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.
2004 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
