As I was preparing for this interview, I had an interesting talk with someone in the biz who shall remain unnamed. The gist was this: Is being a great mixer a prerequisite to having a client list consisting of acts known for sounding great live? Or does having such a client list give one an automatic aura of “Well, he must be a great mixer?” David Morgan has just such a list of clients, including Steely Dan, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Stevie Nicks and his current full-time boss Bette Midler. Hell of a list, and in this case, the preceding question answered itself in two ways. First, when I arrived 30 minutes late and was sent to the office of production manager Marty Hom, he told me they were doing line check. “Line check? But this is a stationary show. It has been going for almost a year and this is the fifth or sixth show in a two-week run. Line check?”
I was informed that this crew does line check every day. And they sound check. Every day. And the entire band and the Divine Miss. M show up for said sound check. Every day. I was obviously among pros who do not subscribe to the “do as little as possible to make it work and I’ll sound check with the Pro Tools tracks from last night’s show” school of thought that has become increasingly common.
The second part of the answer was the show itself, which sounded phenomenal—even without the SSL console that Caesars retained when Celine's production left the building.
FOH: Let’s start by talking consoles…
David Morgan: The in-house desk is a beautiful sounding console, an SSL MT-Plus. I ran the show on the SSL from January until July. But it is not a very responsive live console. For example, say you want to make an EQ change to one input. You have to make the change and save it individually in every scene. There are no global commands. You can’t reorder your set list on your snapshots, so whatever order you saved it in, you were stuck with that. Unless you wanted to move it ALL over to other slots and move it all back one by one. And, you know, that really maximizes your chances of screwing things up. On the plus side, the shows I mixed on the desk sounded great.
In July, I had the opportunity to program and migrate the show over to the Digidesign VENUE desk that CLAIR was supplying for the Cher shows here in the Colosseum Theater. I had most of the mic EQs and plug-in presets available on my USB keys from Stevie Nicks and James Taylor tours, so the programming went very quickly.
We used VENUE and Pro Tools to make multitrack recordings of the show at the end of the July run, and I had the desk and some Genelecs set up in an isolated room. We had another engineer mix front-of-house for two shows while I ran the recording rig. It was a great way to finalize the setup of the VENUE. I have used it out front for every show since July. The transition has been flawless, updating the show is now instantaneous and the audio results have been excellent. Plus, I can now take the show with me when we perform outside of Las Vegas.
Your client list is pretty impressive and all the kinds of people who know something. You can’t bullshit ‘em.
Absolutely and that is what I prefer. I like people who value a quality audio product being delivered to their crowd. And I have been very lucky in the people I have been able to work with.
Give us some history, an idea of how you got here…
I was playing in various bands on the East Coast and moved out to L.A. in 1975 when one of those bands broke up. The drummer from that band and I opened up a demo studio on the corner of Sunset and Vine, and we shared that space with a very popular East L.A. Band called El Chicano who were coming off a national number one single called “Tell Her She’s Lovely.” So, we started doing all of their demos for them and for a lot of other East L.A. bands. One day El Chicano’s sound engineer was sick and couldn’t make a show, so they convinced me to come down and mix for them. The first live show I ever mixed was for 8,000 people at USC. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I didn’t know if I did a good job or a bad job. I just had big Altec mixers with big rotary pots. I had treble, bass and volume and just went for it. I ended up mixing a lot of East L.A. bands. It was a lot of fun and I ended up learning a lot about drums, percussion and bass.
I wanted to be a staff engineer for an L.A. studio and I targeted ABC because I wanted to work for Roger Nichols. And when I finally got a foot in the door there, Brian Ingoldsby was the chief engineer. He was a wonderful teacher, and I learned so much from him. But the main thing I learned from working in the studio is that I don’t belong in the studio.
I started moonlighting at the Palamino in North Hollywood mixing all the country bands on this tiny stage—we would put 10-piece country bands up there. We had a PM1000, and it was the classic thing. Some nights I had to hold the spotlight with my right hand and mix with my left. It was demeaning as hell, but you did what you had to do, and if you could make an extra $20 for holding the spotlight… I’m still playing guitar, I’m working in studios and I’m mixing at the Palamino. So, I’m sleeping about two hours a night.
The guy who had the sound concession out at the Palomino, Dave Hopkinson, had a company called Zeta Sound Systems. He eventually became general manager for Al Siniscal at A-1 Audio. He said to me, “Come out and meet Al, we can always use guys who can mix.” And by that time, I had actually learned something about mixing. When I went to work at A-1, I was mixing all of the Vegas-type acts because Al and Stan Miller had everybody in Vegas at that time. Every weekend we would drive the bobtail up here and work for someone different. So, that was a really good education on rapidly deploying sound systems. I even got to cable page Frank Sinatra’s mic cable a few times, I mixed monitors for Diana Ross and FOH for Susanne Summers and the Tops and Temps. It was a really good fast-forward on my education.
I always had a mechanical aptitude, so I got involved with the nuts and bolts at A-1, building power distros, flying systems and such, and soon I was sent out on the sound crew for the Doobie Brothers tour, the only rock band Al had at the time. I worked my way up to crew chief, and from there to being one of the FOH engineers. That was my big shot. And it was not bad going from being a guitar player in 1975 to being one of the engineers for the Doobie Brothers. At that point, I realized I wasn’t a guitar player anymore and that I actually had a future in this business, so technically my career started in 1978 with the Doobie Brothers, and 30 years later, I’m still here.
When the Doobie Brothers broke up in ’82, I stayed with Mike McDonald and did his first two solo tours. I did a solo tour with Glen Frey. And in that time, Dirk Schubert and his dad bought Tychobrahe, which had been the home of Jim Gamble. For a short time it was called Innovative Audio, and I was running that interim company. The woman who had originally purchased it had her husband operating the business. However, after they got divorced and Jim Chase retired, there was no one to run the company. So… Jim Gamble calls me up and says, “Morgan! Go down to Tychbrahe and save my company.” I mean this was Jim Gamble. This was like God calling Charlton Heston from the mountain.
So, I went down to the South Bay thinking I was gonna be there two weeks. Instead, I ended up becoming the general manager. We took a company that was a quarter of a million dollars in debt and turned it profitable with the cooperation of a lot of my friends—especially JBL—in managing the debt. Ken Lopez and Mark Gander basically rebreathed life into the company. Gene Czerwinski as well. We had these wonderful custom-made Cerwin-Vega amplifiers—we were the first ones to have 600-watt amplifiers. It really was a marvelous sounding PA. Back in the early ‘80s, I think there was a general agreement that we had a killer P.A. We had all the Gamble consoles and real Cadillac electronic packages.
Dirk and I designed everything around the fact that we were basically lazy and didn’t want to work too hard, so my front-of-house on the Doobie Brothers tour took approximately eight minutes to set up and that included getting the consoles out of the cases. Everything was done on big QL multi-cores. It was all prepatched, every rack had patchbays in it. Everything got done in the shop before you put it in the truck and left. So when you got to the gig all you had to do was connect it all together with 150-pin connectors.
Which became the industry standard…
Exactly, exactly. But I got stuck running the business and, once again, I’m a guitar player who can mix a little bit. I didn’t go to business school, I don’t know anything about this stuff. More on-the-job training, right? We ended up with a nice base of clients. We had the Doobie Brothers, we had Toto, we had the Tubes, we had Willie Nelson, we had Waylon Jennings we had Bonnie Raitt, we had Christopher Cross, we had Glen Frey. It was a nice little company there. Although I wasn't much of a businessman, I proudly ran Schubert Systems Group for five years until Dirk, his dad and I decided that it might be a better idea if I moved on. So, they bought me out.
By the summer of 1986, I was mixing Whitney Houston. That was a pretty good comeback because you go away for a couple of years and people forget who you are. So, all of a sudden, I’m right back on the map because this is when she had her 10 straight #1 singles. I worked for her in ’86, ’87 and ‘88.
In ’86 we were doing a show over at Wembley Arena and Paul Simon’s manager was in attendance. I get a call the next day and he says, “Hi, I’m Paul Simon’s manager and I would like to know if you would come and mix the Graceland tour for us.” I said “Really?” And he said “Yeah, I was at Wembley the other night and if you can make that place sound good you can make anyplace sound good.”
I went on to work for Paul Simon for 21 years. In 2006 I finally had to give it up because of repeated scheduling conflicts with James Taylor, with whom I have been working for the last four years. In 2007 I really liked the way my schedule was working out between James Taylor and Stevie Nicks. And I love mixing Stevie. She’s so fabulous to work for and has an amazing band to mix . This year I have this nice alternation between James on the road and Bette here in Las Vegas and the schedules have been dovetailing very well. So I turned my friend Paul Boothroyd on to Paul Simon and he’s been doing a great job for the past couple of years.
And it broke my heart to leave Paul, it really broke my heart. But you can only do so much. And I’m an old Boston boy and if I have the opportunity to mix James Taylor, I’m gonna mix James Taylor. Cuz James and I used to go to see all the same people at the clubs in Cambridge and Boston at the Unicorn or Club 47. So he and I listened to all the same stuff. We stole all our guitar licks from the same guys—he plays them better than I do. We have so much in common and when I went to work for him, he and I became instantaneous friends. It’s just such an honor to be part of the James Taylor shows.
I spent a lot of time with Lionel Richie, too, which I hated to give up. I mean who wouldn’t want to work for Lionel Richie? Such a nice guy and boy can he sell a show. But he got to the point where he was doing a lot of corporates and the very occasional small tour. And, you know, he can live on two corporate shows a month, but guys on the crew can’t.
I had to do the same thing with Steely Dan. You just can’t be in all places at all times. So the last time I mixed Steely Dan was in 2006.
How do you mix James Taylor’s guitar?
You make it sound like James Taylor!
BILL: Yeah, bow many times have you heard an acoustic guitar onstage that sounds like crap? How do you make James Taylor’s guitar sound like James Taylor’s guitar?
Well, I had a lot of experience mixing Paul Simon’s guitar and Paul is very meticulous about the guitar sound.
With James we use an L.R. Baggs pickup. We used to use the Baggs preamp but we discovered this wonderful tool that Radial makes called the Tone Bone PZ Pre. It’s sonically maximized for the unique frequency response and output impedance characteristics of a piezo pickup. We tried it out originally with Carlos Rios in Stevie Nicks’ band and boy, we knew it was a winner as soon as we plugged it in.
So for James, we replaced the Baggs preamp with the PZ Pre and we take the direct out of that and then we take the 1/4” output and send it to a Fishman Aura. The images we have in the Auras are all built off of James two Olsen guitars. We took the guitars to Fishman cuz they’re in Mass and we’re in Mass. They’re such nice people and Larry Fishman just built these images for us. James actually went into a guitar store in western Mass and bought an Aura. It is not like he asked them to supply one. Before anyone knew what an Aura was, James Taylor went out and bought one. James is a real hands-on guy. He loves turning knobs.
SO we get these images back from Fishman and we load them into the unit, At James’ barn in Mass, he’s turned it into a rehearsal/recording studio. So I have a little isolation booth for getting front of house together and listen on my Tannoys. And the two of us would sit there and we would play the guitar and we would turn the speakers off and listen to the guitar and turn the speakers back on and listen to the guitar. We got it to the point where it sounds exactly like that guitar. And that was just with the Fishman. When we added the body with the PZ Pre—with the DI you can get more bottom, more thump–it really turned into a marvelous combination. We get a lot of wonderful reviews with the guitar sound on James’ guitar.
The only thing that exceeds the great review on his guitar are the great reviews we get on his vocal. A lot of reviews in the past few years have said that James’ vocal has never sounded better. And I have to credit a lot of that to using a Shure KSM9. Shure invited me to be part of the developmental project on that thing and I got the original prototypes. One was a cardioid, one was a super before they became a switched dual element. I still have those two microphones, I’ll never give them up. They sound absolutely amazing. I have the first two production models of the KSM32 as well and they are matched to 1/8 of a dB all the way out.
I cried when I had to give my review unit back on the KSM 9.
I didn’t give it back. Opinions aren’t free and I don’t charge for my opinions on equipment it is all done as professional courtesy. I am not for sale and I don’t endorse anything. But if you want to pay me in microphones—that’s currency of the realm. And since I don’t pay for them I don’t charge rental to my clients. So I’m a good deal. If someone hires me they get a whole cartful of free microphones as well. I don’t think Clair Bros. is happy about losing that rental but I do get them a lot of good clients after all.
Those two things are largely responsible for James Taylor sounding live exactly like he does on the recordings and we’re pretty proud of that. The other thing with James is, look at the band I have to mix. You would have to be pretty bad to screw up things with that band. I’ve got Steve Gadd on drums. I’ve got Jimmy Johnson on bass. I got Michael Landau on guitar. I’ve got Larry Goldings on the piano. I’ve got Luis Conte playing percussion. You know? I’ve got Walt Fowler playing the trumpet, Lou Marini playing sax. It doesn’t get much better than that. The only possibly better band I’ve mixed was Paul Simons’ band. I would say that the band we had in 1990, ‘’91 ’92 was—bar none–the best touring band that was ever on the road.
That tour resulted in the best day of my life as an audio engineer—the 1991 Central Park concert for 750,000 people. It was the best day of my life. Phil Ramone and I are standing there looking at each other in awe, I’m mixing and my assistant is Mike Wolf from Clair Bros. and the three of us are just having the time of our lives. It was the most joyful noise you can ever imagine happening in New York City. With 750,000 New Yorkers in one place there was only one injury and four arrests. Contrast that to previous concerts in the park, OK? The four arrests were one pickpocket and three drunk and disorderlies. The one guy who got hurt was having such a great time that he fell out of the tree he was sitting in and broke his ankle. There was no violence, there was no discord with the police. Everybody came happy and left happy. In subsequent years I’ve had people who were not anywhere near the park and they said they could hear the show. I’ve had cops tell me it was the best day of their lives. It became an urban legend. There were 750,000 people there but 6 million people say they were there. It was one of those days that make you glad you chose the music business for your living.
I have been very lucky. I started getting paid for gigs when I was 14 as a singer and guitar player and here I am at 59 and still working so I am very thankful.
Was there a big change in approach for you going to a stationary show?
No. This is very similar to our touring show. Just on a grander stage. Instead of a 40×60 stage we’re on a 125×70 foot stage. (band starts sound check) I’ve have to go to work. We’ll have to continue…
(Over band), We’re doing a benefit for Steven Speilberg in L.A. and this is one of the songs we are doing for that. Apparently it is a dinner honoring Kirk Douglas, so that’s great. I would love to meet Kirk Douglas. But I also want to meet Spartacus…
(motioning to FOH position) As you can see they’ve made me a nice toy here. John Monitto and all of the people at Meyer did everything we asked as far as restructuring the system after Celine. There were some substantial changes. We have better downfill coverage. We have better corner coverage. It sounds really even all the way through the room. We’re very pleased with the job these guys did. The realism, the stereo imagery, it’s everything we could ask for. I love it.
It’s a great sounding room to begin with…
Yeah, it’s a killer room. Luckily I had been in here a few times with Stevie Nicks before we came in with Bette so I had a good idea of what I liked and what I wanted to change. So, when Celine moved out, they took the rake off the stage (A New Day used an extreme stage rake of about 17-degrees—Ed.) and also took off 15 feet and added four rows of seats so we had to get much better downfill coverage. We changed the center cluster to make it a true center. We changed the coverage on the sides, we added M3Ds. We added six Milos that are pointed almost straight down. We like to call them the “showerheads.” Then we added cabinets above the M3D arrays as well. We just tweaked it out nicely. I use the surrounds occasionally for reverbs and such when we have effects like explosions or water dripping. We have rain that falls and it falls all around with the surround. There are some really nice touches with this building.
I head Denis was running two surround mixes. One for the band and one for her voice.
He was running her reverb in the surround. He wasn’t running a lot of instruments in it but we was returning the PCM960 to four channels. That’s a little bit more than we need to do for Bette. The other show was a cross between a Cirque show and a Celine show. With Bette, the point of focus is always on her so I don’t want to divert any kind of point of view out into the house. Everything is always dead-on Bette.
Have you ever seen a Bette show?
I saw her about five years ago in L.A. and five weeks ago in Hammond IN.
You saw the whole show?
Yeah and I NEVER stay for the whole show. It was a really good show…
Did you know how funny she was?
No. But she cracked me up.
Many of my rock ‘n’ roll friends ask “How can you work for Bette Midler?” I answer, “I LOVE working for Bette Midler. Have you ever been to a Bette Midler show?” “Well, no.” “Then why are you judging Bette Midler harshly? She is the most intelligent, witty and dedicated performer I know. She’s 62 years old and she sings every note. There is nothing on Pro Tools in this show except special effects. Everything that is played or sung originates from the people on that stage. She dances every number full out and she never sounds winded. How come a 19-year-old girl can’t do that?
I don’t understand that. I have so much respect for this woman.
At the IN show she did “Midnight in Memphis and…
She killed it. She can still kill “Stay With Me Baby”. All of those old songs from The Rose are still great. She sings the song “The Rose” every night. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, you know? She’s amazing. She sells songs in the old way—the way you are supposed to sell a song.
When Marty told me you were doing line check I was surprised. But he said “We do line check every day. We do sound check every day and she shows up for sound check every day.” I was blown away…
Sure, it’s real professional. And because she is so dedicated, there is not a single member of this crew who would not do ANYTHING for this lady. We’ll work the long hours, we’ll do the extra time. We’ll do whatever it takes to make this show perfect.
The other night Celine was here. There is a wonderful line in the show where Bette lies down on her back and complains aobut how much work the show is and how tired she is. Of course she is feigning it all because she has boundless energy. But she lies on her back and moans, “Come back Celine, all is forgiven…” And Celine just died when she heard that. She was sitting no more than 50 feet away, Dave Torti and I were watching her and she was cracking up. Everybody comes to this show. Everyone wants to be in the presence of the Divine Miss M.
I love snapshots. And this console makes creating and editing snapshots so easy. I mean we just went from nothing to a song in, what, four minutes? And it’s totally repeatable now. So we have a different horn blend, a different keyboard blend, a different blend on the four piano transducers, a different sound to the percussion. It’s all repeatable and it was all done in minutes.
Bette sings on a KSM9 as well. The fixed-point singer Shayna is on a KSM 9. When the girls are on handhelds those are KSM9s. The headsets are DPAs going through the new Shure compact body packs. All of our RF mic systems are Shure and all of our IEM wireless systems are Sennheiser. Earbuds are their own choice but most of the band uses Marty Garcia’s stuff (Future Sonics). Marty also put together the Sennheiser rack for us. Shure and Sennheiser have both been extremely supportive.
You’re not using a KSM9 as a talkbalk are you?
No. I would if it had a switch…
These are artifacts from Cher's engineer. Dave Kob. This was his first full foray into digital so he was not quite ready to leave all of his analog behind. Clive Franks (Elton John) and I were the ones who got Clair to buy all of these beautiful TubeTech CL-2A series compressors…
And they are turned off…
They’re absolutely great. They’re really great compressors. But I use a plug-in of a CL1B. Dave’s continuing to use this and I understand that. But you’ve got a Summit that is built to sound like an LA-2A and I have a sample of an LA-2A onboard that I would say sounds just as good as that and is a lot less noisy. A lot of the transition to digital, for us older engineers is done kickng and screaming. But everytime I adapt myself—which is basically what I have to do is reeducate myself. Everytime I adapt myself to the next step in digital I end up having more fun mixing. It really has created a series of renaissances in my professional environment…
The first big step was good sounding line arrays. The next step… Well, actually the first big step was probably the TC 6032 head where you could actually control a whole bunch of EQs remotely and do it repeatably and accurately. How did we used to do that with 15 parametrics?
This is another great band. Musical Director and pianist, Bette Sussman, Sonny Emory on drums, Tom Barney on bass, Mike Miller and Wayne Johnson playing guitar, Darrell Smith on keyboards, And Taku Hirano on percussion. Great players.
How does she get guys like that to stick around for a run this long?
Because it’s fun! You just WANT to work for Bette Midler. It’s a real privilege. Everyone aspires to a performance like this. She’s one of the greatest entertainers to ever hit the stage. Bette is on top of every aspect of the show—the singing, the dancing, the arrangements, the lights, the video. I mean, she is on top of everything. It is really really wonderful to see. She’s the star, the director, the producer—she wears every hat in the production. We have regular meetings where she presides. She is just as involved as you can be. It’s exactly what you want in an artist. Because you know exactly what she wants and you know exactly what is expected of you on any given day and at any given time during the show. It creates a team. It creates dedication to a common goal of making Bette Midler look good.
