Interview with Mark Johnson, Part 1

We had such a great conversation with Mark that we’re releasing two episodes with him. This first part of the conversation deals with Mark’s early days in the business, including his days at Clark University, 10 years at Opryland, a career marketing Meyer Sound, and his time working with some great performers like Platinum-selling artists and Grammy award-winning singer Anita Baker.

About Mark Johnson

Mark Johnson is a retired AV industry legend from Casselberry, Florida, with nearly 50 years of experience in various fields including audio production, sound design, production management, broadcast audio, marketing, and public relations. Mark holds a Bachelor's degree from Clark University, where he majored in self-designed Expanded Cinema (experimental filmmaking). Throughout his career, Mark has designed loudspeaker systems for multiple Montreux Jazz Festivals, served as the editor of Sound and Video Contractor magazine, and contributed to Church Production Magazine with numerous articles and audio product reviews. Outside of work, Mark enjoys photography, producing his podcast "Above All, There's Hope: My Journey with Prostate Cancer," restoring a 1975 Airstream trailer, and traveling. He is most proud of his career and the friendships he has developed along the way. Connect with Mark at https://www.aboveallthereshope.com and listen to his podcast on Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Apple Podcasts.

Listen and subscribe to the Sound Connections podcast on your favorite podcasting apps including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts!

Welcome to another episode of the Sound Connections podcast. Mainline Marketing's Clinton Muntean recently had the chance to sit down with Mark Johnson. Mark is currently the program director for show production at Full Sail University, but he has a long career working in the industry next to giants like platinum selling artist and multiple Grammy award winner Anita Baker. Enjoy the show.

Clinton

Welcome to this episode of Sound Connections. Today we have Mark Johnson, a 44-year veteran of our industry, sound guy, writer, marketer, and educator. Thanks for coming, Mark.

Mark

Hey, glad to be here. I always like coming here.

Clinton

We tend to have a little fun here. So yeah, so you're not your first time here, but your first time here as a guest on our show.

Mark

Yeah, and I'm honored actually to be here.

Clinton

And we're honored to have you. You know, I think, you know, I was thinking about this morning, we've known each other about ten years. I think, you know, since your time at Full Sail, really, is when I met you. And you know, over that time, it's been great working with you. I really enjoy it, like truly enjoy it. But then, you know, we've also developed a friendship, and you know, I know a little bit about you, and you know, a little bit about your personal life, and we share some of those details. But as I started thinking about the podcast, I'm like, holy crap, there's a lot I actually don't know. But I think mainly about your career, you know, so I know you as a writer and as an educator at Full Sail. But I took a peek at your LinkedIn profile, and that's how I knew you'd been in business a long time. And I know you had made mention of some of your early days, like at Opryland. And so I figured we would talk about some of that today. You know, Sound Connections, bringing people together, telling our stories, you know, about our industry. And you've kind of done some things that are a little different than a lot of us get to do.

Mark

That I have, and I'm incredibly thankful, you know, when I do get the opportunities to kind of reflect on my career. Because I am a lot older than these young whippersnappers, and certainly a lot older than a lot of people who come through Full Sail. Who, in my mind, one of the reasons why I wanted to come back to Full Sail was because of the opportunities to get into these career fields that I've had. And I've had a few different career fields. They can kind of take a shorter route, I guess, than I took, and be on the road or be in a career a lot faster. A lot of what I went through was on-the-job learning or being fortunate enough to hook up with some really good mentors and really good teachers who gave of their time while we're working on gigs and things like that to kind of take me under their wings and help me along. But, yeah, it's been a great ride. I actually had no intentions of going in kind of this aspect or even any of the other aspects that I wound up in. I guess I'm kind of a guy that likes to just kind of follow the path.

Clinton

Well, how do you... So many people, I shouldn't say most people, many people that end up in our industry, many of them it’s not on purpose. And some of [it] is. Maybe they're musicians and started out in a band and found their way onto the AV side or the sound side of the business doing production work. So I noticed that you got your bachelor's degree at Clark University in expanded cinema. So first of all, I have no idea what expanded cinema is. So I want to know a little bit about that. But did you know then? Were you splicing tape at ten years old? What's your deal?

Mark

Not a clue. I don't know. When I was in high school, we had a project in an English class, of all things, to do some creative writing. And the guest lecturer for that class was a guy who had written for television, television comedies and things like that. And we had to partner up with somebody else in the class. So the guy and I wrote a little thing about the invention of the wheel and fire and some other things and copped illustrations from the old comic BC. Do you remember that comic? And made a whole thing and storyboarded it out and things like that. One day we walked into class and she said, “Go get Steven, I need to talk to you,” the instructor said. And she said, “Bud read your piece, and thought it was the best thing that he's ever seen.” From high school students.

Clinton

Yeah, yeah. That's great.

Mark

And so he wants you guys to go talk to some people at Hanna-Barbera. So we got out of school one day, which was, you know, that was a blessing itself. And we had just my friend and I, Steven, Steven Tatsumi was his name. And we were already buddies. We rode motorcycles together and things like that. But we went to the Hanna-Barbera studios in Burbank and it was just amazing. And we went with people and the upshot was that they don't buy cartoons. They develop them in their own in-house. So it never came of anything, but it was always kind of interesting to me. And I really didn't have a career in mind when I went to college. And I was just going to go to college just to go to college, right? And when I got there, they had a video production course. And I had just kind of met some people. I mean, I kind of went to the college not knowing too much about it, but it got me across the country, away from home. So I went there.

Clinton

Yeah, it's like…grew up in California.

Mark

I went to college in Western Massachusetts. So I just kind of fell into it. And I always kind of lean towards the artistic side. And so I started doing video production. And I mean literally, one day I was walking across campus, and one of the guys that I had met who was an upperclassman literally drove up in his car and said, “Mark Johnson, we've been looking for you. Get in.” And I said, “Okay, okay.” And so I jumped in the car, and we went off to work on a video production. And that's how my whole career was basically, just kind of being drug along initially, but really enjoying it when I got to do whatever I did. I just ran video camera for that particular event. But I was working on another event, and I was doing like a boom microphone type of thing. I had a shotgun microphone on a thing. And the guy who was doing audio was just talking about doing live sound. And I said, “Well, that's kind of interesting to me. Can I hang out with you?” And he was doing all the live sound for all the events on campus. And so I just started kind of hanging out with him and learning the trade. But the expanded cinema part came from, I guess I was always kind of interested in visual stuff. And I would do—it's another way of saying experimental film and videos. We called them personal videos or personal films back in the day where you largely shot on Super 8 or 60mm or things like that. And they're relatively short. And at that point in the 70s, early 70s, there were a lot of people who would make these films that were effectively motion art pieces. And I was always really interested in that and still am, although I haven't really done anything. But it was just interesting to me in that eye. And so the major was a self-design major. They didn't really have a film major or anything like that in the school, but they did have film courses. There was actually one of my instructors who was pretty famous in the world of film critiquing and things like that, Anthony Hodgkinson. He was another guy who was kind of a mentor of mine. And I wound up becoming friends with some of the instructors who would teach me that. But I always kind of kept my hand in the creative aspects of it. So that's kind of how my expanded cinema major came across.

Clinton

It's kind of cool that you kind of, you know, it's the first I've heard of this, sort of designing your own degree.

Mark

Yeah, that was one of the cool things that the school offered.

Clinton

Yeah, that's kind of neat, you know, because oftentimes you're pigeonholed into one thing or another and it's not quite what you want, you know. So that's kind of neat.

Mark

Yeah, I think that's the thing that allowed me to actually graduate.

Clinton

Otherwise you'd still be there?

Mark

Yeah, probably.

Clinton

So, how did—so, while you're in college, you're doing some cinema work or film work, you're doing video production, and then you're doing live sound work. So, I don't remember when I looked, I see you went to work at Opryland, which is a little bit away from Worcester.

Mark

It's a minute or two away.

Clinton

And I don't know if there was a gap there, but did you go straight from college to Opryland, or did you make a stop in between?

Mark

Yeah, I definitely made a stop in between. I had been doing, kind of following the footsteps of my friend that was teaching me the live sound at school, and at one point he transferred out. And the words exactly were, “Well, who's going to do these shows now that you're leaving?” And he said, “You will.” And it was like,

Clinton

You know, those cartoon yo-yo.

Mark

And I said, “Do you think I can?” And he said, “Yeah, absolutely. You know what you're doing.” And so I kind of filled in for him. And you know, you learn a lot when you're kind of on the job learning. And fortunately, I didn't do any real serious crashes and burns. But I learned a lot. So I graduated. Actually, I didn't graduate at that point. I left. And I had a couple of projects to finish up, a couple of films. And I finished them up. And I moved to Northern California, where I just basically crashed on the couch in my brother's place. And started looking for work. And I would bounce back and forth between my brother's place in Northern California and my dad's place in Southern California. And the first job I got out of college was working in a store called The Good Guys. And it's not like The Good Guys electronic store. It was kind of more like a Target and things like that. And I worked in the furniture department of all places. And I did that for a while until I saved up my money and then actually moved back up and crashed with my brother. And through his girlfriend's mother, who was the principal at a high school, I got a job in the AV department as their AV coordinator. And I looked after all the gear and set up projectors and did that. And while I was there, my friend from college who taught me Live Sound called me up and said, “Hey, you want to come to Nashville and work at Opryland and do…mix a show?” And it's like, “Well, yeah, I kind of do. Can I do it?” He said, “Absolutely.” He says—

Clinton

So did Opryland have the same right now? That's like everybody knows what it is. So back then, was it as well known? Did you know what a prestigious place it was to work at the time?

Mark

I had some clues because I'd known that my friend had worked there. He had been fairly highly placed in the production world there. And so I kind of knew what it was about. And I worked in the theme park area of it, not the grand old Opry House. Although during my time there I did do some shows within the Opry House itself. So I started out mixing a 50s rock and roll show, which again was a great learning experience because you're dealing more. And this was six days a week throughout the whole course of the summer. And the job was a seasonal job, but I took it knowing that it was a seasonal job. But I wound up working through the winters, building sets and scenery for the following year. And so I wound up being there for an overall period of ten years. Part of them is seasonal and ultimately I got hired full-time. And I was, I can't remember exactly what my title was, but I was effectively the assistant technical director. I mostly dealt with shows that we did off-site. We had a production company built into the thing and we would go do corporate productions and events for different corporate customers who would hire the production show that we would do within the park typically. Or sometimes they would take the creative team, and they would write a show for the client.

Clinton

And then would these productions happen within the park or would they sometimes be outside the park?

Mark

Yes, both, yeah. So we would do them, not necessarily within the park, but we were connected. Our next door neighbor was the Opryland Hotel. So we just moved the show over there and do it over there. And sometimes we would take a show and move it someplace else. So I did that off and on over the next, as I said, 10-year period. At one point, again, one of the things that I tell the students at Full Sail is one of the most important things that I feel in the world of professional production, or just in the world of being a professional, is networking with your peers and things like that. So one of the roommates of the keyboard player in the band that I was mixing came into our little sound booth and said, “I heard from Steve,” who is the keyboard player, that, “You were interested in working in TV production.” I said, “Yeah, that's kind of what my training was through college and that's kind of where I like to go.” And he says, well, “We're looking for somebody at the TV station” where he worked. And I went, “Oh, cool.” And he gave me a phone number and I called the number. And the guy, funny back story, I told my wife, the woman who was my wife at the time, that, oh, “I was supposed to call this guy Larry Sullivan.” And she said, “Larry Sullivan? I know him.” And my wife, Mike's wife, was a singer, a really good singer. And that's how we met at Opryland. And she was a performer there. I was a technician there. And so sound guy and a singer, that's, you know, well, like I say, ex-wife. But, so I called the number, and he says, “Yeah, Glenn,” who was the guy who was my keyboard player's friend, “Glenn told me all about you. Why don't you come down to the station?” And I said, “Cool, you know, let me know the time.” And then I said, “By the way, you know somebody that I'm connected to now. You know, her name is Shawn Johnson, but she used to be Shawn Carter.” And he went, “Shawn Carter, oh my.” He wanted to record her. He was an audio engineer himself, so he wanted to record her. And that never happened. So it was kind of a serendipitous meeting. And then I go down to the station and talk with him and talk with the chief engineer there and ultimately got the job. It went well for a long time, well not a long time, went well for about a year. And then the station kind of changed its direction. So they wound up letting go of the majority of the staff. And actually my friend who got me hired, he and I got fired the same day at the same time. We're sitting there, got called to the chief engineer's office and it's like, okay, time to go. It's like, okay, so...

Clinton

Yeah, I have some friends in TV. It's kind of a bit of a brutal industry. I've heard a lot of stories over the years, very similar stories.

Mark

So that was after I'd been there about a year and I went back to Opryland. And fortunately they would have me. And even though it didn't end well, I had my time at the TV station. Again, I learned so much.

Clinton

Oh yeah, you learned.

Mark

And I often tell people one of the hardest mixing jobs that I ever had was the 5 O'clock news. And you watch it and you look at it from a viewer perspective and you think, “Oh, it's just a guy sitting in a chair or the weatherman up there.” But it just goes like that.

Clinton

Yeah, and it's a lot of pressure because it's live broadcast.

Mark

And there's tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of people listening to your product. So I kind of realized that one night when I was doing the nighttime news and kind of went, wow, there's some pressure here, and I really need to make sure that every day I bring my A game. So I really worked hard at that.

Clinton

And I think some of our best engineers in the industry have a broadcast experience or background even. I think there's something about that kind of environment where it has to be right every time.

Mark

Television, at least from an audio standpoint and probably from many other standpoints, it's like doing live audio. You have your shot. And the news may be the news the next night and the next night and the next night. But for that moment in time, that's your shot. It's not like making a record where it's like, let's try this one. Let's try it this way. So it was a great experience for me. And then going back to Opryland, it was still a good experience and I learned a lot.

Ad:

You're ready to start a podcast. You're looking to buy the top of the line equipment. You're not messing around with the budget microphones. You want the top-of-the-line gear that the professionals use and you're willing to spend to get it. Well, I got good news for you. The top-of-the-line microphone used by the most popular podcast all over the world doesn't cost thousands of dollars to go out and get. It doesn't even cost a thousand dollars. It's the Shure SM7B. The SM7B is so perfect for podcasters that you would say Shure had to have designed it from the ground up for podcasts. Except it came out decades before anyone knew what a podcast was. With its silky smooth vocals and ability to cut out unwanted noises, the Shure SM7B is the last mic you'll ever need to purchase for your podcast.

Mark

After the television job and before I went back to Opryland, I got hired to go out and do a show in San Francisco. We went to this venue in San Francisco, and I was looking up at these little bitty speakers up in the facility that we had to use. I'm thinking, are those the speakers that we have to use for this gig? It wasn't any power really required, it was actually just a bluegrass group that I was mixing. But I'm thinking, there's no way these speakers are going to cover this facility. I talked to the guy who installed them and I said, “What's the deal with these speakers?” I said, “I can't recognize them.” He said, “There's a guy across the bay here, he's kind of a hippie guy and he invented these things.” He said, “They're really cool.” I said, “Okay, let's give it a shot.” I thought they were phenomenal. I'm thinking, what were they? I couldn't remember. I go back to Opryland, I'm working at Opryland. The best way we had in those days, this was pre-internet and everything, we're looking at all the industry magazines. I remember I was going through an issue of ProSound News. I saw an ad for those speakers. It's like Meyersound, and they had Grateful Dead, and things like that. I go tell my colleagues, those are the ones.

Clinton

Those are the speakers, yeah.

Mark

So I called the number, and I got a hold of the company. They arranged a demo. The closest system they had was actually in Austin, Texas. They were still very in their youthful stage of the company, just starting out. They sent the demo system, and we wound up keeping it. We bought it from them.

Clinton

Where did you guys install it? Was it installed, or was it a production rig?

Mark

It was a production rig. We would take it out to do some of the various shows. We had a small show that was going out on a tour, probably like a six-week tour or something like that. That's what we used the system for initially. Then we would just use it for gigs and events. I remember once we had Chic, remember that group?

Clinton

Yeah.

Mark

They wanted a big PA, mostly for the visual aspect because they're Chic. I piled up a bunch of cabinets that we had laying around. It was a UPA system, a Meyer UPA system. I put that at head height for the audience and then piled up a bunch of other gear. That was the only thing I had turned on. The road manager came in and that was one of the things. They wanted a system that looked cool. Other than that, obviously they wanted it to sound cool, but they were more interested in the look. So he said, “Yeah, okay, it looks good.” It worked great. We used that system for lots of different acts coming in. We would do special shows and those were the things that I was involved in coordinating. So I did that for a long time for Opryland.

Clinton

What's either the coolest act or the most interesting memory you have from doing that type of work with this? So you got your Meyer system now and you're doing these productions. Anything come to mind?

Mark

Oh wow,

Clinton

There's probably a few, right?

Mark

Yeah, and Meyer system, notwithstanding, had the opportunity to mix some really interesting shows, a really wide variety of shows. My final years there, I was also kind of like a relief mixer. So if somebody was sick, I'd go in and mix their show. And for those that know about what Opryland did back in those days, there were different thematic shows. There was a country music show, a show about music in the 1920s, a history of America through music, and the rock and roll shows that I started out there and things like that. And one of the things was I just remember going in and having them mix three different shows in one day. And they all have different feels because they're different types of times of the history of the world, or a rock and roll show versus a 1920s show. So trying to establish a different feel through the mix was really interesting to me. And that was cool. But I remember we did a, it's funny and it's sad, we did a Doc Severinsen show. He came in and he brought his band and he brought his fusion band. So the audience, though, had no clue that he was going to bring his fusion band, even though it was kind of advertised as such. So I think they expected him to come in and play the Tonight Show theme over and over again for an hour and a half. And so he's playing, I mean, it's way out there, it's fusion, it's jazz fusion. And I was talking to him after the show because a lot of people left and some people came up and said, “You tell him the next time he comes here, if he sees a crowd of old ladies in the audience, he needs to play appropriate material.” And I'm saying, you know, “Okay, well, I'm not in charge of his creative, you know, what he's going to do.” And I went to after the show, I was talking to him and I said, “Wow.” I said, “You know, what you were playing was cool because it was amazing to me.” And I said, “But, you know, a lot of people were not expecting what you were playing.” And he said, “I know I was afraid to close my eyes during a solo or something because I'd open them up and there wouldn't be anybody there.” So that was interesting. But just having a wide variety of opportunities for me was cool. But while I was there, I became a great fan of products from Meyer Sound.

Clinton

Yeah, so I was going to ask you, I mean, I was guessing the connection there. So that first experience in Northern California and then the experience you had working with their gear, is that what took you or made you want to kind of reach out to them?

Mark

Yeah, so I reached out to them and got the gear in that we used, and it was rock solid, which is part of what they advertised back in the day, great sound and reliability. And so we would do shows with that. We kind of held that as a standard for a long time there. And we were doing this one show that we would do every year about this time actually. We would do a Christmas show in the Opryland Hotel that was written specifically for doing this show in the Opryland Hotel. And the first year that we did it, I had a little UPA cluster. It was a show that we did in the hotels, just like a normal hotel show. It's not really a place where you really want to do a show, right? A production show where we had lots of distance, micing, because it was kind of a very musical theater kind of performance in a hotel ballroom. So we had challenges, wireless challenges, all sorts of things. So after we did that first year, we did kind of a post-mortem, and I said, okay, we've got to make the next shot better. So I called a company called Systems Wireless, and at the time they were the big wireless guys. And developed a good friendship with the owner at that time, and he came out, and for us it was a lot. We had 20 wireless microphones.

Clinton

Back then that was a lot. That wasn't typical, right?

Mark

Yeah, it was a lot at the time. And I called Meyer Sound, and I said, we had this Meyer rig, and we had problems. And I was talking to Helen Meyer, and she said, “Well, we never want that to happen to you again.” And I said, “You know, one of the things I think would be beneficial for us is this SIM, the Source Independent Measurement thing,” that they had recently been promoting, and I had been reading about it. And she said, and I said, the biggest problem is “I have no money. I have nothing as a budget.” And she said, “Well, okay, well, we have a year to figure out how to make it work.” And I kept in touch with them, and they shipped us out a SIM machine and somebody to drive it for us. And we set it up, and with the wireless, and the guy from Systems Wireless came out himself, the owner came out himself. And I have pictures of him, you know, sitting behind the stack of wireless receivers. And we had the SIM machine sitting out in the front of the house, and it worked great. Everything worked great, and it was all very exciting for us. And so, of course, the first thing I do is call Helen Meyer and say it was fabulous. It worked really well. And the deal was basically that we, Opryland, do an ad for them, for Meyer Sound, so that they could run it in the...

Clinton

Yeah, or a case study, so they show how well it worked. You guys had a challenge, solved the problem. That's awesome.

Mark

So we... and it turns out that we were one of the... other than like the San Francisco Opera or Pavarotti or something like that, we were some of the first commercial users of SIM. We were very early on in the evolution of SIM. So I had developed a good relationship with the company, with Meyer Sound by then, as a customer, and something that I could be comfortable with, and just calling them and talking to them about audio and things like that. So I called them up at one point and said, “Hey, I'm thinking about making a career change, so if there's anything that you know of in the industry, let me know.” And she said, “Well, we might have something here.” And so that wound up, I wound up working as a, so again, the networking thing, right? I talked to a contact that I had had for a couple of years, but I wound up going there as technical sales support. So I would go out and do service calls.

Clinton

So in those situations, like the one you were in, you might have been the guy they would have sent out to Opryland to help, know, check, help from the Meyer perspective, check the event.

Mark

Exactly. And that's exactly what I did. So my first two service calls was, one was about a month after I got to the factory, and Helen Meyer calls me up at home. She says, “You need to get to the Koran Theater. Lily Tomlin's there, and they're not happy, and they have a Meyer PA.” So I go out there, and it was very interesting. I expected to talk to the sound person and maybe the stage manager, so I get there right as one of the performances is ending. So I'm just kind of standing out there, and then I go into the sound booth and introduce myself to the sound person. And so she says, “Well, I have to go and get everything reset and everything ready.” And I said, “That's okay, I'll just wait here and we can talk when you're done.” And then the stage manager comes up to the window there because we were back in a little room, and she says, “Mark.” And I said, yeah, she said, “Lily wants to talk to you.”

Clinton

Oh, boy.

Mark

And I'd never had that, okay, so I go there. And she was mad. She was pretty unhappy. And she said, “Did you get a chance to walk around?” And I said, yeah. And she said, “What did you think?” And I said, well, individually, all the systems sounded pretty good. And then she interrupted me and said, “That sounds like—” you know. And I said, okay, so hold on. I said, “Individually, it sounded pretty good.” And this was the typical theater setup where they had systems that were broken up and covering all different areas of the room. So you didn't have like a left and a right cluster. You had one that focused on the orchestra. You had one that focused on the balcony. You had boxes and all that. And they weren't working together. So you're getting all sorts of weird delays.

Clinton

And filtering.

Mark

And Lily has exceptional hearing. Exceptional. She could hear stuff that I wouldn't even imagine to hear. So I said, “They're not working together. It's a system, but it's not working together.” And she said, “Well, can you fix it?” And I said, “Yeah, I think we can.” And so I go back and I talk with John Meyer, and I talk with Bob McCarthy, who was one of the engineers there that was heavily involved in developing SIM. And so we kind of gather up all our things and go out there and clean up the system. And there were some other issues with the system. And so we deal with that and we get everything going, and she's pretty happy with it. And then they closed the show in San Francisco, and the next stop was Washington, D.C., and we hadn't really heard anything from her, like, “Do you want us to go to Washington? Or are you done with us or what?” And she said, “Well, I just kind of assumed that you were going to Washington.” I said, “Okay, ship everything to Washington.” So we did, and we actually, that's what we would do for the next year, is we'd go and do the set up and work on the systems and then turn them back over to her. And it was really, again, for me, really kind of eye-opening and an educational time and even some things. Lily, like I said, she's got kind of a reputation as being somebody difficult to work with, but she was always, to us, she was challenging, to be sure, but she was always grateful for the work that we did and gracious. And there were a couple of instances that really stand out in my mind. One of them was we’d had some problems, not with our gear, but with some other pieces of equipment. And she called everybody back into her dressing room after the show, and she just kind of goes around to everybody and saying, “You know, what happened? What happened? What happened?” And she gets to us, and she says, “Okay, so now we know there's this problem.” And she said, “Why didn't you say anything about it?” And we said, “Well, it didn't really have anything to do with the speakers.” And she said, “Are we all in here talking about the sound?” And we said, “Yeah.” And she said, “Could you fix what was wrong with the sound?” And we said, “Well, yeah.” And she says, “Fix the sound.” It's like, yes ma'am. Yes ma'am. But that kind of shaped how I approach things. It may not specifically be my area, but it's attached to it in some way, shape, or form. So I have to deal with it.

Clinton

It's the overall experience. So whether it's the audience’s experience with the artist. Right.

Mark

So we did. And she really kind of took a liking to us. And to placate her, a lot of people in the industry had told her things like her voice crosses over at 800 cycles. So she needs speakers that cross over at 800 cycles. And because of the characteristics of her voice, she needed an extra bump at 2K. And we're thinking, that's not right. But that's what she was told. So we go in one day for a rehearsal. Actually, there's three instances with her. So we go in for a rehearsal. And she's being real fidgety during rehearsal. It's like, what's going on? She's being real fidgety. And she says, “It's just too cold in here.” And I'm thinking, it's not cold. I'm, you know, this is, she says. So she tells one of her production managers, “Can you go into my dressing room and get my sweater?” And she goes and she says, “Okay.” So she goes into the dressing room. And she just kind of, she's facing the audience area where we are, and she just kind of drapes the arms over. And it's like, you know, just hanging over. And she starts to go at it again. And then she turns around and on the back of the sweatshirt, it was a sweatshirt, it said, “Do these speakers crossover at 800 Hertz?” And then she reaches out and flips it around. And the other side said, “And where's my 2K?” And then me and Bob McCarthy at that point know that we've been had and part of a practical joke.

Clinton

Right, that's hilarious.

Mark

Yeah, it was hilarious. And I have to, there's a picture of that after backstage of us back there with her on the sweatshirt, and we're laughing about it and having a good time. It's somewhere on my Facebook page. And then the other time, which was, we were in previews. So for those who are not familiar with the theater world, a preview is a paid rehearsal. So the audience comes in and watches a rehearsal. Right. And they come in with the understanding that things may stop, things may get redone, things may change a bit. And so we're doing a preview, and I can't remember the town that we're doing it in. And what we had done is we had taken, we used CP10-EQs, and we had a rack of, I think three of them that we were using, and we had put cover plates on them so that nobody would mess with them or they wouldn't move or anything like that. So we would take that from stop to stop so that the changes that we would have to do would be minimal theoretically. So we start the show, and things are kind of going pretty good, pretty good. And Bob McCarthy and I are up in the balcony of the show. And like I said, people had kind of been saying, she doesn't know what she's talking about, this and that and the other. And we're looking at SIM, and Bob says, “Look at that. Looks like this filter has shifted just a little teeny, teeny bit.” And I mean, it wasn't very wide and it wasn't very much. So he just sits there and moves it. I mean, imperceptible to anybody else, literally. And immediately she stops the show.

Clinton

She heard it.

Mark

And she said, “Bob,” and Bob had never been called out at a preview or a show before. And he had worked practically every Broadway show that was popular at the time, Cats and Les Mis and all these things. And he finally goes, “Yes?” And she says, “Did you just change something?” And he went, “Yes?” And she said, “Well, I don't like it, put it back.” And he said, “Yes, ma'am.” And I mean, literally it was imperceptible. And she went on and she was perfectly happy with the show. And there is no way that she could have known that we had done it.

Clinton

She couldn't see us.

Mark

We were in the balcony far, far away. So, it's just like, okay, she's got a fine tuned sense of hearing. Yeah. So, that was interesting. And at that point, it kind of became my mission at Meyer Sound to get some of the difficult acts. So, my next mission was to get Anita Baker who had the same kind of reputation. And I guess I'm proud to say that we were, it was not without its problems, but again, she had a finely tuned sense of hearing, and she was told that she was crazy by other people. And it's like, “We don't think you're crazy. We just think that there's an issue with communication between….” So we worked really hard to get nomenclature, terminology, so that she could understand it or we could understand what she was saying.

Clinton

So you end up being on the same page.

Mark

Right. Yeah. So that was, Anita's tour was really good. And we made it a year, which was longer than any other sound company had made it at that point. So.

Clinton

So in those days then, so you worked for Meyer.

Mark

Yeah.

Clinton

And so was there a sound company involved or was Meyer working directly with the artist?

Mark

There's always a sound company involved. So we supported the artist and the sound company.

Clinton

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark

And there were no charge for our services either. Cause we figured at that point, if it worked and it made it better, then it helped our reputation. And it was something that we could hang our hats on.

Clinton

Yeah, of course.

Mark

Yeah. Doing that. Yeah.

Clinton

Yeah. I mean, that's probably a big part of their success. I mean, for a very long time, Meyer was the standard for it, in particular for theater. Yeah.

Mark

Yeah. So, and met Anita Baker was kind of the, saying, “Well, okay, let's get into the, contemporary music world.”

Clinton

Yeah.

Mark

Grateful Dead had been a long-term client, but yes. And some other moments that just kind of stand out to me. Well, when we were doing Anita Baker, I had this colleague and he would, I'm blabbering on so I can—

Clinton

No, no, this is great. This is great.

Mark

We would kind of have a contest on which clients we could get for the company. Because what we would do is we would go out and look for clients and then hook them up with a sound company. Okay. And so.

Clinton

So when you say look for clients, like an artist you would do?

Mark

An artist, yeah. An artist.

Clinton

So you would reach out to their production people or to the artist directly and….

Mark

Exactly. Exactly.

Clinton

And tell them how great Meyer is.

Mark

Yeah. So, and actually the way I got Anita's was she had heard a demo of our HD1 studio monitors. And that's another interesting story. And if we have time I'm happy to tell it.

Clinton

Yeah, we got time.

Mark

She called up the factory. And so I dealt with all the artists at that time. Or the majority of the artists at that time. And so I was in another part of the factory. And I, you know, over the intercom, “Mark Johnson calling line one, Mark Johnson calling.” So I get back to my desk and I pick up the phone. And I go, “Hello, this is Mark.” And she goes, “Hi Mark, this is Anita, Anita Baker.” Actually she was going by Anita Bridgeforth at that time. And she said, “I'm otherwise known as Anita Baker.” And of course I could identify her voice right away because she had had all those hits and all that. And I was like, “Okay, hi, nice to meet you. How's it going?” And she said, “I just heard a demo of your HD ones.” And she said, “I'm in love with these speakers.” And the demo is over and done with and the speakers are shipped out. She said, “But it's like your first kiss. It's something that you always remember. That's how she termed it.”

Clinton

Oh my gosh.

Mark

And she says, how can I get these speakers? And I'm thinking, you know, in my head, I'm going, she's got a lot of money. She, you know, so I'm thinking you could just buy them. Yeah. Right. Well, you know, artists, I guess, have a certain ego and they don't want to, you know, buy things, even though that they can well afford it. And so I said, “Well, I would really like it if you went out on tour with a Meyer system.” And she said, “Well, that's not my decision. That's my production people's decision.” I said, “That's fine. I just want the opportunity to do a demo for them so that they could make the decision.” She said, I can set that up. So we did that. And that's how we got the, you know, the thing. And she got her speakers.

Clinton

She got her speakers.

Mark

Yeah.

There's a lot more from Clinton and Mark's conversation, which will be featured on the next episode. So make sure to subscribe to the Sound Connections podcast. And if you're listening on Apple podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating and review. And you can now leave a rating in Spotify. If you're enjoying the Sound Connections podcast, the best way to help spread the word is to leave a five-star rating.