{"id":19857,"date":"2020-11-23T05:30:56","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T10:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=19857"},"modified":"2020-10-16T09:06:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T13:06:12","slug":"doug-mckechnies-san-francisco-moog-1968-1972","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/11\/23\/doug-mckechnies-san-francisco-moog-1968-1972\/","title":{"rendered":"Doug McKechnie\u2019s ‘San Francisco Moog: 1968-1972’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In the late \u201960s, the Moog modular synthesizer was still very much an experimental tool. While there had been some ambitious attempts to use the Moog as the centerpiece of recordings \u2014 Mort Garson\u2019s 1967 LP The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds<\/em> was likely the first album to feature the synthesizer prominently \u2014 \u201cserious\u201d use of the new instrument is often thought to have begun when Wendy (then Walter) Carlos released her groundbreaking Switched-on Bach<\/em> in October of 1968.<\/p>\n

However, in that same year, a San Francisco-based experimental musician named Doug McKechnie began tracking his exploratory tunes on the then-brand-new machine. As part of the San Francisco Radical Laboratory, McKechnie was an early innovator on the device, created by Robert Moog and first released in 1964.<\/p>\n

A selection of McKechnie\u2019s recordings from that era have been compiled as San Francisco Moog: 1968-1972<\/em>. Out Oct. 23 on VG+ Records, this collection from nearly half a century ago makes for one of the most fascinating listens of 2020.<\/p>\n

\n

Unlike many of his contemporaries \u2014 who primarily used the bulky synthesizer in a studio setting \u2014 McKechnie took the massive and temperamental Moog Model III out on the road, performing live in a time when few dared employ the expensive and temperamental instrument in such a context.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

And \u2014 again, unlike his contemporaries \u2014 rather than approaching the novel instrument through an academic lens, McKechnie came to the Moog the same way many self-taught knob-twiddlers now approach modular synthesis: in a cheap apartment and with financial assistance from a generous parent.<\/p>\n

In 1968, McKechnie was recently out of both the army and a marriage, and into a $250-a-month space, the entire third floor of a building on Harrison Street. He shared the cost of the 2,500-square-foot rental with Bruce Hatch, recently relocated from Kansas.<\/p>\n

Hatch came from money. \u201cHis father owned a water heater company,\u201d McKechnie recalls. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t particularly musical, but he was a very sharp electronics guy.\u201d Having seen a Moog Model III in an issue of Mechanics Illustrated<\/em> on his flight from Kansas, Hatch decided he wanted one, so he rang his father and asked for one.<\/p>\n

\u201cEight thousand dollars later,\u201d says McKechnie with a laugh, \u201cthese boxes started showing up on our floor.\u201d They had taken delivery of a Moog with the serial number 004.<\/p>\n

McKechnie readily admits he had no real background in music. \u201cI was a singer, but I didn\u2019t play a keyboard or any other kind of instrument,\u201d he says. But with Hatch\u2019s guidance from an electronics perspective, he applied his innate musical aptitude to taming the unwieldy yet powerful beast. \u201c[Hatch] showed me that [the Moog] could encompass the entire waveform circumstance of sound,\u201d McKechnie says. \u201cAnd you could pretty much do all kinds of things with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Six months later, McKechnie was lecturing on the subject at universities; today he laughs at the memory. \u201cI had no real understanding of electronic music, no understanding of the history of it,\u201d he admits. But he was a fast learner. Not only did he figure out how to configure the massive bank of cables and sockets in a way that created expressive, otherworldly sounds, but he worked with a component that allowed primitive programming of the instrument.<\/p>\n

McKechnie says that when the folks at Baltimore-based VG+ Records contacted him about releasing some of his early recorded pieces, they told him, \u201cIt turns out that you\u2019re probably one of the first guys to do live performances with sequencers.\u201d He was surprised. \u201cI had never given it a second thought; the only way I could make anything musical with this instrument was to create little riffs with the sequencers, then play along with them.\u201d The idea that he was doing something unprecedented never occurred to him.<\/p>\n

The so-called Rad Lab was an attempt to explore the possibilities of the Moog, but its existence owed more to another motivation: women.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe same reason why guys play guitar,\u201d McKechnie admits. \u201cWe put an ad in the paper saying, \u2018We need an assistant who believes in magic.\u2019 The next two months, we had three, four, five women a day show up and apply for the job!\u201d<\/p>\n

But some work did get done; quite a bit, in fact. \u201cPretty much every time I performed, we recorded,\u201d McKechnie says. \u201cWe used an Ampex machine in the studio and a Nagra while we were on the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

What might have been his most high-profile performance on the Moog wasn\u2019t documented, because the festival\u2019s live sound engineers were confused by what McKechnie was doing. With the Moog, he began by generating a very loud \u2014 but below the human threshold of hearing \u2014 tone. When the sound man saw the VU meters go into the red, he panicked, pulling the volume faders down to zero. So even as McKechnie continued playing, nobody heard anything.<\/p>\n

That ill-fated performance at the 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival \u2014 yes, that<\/em> one \u2014 might have set his career on a different trajectory, but even so, McKechnie successfully captured many other live and in-the-Lab improvisations. San Francisco Moog: 1968-1972<\/em> draws from that cache of recordings.<\/p>\n

McKechnie admits that the combination of the instrument\u2019s unpredictability and his own improvisational approach meant that not every performance deserved enshrinement. \u201cEvery piece I created was an exploration; nothing was planned. There was a lot of dross, as one can imagine, getting to a point where you had something that was worth keeping,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I tried to record everything we did, knowing that a certain percentage of it would be valuable or usable to stand on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because the Moog\u2019s output was often run directly into the recording devices, McKechnie\u2019s Moog improvisations were captured in high quality audio, largely free from external sonic clutter. And even though the synthesizer was monophonic \u2014 allowing only one note at a time to be played \u2014 in post-production, he fattened up the sound. \u201cI basically created an echo by recording one track onto a second track with a slight delay,\u201d he explains, \u201cwhich gave a three-dimensional feeling to the music.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, sensing their historical importance, McKechnie decided to further preserve the tapes for posterity. With the help of David Gans (of KPFA\u2019s \u201cDead to the World\u201d), he transferred the tapes to digital format. No other changes were made. \u201cThe raw sound of the synthesizer is so sharp,\u201d he says. \u201cThe presence of the waveform is pretty profound.\u201dPart of one of McKechnie\u2019s Moog pieces was used in the soundtrack the Academy Award-nominated 1977 documentary film Spaceborne<\/em>. But for other than the lucky concertgoers who attended his early performances, everything else on the new LP will be new. And a half century after the recordings were made, most everything on San Francisco Moog: 1968-1972 <\/em>still sounds out of this world.<\/p>\n

Special thanks to Nick Veronin.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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