The Standard For Pure Audio (To Gary Hobish)

"A river, a mountain to be crossed/The sunshine in mountains sometimes lost..."-Anderson/Squire/Wakeman

The visual: a bald older guy (maybe with a hat on), sitting with his back to you, staring at a screen alit with audio files and wave forms, surrounded by machines and bookshelves and cabinets…piles of CDs and tape boxes and records…lair of a true sonic alchemist.  He doesn’t move around much apart from slightly lifting his head while focusing on part of the screen…moving and clicking his mouse in hand….he doesn’t need to move around much to perform his brilliance: whoever has worked with Gary Hobish knew that he was powerful, skill-ridden, fearless…behold, one of the most formidable sound manipulators. There was no project that came to him that Gary could not make sound great.  It did not matter what state the audio was in when it was delivered to him…he would moan a little…warn you he could only do his best…and then bring you back something that sounded better than you could ever have imagined.  Gary Hobish was a mastering engineer primo class.

Gary Hobish died suddenly last weekend, doing what he loved to do: dancing the Lindy in Golden Gate Park.  I met Gary through Filippo Salvadori, then running Four Men With Beards, who introduced me to him when I moved back to San Francisco with my record label in the early 2000s, needing someone to master my records.  It was pretty incredible that Gary and I had not met before, given that he was a genuine old-school San Francisco music underground veteran.  We had so many of the same friends, gone to so many of the same shows…ships in the night.  He kept his mastering studio in the classic ancient SF practice space Secret Studios on Cesar Chavez (when you enter, just follow the red painted line through the catacombs and you will find his place) and still had his rent-controlled apartment that he had lived in since the time when artists roamed the city’s streets.  After we officially met, I saw him everywhere…everywhere there was music to enjoy.  And we started working together…and never stopped.

Gary Hobish was mentored in mastering by George Horn, the legendary engineer at the legendary Bay Area studio Fantasy.  He cut his teeth working on John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk reissues as well as The Mutant’s new record Fun Terminal and The Greg Kihn Bands’ Kihntinued. As Gary told me, he would have probably stayed at Fantasy forever, but realized there was only room there for one top banana, and Horn was not going anywhere.  So, after some years, after he learned about the audio force from Jedi Horn, Gary set out alone, and started his own business that lasted for over forty years working with thousands of amazing records. As my friend Josh Rosenthal of Tomkins Square Records commented…just look at his list of credits on discogs…realize that those lists are not nearly complete. It is astounding the legacy of work he has left behind.

Gary and I spent a lot of time in his studio.  You get to learn about someone, sitting around for hours manipulating and listening back to music.  Gary’s list of interests…and how deep he went with all of them…was always so intriguing to me.  Starting with The Lindy…the swing dance that rose from the clubs in Harem in the 1920s…Gary was a fervent Lindy dancer.  When Gary first told me of his love of the Lindy, I was somewhat dumbfounded…he just did not look like the Lindy type (and sorry, Gary, for the typecast). I learned that not only did he participate in the Golden Gate Park weekend Lindy gathering….every week…I found that he was the one who set up their sound system.  The last time I saw him dance was not in Golden Gate Park, however, but at SF Jazz on one of the Sun Ra Arkestra swing nights: he walked around the front area looking for partners, getting right to it when an interplanetary opportunity availed himself to get on down.

Gary loved coffee mugs….set up a facebook page: Today’s Mug…to celebrate his and his hundreds of friends specific pottery passion. Gary loved latkes…putting on a huge latke party every Hanukkah. Gary was one of the first-in-line to test out new pro-tools technologies.  The engineers knew how good he was, how savvy he was…and Gary loved to demonstrate the new advancements during breaks in between tracks (or by using them on tracks currently being worked on).  Gary played bass in one of the original late-70s Bay Area underground bands….The Jars.  They played shows at the Mabuhay Gardens…played with all of the local legendary punk bands that came out of that era. Just a few years ago Gary oversaw a reissue of all of the Jars recordings (you bet they sounded sonically great). Gary loved silent films and he followed his love for the silents by serving for years as the supervising music engineer for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, always making sure the live scores sounded great and were recorded brilliantly…fighting the fight more recently to keep The Castro Theater open.

There are so many more passions Gary had…and so many different groups of people he celebrated them with…and so much music (NRBQ, English Prog, Psych….).

Gary and Warren Defever at an Infinite River show at our house

We spent a hell of a lot of time talking about the projects we were working on.  When we were working on an Idelsohn Society project…The Tikva Records Story…the only source we had for one of the tracks was a 45 with a deep scratch all the way through. But a week later, Gary sent us a wetransfer with a file of his handiwork” a beautifully restored record that sounded so pure, so good. When I had a crazy idea of taking a bunch of Otha Turner Picnic tapes that Luther Dickinson had lying around and weave them together in a way to replicate what I remembered what it had been like to be in the middle of the festivities…complete with the music and with the talking and the crowd and the other ambient sounds…I handed Gary a mess-of-a-package with a spool of notes, 3 DATs of recordings with about fifteen different snibbits of musical puzzle pieces.  Gary carefully sewed and crafted them together, orchestrating a 24-minute audio experience beautifully creating an aural experience for the listener of what being at the picnic might have felt like decades ago when Otha was still alive (it is available on the 2LP Everybody Hollern’ Goat reissue). When Reboot was mastering the tracks for the recent rescored Golem soundtrack for vinyl, and had some big-spectrum audio filling up 27 minutes of a side, Gary was able to master it in such a way that Warren Defever could then cut it to record still have it sound great.  For those not in the know, best practices for cutting a record is to keep it below 21 or 22 minutes. 27? That is insane…27 and having it sound good? That is miraculous.

A screen-grab of side 1 of Development, as pieced together by Gary

The last audio voyage Gary and I embarked on together was the most difficult we had been on together: getting a good master for one of the rarest of Jamaican records: Derrick Morgan’s 1972 early reggae masterpiece, Development.  We had no tapes. Derrick Morgan did not even have a good copy of the record. We could only find crap (super crap) vinyl records of the original pressing that were both problematically mastered and manufactured and scratched to death. There was a warble…something muffly…baked into the grooves with the songs…stuff that not even wizards could conceive of making right.  But Gary had patience…Gary had insane skills and over-the-top omniscient audio know-how; he was better than a wizard: he was Armin Hammer (his punk name, his mastering company name being A. Hammer Mastering): the standard of purity, the standard for pure audio.  He took bits and pieces of the songs from the records we had found: he Frankensteined together verses of songs from one record…splicing them on to choruses of songs from another.  It took us over two years to finish the mastering job for the record and damn it…it sounds absolutely beautiful.  Resurrected from the space of unlistenability. He did that all the time.

Gary showed up whenever I had a band playing…whenever I had a house concert…whenever there was fun to be had.  He supported all of his friends in a way that few do, which makes the hole that he left behind that much wider and deeper.  The last text I got from him was a congratulations on Kaya’s Bat Mitzvah. The guy was a mensch…a rare, classic San Francisco scenester…a true friend…and one of the greatest sound engineers of the modern era.

RIP Gary Hobish.