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Joe
Anderson at the Console:
Sweetening the Sound of Mormon Music
By
Ron Simpson
When
Thanksgiving Point ran the Michael McLean and Kevin Kelly show The
Ark for a second season, producer Staci Peters confided, “One
of my favorite things about this season has been working with [sound
contractor] Joe Anderson. The shows sound rich and wonderful, and
when anything goes wrong, he’s the calmest, most effective troubleshooter
I’ve ever seen.”
What
went unsaid was that Joe Anderson was in his first summer out of
college (BYU), and selecting him had been a bit of a gamble in the
eyes of the production company. Other applicants were seasoned sound
designers and contractors with credits a mile long.
Now,
just a few short years later, the 2003 holiday season has just ended,
and Joe Anderson has proved the logical choice as sound contractor
for Michael McLean’s prestigious Forgotten Carols tour, which
played to an estimated and unprecedented 50,000 ticket holders in
seven cities.
“I’d
have to single out Forgotten Carols as one of the shows I’m
proudest to have been associated with,” comments Anderson. “It’s
such a great experience—after working that hard to mount a production—to
be rewarded by big and enthusiastic crowds every single night of
the run.”
I’ve
watched and listened as Joe delivers national quality sound—rich
and punchy—night after night with demanding artists like Jericho
Road or Ryan Shupe and the Rubber Band.
There
was an event during the Salt Lake Winter Olympics where Joe helped
me out of a tough spot. It turned out that the president of Finland
decided to make a surprise appearance toward the end of the games,
to congratulate the Finnish athletes who had competed so well. My
wife, Maisa, a Finn, was connected to both the sponsors of the President’s
reception and to the Finnish press corps attached to the Games.
Consequently I was contacted at the last minute about sound. A Finnish
blues band and a legendary pop singer were appearing, and there
was concern that the sound would be inadequate for the hall. I turned
to Joe, who, as always, provided the perfect sound solution, and
the well-attended evening, featuring a hidden-from-the-public meeting
of LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley with the Finnish president in
a side room, was a resounding success.
While
Joe Anderson may be a relatively new name in the top echelons of
sound contracting, his pre-professional life for several years as
the head audio engineer for BYU’s touring Young Ambassadors’ shows
was in many ways Broadway tough.
Unlike
a Broadway show that has about thirty days of pre-opening tech rehearsals
to lock down every detail of the production, including implementation
of the sound design and the presetting  of all sound levels, the Young Ambassadors do things
the hard way, moving their sophisticated gear into a venue in the
morning, creating their own look and feel out of a rented space,
then sound checking quickly that same afternoon, and opening the
house at 7 PM prior to a 7:30 curtain—whew. There is no appreciable
simplification of the gear for the road: Joe was expected to calibrate
and soundcheck 24 state-of-the-art wireless transmitter mic systems,
identifying and moving off any local police or other frequencies
that might clash with any of our preset channels. I worked with
Joe during those years, creating the music mix of the shows while
he managed all the performer channels and delivered the final mix.
In between us sat stage manager Adrian Riggs, calling the show.
(Riggs is now company manager for a Broadway touring company.)
What
was the most suspenseful concern Joe had working overseas? “Power
issues, without question. We just never knew when some huge incompatibility
or power failure would come along. Remember Botswana?”
Honestly
I had forgotten. But in Botswana, where we had set up our show in
a sort of theater located in the biggest hotel, a power surge had
ripped through our gear right at sound check time, shutting us down.
This outage, Joe reminded me, proved impossible quickly to analyze
and fix. “So I called [BYU technical director] John Shurtleff, who
was in Chicago or somewhere in the Midwestern USA with the Living
Legends show. He talked me through a hidden chain of fuse replacements,
and we got back in business.”
 Some of the halls in which Joe worked were top of the
line, such as the gilded and elegant Teater Sand du Plessis in Bloemfontein,
Pretoria, South Africa. Others were multi-purpose rooms that had
to be converted quickly into some kind of usable theatrical space,
such as in Botswana, or in the Sunway Lagoon Resort Hotel Ballroom
in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In
all those varying scenarios, Joe delivered beautiful, glorious,
thundering sound.
One
of Joe Anderson’s trademarks on the road is that he turns soundcheck
into stress-relief time. Armed with a microphone and a collection
of studied character voices including deejay affectations, he entertains
the cast as he checks their microphones, adjusting their sound and
setting levels.
Just
about a year ago, Joe was hired to do sound for one of Salt Lake
City’s First Night celebration concerts. He backed his big Andersound
truck into the access tunnel. Opening the show that night was well-known
LDS singer/songwriter and Deseret Book artist Cherie Call, whom
Joe had been dating. Later that same evening, Jericho Road was to
be featured and Cherie stayed around after her set just to hang
with Joe, and offered to help him with some last-minute Jericho
Road preparations.
“Cherie,
would you mind getting something out of the truck for me?” asked
Joe, at one point just before showtime.
She
agreed, and Joe explained that on the floor of the truck would be
a blue road case, and would she get one more microphone cable out
of it for him.
Cherie
went out to the truck, clambered up into the back, used a flashlight
to locate the blue road case, struggled with the latches, and opened
it. But instead of a mic cable, Cherie found a dozen roses, a ring,
and card saying, “Will you marry me?”
Soon after, Joe Anderson and Cherie Call enjoyed a temple
marriage, with a gala reception in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building
in Salt Lake City, just across the street from where that fateful
First Night concert had been held a few months before. Congratulating
them and wishing them the best were just about everyone from the
LDS music community. Joe and Cherie make their home in Springville,
Utah, along with Cherie’s guitar and Joe’s big white Andersound
truck. LDS music has benefited immensely from the talents of both
of them.
In
the arts-aware city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, there’s a music
critic named Bob Eveleigh who writes for the Evening Post.
Eveleigh’s caustic reviews have earned him his nickname, “The Slasher.”
When the Young Ambassadors played the Port Elizabeth Opera House,
the sponsors warned them to expect an annihilating review from Mr.
Eveleigh. But instead, The Slasher purred. The Young Ambassadors,
he wrote, “took the Opera House by storm, earning a standing ovation
after providing Port Elizabeth with some of the best entertainment
it has seen this year.”
Joe
Anderson, a lot of the credit goes to you. When the sound is like
butter, it makes the whole production seem larger and smoother than
life. By making it sound so good, you make the show look
a little better, which in turn makes the audience feel enough better
to jump up and deliver the big standing O.
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© 2004 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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