Among the major behind-the-scenes figures involved in the San Francisco sound of the 1960s,
Wally Heider was one of the most unlikely -- middle-aged and very much on the corpulent side, he hardly looked like an appreciator, much less a participant, in the explosion of psychedelic blues and other sounds to emanate from the West Coast at the end of the decade. And that seeming visual disparity was only echoed in
Heider's personal preference for the big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, music that he played an equally important role in preserving and circulating.
Wally Heider was born in Portland, Oregon in 1922, and attended the University of Oregon and Hasting Law School. He practiced law for a brief period in the 1940s, but his first love was music, and he is reputed to have spent a major chunk of his early adult life as a hanger-on of
Woody Herman's band, following them from gig to gig (anticipating later fans of
the Grateful Dead) and recording every show with the tape machine he had loaded in his car (again, blazing the trail for
Grateful Dead fans). He was fortunate to come along just as magnetic tape had replaced lacquer masters as the standard medium for preserving sound, and electronic recording had begun forging ahead by leaps and bounds. He was especially influenced by the work of Bill Putnam, an engineer who is often described as the "father" of the modern (i.e., post-World War II) science of studio recording, and worked at Putnam's United Western studio for a time as an assistant. By the mid-'50s,
Heider had abandoned the practice of law and established his first recording studio in San Francisco, where he quickly built up a reputation for high-quality work, as well as being one of the most user-friendly operations of its kind.
Though he was able to get in on the very tail end of the big-band era,
Heider's reputation during the 1960s was built on his work with rock bands, to whom he could be very accommodating. According to
Stephen Barncard's account, when
Grace Slick wanted to sing surrounded by light at a
Jefferson Airplane session,
Heider's studio obliged, installing a ring of light cannisters in the studio. His introduction to the booming San Francisco sound had been something of a baptism by fire, in which he was immersed in its full power -- having recorded the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966,
Heider was chosen to perform the same function at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, rock's unofficial coming-out party (he can actually be glimpsed in D.A. Pennebaker's resulting documentary film at the end of
the Who's segment, rescuing one of his microphones from the destruction).
He was reportedly glad to see Northern California getting fresh recognition as a source of popular music, but also saw a huge gap in the available recording facilities, which resulted in a lot of acts going elsewhere to cut their records. In response,
Heider built a new studio, located on Hyde Street, which quickly became a recording mecca for
the Airplane,
the Grateful Dead,
the Steve Miller Band,
Crosby, Stills & Nash,
Neil Young, and
CSNY, among others -- and not just as a formal recording venue but, by some accounts, just a cool place to hang out. During the 1970s, that list came to include Eric Burdon & War,
Santana,
Brewer & Shipley,
T. Rex,
Hot Tuna,
Van Morrison,
Gram Parsons,
Tom Waits,
Kansas,
the Doobie Brothers,
Creedence Clearwater Revival,
Earth, Wind & Fire,
Herbie Hancock,
the Pointer Sisters,
the Jefferson Starship,
the Ohio Players, and
the Jacksons. He'd also expanded his operation at the end of the 1960s to include Los Angeles as well.
In 1978,
Heider sold the San Francisco studio to Filmways, the movie/television conglomerate. By that time, however, he was busying himself with a new venture that was closer to his heart, involving the big bands.
Heider had long known -- as did everyone else in the business -- of the existence of off-the-air recordings and studio airchecks of the classic jazz outfits of the 1930s and 1940s, many of which had begun circulating, at first clandestinely, among collectors. These included unique and never officially released recordings by the likes of
Benny Goodman,
Duke Ellington,
Count Basie,
Artie Shaw,
Woody Herman, and hundreds of other legends of the big-band jazz era.
Unlike most of the people who dealt in these performances -- who were, at best, enthusiasts for the artists involved and, at worst, profiteers --
Heider was uniquely positioned to do something more substantial with the recordings in question, by virtue of his background as an engineer and his legal training. He was able to secure not only the best quality masters but also the necessary permissions from the relevant parties, to the satisfaction of all concerned. The result was Hindsight Records, among the earliest (if not the first) legitimate archival label devoted to the circulation of hitherto unauthorized broadcast performances of the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast to the cheap, almost anonymous issues that much of this music had appeared in previously, Hindsight albums were fully annotated and credited, and offered uniformly superb sound, rivaling the best reissues of the biggest studios. He later sold the label, but not before assembling thousands of recordings that previously had been trapped in legal and commercial limbo, and the label continued to thrive into the CD era.
Heider passed away at age 66, just as that then-new format was taking off -- he had already started a new venture by then, called Swingtime Video, which was built around surviving short film performances of big-band artists from the 1930s through the 1950s. ~ Bruce Eder