(Editor's Note: PSW Live Sound Editor Chris Kathman recently accepted an invitation to speak at the Ex'pression Center for New Media, a unique media arts college in Emeryville, CA. We thought it would be valuable to share the experiences and views he presented to these impressionable minds about how the REAL world of pro audio works! This is part 1, with two more installments to follow shortly.)

When Hani Gadallah asked me to come and speak to you all, I thought about what I would tell you, and really all I can tell you about is my own experiences. I started out actually working in lighting when I was in high school and college. I started working illegally in nightclubs in Washington, D.C., when I was fifteen years old, in 1970. I’ve talked to USC classes a couple of times, and what I’ve told them is that you all are very lucky to be here in a facility like this, instead of doing what I did.

Some of you may work in clubs, I don’t know. Anybody work in a club? One guy. It can be pretty gruesome. They can be filthy. They can have lousy systems. The bands can be very rude. When I was your age, there were no facilities like this. And if there had been, I wouldn’t have been able to afford them! You’re lucky to have great gear like this from Meyer, and other companies, to work on.

The first show I ever mixed, if you want to call it that, was in a little club in New York City on a mixing board about as big as this lectern. It was in a dark, dirty old basement and had beer and coke dumped in it. And instead of having microphone stands like you guys are used to, the mic cables were tied to water pipes on the ceiling. And they hung down like this, and a singer would grab one. And if a sax player needed to play into one, we would take a wire coat hanger and bend it and tie it on. So I started out pretty low level.

I was always interested in music. I didn’t have a lot of musical training myself. I was lucky to grow up in the Washington DC area around a lot of great musicians. I don’t know if any of you have heard of guys like Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton. Nobody? Amazing guitarists. Unfortunately, they have both passed away. Danny committed suicide at his home, and Roy died in a jail cell.

The first exposure I had to what I would call really world class production was when I traveled to Bill Graham’s venues, the Fillmore East in New York City, first of all. Anybody ever go to the Warfield here in San Francisco? I wound up working there for four years, 1989 to 1993. I was working there while Bill Graham was still alive, and a division of his company ran it. I always felt the Warfield was very similar to the original Fillmore East. It had a lot of the same ornate stuff you see over the stage and going up the walls and the red velvet seats, stuff like that. People who worked at the Warfield were always on their toes, because you never knew when Bill might walk in.

When I went to the Fillmore East, it was the greatest sound system I’d ever heard in my life. The greatest lights, the best projected light show, and, you know, great bands, Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrison. There was also a kind of courtesy showed to the crowd that I had never seen in the basically gangster, hillbilly, hippie bars I had worked at in DC. There was recognizable security, and the people could actually come there, like you guys can go to the Warfield and you probably won’t get assaulted. You can go there and see a show, you know the sound is going to be… well, you know that there’s going to be a great PA there, there might be a moron mixing and it might sound terrible, but it’s not because of the PA. And the lights, same deal.