Tequilas in Red Square

Back to the time when car audio became not just a hobby but a passion for many. Sound-Offs were starting to happen all around Europe. In his first article for Talk Audio, Kevin O’Byrne eases himself in with a trip down memory highway.
 
I’ve been very fortunate during my time in the car audio business, not only lucky enough to mix my triple pleasures of music, writing and audio gadgetry, but to have travelled a bit too. Even now I’m writing this from a hotel room in Dongguan, in southern China. I don’t say it to sound flash the hotel is nice enough but I wouldn’t wish a visit to Dongguan on anybody. It’s just that, having again woken at 4am thanks to my body clock wondering why I’m still asleep at 8pm, it was the one chance to write the article I’d been promising the exceptionally patient Mr Rayner for over two months.
 
The world hasn’t exactly been my oyster but it’s certainly passed for a tasty king prawn cooked teppanyake style with a sprinkle of salt and pepper and a dash of lemon. As you get older you find that memories of places and people become precious, because wherever you are, however stressed and lonely, recalling those memories gives you a warm feeling. 

My first trip to Russia was back in July 1998 and was one of those experiences you never forget. Although some years after the popular revolution that made travelling to the motherland of the old Soviet Union much easier for westerners, as a visitor the place was still shrouded in intrigue and mystery.  

I’d heard a lot about Moscow and its people but wasn’t sure quite what to expect. Thanks to Andrei Eliutin, editor of Autozvuk (Autosound) magazine, and installer Vadim Jalalov – together they ran RASCA, the Russian Autosound Contests Agency – I was able to avoid getting into trouble. Apart, that is, from finding my visa had expired when I tried to leave, forcing me to bung sorry, pay 50 US dollars to ‘an official’ at the airport to let me out of the country. I tend to have a short temper in those situations, but it’s at places like Moscow airport that you learn to stay schtumm, nod helpfully and pay up. 

My connection with Andrei had started a few years earlier, while I was editor of Car Stereo & Security. The magazine was part of a pan-European group of specialist mags called ECAP (European Car Audio Press). ECAP was behind the organisation of the first two European Autosound Finals, in 1993 in Bochum, Germany, and 1994 in Rome.  

ECAP had wanted to devise its own rulebook and test disc, and I was put in charge. I knew that would become a nightmare of confusion, especially for those in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Holland who were already getting to grips with the IASCA rules. So I stalled, did nothing until it was basically too late to come up with a new set of rules. Devious but it had to be done. 

However, with absolutely no official help from IASCA USA at the time – infact they were downright obstructive in dealings with Europe all along, wanting vast sums of money for nothing – I was fortunately able to get some help via the back door and obtained IASCA rulebooks and judging sheets via IASCA’s European Representative, who worked for Rockford Fosgate in Europe. I wish I could remember his name because he was heaven sent. I don’t think we even paid for anything, while IASCA officially charged one dollar per judging sheet! The only thing we didn’t get was the events officially IASCA sanctioned, but no one gave a toss! 

Having all the official materials meant we could run the competitions to full IASCA rules, which certainly benefited the British contestants that first year. It also eased the problem of having enough senior judges, because I knew I could call on some experienced guys, many of whom have remained friends ever since. I was joint Head Judge of both contests. 

Much like I had done in the early days of CS&S, Andrei saw the potential (for his magazine) and sheer fun in getting behind the sound-off concept. He had visited the ECAP Finals, saw how it was done, and started to plan for a Russian Finals event. He invited me to be Head Judge.  

A team of local judges would be trained by two leading sound quality and installation judges from Germany, and the logistics (the paperwork side) would be handled by experienced sound-off administrator, Armin Mohren, working alongside Andrei. 

It was here that I first met an installer destined to become one of the world’s best, Dmitri Matveev. Like many great installers, it was the passion of competition that brought out the best in Dmitri, and it really all started at the first Russian Autosound Finals.
 
I remember the first Russian event fondly, not least because it took me back to when the whole sound-off scene had started in the UK in ’89. There was that same devoted effort, that same sense of enjoyment before the big money competitors and overzealous judging took some of the fun out of the events back home. And for their first event, with only a small number of local events and little chance for competitors to get up to speed, I was amazed by some of the workmanship and the quality of the installs and sound. I very quickly learned that Russians are hugely resourceful people, quick to learn and often very talented.  

Parts of the event I now see only through eyes half shut, you know, like you don’t want to remember too vividly those parts that make you feel a little less proud about yourself. 

Tip number one. Avoid drinking tequilas ahead of any important events or functions, such as operating machinery, taking a new lady out on a date or prepping the judges ahead of the first ever national Russian sound-off competition. 

Okay, a few tequilas by themselves would barely dull the senses. In truth it wasn’t so much the tequilas, more the combination of the tequila with the various vodkas also offered to me by the event’s sponsor, a well built and generous Moscovite who I felt would have taken badly any refusal to join him in celebrating the occasion. 

And the tequilas and vodkas came on top of the beers we’d had a little earlier, and later with the meal. Don’t ask me what I ate, that part of the evening is a touch blurry. 

But not half as blurry as waking up the next morning feeling like a half-ton truck had hit me, reversed over me, done a three point turn and then pulled into my stomach thinking it was a parking space. And now it was trying to get out.  

Looking like a badly drawn picture of Camilla Parker Bowles, I peered at myself in the mirror and wondered how I’d get through the next hour, let alone a full day helping to train a team of judges for the biggest event in Russian car audio history.  

Well okay, it’s not exactly the stuff of cold war legend, but it was important to a whole lot of people that it went off right, and they had invited me over as Head Judge to make sure it did. I had a big responsibility to them and I was risking fucking up big time. 

Fortunately for everyone involved, I was partnered by two of the top judges in Europe, Thomas Pasler and Nic König. Being of the other ‘motherland’, Germany, they were both consummate professionals, very organised and extremely efficient. I may have got the credit and no shortage of kudos for being the head judge at the first Russian national sound-off, but without Thomas and Nic, and my good friend Armin Mohren who flew in and assisted Andrei on the logistics side of the competition, I’d have probably overseen the biggest disaster in Russian Autosound history, not the most memorable success story. 

I have a video montage originally made for my old link online magazine, and with the help of Talk Audio’s well equipped technical department, you can now re-live the experience. Well, at least in part. Bear in mind how I was feeling when you see me in the opening clip.
 

 
Did I die and is this heaven?
I returned to Moscow a year later to assist in judging another contest, this time organised by RG Sound. Being the most prominent Russian distributor, handling several well known brands including Pioneer and DLS, they had arranged for a large contingent of Scandinavian judges to come over, predominantly Swedes.  

The judges were all booked into the Hotel Cosmos on Moscow’s Prospect Mira. This was, and probably still is, a quite impressive place on the inside, with armed guards at the doors and a large lobby area populated by ladies equipped with large bazookas. 
Of course, you understand these were not bazookas in the traditional military sense. 

These ladies appeared in the early evening and seemed timed, like some carefully laid booby trap (pun intended for once), for when the bunch of assorted judges gathered in one or more of the lobby bars after the day’s work was over. 

A feature of the lobby in the Hotel Cosmos was a staircase that swept up to a mezzanine floor. One of the bar seating areas was adjacent to the staircase, which had an open side. The only objects interrupting the view of the pretty things negotiating the stairs were the posts supporting the handrail. Those posts were damn annoying but we learned to live with it. 

The various ladies would walk in small groups across the lobby and up the stairs, then down again, providing entertainment for the sore eyed judges. This was, for those who haven’t yet sussed it, the ladies displaying their wares for punters who they fully expected would be unable to resist for the several hours that this went on each night. 

I later discovered that the ladies entered the hotel from the lower entrance, clearly with the full permission of the guards and hotel management. It was my first, but not my last, experience of an apparently high-class 4 star hotel with what was effectively an in-house brothel.  

Of course there wasn’t literally a brothel in the place, but the main assets of such an establishment were there in abundance and I can only assume the hotel was making money out of it too. We preferred to see it as the hotel’s idea of how to best entertain a bunch of predominantly sex-crazed Swedes fuelled by beer. Got to hand it to them Russians, it was right on the mark.  

One guy, a super lad whose name I won’t reveal since I can’t check to get his OK, spent hundreds of dollars a night. Allegedly not one but two or more ladies would entertain him. I hasten to add that I was not a witness or participant. More’s the pity.  

No one begrudged him his time of pleasure. An installer and shop owner of some fame in Sweden (and this will give his name away to those who know him but please, don’t reveal it openly), he had suffered from diabetes and, due to a combination of events, had ended up all but blind at still a young age. I don’t recall him speaking more than a few words of English but boy was he fun to be around. He must have had his dark moments but I only remember him laughing and eager to take whatever life could give him. 

That sound-off event gave me problems. By that time I was working as a consultant to Recoton Europe on the project to resurrect the Phase Linear brand, so I was there partly for that reason (RG Sound was the Phase Linear distributor) and partly because I’d got myself a bit of a local reputation for having head judged the first national finals. 

My involvement upset my friend Andrei. In car audio, politics is never far away. RG Sound was a heavy backer of Andrei’s rival magazine, Car & Music. He wasn’t best pleased when he found I was supporting the event, not least as both magazines had been involved in a furious row over the staging of the national finals that year. They wouldn’t co-operate and, as far as I know, never did. As I was working for Phase Linear I couldn’t really refuse the gig, but I don’t think Andrei ever really forgave me for that.
 
Tequilas in Vegas
I don’t actually like tequila very much and have drunk it on only a few occasions, mostly to be sociable, but for some reason each of those occasions remains memorable. 

We all remember our first time, don’t we guys? No, I don’t mean our first tequila. I don’t even mean our first I mean the first time we were seriously ripped off in a shady club. It was my first visit to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, January 1990, and, being a naturally cautious sort of guy, I tagged along with Vegas Veterans including Richard Lusted (then owner of Western Car Radio in Bristol), Graham Johnson (Alpine’s suave Sales Director) and Mike Wells (of Mike Wells Car Stereo Systems in London). They were supposed to look out for me. Not that I asked them to, I just assumed they would.  

Tip number two – never assume anything, even of your friends. 

That year I stayed at the Riviera Hotel, sharing a shabby room with Richard. In later years I adopted Treasure Island as my favoured hotel. When you climb out of a cab after a long-haul flight in economy, to then be faced with having to negotiate row upon row of gaming machines, punters, noise, flashing lights and general mayhem as you try to find your way around, you tend to prefer sticking with a hotel where you’ve got to know the layout. 

If you ever book to stay at one of the big hotels on the Strip, don’t enter via the front door off the Strip because that takes you into the casino. Reception is usually around the side or rear of the hotel. You get to know the quickest route to the lifts – sorry, elevators. Your arrival becomes a finely tuned procedure, akin to a well planned SAS manoeuvre. No distraction, clear objective – cab, hotel, check-in, elevator, room, crash out. 

One evening, Richard and I met up with the other guys and we made our way to one of the local bars. We sat up at the bar, which was quiet and relaxing. Tequilas were ordered. Behind us a young couple sitting on a couch were enjoying each other. After a while I was nudged and told to look round. The couple were well into heavy petting, oblivious to where they were. We began to wonder if they were the cabaret. 
Richard asked the barman for some paper and a pen and proceeded to write large numbers on several sheets, which he then handed to four of us. On his cue we all turned round, held the sheets high in front of us and cheered.  

8.8 — 9.2 — 9.4 — 8.7 — 9.3 
The couple suddenly stopped what they were doing, looked up and smiled sheepishly. I think the guy saw the funny side of it more than his young lady friend. We were creased up.
 
Never ask to be taken to a good club
I don’t remember eating anything after leaving that bar. Getting a meal in Las Vegas when the CES is in town can be a real pain. If you know places well off the Strip and don’t mind a cab drive, then you’re OK, and I’ve had some superb steaks in simple restaurants. If you can’t be arsed with lining up for a cab (and believe me the lines can be unbelievably long – never visit Las Vegas when the CES is on unless you have to), then your only option is one of the hotels, and that usually means a long wait unless someone in your party had the good sense to book the day before or early that morning. 

We decided to get a cab to a men’s club. There are plenty of good clubs in Vegas – Little Darlings is a favourite of mine, and Cheetah’s is popular – but for some reason my guardian angels decided to ask the cab driver to take us to a good club of his own choice. 
Tip number three. Never ask a cab driver in Vegas to take you to ‘a good club’. Many get a kick-back for taking you to certain places, usually clubs that wouldn’t get punters any other way. 

We all poured into a small, very dimly lit club. No, let me rephrase that, it was pitch fucking dark inside. Of course now (slight cough), being more mature and well travelled, I would immediately turn around and say ‘fuck this guys, we’ll get robbed here’. But this was my first time and these guys had visited Vegas before, so they must know the score, right? 

Well yes, I think they did, they just didn’t enlighten little me. As soon as we sat down we were joined by several ladies. I couldn’t tell if they were young, old, beauties or mangled gargoyles. An hour or two and several drinks later, I ended up in a private room with – in all honesty – a very attractive young lady. I say private room, it was just a partitioned area. A conversation was struck up.  

It soon should have become obvious that absolutely nothing was going to happen in there. At least, not what I or any other red-blooded male might have reasonably expected in a place like that. Not only is it obvious to me now – prostitution is outlawed within the Las Vegas city limits and, while it no doubt goes on in hotel rooms, clubs wouldn’t risk their licence – it was obvious to me within 10 minutes of eventually leaving the place. But right there and then, in front of this young beauty, well, it wasn’t obvious.  

She was still at university, earning a bit of spending money by working in the clubs. She didn’t exactly look like the kind of American hooker you see in films. She looked like a pretty, bright university student. It didn’t look right. I actually remember asking her what her parents would think. What a bleeding stupid question, but her answer should have alerted me to get up and leave. She said why should they think anything, she was just earning some money to support her education. In other words, she didn’t actually do anything that might be considered less than appropriate for a young lady.
 
There were so many red lights flashing by now, God knows how I didn’t see them. Yes okay, the tequila, beers and whatever else I’d drunk, it does all induce temporary blindness. 

So all she actually did was help to rob stupid, unsuspecting males of their cash. I left a short time later, 400 dollars lighter and with nothing to show for it but the memories. I’m not proud of it but we live and learn, don’t we? 
I did point out to ‘the management’ that I felt it was a pretty poor show, in that very English way, hoping for pity – I may have used a couple more pointy words when that didn’t seem to work. I was escorted off the premises. It was the last time I did anything quite so stupid. 

I remember trawling around the booths – that’s American for ‘exhibition stands’ – at CES that year in a bit of a daze. It was my first visit, my first report of this famous show. I was frantic with worry that I’d miss a big news story. But that first CES report in the magazine kicked off a huge amount of interest, following as it did hot on the heels of the UK’s first National Sound-Off. It was early 1990 and there was now a nice momentum growing, not just interest but full-blown passion for audio in cars. 
 
Next time:
Fast Forward/CS&S photographer Andy Wood took some memorable pictures but his first assignment was nearly his last, and mine. Who remembers the black Porsche 911 in the first issue? Well, Andy bounced his Bronica camera off the rear side panel of that Porsche, and lived. More next time
 
Kevin O’Byrne