As we put more energy into our website, we’re going to be offering you features about the band – which of course includes everybody who works with the band – and you.
Once a month, we’ll be profiling a member of the travel group that brings you the Dog, from roadies to truckdrivers to – oh yeah – the band members.
We’re starting with the guy you can see the easiest because he’s out in the middle, our sound mixer, Mr. Michael McGinn.
Hope you enjoy! (“signed” by paw, K-9, the Dog Editor)
That tall, lean, long-haired guy you see standing at the soundboard right in the middle of the Dog Heads is Michael McGinn. Since he works for RatDog, it’s not a big surprise that he’s not your average knob-turner. Actually, he’s a guitar-playing art school near-graduate (all the good ones leave early – actually, he may be the only guy whose professors told him to go) who fell into Weirworld a long time ago.
McGinn’s the son of an Irishman who managed to combine being a member of both the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) and the R.A.F. (Royal Air Force) who landed in the San Jose area repairing televisions. Not so many homes in the early ‘70s had a tube in every room, and although at heart he’s not a tech, McGinn learned how to solder like a champ. From the time he was seven or eight, he was rewriting the pop songs he heard on KFRC – “If they had just changed that last chord, it’d be so much better!” – and when he was 13, his big brother’s 8-track compilation tape led him to Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, the New York Dolls, and the Dictators, among many others. “They say you peak in your sensibilities at 14,” he reflected recently, “and I feel lucky to have been 14 in 1977.”
His first band, Joker, played a lot of Who. After high school, he worked at Tower Records doing the art displays, and formed 3-D Jesus, an art rock band that made an album at the legendary Hyde Street Studio (where American Beauty was recorded). Good result for bad reasons: it sounded so bad to him that he got serious about the process of recording, which would lead to things…
Early in the ‘80s he met his girlfriend’s best friend’s brother-in-law, who turned out to be a guy named Tom Paddock, one of the bright-mind techies in the Grateful Dead’s world. Needing a job, he began working for Paddock, and by the late ‘90s, that job would evolve into being Bob Weir’s main studio guy. Early in 1998, McGinn’s life got rough enough to make him think about how nice getting out of town would be; Bob’s guitar roadie broke his hip, and McGinn got the job. Since his philosophy was that “the studio as we’ve known it is like going to the hospital,” he was clearly simpatico with our fearless leader – the studio is not Bob’s favorite place – and so he became the producer of 2000’s Evening Moods, and then RatDog’s sound mixer.
Mike sits in his living room surrounded by computers, guitars, and his current art project, 108 (a sacred number) different covers for a 4- song CD he’s created, and reflects on life with the Dog: “Bob does something that nobody else does. It’s in the tradition of the Grateful Dead, but it’s definitely not the same; it’s in the spirit, but it’s not his intention to sound like them – that’d be boring – but it’s about exploring…”
Hey, more mixers should go to art school!
