The standard of any industry is to start at the bottom. For the live event industry, that would mean doing it all for that local band, being a general audio tech for that 500-person club, maybe coiling cable at that regional blues festival. That wasn’t for Buford Jones — he started at the top: His first show was in an arena for Three Dog Night at the height of their worldwide fame. Not bad for a kid from Port Arthur, Texas.
This year’s Parnelli Audio Innovator toured for 47 years with all big-name acts playing arenas and stadiums. Those artists include ZZ Top, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Faith Hill and many others. In the early 1970s, he pioneered mixing in stereo and later did the same for mixing in surround sound (such as for Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour). He also pioneered the use of pan pots on a console. Another seminal moment was mixing in quad for Bowie.
Jones had an All-Access pass to the industry’s history before there was really either an industry or a history. He began his career touring for Showco when they started out in the early 1970s, and he stayed for ten years before becoming an independent contractor. Meyer Sound even asked Buford to help introduce new products to their customers, which he did for more than 15 years. More recently he has taught college classes at Belmont University in Nashville. Since 1970, he’s been the owner/operator of Trax Recording Studio where he has produced music, recording, arranging and mixing for a wide variety of genres.
Buford never had to put together a resume and never asked for a job — the closest he got was calling Don Henley and complimenting him on his Building the Perfect Beast album. “I think my name was already on the table to do that tour when I phoned them. That was only one of 32 multi-platinum artists I called.”
“This year, my dear friend, Buford Jones, shines as a recipient of the esteemed Parnelli award,” says noted drummer Russ Kunkel. “Having toured and collaborated with Buford during my time performing with James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and Linda Ronstadt, I can attest to his remarkable talent and dedication. Buford’s passion for his craft has set a standard for all front of house mixers I’ve encountered. I vividly recall our jam sessions while playing with James Taylor’s band — a time when Buford recorded our improvisations. This recording led to an opportunity presented to us by Peter Asher, marking the genesis of our instrumental fusion band, The Section. Without Buford’s vision in capturing those jams, this wouldn’t have become a reality. Congratulations, my friend — truly deserving of this honor.”
But Are You Single?
Buford Jones grew up in Port Arthur, TX, an oil refinery town that also ran another music legend out of it: Janis Joplin. Jones chuckles when saying he read in Rolling Stone magazine once that she said that she was the first hippie in Port Arthur and they ran her out, and “look who is pumping gas now.” “I related to that,” Jones says. Sure enough, his father, Raymond, was a foreman at one of the big refineries; but it was his father’s hobby of building guitars that made a life-long impression on young Buford. With a mechanical/electrical background and a carless garage, Raymond worked a metal lathe, drill press, and other tools building and repairing guitars for all the local shops. When Buford was 11, he was gifted a Heathkit radio kit. “I was so enthralled by the challenge of putting it together that, once I completed it, I tore it apart and built it again. I haven’t been the same since.” Dad also gave him a couple of home-built guitars, teaching him the fingerpicking style of Chet Atkins and Merle Haggard.
After graduating from high school, Jones went off to Dallas College’s El Centro campus, where he received an Associate of Science degree in Electronics in 1969. Once out of college, he went to work for the biggest stereo repair shop in the state. “One day, a guy came up to me and told me there was a company down the street hiring,” he says. Jones replied he was happy where he was but was talked into visiting. At his next lunch, he ambled down the street and entered the building of a company he had “no clue of what they did.” That company was Showco, which at that point in 1970 was on verge of becoming the pioneering touring sound reinforcement (and later lighting and staging). Jones went and sat down with the three owners, Jack Maxon, Rusty Brutsché and Jack Calmes. They fired questions at him and liked all his answers. Yes, he had an electronics degree; a home studio; played guitar and a little piano. The last question was unexpected: “Are you single?”
He took the better-paying job and showed up to work the next day, “not having a clue of what I was to do.” They sent him into the repair room and put him to work soldering snake connectors. “At the end of that day, Jack [Maxson] walks up to me and tells me to go home and pack my bags and come back in hour.” Then he drove to Atlanta to do sound for Three Dog Night. For almost a year, he set up the massive P.A. and watched Maxson mix. “We would typically do three shows over a weekend with them, and they’d fly home to LA, so we’d pick up one-offs for bands like The Kinks and The Guess Who.” He quickly transitioned to being behind the board himself, and those early days would stay with Jones the rest of his career. “I still think I emulate those big fat sounds from the early days,” he says. “Those huge drum sounds and the overall mix having a thickness to it, it all glued together. I made a lot of mistakes — mistakes that should have gotten me fired,” he says laughing. “But they spotted something in me and whipped me into shape.”
Jones was on the sound crew of ZZ Top before and then during when their 1973 album Tres Hombres came out with the hit “Le Grange.” They were suddenly huge everywhere — almost. Another key moment for him was when the lesser-known ZZ Top was playing in the Northwest and opening for Uriah Heep — a seemingly odd pairing. But ZZ Top was stealing the show. “People would stop by my console and ask who the heck was that band, and say they needed to go buy their album. It was a thrilling moment, because that’s when I saw what was really happening: We were promoting a product. I learned early in my career that we are promoting that artist’s records, so people would buy them, so the artist could go back into the studio and make another one. I knew my job was to make the concert sound really good.”
When his time with ZZ Top had come to an end, and Jones was ready to move on, Showco came back with, “How about Jeff Beck?” It was a radical change, and a thrilling one, Jones says. “It was something new and I was working with the best musician on the planet.” It was not an easy gig: He did 33 shows in 30 days, with no days off and no hotel rooms — they drove the trucks and slept on top of the speakers in the back when they could. “We had a lot of fun,” Jones recalls.
The Peter Asher Era
Showco’s R&D team (with Parnelli Visionary Lifetime Honoree Jim Bornhorst as lead) then came out with their first “SuperBoard,” which was built with road durability in mind. It was an industry game-changer, with 30 inputs, four quad outputs, plus two additional independent mono outputs. All input modules had parametric EQ — one of the first to have that feature. Then there were eight buses for panning — also revolutionary. Jones had the first one on the road at a time when “most engineers didn’t know what parametric EQ was.” He would effectively vary Qs (bandwidth) and frequency, and he mastered the stereo feature. Then came Bowie on the Diamond Dogs tour of 1974, after the original FOH engineer was not working out. Jones was hesitant at first, because of his negative impression of the Bowie — an impression that turned out wrong. “I was terrified to meet him, but he turned out to be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” he says. Jones went to one of the shows early in the tour and Bowie welcomed him backstage afterwards. “He had a note in his own handwriting with all the audio cues and talked through the show with me,” he says. Jones was impressed with the details and the planning that Bowie put into his shows. “He had a secretary type his lyrics and was specific — ‘turn up the Mellotron here,’ ‘more reverb here.’ Then he told me that these were just his ideas, and if I disagreed, I could do whatever I thought was best. After the first week together, he was thrilled with all the improvements I was able to make.” Jones would go out with Bowie again on the following tour where he mixed with quadraphonic sound, one of the first to do so.
By the late 1970s, Jones had established himself for two of the era’s biggest names: Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. What they had in common was manager/producer Peter Asher. “I met him when I was mixing Linda right when she was selling out arenas,” Jones recalls. Asher appreciated him, and he had Jones ping-ponging between both acts, as he purposely never had them touring at the same time so he could give both the attention and support they deserved. “That’s when my mixing truly developed. It’s when I learned it’s not just a gig, not just amplifying an artist and tearing down the gear and going to another show, which is what a lot of folks did.”
“I held the FOH engineer to a very high standard — these were not rock and roll shows, where it was all about crunch and power as the musicians were acting as accompanists to two of the great American musicians of the era,” Asher says. “Linda’s extraordinary and emotionally gripping singing and James’s soulful vocal and classically precise guitar had to be front and center without the band as a whole losing any power. Buford mastered that fine balancing act and made it one less thing I had to worry about. I am sorry that I will not be there in person to thank him again — those early Showco tours were magical, and Buford was one of the key magicians.”
It was also a period of reflection for the young Jones and the career path that had chosen him. During his first year with Showco, he didn’t go home for 11 months, including Christmas when he worked for Black Oak Arkansas. “And it didn’t slow down from there.” For the decade Jones was with Showco, he did not even have an apartment but crashed in the back of a friend’s Mexican restaurant. “I was only home a couple of weeks a year and that room had a bed, my guitars and studio gear, which was all I needed.”
In 1980, he had a conversation with Asher where Jones noted that since he was either mixing Ronstadt or Taylor, what if he just worked for him full time? Asher agreed immediately, and he parted Showco on good terms. By concentrating more on two of the best in the business, Jones saw an opportunity to learn more about music and become a better engineer. “I’m not a typical P.A.-technoid — I’m about the music. To me, the console is another instrument, and I’m playing it like a guitar.” Thus started his independent phase that would carry him to the point when he retired.
Roll Tape
Working so closely with Ronstadt’s band allowed him to experiment and perfect a sometimes-controversial task: taping the band just for the benefit of himself and the band. When he first hooked up a tape machine to the console, it was not successful. “Sitting in the back of the bus listening to it, with Linda on one side of me, Peter on the other, and the band completing a circle around me, well … it didn’t sound too good. Linda asked, ‘where is the guitar?’ and I said it will be there tomorrow!” He realized several things at once. First, he was putting too much energy in the P.A. and not enough into the console, so he thinned out the P.A. on the low-end and then was adding more gain to the individual cues, learning what a linear response was and creating an even better house mix. Then the house tape became much better. Well-known and respected audio engineers thought this was a waste of time and even a distraction, but not Jones: “If you can’t make a decent tape with a great-sounding P.A., then you’re not well-rounded.”
The performers and their manager sure got it: Listening to show tapes the next day allowed for critiquing their playing and sound, which made for better performances. As for Jones, “it really escalated my mixing ability. And I felt if we had could review our work, we could better accomplish the sound the artist had created on the album. While a member of the band sitting there always wants the standard ‘more me,’ if I can take the overall live sound and translate it to tape, it’s a powerful tool.”
His audio philosophy differs from others in other ways. For example, he was told by one engineer that the goal is to have everyone in the arena hear the same vocal. “That’s a strange way to look at it,” Jones says. First, he believes it’s impossible; secondly, shouldn’t the people in the middle center, the people who (especially in the old days) waited in line for tickets longest get the benefit of that experience?
Jones was a pioneer of the use of stereo in a live concert setting, even when not everyone appreciated it. When mixing the three guitars of Lynyrd Skynyrd, he used it to put a little space between them via stereo. When he pointed it out to the band, he was told to go back to mono because “the band doesn’t do special effects.” He chuckled at that.
In 1987, Buford was asked to mix Pink Floyd for what was to be 45 shows. It turned into 200 shows over two years. While he’s hard-pressed to say what artist was his “favorite,” he says this was his most enjoyable, because it was so challenging. The show involved three consoles, 136 inputs and required Buford to hire two more set of hands to mix it all. It was also when he mixed in surround sound. During a rehearsal, David Gilmore walked up before sound check and could tell Buford was anxious, trying to get everything exactly like the albums. Gilmore said, “Be an artist and paint this picture however you want.” Buford said he felt a load just drift away. Later in the tour, when Gilmore heard one of the tapes of the live show, Buford was told the next morning that they were going to make a live album of the tour and he was going to mix it. For the live concert engineer to mix an album was a rarity — and this was the only one Buford did.
The Meyer Sound Era
Buford is drawn to speakers with flat or equal aptitude response, which took him to the Meyer Sound doorway of John Meyer. “If you’re not starting [with a flat equal amplitude response], you’re mixing against yourself. I argue that the systems John builds have equal amplitude response with very little phase, and they make for the best sound.”
In 2001, he got a call from industry communications specialist Greg McVeigh. “I was finishing up year six with Faith Hill and thinking of phasing out of touring, and Greg asked if I would come to work for Meyer Sound.” At first, Jones demurred. “I’m not a sales guy.” Conversations and an agreement ensued, and like that first day at Showco three decades earlier, Jones showed up, not exactly sure what he was to do. “I flew to their headquarters in Berkeley and [owners] John and Helen were having a sales meeting, and they all stopped and stood and welcomed me, gave me a tour of the factory, and said it was wonderful to have me. Then I asked what I was supposed to be doing.”
“You can hire people who want to get off the road, but they aren’t always a good fit for a manufacturer,” McVeigh explains. “But I knew Buford would be a unique fit for Meyer. He is well-loved and respected by everyone.” He adds it was something else when the soft-spoken Jones came into Meyer Sound’s Bay Area office that first time. “Even with that Texas drawl, he fit right in.” Jones quickly became an excellent liaison for the company, working with audio companies and engineers all over the country. “He was the only manufacturing guy Clair [Bros] would allow in because he had the gravitas, the skills and the reputation. Then later, Meyer started using Jones in more in an educational function, doing workshops and seminars worldwide and he really thrived there.”
“Buford brought an incredible depth of experience and knowledge to the Meyer Sound education program,” recalls Helen Meyer, Meyer Sound co-founder and executive vice-president. “The lists of artists he’s mixed with — either on the road or in the studio — reads like a Who’s Who. Yet Buford was so humble and passionate about sharing his knowledge with young audio professionals. We were honored to have him as part of our team for 15 years.”
As Jones could speak to the benefits of a Meyer rig better than most and talk engineer to engineer, he was sent all over the planet, growing Meyer’s reach while filling up seven passports. And he was still getting behind the board himself, mixing Clint Black here and Counting Crows there. “It worked out well.” But that phase inevitably ran its course as Jones says, “I hate airports.”
Professor Jones
In 2008, Jones transitioned into his final phase: educator. From early on in his career, he was getting requests from various conventions and industry meetings like NAMM and InfoComm, and during his time with Meyer he headed their education department doing seminars, lectures, and classes on audio including some for DiGiCo (their S7 was his preferred board in his later career).
Then came a call from Belmont University’s Scott Frenzel, who at the time was one of the instructors there. Jones was taken to the office of Doug Howard, dean of the school’s Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, and after the conversation where Jones shared just some of his history and stories from the road, “the dean turned to Scott and told him to start a new audio program and call it whatever I wanted to call it.” Thus, his Advanced Live Sound Mixing program was launched. “It filled up right away, and I really enjoyed that.” The pandemic came and today, Jones has stepped back to enjoy a well-deserved full retirement.
Meyer Sound co-founder and CEO John Meyer, the first recipient of the Audio Innovator Award in 2004, says Buford’s achievements in sound mixing deserve this distinction. “Buford’s accomplishments in sound mixing put him among the best in the field. But it’s his dedication to giving back to the industry that stands out and continues to inspire the next generation of audio engineers. Congratulations to Buford on this well-deserved honor.”
Buford Jones will receive the Parnelli Audio Innovator Award at the 2024 awards ceremony, which is set for Jan. 26, 2024 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA during the NAMM Show. For more information, visit www.parnelliawards.com.
