Article

Monday, October 26, 2009

A Friend & Colleague’s Tribute To The Late John Vrtacic

"The industry has lost a pillar"

An ELDER is gone.

I have never been one to think too much in terms of chapters closing because my attitude has always been, let’s go to the next chapter.

But when the world of music and the recording industry lost John Vrtacic to cancer in August, the industry lost a pillar.

I became aware of this man from Europe in 1976 when I became the General Manager of The Little Mountain Sound Studios; taking over from Jeff and Jeannie Turner, who interestingly enough were taking over the studio I built in 1972 with Creative House on Homer Street in downtown Vancouver.

Crazy business!

I knew that I needed a cracker jack tech whiz as my first and most important employee.

A friend said that I needed to check out this new fellow in Toronto by the name of John Vrtacic. I did, and the conversations began, first to convince John to even talk to me and then to convince him that Vancouver and Little Mountain Studios were where he should be.

It took an Air Canada ticket to get him out to Vancouver to check us out and I will never forget sitting with John and Roger Monk, my senior engineer, at the Salmon Restaurant on Burrard Inlet on a perfect late August evening.

Still, the situation required more persuading phone calls, including some serious conversations with his wonderful wife, Alice, to convince them that Vancouver was indeed their destiny. Two more tickets waiting at Toronto International, and finally, cautious John and Alice arrived in Vancouver.

And our amazing 33-year journey began.

I’ve been asked many times following the extraordinary success track of Little Mountain Studios who I credited most if all those hits and acclaim. It was always expected that I would name people like Bob Rock or Mike Fraser; and truly their role in the fame of the studio is known by everyone.

But my answer was always swift and emphatic - John Vrtacic was the “key man” to that success.

John sought perfection. He was the stickler for pre-maintenance (he actually believed in warding off Murphy’s Law before it struck!), and always kept an eye toward making everything work better every time and all the time.

Little Mountain was one of the first studios in the world to work with the then-new Sony 3402 (tape machines, if you can remember back that far) and then there was all of the blood, sweat, and tears (what a name for a band!) that we went through with software glitches and anything else that could go wrong.

The phone and Telex (remember those?) bills went through the roof as John conversed with Sony about the software glitches, and he’d work crazy hours with no extra compensation to get those machines to perform as they were designed to do - working optimally in the “real” world that we lived in every day.

John beat down the problems and made those machines cook!

One day, my receptionist called to say that there were some gentlemen in the foyer. A lot of them. And they were all Japanese.

Sure enough, they were from Sony and they were in Vancouver at Little Mountain Studios not to see me, but John Vrtacic. (By the way, the Japanese pronunciation of “Vrtacic” was priceless - I really wish I’d recorded it.)

What a meeting as they finally greeted the man that had saved Sony’s technical buns. They expressed over and over their gratitude to John and to us for allowing him to actually work for Sony, and showed their gratitude by virtually giving us three $75,000 machines for next to nothing.

And John, just the way he always was, couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about. He was just doing what he thought he was supposed to do - make everything work perfectly.

John was always so gentle and quiet; a true gentleman in every sense. But he always knew when he was right and when he was right, there was no argument. End of debate… he was right.

The only time I remember John speaking up emphatically was at A&M Studios in LA. We’d flown down to re-do a disco (remember those days?) bass track. The producer insisted that he wanted the “black box” that John had designed.

Today’s generation will scratch their heads but there WAS a day when there were no “active” direct boxes, and John designed one of the first ones in the mid 1970s. We were going to attempt to patent it but our lawyers said forget it, just use the box as long as we could and stop even thinking about protecting it. This broke John’s heart as he knew he had created a piece of magic.

The A&M engineer plugged in John’s box, the session began, and I’ll never forget the engineer’s exclamation as he heard the sounds coming out of that box - no EQ, no FX, nothing - just straight up and flat.

“What’s in that box?” the engineer asked, to which John replied, “well, I could show you but then I would have to kill you!” It was the only time I ever heard John make a threat when I actually thought he was serious.

After his passing, when so many of us recently gathered to honor John and be with his family, there was a general feeling expressed by many at the event, including the young generation, that a chapter had closed.

An elder brother has gone on and the world of technical excellence will never quite be the same again.

John… we will miss you.

Bob Brooks,

(Read more about John here.)

Bob Brooks
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