.
“It scared everybody,” Weiss says. “It happened so fast. Since then he exercised and took [health issues] seriously.”
“It was a pretty traumatic time,” confirms bass player/musical director Rienie Press. “He had his doctor out on the road with him for a while.” Stan was then usually seen walking around the top of an arena hall during sound check, getting exercise in.
In addition to his artistry, Miller has earned Diamond’s trust every day. Not that Miller was a pushover — he can and, when something affects the quality of his work, will be confrontational. “He’s sometimes stubborn, but has a gentle soul and a good heart,” Lowery contends.
“Stan is very competent,” adds Press. “The biggest thing that has endeared him to Diamond is that he always gets Neil’s voice out there and sounding the way Neil wants it to.”
Miller on Neil: “He’s a very loyal guy and a nice fellow. Most of the musicians have been with him for 25 years. That doesn’t just happen. And if he weren’t a nice guy, I wouldn’t be there. I expect to be treated as I would treat someone else. Artists often don’t treat their people very well. When you’re on the road together for this many years, we all have our moments and know when to stay clear of each other. On the other hand, Neil has a knack for surrounding himself with people who are diligent at making him look good.”
Reflecting, Miller adds, “A lot of artists don’t get it, and I’m sorry for them because as a result they don’t get the best show in the end,” Miller says. “I was able to try things throughout my career, and that was fun. If I had to do things the same way every night, that wouldn’t be any fun.”
His philosophy of mixing is unique. “When I watched other engineers, I saw people working against the sound system. People would EQ the console as opposed to the system. ‘Those who EQ best EQ least.’ And I’ve seen people with all this equipment who didn’t know how to run it! [Laughs] I see people tweaking knobs on a console without it even being on. Set a graphic EQ in a curve and never listen. You should listen to it first!”
Today, Miller lives in Big Bear, Calif. with his life partner of 20 years, Thomas Bicanic, a chef. Together they manage their 12-room bed & breakfast and restaurant, Knickerbocker Mansion. Stan has a daughter, a son and three grandchildren. “My children turned out to be an asset to society, in spite of me.” His daughter is executive director of a nonprofit medical society and his son is an airline captain.
Italia: “His is a life lived well. I can not think of anybody we worked with who is ahead of the curve more than him.”
Miller will receive his Parnelli Award at a gala dinner on Nov. 20 in Orlando. For more information on the Parnellis, go to www.parnelliawards.com.
