My Journey In Music: Part II - Launching Into Life

In a momentous decision, I decided to leave my hometown of Chico (in northern California) and my local musical success to find my future as a recording engineer in Hollywood. So I transferred from Chico State to Cal State Northridge where my audio recording specialty fell into the Broadcasting School’s jurisdiction. This change quickly resulted in an amazing series of connections.
 
Within my first two (junior year) semesters there, I became the student instructor of the high-end music recording laboratory, where my students recorded all University musical events on campus and off. I also became acquainted with four outstanding men who became my mentors: Bill Lazarus, a recording engineer for BB King, Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield, and later the head of audio at Universal Studios; C. Wayne Taylor, former RCA engineer and head of the University’s audio services; Sidney Salkow, my film professor (I was his student aid) who was concurrently directing “Ironsides” with Raymond Burr at Universal Studios; and Dale Manquen, who was my Acoustics professor, and former lead engineer at Ampex in their professional recording machine division as the inventor of the MM1000. He was also chief design engineer for the 3M M79 2”/ 24 track machine, and served as President of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for the U.S.. Mr. Manquen and Wayne Taylor were my sponsors into the AES, an elite professional association.
 
A new Southern California drummer friend, Marty, had been talking with my (first) wife, Kathy, and one day when we found each other waiting for the same elevator, he said, ” I didn’t know you wanted to be a recording engineer! My uncle Arnie owns some of the top recording studios here.”
 
The following day I got a phone call from Uncle Arnie who started the conversation with, “Marty said you want to be a recording engineer.” And over the course of this momentous 15-minute phone conversation, he offered me my dream job, and then completely talked me out of my life’s ambition to be involved in the professional audio world!
 
Arnie continued, ”You can start here at my Santa Monica studios tomorrow morning, but I understand you’re a newlywed...?” to which I said yes.  Then Arnie explained, ”Well I really wouldn’t feel right unless I told you my life story. I’m 34 and I’ve been married 4 times, and it’s all because of this crazy business.” He also told me what to expect over the coming months with unreasonable record producers, diva artists, and the hard and very demanding life in the studio. The clincher was his forecast of what my new wife would do. The first night of the first week, he said, when you are held over by a producer, your wife will call and nicely ask when you are coming home, and you will say, ”I don’t know dear, as soon as we’re done here I suppose.” Then, after the producer keeps you overnight and into the next day, and until the project is done, she’ll ultimately be calling almost hourly, her voice getting progressively louder and more and more angry, until she’s yelling at the top of her lungs for you to ”get your ass home if you want to see me here in the future!” Arnie finished, ”That’s almost always, exactly the way it goes, every time.”
 
After that call, which confirmed what I’d also been hearing around the water coolers of the other studios where I’d been spending time (downtown at Sunset & Vine, Hollywood), I decided to change course, away from the hazards of that fast Hollywood lifestyle, valuing my new bride and our marriage above whatever powerful lifelong dreams I’d always had for becoming a recording engineer.
 
Shortly afterwards, I got a sales job with the stereo-video chain retailer Cal-Stereo, which was, ironically, a few blocks from Arnie’s Santa Monica studio. I’m not really a sales-type, I thought, but was soon surprised with some early success. Over the next 5 years I became a store manager, subsequently being called upon to help manage the simultaneous opening of 5 new stores in the remote Northern California Bay Area. I was the only person in the company who’d come from these (very foreign) Northern California territories and therefore was one of the point-men for this expansion.
 
After some amazing years with Cal (and after it went surprisingly bankrupt), I opened my first stereo-video store, improving on the Cal-Stereo template, and only 2 blocks from Cal’s highest performing store (out of 27), a San Jose location. I was off and running into a future that included the ownership of 13 varied and interesting businesses, providing a wonderful lifelong journey (with my new wife) to the present production of our music TV series, “Plugged In and Turned On In Paradise.”