Fall 1995 - LifeUSA

After escaping Ameridata, I was without work for about a week before I got a tip about a gig: One of the tools I had used in my work was something called MicroFocus Cobol DIALOG SYSTEM. This was pitched as the power of COBOL (which truth be told, was actually very good at doing straight up transaction processing) with a graphic user interface. The way it worked was that you wrote your Cobol programs in text on the back end, and it worked just like any old mainframe. But instead of building a screen interface, you put in a single section to "call out" to a paired Dialog program: You built a graphic user interface in a different tool, and you had a single two-way pipe between your screen and your program logic. It was kludgey and you were definitely limited in how the program would operate - you collected the data on the screen, hit a button, and BAM it sent it to the back end where the real work happened. Then it passed the results back up the pipe, and you had your results on screen.

In other languages like VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi, etc, the logic was at the same layer as the screen code... but those tools were only just coming to the fore in the mid 1990s. For an number of years, Cobol and Dialog System was a very slick solution for the big corporate IT shop that was looking to leverage existing talent (years of Cobol programming), but modernize the user experience.

Having this on the resume was like having Java on your resume in 2000. It was HOT.

So I was out of work for a week, and then it was off to a project at a life insurance company LifeUSA - back to contracting. This was a local company, with a strong "ownership" culture - the employees were believers, the bosses were very out and about, and stock options were given freely. By the time it was finally sold in the late 1990s, there were more than a few millionaires made... across the organization. It was like Enron, only the business wasn't a sham and people actually made money.

I learned all of this in the course of the year I worked there, from Fall 1995 to Fall 1996 (when I was recruited to join ValueRX). Of course to start, I was not brought anywhere NEAR the company: Somehow I was put into a room with 3 other programmers, a classroom with tiered desks, a huge whiteboard, and four computers. In a low profile building in an office park 2 miles from the main campus. Our team included Eric, the chain smoker who only knew the back end Cobol parts, Steve, the young(er than me) geek who only knew the Dialog side, myself, who could bridge the gap, and Bob W.

Bob W (I don't often withhold names, but this guy...) was a programmer who I had run across at Ameridata: He had been working on Cobol reports for months and months, and suddenly had to leave due to a family emergency. I picked up his work, and discovered that he hadn't actually done much work, but that the work he HAD done was completely useless... and I rewrote them from scratch in a couple of weeks. My DAD had actually run across this guy's name in code HE had rewritten as well - the guy was a bad penny: If you saw his name on a program you were working on, you knew you were going to have to reach in, rip out the guts, and start from scratch.

So I'm on a new project, and somehow in the middle of this strange scene, I'm in an office with this guy again, who was all chummy chummy. He was supposed to be "the Architect" of the project, laying out the program logic that we were supposed to make happen. As it happened, he was around for maybe 2 hours a day, and out making phone calls the rest of the time. So Eric, Steve, and I whiteboarded the whole thing and got to work. After a few weeks, Bob stopped showing up entirely... and nobody asked us about it. But we suspected he was "reporting his progress" to the boss who was 2 miles away and never stopped by.

The project was a system to track Insurance Agent commissions against the draws they had taken. The data was complex, and we needed to calculate the value of the policy over time (commissions were paid at certain maturation times). Eric's coding was very tricky, and I actually learned some good tricks in the way he did things. We got along well even though his constant nicotine cloud was thicker than the haze inside of First Avenue. Steve, on the other hand, was a programmer who liked to make things complicated. He wrote elaborate error checking routines into the graphic front end that were unnecessary (validation could be done much faster and cleaner on the back end), and by the end of it, the screens were huge unwieldy affairs that pushed the very limits of the computers it was running on.

We had split our efforts because I had a hard time working with him: We were both young and convinced we were right - so he worked on one big screen, and I broke my half of the program into several smaller programs that handed control across as needed. Many small, simple programs that do their job well, versus one huge monster that crashed frequently. To be fair, his side DID work - and it behaved ALMOST like a Powerbuilder application would. But I would have done it completely differently.

We handed off version 1 to the client, who liked half of the program.... and wanted another project done. They gave me the whole project this time, and Eric and Steve were stuck working on Version 1.1 of the monster. Every so often I'd stop by to see Steve's handiwork. He was always defensive and I quickly learned not to comment on it in ANY WAY. We saw Bob W from time to time, and were never sure just what project he was working on.

Now, 2 months into the project, we were moved into the mothership: Goodbye remote facility with no privacy, hello cubicle. And it was here that I learned about the culture. For the most part, it was a pretty positive experience, especially after the slightly depressing start in corporate America at Ameridata and the Telephone Billing place. They had spirit days. People brought food to share. People went out to lunch together. It was at one of these spirit events that I witnessed the horror of one of the VPs cooking up RAW bratwurst as though they were pre-cooked. 3 minutes a side, soft and pink on the inside. I ate nothing but potato chips that day.

I was sitting in my cube one day in January 1996 when the Director of IS came by and asked "Have you met Mark? He likes music - you should go talk to him". So I wandered over almost immediately, met Mark Loesch, and we became immediate friends. A couple of weeks later, he invited me to his birthday party... but not being a particularly good listener, I came a week early. And we sat with a bottle of wine and knew that we were of the same tribe. The relationship with Mark was what brought me to ValueRx in the fall of 1996. On my other blog are more stories about Mark, who I miss every day since he died in 2007.

In the meantime, Mark and I were regular lunchmates, heading off the the "Cafetorium", where the neon sign promising "Fresh, Tender, Juicy Wieners" brought a laugh daily. There were other characters there as well: Mark's sister in law Molly was just beginning her programming career there. Our friendship there was wonderful, but by early summer, Mark had taken off to a new, mysterious gig, and I was stuck with the Cobol Guys.

Over on the "old Cobol Guy" side of the fence, a guy named Gene was never seen to be doing any actual work, but was always too busy to answer a question... and I overheard enough heated discussions about "Beany and Cecil" that I'm sure that once he left, he probably uploaded himself into the alt.tv.beany-and-cecil newsgroup and haunts it to this day. There was Tom, who resembled a pekinese, and wore clothes two sizes too tight - and vintage from the 1970s, which is when they were first bought. Another programmer, whose name is lost to time, had Solitaire up on his computer EVERY SINGLE TIME I WALKED BY.

I met more "Business Analysts" and was still none the wiser on exactly what their role in the organization was supposed to be. As I worked, I developed a work style to cope: Meet with the business analyst. Go to the client, review what the business analyst had told me, get the REAL requirements, and build according to the client's specs. This worked pretty well, until one of the analysts figured out I wasn't doing what he said. He tried to raise the issue with the client, but she was happy with my work. So he went to the project manager, who took him off the project, and put a different analyst in. Even today I have a suspicion of the pure "business analyst". They rarely understand what the client wants, nor what the developer can do. The best BAs I've worked with have a realistic view of their role. The worst actually believe they add value.

In addition to Bob W, there was one other "prize" coder at work at LifeUSA. One of the guys from the Telephone Billing gig was doing mainframe programming... and I was called in to finish his work on something when he was out for a week. I already told part of this story in another post, so you know that I fixed his 2 months of work in a few days.... and when he returned he wasn't very happy with me. But for a time, given my shared history, this guy, Eric the smoker, and I were friendly. It was in that time that Eric dropped perhaps the most crass line I've ever heard (outside of some of Phil's gems) - In talking about doing Y2K work for $70/hr, Eric paused and said "Man, for that kind of money, I'd blow dogs".

By the end of my year there, things were looking good: I had a good reputation, people wanted me on their projects... There was some tension with the Cobol Corps, but I didn't pay it much mind. In the early Fall, the IS Manager asked me into his office for a meeting.

He wanted me to consider dropping the contract, and coming on as an employee. He made the pitch for the culture, the people, the opportunities... but in the same breath he stressed something else which made me shudder: He wanted me to know that this was a slow moving place, and that I could expect a long, stable career there, but I'd need to slow my work down a bit, because I'm shaking up the team and people feel threatened by my work pace. We're a TEAM here, not a superstar shop, but it's a good family. So slow down, come on board, and I can have stability and an easy life.

I thanked him profusely for the offer, and within a week was interviewing with ValueRx.

Winter 1993 - The PPGs

By late 1992/early 1993 there was still a part of me that thought that a career in music was a possibility, and I crafted a plan: What I really needed was a decent mixing board, a multitrack ADAT, and a good effect unit. I came up with a budget of $6500 for the project, and approached my dad for a loan. This was actually the first time I had decided to ask: Up to then I'd been able to work and save for each piece of gear - $500 here, $1000 there. But a big investment like this... I needed some help. He gave the money willingly, though with the caveat that this is the last of it - what I did next would need to fund itself.

What happened next was absolutely brilliant and idiotic at the same time. Not one day after depositing those funds, I picked up the CityPages and saw in the classifieds "PPG Synth - Call for Details". I couldn't not call. The PPG. The legend.

The PPG was one of the first digital synths on the market in the early 1980s, but with an analog filter. It had a brittle, digital tone, but was very distinctive. The opening to "The Politics of Dancing" was very PPG. Most of Propaganda's "A Secret Wish" album was PPG. PPG was the sound all over Depeche Mode's "A Broken Frame". Nothing sounded quite like a PPG, and nothing still does. Plus, it was GERMAN, and RARE, and BLUE.

So I called. I was... I wasn't thinking. I had a plan for that money, I really did. But I called. And I went out to meet this guy.

He had a beautiful recording studio a block away from Paisley Park - he and his brother were a band I'd never heard of called "BroJo" (after "The Brothers Johnson" - but not the funky ones who worked with Quincy Jones). They got a recording contract and a big advance, plowed it into gear, and never went anywhere, and apparently started renting out their studio and gear to jingle artists. It was a gorgeous facility with just a hint of "starting to get run down" about it. And this guy was talking a mile a minute, too. He led me into the gear room, and I couldn't believe my eyes.

TWO PPG Wave 2.3 synths, a PRK FD Master Keyboard, AND a Waveterm B computer. This was the full PPG system worth well over $40,000 just 8 years earlier, a serious competitor to the Fairlight and Synclavier. And he had it all. And it all WORKED.

And I could take it all home for $6000.

Oh man. What a choice. Be responsible, get the Mackie 24/8 mixer, get the ADAT, get the Lexicon, actually have a studio where I could do more than "press play and lay it to DAT". Or blow the money on a dream synth system from 8 years earlier with a horrible reputation for reliability, manuals in German, and no support.

I don't need to tell you that I crammed that gear into the car, wrote him a check, and raced home, my mind full of justifications, of rationalizations, about how somehow just somehow, this gear would be JUST AS USEFUL in my long term plans as the recording gear... oh yes.... why did I even WANT that recording gear anyway? If I needed to, i could just rent time in a place like BroJo. Yeah, the music I'll be writing with this PPG system will be incredible. Plus, the gods must WANT me to have this, to have the ad appear RIGHT when I could afford it...

It was like Jack trading the cow for magic beans. And I knew the beans were magic. I had no regrets. My dad rolled his eyes. Pamela (my then-girlfriend, now wife) was excited by the blue things, and happy that I was happy.

I got a new Ultimate Support stand for the whole system, which rose up the wall, with one synth almost vertical. The glowing green screen of the Waveterm was comforting. I loaded up sample disks (5 1/4" floppies) and heard sounds I had heard before on records - very distinctive choirs and strings, punchy drums, and a stand up bass that was very very playable. I had a wonderful month with them - recorded several songs with the PPG as the main sound source, got to know their inner workings....

But the bloom was coming off the rose just a bit: The PRKFD didn't actually do anything that the manual said it did. All it did was send Midi notes. You could click the keypad all you wanted, and it wouldn't change what it did. The Waveterm was actually a user-hostile system, that despite having a full screen, still insisted that you communicate with it using unlabeled "soft keys" that changed function depending on the screen, and used cryptic acronyms (of GERMAN terms) for everything. I never got it to do several key things... like sample, or sequence. It let you build your own waveforms and wavetables, but everything I made sounded either like a flute, or a flute through a distortion pedal.

And then they started failing. It was a mere 6 months into ownership when one of the Waves decided to go dark. I brought it to The Good Guys, my repair shop, and 2 weeks and $250 later, it was fixed. A blown capacitor. 3 months later, the OTHER wave went dark. The Good guys fixed it. And so it went for the next 4 years: Every four-six months, one or the other would fail, and the Good guys would get $250 (or more) to fix it. They got over $2000 of my money that way, those crafty PPGs. And you really couldn't argue it.

Alas, I knew this going in: The PPG was a notoriously unreliable beast: They failed Depeche Mode in concert. Everybody who had one needed another for a hot spare. The inside was basically a computer with three big cards plugged into it, and the cards came loose over time - it was common to drop a PPG to reseat the cards! It was like having british sports car - a rich man's folly.

After the PPGs, there really wasn't anywhere I could go with the vintage gear - maybe a Fairlight... but that would have been at least $4k back then, and my money was spent. The PPGs were the last hurrah of my vintage phase. I had everything I could have wanted - a Jupiter 8, a Linndrum, a Simmons SDS7 kit, a TX816, a PPG system, a MemoryMoog, an OB8, and the Rhodes Chroma... And it was all running through my Mackie line mixers, sequenced by my Mac, using Performer...

It was a good setup, and I wrote a hell of a lot of music with it. And by 1998 when the studio fell, I had got my money's worth out of the gear. The PPGs wound up selling for a bit more than I paid in 1993, but less if you factor in all of the repairs - I think it was $7500 all told, and they had recently been serviced, so I hope the owner got some good use out of them. I'm sure the Good Guys knuckled back a tear...

In 2000, Wolfram Franke of Waldorf (which continued the PPG tradition) created a "Virtual PPG" plug in for the computer. And to my ears it sounded amazing - JUST like the PPG I remembered. And the PPG sound appeared again in a lot of my music... for a while. But it kept refusing to blow a capacitor, and it only cost $400 total, and I never had to drag it to the Good Guys... so the experience wasn't completely authentic.

As a coda, I decided to look up BroJo, and the only mention out there is "Three Charged in Hazardous Waste Fire - BroJo Sound Studios" under the category "Disaster - Fire" in the annals of the Carver County Historical Society. I don't think it's worth the $3 for the article reprint however...

Summer 1996 - The Awesome Denouement

I have to stick with linear just long enough to give the payoff on the Hip Clips Music story, because it was awesome.

In Spring 1995, as Hip Clips was failing to take the world by storm, Paul was being a good internet citizen, participating in various discussion boards (not astroturfing, just being online) and wound up chatting with a certain celebrity about Windsurfing. And after a while, the two became net-friends, and Paul was invited out to Half Moon Bay California to do some Windsurfing, and some talking...

And that was how it came to be that Thomas Dolby asked Paul to join him at his Silicon Valley startup company Headspace. As a part of this, Hip Clips was "acquired" by Headspace. No, there wasn't any actual money in this, but at this point I was just happy for Paul, so I signed away the rights. And Paul and his wife Melissa up and moved to California. JUST LIKE THAT.

Working for a man who I had somewhat idolized as a synth god in the 1980s... It just seemed so wonderful.

Of course, in those early days, Headspace was sort of struggling to find a place in the world - for a few years it got by being "Thomas Dolby's Company" - Paul did some soundtrack work for videogames under the Headspace banner... but it was more of a services company than a big product idea.

In early 1996, that changed when Headspace acquired a pretty cool browser plug-in called "Igor": The idea of Igor was to be a standard midifile player with a twist: You load in your own sounds. So we were approaching MORE bandwidth, but still nowhere near as much as if you were streaming actual music. A Midifile is maybe 4k in size, and the initial Igor download was I think 4 meg, which was as much memory as most professional synthesizers were providing as standard. So you could start with a good basic sound set, and then if you "sonified" your website with Igor, you could also specify custom samples to be downloaded into the player for your own sound. They called it "Rich Media Format" RMF files.

So after you bit the bullet and installed Igor (and it was available on those CD-Roms on the cover of magazines, don't forget), you could get a pretty good sounding bit of music going with a less than 100k download (10-20 sec on dialup), music and samples. It was a cool concept, which was ultimately doomed by the ever cheapening bandwidth that allowed for real streaming music without the gimmick, but for a few years, it was pretty unique. They refocused the whole company around this plug in, renamed themselves "Beatnik", and ran with it.

I know I know - we'll get to the ME part of the story now.

As they were preparing Igor for launch in Summer 1996, they wanted some demo files to show it off. They had the music licenses to Hip Clips already, and Paul knew I had the source files. So in what I'll call "the easiest money ever" (as long as you don't factor in the hours and hours of work that went into the ORIGINALs), Headspace paid me $100 per file to deliver the source midi files so they could repurpose them into Igor.

The catch is that I did need to do some prep work on the files: A lot of the drum tracks weren't mapped to traditional voices, since they were triggering my ancient strange pieces of equipment, not standard midi boxes. But once I got into the "cleanup" mindframe, the whole project was done in a few weeks, and they cut me a check for $4000.

But that's not the good part. The good part is that in Summer of 1996, I finagled a visit out to Headspace in San Mateo and got to hang out with Paul in Silicon Valley in the middle of the Tech Boom. As we walked the streets of San Mateo, there were shiny BMWs lined up like it was a dealership - every 25-year old in the area was flush with money, and were spending it as quickly as possible...

And while I was visiting, I got to spend a few minutes talking with Thomas. I tried to geek bond on a few technical things, but as it can be with professionals who lived through a time, he seemed mildly relieved to NOT have to be using some of those old synths, and was especially pleased with his brand spanking new Yamaha QY700 all in one synth/sequencer/groovebox. I grinned and rolled with it.

I did, however, get to pet his not-turned-on Fairlight CMI Series 3. That was some legendary tech.

And I heard tell that it was around 2003 when he finally got around to trying out his Fairlight again, and started playing some of his old tracks again, rediscovering his love for the gear once more. But that's his story, not mine.

By 1998, just about everyone was getting DSL, and the need for a tool like Igor (now the Beatnik plugin) was pretty much non-existent - the people who cared about a quality audio experience were buying the bandwidth, and the people who didn't stayed with dialup and didn't care about having music on their websites. Beatnik did a few re-focusing moves, partnering with Nokia to port the technology to mobile phones, and somehow getting into the custom ringtones market, but by then Paul had moved on...

It was a wonderful payoff to the Hip Clips adventure to finally get some money, some schmoozing with a hero, and some impossibly good Thai food as well. Paul never did come back to Minnesota, and I never did move out to California to find a pot of gold.

Fall 1994 - Hip Clips

You kids may not believe me on this, but in the early to mid 1990s there was an explosion of rich content playing on computers - animated menus, interactive stories, cool video clips on demand, funny animations... But it wasn't on the internet. No, there was a big market for interactive CD-Roms back then. Magazines were putting CDs on their covers. There were CDRom magazines you could subscribe to. Of course Games were on CD, but so were corporate presentations.

And the backbone for a lot of this development was a product called MacroMedia Director. Director has since been wrapped into the thing we all now know as Flash, and is sold by Adobe. But in 1994, if you wanted to be a king of new media, you dropped the $1200 on a license of Director, and you needed a pretty powerful machine to run it - we're talking at LEAST 40mhz CPU, and preferably 8 meg of ram. Yes, that is MHZ not GHZ. And it's MEG not GIG.

By 1999, almost all of this type of content was being delivered by the Web, with Broadband connections growing in popularity. But in 1994, one of the best selling CDRoms was from the San Diego Zoo, a virtual tour with short, tiny, embedded video clips.

Cards on the table: I was not a visionary here. I came along for the ride. All credit goes to Paul Sebastien, who called me up and asked me to help him with a project. Paul spotted the trend and connected some dots: People are making interactive CD Roms. No matter what your content is in there, you are probably going to have a menu or two or three, plus a splash screen. And what says "multimedia experience" better than music? GOOD sounding music?

CDRoms were the breakthrough over Floppies because they offered a crazy 650meg of content - bigger than many hard drives at the time. And games delivered on floppies were limited to 2 meg or so. The music on games and presentations at that point was "Midi Files" - this was basically a musical score that the sound card in your computer would play back. They usually sounded tinny and terrible, and never sounded the same from computer to computer. But storage wise, they were very economical. And the Web of the era was also limited to these Midi files too, and forget about video!

Paul figured with the huge storage size of a CD Rom, people could actually put REAL music on there. But few people in 1994 would have access to high quality license-free music. And at the time, the competition was very high priced "industrial music" companies, who did canned music for corporate films - each track would cost between $10-100. Paul's vision was FIFTY great, loopable pieces of music in 5 different styles for $150 (I think) - $3 a track, in high, medium, and low quality versions for inclusion in your project, license free.

But Paul needed some help: This was still in the days of Psykosonik, and he was having some degree of writer's block on their third album... any music coming from his brain would need to be dedicated to his actual BAND. So he asked me to join him and be "the music guy", and Paul would be the Macromedia Director guy, plus the marketing. That division of labor worked for me: We did some basic numbers modeling, and hopefully this would bring me somewhere around $10,000 in the first few months if all went to plan. The upside could be incredible. Of course there would be no up-front compensation, but I had a day job, so that wasn't that big of a hurdle for me.

For 3 months, I wrote music like a madman, laid it to DAT, and drove to his townhouse in Plymouth to play tracks and see how the project was coming along. The styles were Slow Groove, Midtempo, Upbeat, Ambient, and Hyper. In the end, I think we scaled back from 50 to 40, because I was beginning to burn out a little and the user interface looked good with 8 buttons per style. 40 completely distinct 1 minute pieces of produced music is a bit much for even a maniac like me. And I was obsessed with making each one really sound DIFFERENT, unlike some libraries we had found where it was really only 4 actual compositions, but sliced and diced 5 ways each. So for each track, it was a blank slate: I picked a tempo/style, and started writing.

Paul learned more and more about Director, but the application had mysterious crashes, and despite having a simple interface, would crawl to a halt on many systems. Again, this was new territory - CD Roms were hard to make compatible with every system, and you had to put a lot of "sensing" code in to see exactly what hardware landscape it was to interact with... Things we take for granted in the web world now.

Also recall my writing style during this era: Twirl the knobs, hit record, and move ON. I was still using Performer, and the sounds on this project were heavily weighted to the Jupiter 8, The SY77, The Oberheim OB8, the Juno106, LinnDrum, Simmons SDS7, and TX816 So each of these songs was truly a moment in time captured. There was no easy way to go back and recreate one if we wanted to change it a little... I delivered these "AS-IS", and Paul was very accommodating, really. And sitting with him in his austere, beautiful studio listening to my tracks was a very fun experience, because he wasn't shy about handing out the compliments. I felt very good about this project.

When the CD was finally ready for market, it was months later... and you probably don't need to be told it didn't sell all that well. I think several dozen all told. But it was alone in its genre, so it could actually be said to be the "best selling" of its type, which helped Paul down the road....

This experience was also my first encounter with... astroturfing. Since we didn't have much money, we couldn't take out a full page ad in the back of Mondo2000 magazine. We tried to spread "word of mouth" via various internet bulletin boards and usenet forums. But even back then, there were pretty strict "no selling" policies in these user communities, so Paul and I logged in as "normal people who had bought Hip Clips and really liked it". Of course, how suspicious is it that you have a user just join the forum and the first and last thing he posts is mention of a product he likes? Yeah.

I confess I only did a few of them because I felt guilty about it. But Paul went to town on it - I think he had 3 dozen different AOL accounts at one point, posting accolades for our product. Not that it worked THAT well, but hey, we sold a few.

In the end, I never got any actual cash from the venture: Paul went into debt getting the CDs printed with cases, and he had to pay off the Director software as well. But he did give me one of his pieces of gear as sort of a "sorry this didn't work out" sort of gift, and music junkie that I was, that was actually JUST FINE with me. Plus, I got 40 pieces of music done. I only wish I had thought to make each one a full piece of music, because I really really like these pieces even today, and want them to go longer than 60 seconds. Plus it proved that Paul and I were a pretty good team, which would come in helpful in our ventures in the in the new century... but that's another story.

Winter 1990 - Six Crises

Mike, the lead singer of PG13 and my ongoing partner in Musical Crime came to me with several odd proposals in the years 1989-1991. Some of them resulted in some odd garage-funk music that we called "Spongebath", but today I'll tell you about one of the two "Rock Operas" we almost started. One was a musical history of Sammy Davis Jr called Yes I Can that we never actually wrote any music for, but give us 10 min and we could sing the whole thing out. I have half of a sketch from the dramatic intro, but it never materialized. We imagined a great "Sammy loses his eye" moment recording a ping pong ball bouncing across the floor, and someone shouting from the kitchen "MY EYE!" Perhaps it is better that we didn't do more with this.

The other we actually wrote music for. Six Crises, the Opera based on the book by Richard Nixon of the same name.

The first song we wrote was actually me alone: I was watching CNN Headline News in the apartment I shared with Erik, and there was something on about white bigots in South Africa, and this man looked a bit like Santa Claus but more Dutch, and he was spewing some particularly florid hatrid "We cannot allow them to take our land, rape our women, kill our children. We will FIGHT until the bitter end". But what was amazing was his VOICE: He had the most silken deep voice, a voice you'd love to hear telling you bedtime stories. A voice that probably had a beautiful laugh. A voice put to a very evil service. I couldn't believe my ears, and the next half hour of my life was wasted as I raced to find a videotape so I could capture this man's voice, since Headline news repeated their stories ever 30 min. I actually had to wait a full hour for this particular piece, but it was worth it.

Immediately, I got to work on a piece of music that was menacing and plodding, sounding a bit like a military march with low horns and some distorted synths percolating in the background. By this time I had my Yamaha SY77, which had some very good brass and strings sounds, and I was able to sound somewhat epic. It built and built, until everything dropped away and I dropped this voice in: I had filled the memory of my Akai S950 with this sample, and it was too big for a single disk, so I had to use it or lose it.

It wasn't a long song, under 4 minutes, but it was long enough to. We listened to it together and the voice gave us chills - Mike didn't even know where it had come from, but he was captivated. We decided this would be the music for the chapter on Alger Hiss.

But the music had its own contained presence and we never could add lyrics to it. We just called it Alger Hiss and let it sit over to the side on tape. We never loaded that sample up again, never worked on that idea again. There's something to be said for a sound demanding to be worked with, and that experience being DONE with. I never did a sample grab from TV after that, either. Done.

The other song we did was far more lighthearted - we imagined it to be Dick singing to Pat, making a statement of purpose before striding out the door to get his ass handed to him by Kennedy in 1960. It was called "This I Believe".

Right around this time I got the LinnDrum, and so the song was built around a slightly swung groove on the Linn, with the SY77 horns and strings, TX81z cutting through with percussive bass, and the Juno playing Organ as it did so often in the spongebath days. We wrote the song and cut the instrumental, but Mike never shared with me exactly how it would sound... until we played at the Seventh Street Entry in late Spring 1990, warming up for a rival synthpop band "X-Ray Kiss".

Mike pulled out all of the stops singing this, and I'm fortunate to have captured this on video because it was a true work of art. The video, by the way, was shot on a camcorder I had purchased just days earlier from Daytons, where they had a very generous return policy. And yes, that camcorder returned to Daytons just days later, before the 10 day cutoff. The salesmen were righteously pissed...

After that, we sort of let the Rock Opera thing drop, but it wasn't the end of our projects by any means.

Spring 1997 - A Different "Cube"

My time with the ValueRx Reporting team had been going well, though having moved the team here, is was becoming apparent that this team would be pretty straightforward and... well... dull. Writing reports isn't really the most glamourous job. But one day, Mike and Mark had a wild new idea.

Now, Mike and Mark shared the cube next to mine and Cobol Guy's, and they peeked their heads over frequently. And one day they peeked over and DEMANDED I join them in the conference room immediately. So I went... Mike had discovered something called "Data Warehousing" and wanted to tell me about it. He tried to explain:

"So you have a CUBE. And we're talking about CARS. So down one side, it's colors - Red, Blue, Silver, Black, White. And across the top it's 2-door, 4-door, wagon, van. And along the back side it's brands - Ford, Chevy, Dodge, Mercedes. And inside this cube is NUMBERS. So you go 'Red, 2 Door, Dodge = 5' and 'Silver, Wagon, Mercedes = 3' oh and these are sales figures."

Much as you probably are in reading this, I sat completely confused while he drew and re-drew the cube, finally scribbling in the middle "ANYTHING CAN BE IN HERE - IT'S INCREDIBLE". I furrowed my brow and nodded meaningfully, muttering, "yes, I think I see... there's really some potential there..."

Turns out there was a Data Warehouse project already under way, but it had stalled out under the watchful eye of a Price Waterhouse billing farm (2 persistent resources, then 3-5 greenies rotating through every 2 months, generating almost nothing). My job was to wrest control from Price Waterhouse and get the project back on track. Which wasn't easy because I had no fricking idea what this cube thing was.

Fortunately, Mike was a big fan of learning on the job: We ordered "the bible" of data warehousing by Ralph Kimball: We liked his writing style better that Bill Inmon and Claudia Imnoff's take on the subject - they were much more dry. Not that we actually read much of the book - both Mike and I are learn-by-doing people, so after the preface and the first 2 chapters, the spine wasn't cracked on the book.

We also booked travel to a conference of "The Data Warehouse Institute" in San Diego... and we learned a lot. Some things we learned: Conferences are almost useless, expense reports are rarely scrutinized, and martinis are delicious. We were very bad boys. But we actually learned at the conference that whatever data warehousing really was, what we were already doing wasn't terribly far FROM it. Thus energized and vitalized, we returned to really tear up the DW, and I'm pleased to say we actually did a good job.

Ok - I'll back up and actually define this now: Data Warehousing is taking data FROM your core transactional systems and moving it TO a new system that has been specifically optimized for reporting... but not boring invoicing reporting: Analytical reports: Show me Sales by region by salesperson by product line... now resort that so that product line is the primary sort, roll it up to region, now show me only the bottom 10% of our product line.... A well designed warehouse allows your team to have truly interactive access to your company's information, "turning data into knowledge".

Our warehouse was far from that - it was basically a huge dump of claims data, growing and growing. The reports you wrote against this were not fundamentally different than the ones you'd write against the invoicing system... but at least they didn't slow down the main system anymore. But we wanted things to be better.

Another Martini-fueled evening, this time at the Monte Carlo in downtown Minneapolis, and Mike, Mark, and I came up with our new strategy: Data Marts: You take your data warehouse and create even smaller subsets of data, at pre-calculated summary levels: You ditch the lowest level of data and just store the numbers (the facts) and the dimensions (colors, brands, styles): This was the cube that Mike was ranting about, but in truth, none of us had truly grokked it yet. The concept had been there from the beginning but all at once, we truly UNDERSTOOD it (after a few drinks and steak!). We drew it out on a napkin and brought it into work the next day and started planning...

The night seemed magical because our new CEO (who we DID like) Kevin wandered through the restaurant: We imagined ourselves to be insanely cool, to have come up with this great strategy and to have been hobnobbing in the same restaurant as our CEO.

By Spring 1997, we had moved to a new location - corporate headquarters built just for us, and on day one, we were already out of space. I wanted to punch the facility planner (who oddly was a cousin-in-law of mine). Mike and I had wrested control of the warehouse entirely away from Price Waterhouse and they were in the final throes of the handover. I was the lead architect, and Mike had a new title: Director of Data Warehousing. Whoah. He was a Director! He was actual MANAGEMENT. And he was 32! And with my promotion to architect, my friends at Safenet wrangled a rate increase. And two weeks after that, Mike TOLD about the rate increase, and I went right to my buddy Jay, and caught him trying to tell me there wasn't an increase. Dude tried to pocket the increase flat out. Which was extra-dirty pool. Caught, he increased my rate, but not before grumbling that the rate increase was really HIS because he had negotiated it, so I shouldn't have cared as long as I was being paid an acceptable rate.

Yeah. So I soon severed my relationship with Safenet... in a pretty awesome move.

Summer 1998 - The Studio Falls

In April 1998, I became a homeowner. Finally leaving years of rentals, my wife and I moved to an older house in Edina, built in 1913. And one of my "gifts" from my kind wife was a large room for my studio. Much larger than any room I had (except for the Death Star configuration of 1992 when I took over the center of a living room in a huge old apartment), but with a catch: There was a high traffic corridor bisecting the room. So the usable contiguous space in the studio was "just" a large L shape, not a full Rick Wakeman surround. Even a "U" configuration would be difficult. Some things would just have to go.

A couple of my things had gone in the months prior to us buying the house: We were making a full 20% downpayment, and there were a few thousand to be had by sloughing off some of my lesser used bits of gear. The Rhodes Chroma made its way out in 1997, going abroad to a nice man named Clive. The OB8 left even before that (I never truly bonded with that synth). The Simmons Drums had gone by 1996...

Around this time, a strange music store had opened in NorthEast Minnespolis: Wedged into the front half of a plumbing supply store, this outfit was one guy who always looked 3 hours short on sleep... but ALL he did was strange european things. See, by 1995, some crazy Swedes created a "Virtual Analog Synth" called the Nord Lead. And while I saw them all over the music magazines, nobody in Minneapolis had one. But this guy did. And it sounded great.... but not as great as my Jupiter8. And it only had 4 voices...

But it was only the beginning... the Europeans were coupling new DSP technology with old school user interface design, creating new synths that looked bold, sounded huge, but were easy and fun to use.

In Spring 1998, my guy got in a bit of gear that changed everything for me. He got an Access Virus. This was built by germans and had completely unreasonable specs: 16 voices, each with 2 oscillators. up to 16 different parts could be addressed, and routed to 3 stereo outputs. It had separate chorus and delay for each voice. And most importantly, it sounded INCREDIBLE - as good as my Jupiter 8 did to my ears.

And so I revisited my manifesto: I had got into these vintage synths because I was tired of the horrible user interfaces of the synths of 1990. I was tired of the digital sampled sound of those days, and the "play this preset" mentality. I moved to old synths not just because they sounded good, but because they had an immediacy to programming, AND because they were DIRT CHEAP during that brief window of time.

But by 1998, I was feeling the limitations as well: They were big and heavy and generated a lot of heat. They required lots of cables. They wandered out of tune, and never sounded quite the same from day to day. And frankly, I had used the hell out of them and was ready for some fresh sounds.

So yes, my friends, I traded my huge, heavy, beautiful Jupiter 8 for a tiny red box with knobs. Finally, new technology that sounded as good as my old stuff, but had a great user interface and was fun to use. The Access Virus had it all.

Within 4 months, everything else was gone, and in its place was one Fatar SL990 controller keyboard and five modules: A Roland JV1080, an Akai S5000, an Access Virus A, a Waldorf Microwave XT, and a Nord Lead 2. One MIDI interface, and two 8-channel audio snakes is all I needed. And it was incredible.

I tell you now, and you'll never believe me, but I didn't shed a tear for a single piece of that vintage gear... It wasn't until years later that I began to pine for the Jupiter 8 again. But everything else... It was ok. Some serious nerd was happier than I was with it. And The Good Guys (my repair shop) was considerably poorer without my regular visits.

Spring 1994 - Contracting Hell

I first recounted a version of this tale on my personal blog... but I'm revising it and posting it here, because it is a CLASSIC Tale of the Nineties.

By early 1994, I had done 9 months of good work for my Dad, learning Cobol, and our first release of our software was in the client's hands. Dad took a call from a headhunter friend, and he forwarded the contact on to me. One thing led to another, and I took a programmer job for an outsource code shop. Prior to this, COBOL was something I did with my dad. This was my first chance to take the skill to the street and see if this could be an actual career for me.

As first gigs go, it was pretty low-profile: I was a subcontractor working for a subcontractor, working for a contractor, working for a telephone company in southern Minnesota. I was paid $15/hr, and told to bill 40 hours a week, no matter what I was doing. With 3 subcontracting firms above me, I am guessing that the client must have been paying at least $50/hr for my work, with everyone taking between $5-10/hr off the top.

Still, this was my big entree: I was going to make $30k a year. The recruiter said the gig was for 12 months. I could BANK on that. Of course, I needed to get corporate attire: 3 pairs of slacks, 5 dress shirts, 5 ties, 1 pair of shoes. The old man fitting me for these things commented the pants "look good across the beam" while appraising my tush. Which was a lie, since I was still around 135 lbs and over 6 feet tall. But it takes all kinds.

Also, having lived in the city and having divested myself of my very bad automobiles, I needed some way to get to and from Eden Prairie. So we bought a NEW CAR. A Nissan Altima, Sea Blue, that we named Evenrude. It was a wonderful car.

We were in an office plaza in Eden Prairie, the dress was business formal (shirt, ties, slacks), there were 6 of us in this office. I shared an office with a woman just a little older than I was. In the back were the "mainframe guys" who literally did nothing but play card games on the computer all day. One other guy would stare at lines of code all day. One slept. This was before the world wide web - I can only imagine what THAT would have been like.

For 4 weeks, I was given nothing to do. NOTHING. But bill 40 hours, and say I was doing "Conversion" work. Turns out, this shop was in the SLOW and LABORIOUS process of converting a system from MainFrame to something else... very very very slowly. Bored, I surfed through the code library, trying to make sense of what the system did (boring billing stuff), and see what massive changes were needed. As I said in an earlier post - I'm not so great with reading for reading's sake: I'm goal oriented: What needs doing, and by gum it'll get DONE.

Finally, after 4 weeks, they gave me an assignment: Take this one program, and convert it. It should take 2 weeks, they said. I took this program, and God as my witness, all I could see it needed was ONE LINE of code changed to work properly. So I did it. And my boss said "you're not done, this will take two weeks". Which I took to mean there was something else I needed to do. So i got in there and started to do some additional improvements, I reformatted the output to work on standard printers, I changed some of the input parameters to match PC keyboards better....

And after 2 weeks of puttering, my boss said "it'll take another week". So a week LATER, they sent off the code. And one week AFTER THAT, the top-level contracting firm called up and yelled at me for making all of those changes, what was I STUPID??? So I immediately backed out those changes, just did the one line of code, and shipped it off 10 minutes later.

8 weeks, and only one program modified, and only one LINE of code modified. And I had made almost $5000. And it felt TERRIBLE. I talked to others in the office, and they all said "kid, relax, this is an easy gig - enjoy it! The next one won't be like this and you'll remember this fondly". Really.

The boss called me into his office and said that "the clients wanted me fired, but he talked them into giving me another chance". I said thank you for the opportunity, but I don't think this is right for me. I walked out. Actually I'd like to say I walked out, but I gave two weeks notice, did nothing but show up for 80 more hours, made another grand. Sigh.

It was back to my dad's basement for a few months (and I am forever grateful to him for his employment in that period... since I had a car payment and everything!!!)

Two gigs later, I ran into one of the Mainframe Guys in the shop: He had taken ill and there was some code that NEEDED to get done. I filled in, and the work that was supposed to be 80% done hadn't been started, but that was ok because the two weeks he had said he needed turned out to have been only about 30 minutes of code on my part. I didn't make a big deal out of it... but I did learn some lessons about trusting people: there are a lot of people in this business who are not interested in working very hard, and are not above deception to keep themselves comfortable.

I am not one of those people.

Fall 1992 - TX Treasure

When I think of the vintage gear tsunami I fell into, it's remarkable to think it really "only" lasted 2 years - first toe in the water in 1991, last great deal found in 1993, after which point I started to retire pieces of gear. One great find for me was the TX816.

I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.

The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.

If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.

Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.

I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.

Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.

The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).

Fall 1996 - The Cube

After being confirmed as "Master of the Abacus" there was work to be done at ValueRx. Lots of work. Well, actually not that much work. Scratch that. NO work. See, there was still a fully functioning department running in Detroit - the work hadn't actually MOVED to Minneapolis yet. They were staffing up for the EVENTUAL work that was to appear. But they hired a good 2 months too early.

Now to be fair, in 1996 people were starting to worry about a thing called Y2K - where thanks to disk-space saving techniques employed in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a very real possibility that computer systems would think that the year 2000 would be the year 1900. Financial services and insurance industries were particularly concerned - interest and annuity calculations, AR aging, etc. So by 1996, most forward-looking institutions were scooping up people who knew COBOL and putting them to work on rewriting vast acres of code - millions of lines of linear procedural code. And this was before the "object oriented" revolution where you make a widget and call out to it, no, basic date calculations were cut and pasted into these long long long programs.

For the record, I never needed to work on a Y2K project. I did do some minor work to make sure that the freight shipping software I helped build would handle it, but that was it.

Anyway, COBOL guys were going fast, and their prices were going up. So it was smart to build a team in advance... but we who were hired early were a bit mystified. And there was a lot of finger-pointing in the ranks of the transition team as to who was to blame for the delays in bringing the work to Minneapolis... Angry James was in the middle of a lot of those discussions, but Mark and Mike were spared, since they were just carrying out the directions.

So what we had: Office space. Staff. Chairs. What we didn't have: MUCH office space, computers. We were double-cubed, with one computer to share. I was in a cube with a traditional Cobol guy... who really liked playing Solitaire. For my part, I liked surfing the new-fangled WEB. We were in this cube 8 hours a day, and took 30 minute turns at the computer, doing nothing.

After a few weeks, we at least got copies of the source code to start reviewing... and by 6 weeks in, the first Detroit Transplants started arriving, and bringing with them actual WORK. But I'm going to level with you, those first 6 weeks were very surreal, because I was paid 40 hours a week to really do nothing. In a different way from the telephone billing system scam in 1993 - that was 6 weeks with no hope. This was just 6 weeks of idleness with the expectation that things would be getting CRAY-ZAY soon enough.

My cubemate, being a very traditional coder, was beyond thrilled when the source code came available, and would enter trance-like states of staring at screens and screens of code, taking meticulous notes. Being who I was, I could review code for maybe 20 minutes before glazing over: Tell me what you need the code to DO, and I'll make it DO it. But "learn the code?" Ugh.

So I started my now-classic method of "when you're bored, find a meeting and sit in on it". And I participated. And before I knew it, they asked me to be the team lead for the Reporting team, because I liked to get to the heart of the problem and solve issues, not just talk about it. Which was awkward for the ACTUAL team leader, who had relocated from Detroit, and was very very used to being the "Skip" of the team, guru of knowledge, and giver of long timeframes for fixing things. When I jumped in and by the next morning had the solution to the problem she said would take 3 weeks to resolve, I was not making a friend.

But I was young - like a puppy dog. Not even 30 years old - I had not yet settled into the comfort of a job you can keep doing for 20 years. (and for the record, I have still not settled into that). I didn't KNOW I was stepping on toes, I honestly thought they'd be thrilled that I found the solution. HA.

Fortunately, the people in charge who had decided to make the move from Detroit were all relatively new to the organization, and weren't fixed in their ways. They saw me not only as Master of the Abacus, but as "someone who gets things done". This reputation would serve me well in early 1997... But let's stay in 1996 for just a moment longer.

In late 1996, near the holidays, the CEO of the company paid us a visit: By this time, the Detroit people had moved in: Over 40 IT people had uprooted their families and decided to move to Minneapolis for their career. Prior to this, ValueRx had offices in Minneapolis, Detroit, Connecticut, and Arizona. This move was to centralize all operations, and allow the company to be more lean and agile.

The CEO popped in and called an impromptu meeting in our lunchroom: 40 people, some from Detroit, some from Arizona, some new employees, some contractors, all crunched into a stinky-microwave lunchroom, while one floor down a much more comfortable conference room sat, unused, because nobody thought to plan this out. The guy (his name is lost to the ages for me, and I refuse to google him) started a half-hearted "thanks for coming together, gang" speech... and a few minutes in, his cellphone rang. He reached to his belt clip and unhooked his then-awesome StarTac flipphone, and took the call. Standing in the middle of a ring of people. He simply pretended we weren't there. For 5 minutes. It was the most rude thing - he didn't excuse himself, he didn't ask the person to call back. In that moment, we just didn't exist to him.

He snapped the phone closed, finished his little speech and asked if we had any questions for him. Someone from Detroit asked him when the corporate offices in Connecticut were moving to Minneapolis, since all of the other divisions already had. His answer:

"We're going to keep that office open - it's just a few of us out there, and my wife likes our neighborhood, and the kids are in a good school, so we're staying out there. We can manage remotely."

After a pep talk about sacrifice for the company, and thanks for relocating. It was incredible. He then scurried off to a meeting, leaving us all in stunned silence.

I think 4 people quit that day, and many more of the people who were planning to relocate decided NOT to do so. Heck, these were COBOL people, and as I mentioned, it was 1996 - there was plenty of work for COBOL people then. In fact, I think that was about the point at which the local people in Minneapolis got a whole lot more work, as the transplants and the stay-behinds all found lucrative work elsewhere.

I will also note that within 3 months, there was a new CEO as well.

Spring 1991 - Vintage

From 1984-1990, I prided myself on having pretty cool new gear: My first synth was a Yamaha DX9, which was the nouveau of the nouveau (even if it sounded like a reedy kalimba with zero power... I ran that thing thing through a chorus, and then later a flanger just to get some meat on the sound...). From there, I was buying new gear at a healthy rate, but in a strange pocket: Never the best, never the worst: I was a straight up midrange playa. And even from the beginning, I had sequencers and drum machines rather than tape machines and good mixers. Somehow that whole "program it for live" thing was in my DNA from the very beginning.

If you were paying attention in the 1980s, the second half of the decade was a horrible one for synthesizers: Yes there were some great machines, but what we were losing were knobs and sliders: Synths were becoming pre-set machines that you could edit if you wanted to search through menus and squint at a 2x40 lcd. You sure as heck weren't going to whip up a new sound in the middle of a gig. I felt pretty strongly about this: I even wrote a letter to Keyboard Magazine that got printed, and it was "letter of the month" lamenting the lack of feel in the new synths...

It wasn't all bad - you had synths with 16 or 32 voices that sounded better than the Fairlights that made us all drool in 1984 - some even had the same waveforms, so you could sort of live your Fairlight dreams, just without the light pen. And I was buying these synths, selling them off after 9-12 months, and going for the next one. I kept Torps Music in Minneapolis going for a while... at least until one day when the keyboard salesguy hollered "hey, it's the money guy". I walked out and never returned.

Anyway, by 1990-1991, I was getting bored of the whole new-box-does-everything mode, and was looking for a thrill. At the time, I was writing a LOT of music, by the way - usually 1-2 new songs a week. The period from 1990-1992 was insanely fertile: over 200 songs. The point is, I was chewing through gear, but it was being USED - I can still listen to any track and tell you exactly what was making what sound. I loved my gear. BUT the state of new music gear in 1991 was pitiful: Roland was recycling the D50 sound engine yet again, Korg had new versions of the M1... Even yamaha with their commitment to strange sounds in FM was only releasing "sample player" instruments.

And sounds on the records... people weren't even trying anymore: they'd buy the new synth, dial up the presets, and record the song. So if you bought that new synth, you either had to use the same sounds (easy), or commit to programming your own signature sound... and did I mention that you'd be doing that with the small display, 4 buttons, 1 slider, and a single dial? Yeah, not very fun.

But in 1990/1991, something magical happened: People started selling off their old gear to get these new machines. Now I understand a guy who is in a YES cover band needing to have a synth that 1) he can carry, 2) stays in tune, and 3) is capable of sounding like more than the synth at the end of ELP "Lucky Man". These are working people, and they were making choices.

And in the process, they were selling the synthesizers that I dreamed about in the early 1980s. My first true vintage purchase was a Roland Jupiter 8. MINT condition. For two hundred dollars. It didn't have a midi interface (I added that myself for another $150), so I could see why the seller wanted to upgrade. But this synth.... it was incredible. This is the synth that percolated behind Duran Duran RIo. Most of Howard Jones "Human Lib" was on this synth. This is a desert island synth, sitting perfect in any mix.

My next purchase was a midi'ed LinnDrum. This classic drum machine from 1983 was limited from a 1991 perspective (16 sounds, as opposed to the 100 drum sounds in 8 meg of ROM in the new Roland R8), but this was the sound of almost every synthpop record from 1983-1986. The drums were in Heaven 17, Human League, even Dead or Alive. And it was covered in buttons and sliders - it was ridiculously easy to use, and it sounded great.

When I think of the gear I added in that 2 year period, it is almost insane, and yet my total outlay was under $3000, which was a lot less than the flagship Kurzweil K2000 supersynth was selling for. I added a Simmons SDS7 brain for $75, and a trigger-to-midi interface for another $50 (the thick Ksssshhhhh drum sounds of synthpop). I bought an Oberheim OBXa for $350 (The Time, Prince, Thompson Twins, and more).

Two treasures: A Rhodes Chroma for $200. This was the last ARP synth, and had a strange fragile sound - used as the lead synth on Rockit by Herbie Hancock, and also used by The Fixx. It wound up the lead on a lot of my tracks. And a MemoryMoog for $550, once owned by local rock legends The Suburbs (I saw that synth on stage many times) - I named it "Dr Voltage" for its huge sound... but truth be told it was insanely unstable and couldn't be relied upon to sound the same from hour to hour... I used the Doctor very sparingly in my compositions.

There were things I passed up. I didn't buy the Oberheim 4 Voice for $300, because it was too huge. I didn't buy any of the minimoogs because they didn't have MIDI, and I wanted/needed to be able to sequence these things (remember - I was a trigger-it-live guy, not a tape guy.) I never bought a TB303 Bassline - even with the acid factor, it just sounded wonky.

So my studio by late 1991 was a full half of the bedroom, creeping toward the ceiling on some seriously overloaded Ultimate Support stands. And I sat there with my Mac SE (still!) running Performer (Still!) running all of these synths into a cheap Tascam line mixer (though the noisier ones got routed through a noise gate), and printing my compositions directly to DAT - never printing the individual tracks.

I'd leave the gear up and on until the song was done. I'd set the verse up on a loop, and bring in synths, twirling the knobs and setting the sliders to find the perfect sound... it was very "of the moment" and I never saved the sounds back - that sound was for that song, and that was it. Print it, move on.

I had no shortage of musical ideas - they were flying out of my head faster than I could keep up anyway, so I never really thought about posterity or replications... I was thinking that if I ever really needed to do a song again, I'd probably do it BETTER then next time. That's what I told myself, but in truth, the few times I did try to do a remake, the sound was different enough that I considered it a new song entirely....

There were a few more treasures that made their way into the studio in 1992, but that will be another post. But Spring 1991, the arrival of the vintage... it was an amazing time, and I made some great music with those machines. What happened to them? Yeah, that's another post again.

Fall 1996 - Master of the Abacus

I was finishing up a project at a large life insurance company when I was called by a former co-worker, Mark Loesch, who had left just 3 months earlier on some "special project". Turns out he had been tapped by another former co-worker Mike (who had left just months before I had started, but we all could say we worked at the same place) to help with an ambitious project: A large Prescriptions Benefits Management company, ValueRx, was moving its corporate headquarters from Suburban Detroit to the Twin Cities, and Mike and Mark were helping make it happen... and they needed more help.

Now, I was 29, they were 30 and 31. We were young turks. The fact that Mark had gone from a straight up Programmer to some sort of "project manager" in just a few months was mind blowing to me... so naturally I needed to be a part of this. I arranged for an interview, and of course had some coaching sessions with Mark over martinis. During one of those sessions, we were riffing about things I could to do blow the interview. The obvious "remove the pants" gags were explored, the "pretend to speak only German" gag, but the one that had us laughing the most was the "profess expertise in something completely irrelevant". Interviewing for a DBA position and very seriously presenting as a qualification your entry into the State Fair Crop Art competition, for example. Or professing knowledge of the Abacus.

I walked in wearing a suit and met with Mike, Mark, and James, their boss. James was a bit like Ian McShane in Deadwood - affable but a bit moody, and as I later discovered, very prone to profane outbursts and yelling fits. But in the interview, it was all good. They were DESPERATE to start building a team locally and if Mark was vouching for me, then I was good. The interview was casual and free roaming. And at the end, I turned to Mike and James and said "Gentlemen, there's one more thing I think you should know. I am a MASTER of the ABACUS." They both looked blankly at me, then at Mark, who couldn't believe I had actually done it. I held the character for a moment longer, raising my eyebrows and looking at each meaningfully, before Mark and I collapsed in hysterics.

At that moment, I probably could have lost the gig, but it just felt right. That afternoon, they called and said I was in, and how did I want to join? I was interested in staying a consultant: My experience with Ameridata made me shy about moving away from an hourly compensation model, and in the intervening year, I'd done pretty well as a contractor. So the employment offer was waved off, and they said "in the interest of making it easier for our accountants, we're partnering with just one consulting firm, so call them up".

What followed was a tough call: Now, in 1996, the contractor market in the Twin Cities was pretty loose. Most firms were run by a guy who was contracting himself, and folded a few people under his wing. It was typical to get a 1099 in for 5%-10% of a skim off the top. For a W2 hourly employee, 20% was typical, sometimes 30%. I understand (now more than ever) that there are costs, and that there is value to working through a firm. But having gone through 3 contracting companies and 1 FTE position in the previous 3 years, I felt I had a good feel for what reasonable was.

So when they said they take 40% W2, I laughed and said "nice try. I got the gig, I've already got it. All I'm asking you to do is process the invoices". "Yeah, but what about the next gig? We need to create a long term relationship here" Like HELL - my next gig will be with the next people who find me the WORK - I need you to bill this, and if you didn't have a lock on this client this call would already be OVER, you JERK!

And that's how I met Jay at Safenet. And despite our shouting match, we did get friendly eventually. But he never budged from 40%, and I did cave in, because even with the 40% take, it was still a 20% raise for me. And once that gig was over, I indeed did NOT work with them again.

Back to the Abacus: From that day on, I had something of a reputation with the management at ValueRx - I was the guy who cracked the absurd joke at the interview - that spoke to some insane confidence, so I must be good. That worked to my advantage (and I did do good work there).... but I think it spooked James a little, because the guy almost never spoke to me after that, and mere months later he quit abruptly and went on a vacation to the black hills with a high powered rifle to do target practice on prairie dogs. He was not a stable man.

But it did create an instant bond with Mike, and the three of us, Mike, Mark, and Jim carved quite a niche for ourselves at ValueRx. More on that to come.

Forgot to mention...

Linearity is for chumps. The stories will jump around in time, and I'll intersperse different subjects.

I'll tag these posts with keywords so you can find the whole story, however, and will link across when appropriate to a referenced but already blogged event.

Now back to the stories.

Winter 1989 - Performing Live

In 1984-85, I played keyboards in a live band. By 1986-87, I started doing studio work, which de-emphasized the live playing element. My revelatory moment was in the summer of 1987 when I worked with my friend Al in his 8-track basement studio: The two of us were sequencing synths using MOTU Performer, and laying down tracks to SMPTE Time Code. I was stacking 3-4 synths on a line, and it was amazing. We actually sounded a bit like Stock Aiken Waterman with our song "DYMF".

I bought my own copy of Performer, got a Midi Time Piece, and hooked it up via Serial Port to my Mac SE (not SE/30, just SE). This was my workhorse computer: My Mac256 made it through freshman year, but by the end of that year, the amount of disk switching necessary to finish a 20 page paper was intolerable. I started sophomore year in 1987 with a Mac SE, with the whopping 20 meg hard drive. This became my music machine.

I bought Performer AND Composer, which was the MOTU Notation software, which I used in my music theory classes to notate my assignments, which would have gobsmacked and amazed my teacher, if only he hadn't introduced me to Composer in the first place. We were geeks together, Carleton Macy and I, swapping Mac tips. But that's not this story.

By my Senior year 1989-1990, my Mac SE had been upgraded to 4 whole megs of RAM, and a 170 MEG hard drive. My home studio had grown to include a sampler (Akai S950), a good synth or two (Roland Juno 106, Roland JX8P, Yamaha TX81Z, and the cream of the crop, the Roland D50 Synth), plus two drum machines - a Yamaha RX5 and an Alesis HR16B. I had a 4 track, but I was proud of the fact that with this setup I could actually run everything LIVE from my sequencer. Somehow this seemed very important, that the sounds be triggered "live" by the computer.

It was all the more important to me because my friend and rival Paul Sebastien had brazenly made the switch to the Tape Show when performing Live. Paul, like me, was a great arranger and studio nerd, but unlike me, he was also a fan of printing things to tape and moving on. His studio was always cleaner than mine - just 1-2 good synths, with a good mixing board and tape machine. He multitracked, he bounced, he acted like a real studio guy. And by 1989 he had arranged with some friends to create a "scene" - his friends opened an 18-up club above another nightclub, and Paul ran the house band, called "Smilehouse".

Smilehouse had a great sound, lots of production gloss, and a full lineup of smiling musicians, all of whom (save Paul) were faking their instruments while Paul's beautiful mix was playing on a tape deck back at the sound board.

I'm going to level with you: given the rear view mirror of 20 years, I can't imagine what the difference would be between a guy pressing play on a tape, versus pressing play on a sequencer which was then triggering the synths. But it meant something to me.

So my response was a fake band called "The Acid Police" and there was a prank involved that I'll go into at a different time, but it was a joke that grew into an actual semi-popular band at my college. We got gigs, we sold tapes, we had fans. And when we performed, we performed "live".

And by live I mean: Keyboard stack in front with the Juno and D50 on it. Keyboard stand on the right (my left) with two slabs of wood on it: On the lower slab was the two drum machines and the keyboard and mouse. On the upper slab was a rack case with the mixer, TX81Z, and Roland Delay, next to a second rack case with the sampler and on top of it all was perched my Mac SE. So between songs, I switched floppies, loaded songs, opened files, switched presets, and updated the mix.

Though I wasn't "Playing", I sure as hell was BUSY up there. I also usually left myself at least one line to actually PLAY on stage as well, while Mike and Erik ran around. Oh, Erik was my Andy Fletcher - he had a non-plugged in Keyboard (the JX) and faked, because he was actually just my roommate. Mike Mattison, now of Scrapomatic and the Derek Trucks Band was my amazing singer.

But as we played, I was always up on a riser, with my gear... and as I danced, the riser would rock, and the equipment rack would sway back and forth, the top arc over a foot of travel. I'd have to stop and grab my computer several times per song. Plus there were always mix issues, so I worked that mixer a lot.... and more than once the wrong patches were loaded, leading to a song restart... and about half of the stage banter was "is it done loading yet, Jim?"

Setup and breakdown was always horrible - because I had to make sure everything was plugged in properly, all midi cables were routed properly, all power was good, no ground loops.... Plus, that stuff was HEAVY.

We did I think 4 gigs like this, before I started to realize that in the final analysis, both the Acid Police and Smilehouse were sending a single stereo signal to the PA system. But Paul got to relax and i sweat bullets with every show.

In winter 1989, I got a DAT recorder... at first to capture my compositions... but by Winter of 1990, I was starting to use that DAT.... for playback. Yes, I started doing Tape Shows.

Spring 1995 - The ERP Crisis

In late summer 1994 I signed on as a programmer/analyst at a computer configurator/reseller called Ameridata based in Golden Valley. Think about what CDW does now, they did then: They worked with Compaq and HP and Apple, and sold computers, printers, networking gear, and everything else via mail order and inbound sales. In the pre-internet world, it wasn't a bad business: They had one big warehouse, a lot of customers, and were also growing into the services area as well. Their system was (as most things were in those days) a heavily customized COBOL system they had bought maybe 10 years earlier and had tweaked the source code beyond all recognition. I was there because, well, I did COBOL. We called the system ADI.

Thing moved quickly for me there... in the late summer, I was doing programming work anyone needed doing, and was creating some consternation in the ranks of the veteran programmers. I was fast. Too fast for the established norms they were used to. There were wide swaths of code that the whole team referred to as "OSK" - Only Skip Knows - the guru who had been tweaking the code the longest. And to do any work in that code, you needed some of Skip's time, and he doled the time out very very meagerly. For such a busy man, he kept very lax hours, and to everyone's surprise, he up and quit 2 months into my tenure.

Fortunately I was able to figure out the OSK bits without too much trouble.

Around December, there was a rumble through the organization... there would be a new system. Something to replace ADI because ADI was old, and they needed to move into the future. Something called "BaaN Triton", which I would come to learn was an "ERP" system, similar to SAP (but less expensive). Half of the team was split off to work on the BaaN project, at a new location, while the rest of us were to keep ADI alive.

Around the same time, Ameridata decided to expand and purchased a similar outfit in Gaithersburg MD. This was a first step toward global domination, I suppose. They put ME on the team to figure out how to put Ameridata East onto ADI, and quickly, and they gave it to me to figure out. After a few weeks of looking at the tables, a thought occurred to me: Did these groups have separate sales forces? Yes. Separate warehouses? Yes. Separate purchasing departments? Yes. When would they be integrated? Sometime AFTER BaaN.

Then heck, let's just clone the system, add a switcher front-end for the 4 people in the organization who need to access both, and be done with it. The project went from a 1 year project to a 3 months slam dunk. I went on my first real "business trip" out to Gaithersburg for the (completely uneventful) cutover. ADI2 went live, and I felt pretty good. Which meant it was time for me to join the BaaN team.

Now, this company may have had high hopes for this BaaN system, but let's take a look: They had a Cobol system that worked. They had business processes that worked. They had in NO way outgrown their systems: Every screen was responsive, every team member got reports they needed. Even with their acquisition, given the huge geographic difference AND the completely separate sales/customer base there was nothing pushing them.

Nothing but a consultant from CSC who had done an assessment and determined that in order to play in the "big leagues", they needed an ERP. Mike was a suit guy, and not only did he do the assessment, he picked the software, and he committed to staying on for 2 years to see the project through.

I never knew the full numbers, but if memory serves, the software and implementation was due to cost over $4m in software and hardware alone, let alone services. At the time, Ameridata had total annual revenues of $10-15m, and I can't imagine margins were that great, even in the wild 90's. And the project was structured just like you'd expect an ERP project to be structured: 6 "business analysts" were brought in who were expected to be entirely non-technical - just work on the workflows. Then there was Mike. And a new DBA. And a new Report Writer.

Plus the 6 people who had run the whole operation for the previous 10 years on the system they already owned. And these people were cross-trained to be the programmers in BaaN. I was sent to Grand Rapids MI with two compatriots, John and Jim, and none of us could figure out why we were only learning certain "modules" - we were capable of maintaining ALL parts of our previous system, so why wouldn't we learn ALL of Triton? Oh, it doesn't work like that... it's so complex you need to specialize.

This did lead to my first amusing travel story: At the Hertz office, they were all out of mid-size cars, but they did have a Town Car they'd let us have at a discount. I said yes and spent the afternoon tooling around in a Lincoln, until Jim and John teamed up on me and DEMANDED that I return it and get a compact because EVEN THOUGH it's at a discount, they would be terrified if the VP asked them to justify the expense. For we spent the next 2 days in a Ford Fiesta.

Triton was written in some Moon Man 4GL that had huge processing overhead, and had a charming habit of crapping out with the message "SERVER GESTAPT". The Server in question was a refrigerator-sized computer that cost $250,000. a 4-processor Pentium 90 with 6 GIGABYTES of storage (in the form of 2 dozen 270 meg hard drives). The thing was huge and loud and had a cold room all to itself. It had a dedicated terminal and had something on it called NCSA MOSAIC.

More about my first exposures to the World Wide Web on MOSAIC in a future post.

Naturally, that was just the TEST machine. The PROD machine came later, at another $250,000. And even with all of this, the system was horribly poky. Oracle blamed BaaN, BaaN blamed Oracle, everyone blamed ATT (apparently our superserver was not the most desirable one, even with that cost). The network took some blame. You'd log in, count to 10, enter an order number, count to 10 for the HEADER, then wait 15 more seconds for the Detail Lines to draw. And we programmers were locked out of the low-level routines - this was a 4GL - they just give you an "interpretive layer" which is a layer of code above the code (which is already above some code)....

It's worth mentioning AGAIN that our little ADI system ran just fine on the 486 tower, connected to 500 meg of storage which held everything.

I was just a programmer, here, keeping ADI going, and building things in Triton as requested, but I was kept entirely out of the "fishbowl" - the conference room where the business analysts kept the 4 "subject matter experts" in the company hostage while they documented workflows and use cases. For months I watched flow charts go up on the wall-length whiteboards. It was while walking past that I first heard the term "Out of the Box", which didn't make any sense to me.

I left there in Fall 1995 (that is another story) and sadly wasn't there to see their golive in Spring 1996. But I heard that they went live replacing ADI1 only, and that "overnight processing" (invoicing, inventory updates, etc) took 26 hours to complete, during which time everyone was locked out.

I was just amazed: I was able to bring a new business unit online with their proven older technology in under 3 months. In 18 months they spent more than $4m to barely replicate what they had working when I walked in the door, with a system that barely was able to function. The plan was to bring ADI2 on board within 6 months. I never heard any plans to bring on their IT consulting wing or their implementation services... As far as I could tell, BaaN was just there to replace ADI.

But the next steps didn't happen, because by Summer 1996, the company had been sold. To GE, who DID have a national presence, and who were in the process of installing SAP. By Fall 1996, the Triton team was already hard at work.... planning for the replacement of BaaN with SAP.

It was told to me that the whole reason they went up on BaaN was to increase their sale value, that the sale had been in the planning stages for years, and if they were able to point to this ERP in their core, they'd have a higher market value, since obviously they'd be bringing not just 2 warehouses to the deal, but "engineered best practices" and "state of the art software". That strikes me as a pretty cynical way to look at it, but I can't argue with it either, since GE bought them for almost a half BILLION. And installing ERP for its own sake sure as hell didn't make any sense to me.

Now, all of this is to my best recollection, of course, and seen from the programmer's chair. There may have been a whole different story two levels above me. And maybe somebody wants to tell that story. But this is MY blog. And the whole thing struck me as such a "poster child of ERP Excess" I just had to share.

What? Another Blog?

Having blogged pretty regularly for the past 4 years, the shape of my main blog has turned very personal and creative, and I'm grateful to have that forum. But there are some far more geeky things I need to tell you about - real stories about working in IT in the 1990s when everything changed. Stories about working with music technology. Stories about strange interactions with real people.

And I want to share these stories with more people, but I don't imagine those people want or need to know everything about my summer vacations or my kids' cute stories. This new blog will be where I host the truly nerdy stories about 3 1/2" floppy disks, 5 1/4" floppy disks, and even 8" floppy disks. Visitors will get all geek, nothing heartwarming.

So I need to re-introduce myself here: I'm Jimmy B - Raised in Minneapolis. Bought my first synthesizer (a Yamaha DX9) in 1984 and my first Mac (a used 256k Mac) in 1986. Liberal arts educated, record store clerk, coffee roaster, barista, and almost accidentally, computer programmer. Through it all, I also have had an active music life, performing live, arranging music for film and choreography, a brief stint in advertising, and even writing backing tracks for lounge singers.

So I'll be telling these stories here... and to help you place these events, I'll preface each story with an approximate date. The blog is Tales from the Nineties, but I'm not ashamed to say there'll be some stories from the late 1980s in there, and a few from the early 2000s. We'll stop there, because I want to use as many real names as possible, and once you gel close to that 7 year window, people get touchy.

Why the 1990s? It was a period of huge upheaval - the dotcom bubble started, the traditional view of what Information Technology was capable of was dying, the internet was growing, and music was moving from the studio to the bedroom. I was in the middle of this, and saw some interesting things. For some, the 1990s is still a little too "close" - we're only really getting comfortable with 1980s nostalgia these days. In some ways, there's a lot of the 1990s that people still consider "current" - think about how many Seinfeld quotes or Simpsons season 2-12 episodes you still hold dear... we're still not OUT of the 1990s in many ways.

But it's time to start looking back at the stories of this time... I hope you enjoy this blog. I'll leave comments open if you want to join in the discussion. All stories will be true to the best of my recollection. I promise.