Rock Hall of Fame hails Heil's technical wizardry

FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS, Ill. -- The keen ear and technical know-how that put Bob Heil's name in the Rolodexes of rockers Pete Townshend, Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton have landed him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.\nA display of mixing boards, special effects machinery and speakers made by Heil and used by the biggest rock acts of the 1970s will be put on permanent display June 8 in the Cleveland museum.\n"This is something I have been putting together for about a year and half," Heil said of the display. "There's a lot of history in this equipment. I told the curator from the Hall of Fame that I would clean everything up really good for him and he freaked out. He told me not to clean or fix anything."\nHeil is a pioneering figure in the industry not only because he built the high-powered sound systems that made 1970s concerts the spectacle they were, according to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Curatorial Director Howard Kramer. He also pioneered methods to make that A-bomb-loud sound well articulated, instead of just a wall of unintelligible noise.\n"The concert business became what it is today because he made the experience so much better for the customers," Kramer said of Heil. "No one made the leaps in live sound that he did."\nHeil, can pinpoint the date he made it in rock 'n' roll. It was a fateful night in 1970 when he found himself on the opposite end of a phone line with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia.\nThe psychedelic rock band arrived in St. Louis without its sound equipment and was desperately looking for something to borrow for a show at the Fox Theatre. In stepped Heil, who supplied a public address system complete with speakers, mixing board and microphones from his store, the Ye Olde Music Shoppe in Marissa, Ill.\n"It was so much better than what they had, it blew them away," Heil said. "They took my stuff on tour with them when they left for their next show."\nAfter that, luminaries of '70s rock 'n' roll sought out Heil, who eventually relocated to Fairview Heights and changed the name of his business to Heil Sound.\nThe Who had him build a custom quadraphonic mixing board for the band's 1974 Quadrophenia tour. The board, called MAVIS for Music and Voice Instrument System, along with a rear channel speaker from the tour, are the centerpieces of the Heil exhibit, according to Kramer.\nAlso included in the display are a mixing board used to produce the sound for the legendary Mississippi River Festival and a fiberglass Talk Box, serial number 1, signed by Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton.\nThe Talk Box, which was invented by Heil, allows a guitarist to manipulate the sound of his instrument with his mouth.\n"Joe wanted it for his song 'Rocky Mountain Way,' so I built it for him," Heil said. "He made a sort of guttural sound with it. But Peter Frampton could actually talk through it."\nA microphone in the display used by The Who singer Roger Daltry is still wrapped in the 32-year-old red gaffer's tape that Heil put on it to keep the microphone from getting lost in the crowd.\n"He would swing those things by the cord, and the microphones would come loose and go flying," Heil said of Daltry's trademark stage move. "While everyone else was thinking 'man, that looks cool' I was thinking 'Hey, that's my microphone!"