The second act I worked with (in the early 1980s) after I moved to Toronto was a Top-40 rock cover band that never really had a name. I forget how I hooked up with them, but it would have been by answering an ad of some sort, either in the “Dramatic/Musical Talent” section of the Toronto Star or from a bulletin board at one of the local music stores.

Whichever way it happened, this was a new one for me… a newly formed band, still in rehearsals, with me invited to sit in on the rehearsals and learn the show.

The rehearsals were taking place in the living room of a Victorian row house on Sherbourne Street in downtown Toronto. At the time I thought it was a pretty posh address for a band house, but the block is derelict now, so maybe I wasn’t seeing it for what it was.

In any case, the band, which consisted of bass, drums, guitar, keyboards, and male and female lead vocalists, was set up with the entire PA system in the largest room on the main floor. The mixer, a 14-channel Tapco 6100, was in there with them, so that’s where I would have been as the band ran through their three sets over the course of a day or two.

I don’t have any specific memories of mixing in that set-up but I think we were mainly using the monitor send and the wedges to hear what they were doing. I say that because of what happened later…

Diving Right In

A bit of backstory on the band. They had been formed from the partial remnants of what we now call a tribute band (i.e., it mimicked the act of a particular artist, in this case one of the more… shocking… acts of the 1970s).

That band had broken up with a certain amount of debt, so they had re-formed into two bands, with the older members forming an R&B act and the younger ones, with some additional players, forming the band I was to work with. Both acts were booked/managed by the same guy, the older brother of the male lead singer in my band and the hope was that both acts would do well enough to pay off the debts.

Rather than do a week or two of shakedown/break-in gigs in some out-of-the-way bar, the manager had decided to launch with a high-profile show, albeit in the bar of a hotel by the main Toronto airport. This hotel was also generally known to be a holding facility for immigration cases, so it wasn’t exactly The Ritz.

On the big day, we loaded everything into the band’s “truck,” a converted school bus, with the back half walled off for gear. This was an interesting arrangement, especially since the original emergency exit door was still the only access to the back part where the gear went.

We loaded in and set up some time in the late afternoon. I have no recollection of doing a sound check, although we must have.

What I do remember is that when it came time to start the show, the place was packed. And not with just anyone, either. Even though I’d only been on the scene for a few months at that point, I recognized several “movers and shakers” from the Toronto talent booking world. For example, “Wing Ding,” the guy who booked the first band I’d worked for, was there.

When the show started, it immediately became apparent that the mixer was not working properly. The mains were completely distorted, and there was nothing that I could do to correct that. The Tapco 6100 had no input gain adjustment – it used a circuit they called “AutoPad,” which I still don’t really understand how it was meant to work but it was some kind of automatic gain adjustment.

The only possible adjustments that could affect the mix level, and therefore, potentially, the distortion, was to either turn the channel levels up (or down) and the master level the opposite way or vice versa. Neither had any effect.

To this day, I don’t know if this is a fault that cropped up between rehearsals/sound check and show time, or whether I had simply, somehow not recognized the problem. Looking back, in spite of my relative inexperience (I was all of 18 years old.. still underage to be working in a bar), I can’t believe that I would have overlooked such a glaring sonic fault, so the “it came up after sound check” scenario seems more likely.

As I write this, I’m also thinking about the experience that I did have at that point, which included: Owning a different Tapco mixer (a 6201) for two years (worked fine), and mixing on several other, professional level, desks including a Yamaha PM1000, PM700 and PM180 and an H & H console who’s model number eludes me.

A Blessing

In any case, the first set was a total disaster, and try as I might, I couldn’t think of a workaround to make things go better for the second. The only other output on the desk was the monitor send and it either didn’t occur to me to try that for the mains, or it just wasn’t going to happen.

So, the second set was looming, the band was starting to take their places on stage, and I had nothing… absolutely nothing that I could think of to do to improve the situation.

As I was standing behind the console, dreading what was going to happen next, and probably having some thoughts about my life choices up to that point, I was interrupted by a disturbance off to my left, by the bar. A disturbance, and the sound of breaking glass – a lot of glass breaking.

Someone had gotten behind the bar and taken a broomstick to the three-tiered row of bottles, peeling them off to smash on the floor. He had gotten up one row, and down the second row before the bartender tackled him.

And that was it: show’s over, time to go home folks, can’t run a bar with all this broken glass and spilled booze all over the floor. I never did find out what the story was behind this incident, whether it was someone who had personal reasons for hating “the demon rum,” or had a beef with the bar, or, which occurred to me at the time but I never had the nerve to ask, had the band’s manager paid the guy to create a disturbance so the doomed second set didn’t have to happen?

The bar emptied out after that, and we loaded out. During the load out, I found a $5 bill on the floor that someone must have dropped in the melee. A good score – 1/35th of my week’s pay! For the next show, a PM-700, my “axe” of choice at the time, appeared, and that was the desk I used for the rest of my stint with that band… which is a whole other story…