Mercenary Audio - I Don't Know Much About Art, but I know what I like. by Dan Daley (the "Shit on a Stick" article)

by Dan Daley from "Studio Sound" January 1997
Reprinted with permission

Fletcher always looks like an alley cat that has just been in a vicious fight. And won, if just barely. Tattooed, razor-haired, with a Camel perpetually hanging from his lip, he looks more like a picture on a post office bulletin board than a poster boy for pro audio. Fletcher (he only uses one name) and his Mercenary Audio, a loose conglomeration of a recording studio, a vintage gear buy-and-sell service and now a production company all based in Boston, have been a fixture on the pro audio scene since the company was formed in 1989 out of the remnants of an engineers referral service. Fletcher has a highly developed sense of business, but one formed in the streets rather than Harvard. As he described the origins of the company, "Being a freelance engineer in Boston has the same income potential as having the Nutri-system diet franchise in Somalia. One day my wife told me, 'Sell something before I get home tonight.' I called up Ed Evans at the Power Station and he bought one of my LA-2As. Then I found out that other people needed other things. So I turned this into a pro audio dating service."

Once Mercenary became a manufacturer -- it markets its own version of a Neve Class A discrete mic pre and ancillary stuff like racks -- Fletcher became a participant at the AES Show rather than a spectator. And over the years, his Brooklyn origins and the need to keep from being lost in a sea of major manufacturers whose corporate spending made his annual revenues comparable to their lunch budgets, drove Fletcher to devise some interesting marketing strategies. Such as at the 1995 AES in New York, where he found a Harley-Davidson golf cart (the motorcycle manufacturer used to make them), chopped and channeled it, added an electric motor and had New York studio liquidation maven Ham Brocious ride around the show displaying the Mercenary logo (which looks remarkably like that of Harley-Davidson's) and the catch phrase "Analog Is Back And It's Pissed" on the side.

That sentiment provides a rationalization for what occurred at the 1996 show in Los Angeles. Fletcher, who says he has long had an artistic bent -- he specializes in rearranging garbage via nuts, bolts and welding torches -- decided to make a visceral representation of his disdain for both the quality of contemporary digital sound and for his view of the culture of home recording that has grown up around it. He bought a used Alesis ADAT for $75 and a new Mackie 1202 mixer. After getting both suitably distressed in appearance by holding $10-per-throw shot put Olympics in his shop -- using the taped wiring guides on the shop floor as markers and personally winning the Games with a 15-foot, three-quarters-inch throw of the ADAT -- Fletcher then impaled both the ADAT and the 1202 on a large iron spike and added a pungent title, "Shit On A Stick." The work was then displayed at Mercenary's booth at AES, a booth that in the past has been characterized by barbed wire, chalk body outlines and a smoking section, which in Los Angeles is not only against the law but will get you ostricised from every sushi bar in town. What was "Shit On A Stick" about? "It's about the fact that they have been telling us that digital audio is great since 1980," says Fletcher. "But it doesn't sound great. They've been lying to us. Some day it's going to sound great, but not yet. It's the emperor's new clothes. Things like ADATs are good writing tools. But no more than that. They're writing tools disguised as being acceptable for pro audio use and they're putting studios out of business. Most of the [records] I listen to [are] low budget; but the ADATs and the Mackies have taken away the incentive to make good-sounding low-budget records. They make them sound tinny. You can have great playing but the record has no soul because of the equipment."

Fletcher's passion is clear. And lacking the MBA that's become all too common as pro audio becomes a Wall Street industry, and having an innate level of social interactivity that's akin to what the Marx Brothers showed with Margaret DuMont, this is how Fletcher chose to both express himself and to garner a little bit of show publicity for his products and his stance. Alesis was not pleased. According to Fletcher, he received a visit on the show's second day from Chris Plunkett, AES's director, who said that Alesis had expressed its displeasure and who showed Fletcher the rule from the AES show handbook stipulating that no manufacturer will show another manufacturer's products in a disparaging manner. Fletcher was not impressed with the first reason for

Plunkett's visit -- he responded by saying, "I'm a firm believer in the U.S. Top Ten" -- an allusion to the Bill of Rights -- "and freedom of expression has always been number-one with a bullet." He had less success rationalizing the second, however, and after a short stand-off -- "I told them that I thought the ADAT never sounded better than when it was impaled ion a spike," says Fletcher, who adds that he also considered packing up his two-inch eight-track decks and ramming the Alesis booth for effect -- Fletcher realized that he had gear to sell and an investment in his booth. He relented and replaced the sculpture with a sign that read, "This space available. Formerly protected by the First Amendment." Which is to say, Fletcher capitulated, but he went down swinging.

According to a story in Billboard the week after the show, Jim Mack and Jeff Klopmeyer from Alesis were a bit incensed at Fletcher's use of their product as the whipping post for his opinions, noting that they felt that the sculpture "violated the collaborative spirit of a convention in which competing companies are increasingly partnering with one another...," and adding that they felt equally flattered that Fletcher felt that the ADAT was the ultimate icon of digital audio.

Mackie, on the other hand, had a very different response. "They were pretty cool about it," Fletcher says of that company's response. "Greg Mackie told me, 'You bought it; do what you want with it. I bet it still works.'" The Mackie 1202, of course, is not a digital mixer. Fletcher is passionate and slightly nuts, but not crazy enough to spend $8,000 on a Yamaha 03 console and impale that in the name of art. But he says the Mackie is also an icon of the semi-pro audio culture that so annoys him.

The very different responses of the two companies involved speak reams about where pro audio is today. Alesis showed no semblance of a sense of humor, and they played into Fletcher's passions and guerrilla marketing tactics. Alesis was once a small start-up company but, thanks mainly to the ADAT, has grown into a formidable corporate entity in pro audio. They took it personally, and in a way I can't blame them; their Disney-like response to the use of their trademark reflects the fact that Alesis' identity is so closely wrapped up in the massive personal recording market that Fletcher is so vehement about. From their point of view, Fletcher's artwork was an attack on them as much as on the product. To Fletcher, the ADAT is the Golden Calf of pro audio; to Alesis, it's the franchise.

Mackie, though, like its bearded, sandaled, somewhat Hippie-like founder, Greg Mackie, is the Ben & Jerry's of pro audio -- a laid-back bunch of technerds from the great Northwest who sometimes seem less interested in the progress of their own stock price than in the potential for life on Mars.

The two responses and the whole situation that developed at AES bespeak a diverticulation of the pro audio business, one that sees much of the industry heading towards the corporate stratosphere of high finance and strategic alliances and run by MBAs instead of guys who started in their garages; and on the other hand, the guys who, regardless of their level of success, will never get themselves spiritually out of the garage. There is also a schizophrenic ambivalence within the industry and within companies themselves. Alesis has not gone public for financing but has certainly become a formidable corporate entity; in their hearts they probably wanted to laugh about the whole thing but their striped ties were pulled too tightly around their necks. Mackie has gone to public financial markets and is there on the NASDAQ Exchange along with IBM and Apple, but the company seems to truly not want to let go of its grass-roots, basement scientist origins that also keep it close to the revolution that it helped start. And Fletcher, who revels in his own contrariness and rebelliousness, nonetheless knows that if he doesn't sell a mic pre at the end of the day, he's going to have to face his wife and get a real job.

Will "Shit On A Stick" change anything? Fletcher says he's happy if, as he puts it -- somewhat melodramatically -- "If one kid learns to think and to listen instead of hitting daddy up for $40,000 for Full Sail; then there's a reason for me to draw breath." In this columnist's opinion, if his scatological sculpture reminds a few people to stop and consider the cultural sea change that pro audio is undergoing, then perhaps I'll add a Fletcher to my collection.

Home | Gear | This Just In! | Swag | The Black Pages