When he speaks to me from Milwaukie, OR, Jim “Redford” Sanders sounds like just about the most positive, personable human you’re likely to meet. “I’m living the dream,” he stated. “I’m a very, very fortunate man. I’ve traveled the world, snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef, driven many motorcycles, and clapped my hands in the Sistine Chapel to check the reverb.”
In short, he’s a man who loves his job and always has. Right now he’s out doing Front of House for Frankie Valli. “I’ve known Frankie since 1983,” he said. “I’ve probably mixed more of his shows than anyone on the planet.”
Born in Grants Pass, OR, a small city of 25,000 roughly 100 miles from the California border, Sanders knew he wanted to work in music very early on. Pretty much right away, he started making money from music as well, if not in an entirely orthodox manner. “When I was a kid I had this Philco transistor radio. Grants Pass had two radio stations; farm news, you know, if somebody’s cow got out they covered that, and a Top 40 station.”
The radio got him in trouble in the fourth grade. “They thought I was gambling,” he recalled. Strictly speaking, he was. Telling his classmates, “I’ll turn the radio on and the next song that comes on I’ll tell you its name, the band, and I’ll sing it for you.” Long story short, he separated a lot of kids from their lunch money that way.
Then, in 1964, something crazy happened, he said – something that happened to a lot of people that year – “I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan (a CBS television show), and I said, I want to do that, right there.” At age 11 he got his first drum kit, and a year later, started his first band. By 2000, he had come full circle, mixing Ringo Starr for roughly 100 shows.
Once out of college, Sanders continued in music, working with a country rock band playing clubs. Unlike some musician/engineers, however, Sanders couldn’t wait to move from behind the kit to behind the board. His first “teacher” was a man named Jack Barr. “I walked into this club and he had a console, a house snake and a real PA. I’d never seen one before. I didn’t even know what mixing was, to tell the truth.” On days off he’d hang out, and Barr would give him a turn on the desk.
Soon enough he told his band he wanted to get off the stage and mix them instead, but they vetoed the idea. “They said, you know, you don’t really have any experience.” Of course, given the fact they didn’t even have a sound person at the time, Sanders’ experience, thin though it might have been, was certainly greater than the alternative. “So I quit the band,” he said.
Suddenly unemployed, he got out the phone book. “I turned to ‘S’ for sound. There were 10 numbers. I got in my VW Fastback, pulled my hair back and off I went looking for a job.” Where he landed was Northwest Sound, then one of the largest audio companies in the world. They had the Eagles, Crosby, Stills and Nash (CSN), Joni Mitchell, Boz Scaggs, Steve Miller, and Neil Young. And while over time he’d mix a lot of those Northwest artists, he started out pushing a broom in 1977.
At Northwest he learned from the greatest teachers anyone could wish to have: “Richard Irwin taught me how to mix. Bob Sterne, one of the owners, taught me about life and how to deal with people. And David Reynolds, ‘Snake,’ taught me how to mix monitors, how to get things the way the band likes it.”
Over his career Sanders has worked with some of the most recognizable artists of the past 30 years: Stevie Wonder, CSN, Styx, George Benson, The Cars, Joni Mitchell. The list goes on, but it was just prior to the Eagles “Long Run” tour that he got his nickname, “Redford.”
“We built the tour’s PA with Pioneer TAD, the first company in the US to use the TAD stuff, with the first Beryllium drivers. We sent it down to rehearsals at Francis Ford Coppola’s place, the same soundstage they parted the Red Sea for The Ten Commandments,” he explained.
Snake and Irwin went ahead, leaving him to build and ship bits of gear as needed as they tweaked the system. “I’d get a phone call in the middle of the night saying, “We need a 16-pair XLR to XLR, and I need four of them going the wrong way. I’d build it and ship it first thing in the morning.”
When he finally did get down to the soundstage, rehearsals were well underway. Security was tight, and when Sanders walked in with a four-day beard, short hair, and mirrored sunglasses, the first thing Glen Frey said was “Who in the f@#k is that?”
““Don Henley’s drum tech at the time, Tony Taibi, replied, ‘I don’t know, but he looks like Robert Redford.’” The name stuck.
Redford stayed with Northwest through 1983, when it was taken over by Maryland Sound. After the change of ownership, he met and began working with Frankie Valli. “Pablo Wheeler and I,” he recalled, “we had about 72 hours to put together a PA system that consisted of a Northwest monitor system and a Maryland Sound front end. Then we went on the road and did 70 shows over the summer.”
Five years later, in 1987, he says, was the last time he mixed wedges, “I went out front in ’87. I’m done with monitors, that’s a young man’s sport, there.” He also left Maryland to go independent that year. At the time he’d been doing monitors for Stevie Wonder for several years, and they’d asked him to take over Front of House, but that wasn’t the only change Wonder’s camp was fixing to make. In addition to bringing Sanders out front, they left Maryland Sound behind.
“Push came to shove; young Redford had to go,” Sanders said of the move. He stayed with Wonder until 1991, in that time mixing one of the biggest gigs of his career, an outdoor show for approximately one million people.
In addition to gigs with high profile artists, for the past 12 years Sanders has also worked with ATK Audiotek as part of the sound crew for the Super Bowl. There he works with Bob Sterne – his former boss - who serves as Audio Coordinator for the Super Bowl. “We’re the backbone audio crew. We’re there two and a half weeks before the game and three days after. Anything that needs an audio feed we get it there, then we start branching off.”
Typically, Sanders game day gig is mixing the post game interview room for broadcast on NFL affiliates. But the labor intensive part of the gig is set up – and building the halftime stage in about four minutes. “On the Super Bowl, I don’t touch a lot of knobs per se, but I work with some of the best people in the entire world and we put on the biggest rock show that there is.”
Sander’s approach to his gig remains as straightforward as it is thorough. “I call it combat audio: When I get on an airplane I’ve got a 58 with a switch on it – because I don’t want anybody else’s germs and I don’t want anybody else to have mine – a $30 pair of headphones, and a phase checker. I’ve got a thumb drive for the Venue or the Profile, a Flash Card for the 5D, and if I walk up and see something analog, I think, ‘All right, it’s gonna be a good day.’”
That statement speaks directly to Sanders preferences when it comes to gear, “but they don’t make my preference anymore,” he says. “The greatest console that ever graced our industry was the Midas XL4.”
If he sounds slightly crusty, he comes by it honestly. “I did 192 days on the road last year. I’m a crusty old bastard.” Maybe so, but he laughs easily and often. During down times, he’s back to his home base of Milwaukie to see his family, girlfriend, mother, sister and her family, and he still plays music with some of the same people from that original band of 12-year-olds. You can get more info and music at www.burrmans.com.
A motorcycle enthusiast, Redford also rides his 1984 Harley FXR and 2002 Harley Road King as often as he can. For the past 10 years, one of his favorite rides has been the Portland Toy Run, where he and other enthusiasts and bikers – there’s a difference, he explained – fill several city buses with toys for sick children at the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. “This year we set a record, there were 7,000 motorcycles and we filled three buses with toys.”
While repeating, “I’m the most fortunate human being,” he makes it clear there are a lot of folks he’s seen in professional audio that are less so. “This business is not for the squeamish. You can get squashed like a bug, but if you can survive it, you can make a comfortable living, you can work half the year. You’ve just got to pay attention, and stay out of jail.”
And once more, there’s that laugh. “I look at it this way,” he concluded. “There’s 24 hours in the day, and sometimes 22 of them can suck pretty good. However, when the lights go down, and the people stand up and start screaming, I get two hours that make it all worth it.”
Based in Toronto, Kevin Young is a freelance music and tech writer, professional musician and composer.
More articles by Kevin Young on PSW
Theatrical Sound Designer Mick Potter & His Work With Andrew Lloyd Weber
Monitor Engineer Michael Prowda, Listening & Balancing
Distributed PA In Paris To Bring A “Home” Message To The Masses
New System At The Historic Queen Elizabeth Theatre In Toronto
Return to article