This is the beginning of SoundMan's carrier in audio. It was the first time he was ever paid working with a band (and the last time he was paid for many years). The band was Hun from Niles, Michigan and the gig was a battle of the bands. The band won and SoundMan got an equal split. Free drinks, free chicks, rock n' roll and money⁈ Sign me up.

CareySound's first tour was with Mitch Easter's band Let's Active shown playing here at Washington & Lee University in Virginia.

What can you say about Papillon's. My best friend Simon Ritchy, first opened this club in the Quaker Village Shopping Center as a disco following the success of the movie Saturday Night Fever starring a young John Travolta. When the disco craze abruptly ended he started booking national rock acts in the room and for several years Greensboro was host to the biggest, most successful rock club in the state. In an era of drugs, sex and rockin' roll, perhaps the biggest unknown secret of it's success, and then it's eventual down fall, was that Simon was the most honest and honorable promoters in the south. In that he stood alone.

In the picture bellow Elvin Bishop performs to yet another sold out crowd.

One of my favorite bands at the time, Blackfoot performed at the Kenneth R. Williams Auditorium on the campus of Winston-Salem State University. We have done a lot of shows at WSSU over the years but this one was notable for being the only rock show we ever did there.

This was a outdoor festival at NC State featuring the first Brown system.

There are two people that are most responsible for our success in the audio business here in Southeast. Both are great friends. One is Simon Ritchy owner of the states biggest rock night club Papillon's and the other is James " Coffee" Yourse founder of the legendary band Covacus. Coffee and his band Covacus helped us make the move from nightclubs to major concert halls. Coffee's current band is Sweet Dreams.

These pictures of Covacus were taken at a show in the collisium in Roanoke, VA. The first person to the left in the picture below is Barbara Weathers who was still in high school at the time. She latter went on to be the featured female vocalist in the band Atlantic Star (thanks for the correction Arron) and was responsible for their biggest hits with her knock out ballads.

Located on Davies Street in down town Greensboro, Secret Garden was the second club to open in this spot after the Boardwalk closed. It was owen by Que Lee (his second club in Greensboro) and here we are loading in for a show.

Richard Bowling's dad owned Greenboro's first sound company Bowling Sound. Richard owned a succession of Greensboro night spots. We started doing shows for him at his Florida Street Club Cosmos II and worked with him until he stopped doing shows. This is a picture of one of our many nights at the club.

The many faces of Greensboro's own, The Alkaphonic's. Mike Armeniox was their Soundman.

Tate Street at the campus of UNC Greensboro, believe it or not, was the center of the music scene in Greensboro, It boasted no less than four live music venues in one block. The biggest was a restaurant during the day named Friday's that they turned into a club at night. Among the many bands that we did at that club was R.E.M, The Bad Brains, The Fly's and the db's. Pictured below was a the local favorite The Alkaphonic's. Keith Roscoe had his guitar shop upstairs across the street.

This was one of the first AHB (Allen & Heath Burnell) consoles sold to the US market and it had the unfortunate notoriety of having a 100% failure rate (it was officially 50% but all four of the ones we got broke immediately). It was the first desk that the British manufacturer had farmed out to another company to be made and it was on of the most poorly made desk I have ever had. It wasn't that it was a bad design, it was just badly made. The company that made the desk for AHB stole the next design and sold it under their own name Sound Tracks who went on to become DiGiCo. It's a small world isn't it.

I had designed a monitor console that I was ready to build when AHB sent me one of the desks for all of the trouble we had had. Like I said earlier, the design was fine, it was the workmanship that was terrible, so I decided to use it as a platform instead of starting from scratch. Here I am starting to dismantle the desk. I completely striped it down, removed the faders and the subgroup buttons and rebuilt it into a our first dedicated monitor console. It had twenty inputs and was capable of 14 mixes when I was finished.

I would never have thought that John would have grown up to be a SoundMan. Here he is at less than one year old at our warehouse on East Sycamore St.

This warehouse on East Sycamore was another of CareySound's many home's. This was the sales counter. This picture was taken 25 years ago. showed up to work one day to find Mike standing on the front poarch and cops and police cars all over the place. They had found a dead homeless man across the street and were looking for his shoes. We moved shortly thereafter.

The console, not the band. This was Electro-Voices first concert mixing desk before they bought Greg Mackies TAPCO and introduced their second series the PANJO. This is an early picture of the desk taken at Simon Ritchy's club Papillon's.

Here is another shot of the Catalina with three side cars making for a 36 channel desk. An unheard of number of inputs for that era. The desk was eventually sold to Jim Reese of Audio and Light Rental.

I've lost track of exactly how many different homes that CareySound has had over the years but needless to say it's been a lot. I started out in my backyard and then returned their a few years later for a short while. Here is a picture of Jay Speetjens helping to put up a work building in my back yard where he built a lot of loudspeakers for us and Associated Sound Products of Raleigh. My neighbors "encouraged" me to move back into a more suitable building.

Dave was a co-owener of Associated Sound Products in Raleigh with his partner Steve Foley. We were very close to them and traded shows from time to time. I guess they call that networking now. Dave and Steve are now rich after selling their business to their employes a few years back and are living the good life that comes to all hardworking soundmen. OK - so I lied a little and they aren't even rich in spirit but they did sell their business, or was it give it away, I forget. David is now one of our sales reps working for Bob Edsall who owns Applied Audio Marketing out of Asheville.

Burly Hayes, owner of Somewhere Else Tavern, and his brother Steve produced an outdoor concert on a farm. I remember that Bill Kennedy talked me into doing it for next to nothing (I'm not exactly sure what he had to do with the Hayse brothers) but I had insisted that we get get extra money if it rained. It's bad enough doing a show for next to free in the middle of the sweltering southern heat, but add rain and it can be down right torture, hence the hazard pay. It rained and we didn't get the extra pay, but at least it was hot and the only toilet that was in a small cabin behind the stage plugged up really early in the day. On retrospect, looking at that strange pile of speakers, I guess that we were lucky to get any money at all. We all had to start somewhere and we started Somewhere Else. Thanks Burly.

Ok, this wasn't an official stage at City Stage. It was an alternative festival that was at the same time and in the same place as City Stage. If I remeber the City didn't want to have two street festivals so close together and they made the Arts Council integrate this event into their festival. The stage was located next to the parking garage on Davie St. If you look real close you'll see a young Jay Speejens with his Soundcraft 400B desk doing monitor duty. This was the first of our Brown systems. Also not my favorite performer vocal microphone of all time the EV PL80.

Edwin McCain at ECU about 1995.


Ramsa WRS-852 and EV MT4 system.

1897 - Lenox, Iowa - My grandfather Ivan Carey on extreme left with his brother and sister, Mom and Dad and employees.

CareySound began making stereo speakers in my backyard tin he summer of 1978 and this was our first customer. I'm sorry I can't remember his name but he was a friend of Mark Sechrist of High Point, a customer and friend of mine from my days at Sound Systems, Inc.

This was the first PA system I built from plans I had designed in college 6 years prior. My reference source for this design had come from a book on loudspeaker design by William Cohen and If I remember right it was published sometime in the 1950's. There was math involved in the design of the horn but that was still in the area of 'cut and try'. I believe I constructed the W box sub from particle board. I still use that book today for passive filter design's. This was built around 1979.

I guess that's still my motto. This was a recording session in my first building on Spring Garden Street. That was in 1979 and was located in the basement behind Synder Construction. Yep, you guessed it. That's a EV TAPCO 6100RB and 6100EB mixing console. It was sold very shortly thereafter to Simon Ritchy for use at Papillon's nightclub. I can't remember who I was recording but I think it may have been Eddie Knight's band Blue Kangaroo.

John is my back-seat driver for this Plazazz concert in the governmental plaza in downtown Greensboro. I sure am proud of my boys.

We all had to start somewhere.

Our comming out party as a national act production provider began with Simon Ritchy once again helping us out and hiring us to do audio and lights at his Papillon's nightclub for headliner Delbert McClinton. It was our first show with a national act followed two days later with Elvin Bishop downtown at the Boardwalk. That's me with my spiffy Carey Sound t-shirt and orange Pual Klipsh hat the night of the show. Nice back stage pass on my belt too. I can remember Hugh Sarvis's comment on my custom-T to this day. But that's another story.

This was taken in our second storefront in the 200 block of South Elm Street. You had to come in the back door from the alley to find us. Good friend Simon Ritchy took pity on me and hired a carpenter to help during construction.

Back left Mike Armeniox, right Jay Speetjins
Front left Tripp Cains, right Ken Carey

Doesn't everybody have a picture like this one around somewhere? This was taken around 1985 in the parking lot of the Depot in downtown Greensboro. Notice the legendary Soundcraft 800 32X8 monster console and not to mention the KT DN27 eq we purchased from Rockin Road Audio of Hank Williams, Jr. fame located in Atlanta. I paid $10,000 dollars for the desk and $700 for the EQ, huge money at the time. Cliff Miller was our best rental customer of that desk when he needed something bigger than his EV TAPCO Panjo desk. In addition to the Panjo and 800 console in the picture is the 40 channel EV Catalina console and a hand built 16X10 monitor console based on an early A&H desk. The Catalina and monitor desk were eventually sold to Jim Reese and the money was spent investing in the company Moto Lights who made the first commercial moving light fixture to be sold in the US.

We built two of these systems. The other one went to Associated Sound Products of Raleigh, NC.