I was probably one of Wally’s earliest associates in Los Angeles/Hollywood. In 1959 I was the tech service guy for Ampex in Los Angeles. Late one afternoon I got a call from a guy in Oregon who talked so fast and stuttered so bad that it was difficult to understand him. Eventually I got the drift that he was to record the Terry Gibbs big band that weekend in Hollywood. Wally lived in Oregon and was having someone drive down, pulling his recording equipment in a trailer.

(Later, when we were better acquainted, I learned that in college he had known the son of the man who founded U-Haul. Wally got U-Haul to custom-build a closed trailer to his specs. The entire floor of the trailer was covered by a mattress, soft riding for delicate recording equipment.)

This frantic, stuttering guy wanted to have his Ampex 351-2’s checked over and carefully aligned for the recording sessions. The next day a guy showed up with the equipment. I carefully checked out the Ampexes and put a spit shine on the alignment. It was the beginning of a long-time, supremely interesting relationship with many ups and a few downs. If you knew Wally well, there was never a dull moment in your life.

In 1959 Wally was a ‘small-town lawyer’ (his own words) in Eugene, Oregon. He never was much interested in law, and had entered college studying music. He formed a dance band which played in Oregon and Northern California territory. One of his players, Kenny Hing, later became a mainstay of the Basie sax section. But after two years, his lawyer father told him that he had fooled around long enough. He had to switch to law or Dad was cutting off the support.

So Wally became a reluctant lawyer 9 to 5, and began recording bands as a hobby. But this was not a single mic into a home recorder – Wally had serious recording gear. His portable mic cabinet included U-47s, 77-DX’s and other pro mics. (Later, in ‘60 or ‘61, Wally had the first Sony C-37 I had ever seen.) The trailer wouldn’t accommodate a large mixer or huge monitor speakers, so he had a pair of JBL LE-8’s in bookshelf-sized cabinets. We didn’t know it at the time, but he was presaging the later trend to near-field monitoring on moderate-size speakers.

The mixer was passive, feeding the mic inputs of the Ampexes. There were five or six rotary mixers on the left and an equal number on the right, possibly with a master in the center. All Daven rotary step attenuators. One or two on each side had early solid-state preamps, each powered by a 9 volt battery, for use with low output mics.

Wally’s recording of the Terry Gibbs band continued over a period of months, at several venues including the “Sundowner” club on Sunset Blvd. Since the recordings were not ‘official,’ copies could not be sold. Wally supplied copy tapes to the leader. Later he had the Gibbs music mastered and pressed on LPs with a plain orange label stating artist and titles only. These he gave to selected friends. A couple of decades later, after Wally’s passing, the master tapes were made into a series of CDs and became a big hit as – you guessed it: The Terry Gibbs Dream Band.

A few years ago I ran into Terry at a NAMM (Music Merchants) convention. He asked me if I remembered what mics Wally had used on Terry’s vibes. I did: a pair of RCA 77s. It is difficult to get a clean sound from close-miked vibes because of that horrendous attack spike, which my late friend John Jarvis used to say was “almost enough to burn a hole in the tape.” Condenser mics with their superb transient response will send a large part of that spike on to the preamp, where it usually causes trouble. A ribbon mic is just ‘relaxed’ enough not to try to replicate the full tower of that spike.

Wally may not have known anything about studio equipment and technique at that time, but he had become, presumably self taught, an excellent big band mixer before setting foot in Hollywood. The sound of the Dream Band recordings is top grade even by today’s standards. They were 2-trk masters with no EQ and no post-processing. And he didn’t even have the advantage of a studio setup – he had to mic the band on the stand of a live performance. Wally had recorded many big bands on this ‘unofficial’ basis. He told me once that there were only two leaders who wouldn’t allow him to record. One was Basie; I don’t recall who the other was. By the time Wally joined United, he was already one of the best big-band mixers.

Altho I had left Ampex, through Ampex connections I bought a new 300-3 recorder. Everyone knew that 4-track was coming, but 3-track was still very much alive. Wally rented my machine for most remotes. Later it was rented by United Recorders for months at a time.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. After Wally moved to L.A. in about 1960, I became his ‘chief engineer.’ I did all his design and most of his maintenance work and often traveled to sessions with him. One I remember fondly was the Monterey Jazz Festival in about ‘61. (Backstage, Rita, like all ladies, was charmed by the smooth flaterer, Duke Ellington.) We did another jazz festival in Las Vegas where June Christy kissed me. Curious? Suffer! There was a Kenton band appearance at a private party by the owner of a prominent savings and loan, one or more Buddy Rich on-location sessions, and many more. I was in Las Vegas with Wally and Bill Putnam to record Sinatra at the Sands. But that didn’t turn out to be the album by the same name. Frank was not thrilled by the house band and conductor. (Rumor was that the conductor was the nephew of a famous song writer, who of course knew Frank.) After the second night we saw Frank, just outside the windows of the room where we were recording, walking to his cabana. He saw Wally and shook his head “No.”

Wally probably recorded all the Sinatra on-location albums, as well as dozens more by other artists. One Sinatra date was in Chicago. I was not comforted by his account of my 3-track high on a fork lift to load into a plane. Wally said that when the fork lift rolled over even a small irregularity in the pavement, the machine swung back and forth dangerously. I’m glad I didn’t see it. I gave him the phone number of a lady I had known who had moved to Chicago. She enjoyed an evening of Sinatra with Wally, but couldn’t remember who I was! I caught up with her several years later on a business trip to Chicago. Then she couldn’t remember who Wally was! (No, she was not ‘that kind of girl;’ she was a classy lady.) Once I was with him in LV recording a rather unusual act at the Dunes – George Burns and Carol Channing. The producer/label owner was Enoch Light. Remember the “Command” label and “The Light Brigade?” Bob Fine, a top New York mixer, flew out to do the mix.

Among Wally’s on-location jobs were stand-up comics, who were selling records in the day. Bob Newhart, Bill Dana (“Jose Jimenez”) and others, including Lenny Bruce. A comic would be recorded for several shows, then would pick the best versions of each routine for the record. Lenny found it too tedious to listen to all the material, so in an arrangement engineered by Wally, he sent copies of the master tapes to my house. I had made the Ampex 3-track convertible from 1/2” tape to 1/4”, switching head assemblies, guides and tape tensions. I built a foot pedal and my wife Rita spent many evening hours, after the kids were in bed, at the Ampex with earphones and a typewriter, transcribing every word. Now and then she would collapse over the typewriter, laughing. She would call to me, “You gotta hear this one!” Fortunately, the earphones protected our two young children from an early education in the ways of the world as seen through the eyes of the brilliant Lenny Bruce. Later I edited one of his albums, borrowing extra Ampexes from Wally in order to cover splices with ‘wild tracks’ of audience laughter gleaned from the same sessions.

By this time, Wally had gone to work for Bill Putnam at United Recorders. Putnam had built a ‘portable’ mixer for Wally. Three channel, with rotary mixers on the first individual modules I had ever seen, and also the biggest, being vacuum tube with a big rotary knob. The board was clean, had EQ and was a big improvement over the old passive mixer. But portable? The mixer itself was heavy enough, but someone had built a desk under it from heavy wood 1” thick! My shop was in the back bedroom of my house. Getting that thing tipped up through narrow doorways was a back-breaker. Later, Capitol Records rented the board for at least one on-location job; maybe more. Wally was thrilled that the Capitol lab had found the range markers I had put on the sub-masters to be exactly where they would have put them. So?

By then Wally had graduated from the trailer and owned a truck with a large box bed and lift gate. His monitors became 604’s in large boxes, the ‘standard’ monitor in Hwd. I designed and had built a custom metal housing for three McIntosh MC-30s. I designed in a feature which Wally really loved: the center channel could be raised up to 6 dB obove the monitor level of the outside channels. This more closely replicated the final mix, dispensing with the problem of center being harder to hear when all three were at optimum recording level. Remember, consoles in those days didn’t have monitor mixes.

One Saturday morning I received a frantic phone call from Wally. Well, all phone calls from Wally were frantic, but he was over the moon this time. The truck had been packed the previous day and was scheduled to leave for a remote. But overnight someone had attempted to burn it! A candle had been placed on the frame below the bed, where it burned a hole through the wooden floor. Fortunately there was no serious damage, but a lot of smoke on the equipment. Wally and an assistant brought the truck to my house where all hands, including my wife Rita and a few helpful neighbors, were on deck. Among other measures, we extended mic snakes along the sidewalk and scrubbed off smoke residue. It was especially difficult getting the XLR pins and sockets clean – that was my job. That’s when I learned that the stems of wooden matches were a pretty good fit into the XLR pin sockets. Wally had a pretty good idea that the mischief was done by his only location recording competitor at the time. I don’t know how that was settled, but I heard, several years later, that Wally threw the guy down a half-flight of stairs at the studio over a different disagreement, presumably.

Another Saturday, Wally called and asked me to come to United, without saying why. There I saw him mixing down a Sinatra album. He said nothing about what he was doing, but soon it became clear that he was ‘ghosting’ for Bill Putnam. Bill was a top-level mixer at his Universal Studios in Chicago but mixed only rarely at his ‘new’ United Recorders in Hollywood. But Sinatra, after leaving Capitol and founding his Reprise label, insisted that Bill personally mix his sessions. It became apparent that Wally wanted me to see that he was entrusted by Putnam with the Sinatra mix-downs, without actually saying it. Then he could honestly say that he “hadn’t told anyone.”

But after a while Wally began to complain to me about the intense boredom of having to put in eight hours at United when there was nothing special for him to do. Wally was a hustler – he always had plenty of his own irons in the fire to tend to.

Then Wally accepted Putnam’s offer to manage Putnam’s new Las Vegas studio. After only a few months the arrangement fell apart and Wally left Putnam’s employ. He was back in Hwd. and opened his own small studio at Selma and Cahuenga, entrance on Selma. By that time I had moved on to other endeavors and had only sparse contact with Wally. Soon he opened a larger studio right at the corner, entrance on Cahuenga. And the remote biz was flourishing. Wally Heider Recording prospered, and a few years later was sold to Filmways (fat on Beverly Hillbillies etc.), with Wally staying on as manager for a few years. Filmways bought the whole building, which included Shelly’s Manne Hole, the famous jazz club operated by drummer Shelly Manne. Wally once commented to me that he was “now Shelly Manne’s landlord.” The dark side of that was when he had to refuse to renew Shelley’s lease because music from the club sometimes bothered recording sessions through the wall. That was the end of Shelley’s Manne Hole.

Then Wally called one day in December ‘61, in his usual panic, to say that he had booked two remote jobs on the same weekend. One was the Don Randi Trio at Sheri’s club on Sunset. The other was some unknown singer/guitarist at PJ’s, a very prominent club at the time. As a favor I agreed to mix the latter date.

Wally’s assistant Grover Helsley and I set up on Friday. I was amused to find that Wally had taken all the better mics etc.; what I had to work with was basically the dregs at the bottom of the box. And the passive mixer! I used my 3-track and borrowed a Universal Audio 1176 limiter. ‘Limiter’ is often a dirty word in the recording biz, but I had developed a special technique for using one in a way that maintains artistic values and does not squash the apparent dynamic range. It was a great help in controlling wild vocals. (Later, my buddy Lanky Linstrot used the technique for all the vocals he recorded on many more than a hundred albums. Ever wonder why the powerful voice of Vikki Carr didn’t crack the plaster? The limiter knows.)

Grover and I used most of the day setting up in the office area on the second floor above the club. About 5:00 we broke for dinner. I had come on my BMW motorcycle. I was not yet an experienced rider, and on the way home I let the rear wheel get caught in one of the ruts beside the railway (not street car) tracks which still existed along a portion of Santa Monica Blvd. The bike threw me in the air and I landed on one shoulder and the side of my stupid head. My clothes were all torn up, the helmet had a bash in it and my hands were bloody. The ER doc went over me again and again, saying, “As beat-up as you look, I can’t believe there’s not a broken bone somewhere.” Reluctantly he released me, shaking his head.

I mixed that night in pain. But it was nothing compared with the next night, Saturday, when the bod had begun to REALLY hurt. There were tears down my cheeks from the pain as I twisted the knobs. On Sunday I couldn’t get out of bed, but the date was done and the masters were in the can.

The date was for Reprise; the producer was the late and very great Don Costa. The album was “Trini Lopez at PJ’s.” It sold six million worldwide, I was told. But every time I heard one of the cuts on radio, my back hurt! It’s a good thing I was using the limiter. Every now and then, between lines, Trini would let out a falsetto “WHOOP!” I saw the compression meter duck 15 dB on some of those. There was no way to anticipate them. Fix it in the mix? Had I not been using the limiter, they would have been square waves on the master tape.

Occasionally I have heard cuts from the album in recent years. At first I was puzzled; the mix didn’t sound like what I put down. Upon closer listening, I understood why. Trini was not exactly a guitar virtuoso; many of his chords were ‘questionable.’ Sounds like they overdubbed a better guitarist who was playing in Trini’s style. But the master was on 3-track with no acoustical separation, so in suppressing Trini’s guitar, the drums on the same track had to be pulled down too.

But back to our great friend, Wally. Here’s the kicker: some time after the album was released, I happened to run into Wally somewhere. Stuttering nervously, even more than usual, he told me, “N-N-Now Pat, I gotta tell you straight – when someone asks me if I mixed the Trini Lopez album, I say that I did. I-I-I hope you’re not bugged by that!” I just laughed. I was off in different directions and was not trying to build a personal reputation in the recording biz. I told him I was glad the album had served him well.

Wally’s first ‘side’ project was Hindsight Records. In the old days, radio stations had ‘transcription libraries.’ The transcription records are 16” in diameter, turning at 33-1/3 rpm but with the wide groove as used on 78s. Three of the major transcription libraries were RCA Thesaurus, Standard and World. The companies recorded music which was licensed for radio play only. Thousands of music cuts were supplied on transcriptions. Some were performance duplicates of for-sale records, altho separately recorded. As radio gravitated away from older music, the transcription libraries were usually trashed. Wally bought all he could find. Among the Hindsight LP releases were Gene Krupa, early Stan Kenton, Harry James, Duke Ellington and many more. There were at least a pair of comedy albums which had not come from transcriptions, Bob & Ray and Henry Morgan.

Selected cuts were dubbed to tape, complete with ticks and pops. Wally insisted that each and every tick and pop be removed. In those pre-digital, low-tech days, that could only be done with a razor blade and splicing tape. The process itself was debatable, however. On sustained notes or passages, the removal of a tiny piece resulted in an audible ‘blip’ that I found more objectionable than the original click. The early click editing was done mostly by a good friend and associate of mine, Tom Shallcross.

In 1971 I accepted Wally’s request to became head of maintenance for the Hollywood studios of Wally Heider Recording, replacing my friend and fellow BMW rider Tom Scott, who was moving out of town, if I remember correctly. By that time Studio Four was up and running, down the street half a block. There were lots of remotes, we were making the conversion from 8-track to 16-track and maintenance was busy. Even so, I was proud that my team and I dug a lot of obscure, long-standing bugs out of the equipment in several studios and the remote gear. But I had always known that, as well as Wally and I got along when I was an independent consultant, I could never work for him. Sadly, that proved to be true and in just a few months, we came to a parting of the ways. With more than a little help from a few jealous staff members, I might add.

Wally admired knowledge and talent. But what he prized most was ‘hustle.’ Wally’s highest compliment was, “No grass grows under HIS feet!” Wally was a very smart man, but I feel that this priority caused him to make some regrettable blunders. One of his early studio managers was a guy whose total experience in the recording industry had been as an instrument and equipment mover. With a partner he had loaded my 3- track Ampex and Wally’s remote board and other large pieces in and out of my house many times. But he had hustle.

When I was head of maintenance we hired an older technical engineer with a wealth of experience at design level. He was making valuable contributions to the technical picture, especially in the 8 trk to 16 track conversions. While I was on vacation, Wally fired him. The only explanation I got was that when the man shuffled down the hall, he looked as if he had nowhere to go and was in no hurry to get there. (My words, paraphrasing Wally’s.) It was a great loss.

I had no regular contact with Wally for several years. I ran into him a time or two at Disneyland’s Carnation Plaza, which featured big bands all summer. A decade later, in the early ‘80s, Wally called and wanted to know if I would like to go hear a local big band with him. I did. It was a reunion of sorts, just the two of us. Neither of us mentioned the ‘old days,’ both good and bad. I wonder whether Wally knew at that time of his cancer and wanted to renew old relationships. At any rate, it was a great pleasure to see him again.

There was one more in-person contact. A few months later Wally hired the Woody Herman band for a private job just for invited friends. Woody and Wally had long been close friends. Wally once mentioned carrying Woody in his arms to the car for a medical appointment. An interesting sidelight was that one of the invited friends was Pee Wee Monte, Harry James’s long-time manager. James had passed away a few months prior and Woody, having been screwed royally and ruined financially by his long-time manager, was in need of good managerial assistance. Wally saw this as the perfect marriage and hoped that he could put Pee Wee and Woody together that evening.

But when the band took a break, Pee Wee made a bee line for my table. I had mixed a big band series at the Hollywood Palladium for radio station KMPC. (Come to think of it, I saw Wally there with the Tex Beneke band. Wally and Tex were long-time buddies.) Another of the bands was Harry James. Pee Wee confirmed earlier that evening that it had been Harry’s last radio broadcast, significant in view of the hundreds he had done in his career. So after this brief conversation with Pee Wee, I was surprised to see him sit down at my table during the break. But the real story slowly unfolded – Pee Wee was grooming Joe Graves to run the Harry James ‘ghost band.’ Joe had studied James’s trumpet style as a youth and played a very close imitation. The Graves band had not yet been announced publicly. Evidently Pee Wee wanted to avoid a potentially awkward conversation with Woody; that was why he suddenly found me and the others at my table so interesting! The Harry James Orchestra under the direction of Joe Graves was indeed born; I later heard it at the Carnation Plaza.

My last conversation with Wally was from my office as Supervisor of Audio Facilities at CBS Television City in 1988. I don’t remember why I called, but I was shocked when Wally told me of the cancer, all the more because, to the best of my knowledge, Wally had never smoked in his life; certainly not when I knew him. We kept it light and cordial, but the underlying current was heavy. Of course I wished him the best and offered to do anything that I could for him.

Wally was the poster boy for ‘one of a kind.’ He rocked the world of most who knew him. I believe that Wally was one of the first to look at remote recording professionally. BW (Before Wally), remote recording had usually been done radio-style – a minimum of mics, a small, simple mixer and headphones for monitoring. Wally was the first I had known who just about took a recording studio to an ‘on the job’ recording site. And he changed the world of remote recording.

I feel privileged to have known Wally Heider. May he rest in peace.

I enjoy the reminisences of the many others on this list who were associated with Wally, especially those who ‘fill in the spaces’ during the later years when I was no longer a close associate of Wally’s .

Pat Tobin