The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

seemed to tell Shelby’s story. It was all very cleverly done. It was too much for anyone watching it to process and the effect was both awe-inspiring and mesmerizing. It was unforgettable. ] SAAC: It was such a hit that the fol- lowing year we asked you to come back to the second convention in Her- shey to show it again, realizing that the majority of people attending that convention would not have been at the first one. SERB: My brother and I drove a box- truck across the country. I gave up my vacation to do it, and I had just gotten married. SAAC: Your wife was lucky you didn’t ask her to go. SERB: For some reason she didn’t want to go. I can’t imagine why. SAAC: We remember putting a re- quest for slides in the club magazine so you could have a lot of new images in the show, of cars whose owners would likely be at the convention. Dur- ing the first showing at Oakland everyone was transfixed by the show. But during the second showing, when somebody recognized their car on the screen or recognized a car they were familiar with, they cheered, and after the first time that happened it was sort of infectious. SERB: The second show at Hershey used the same narration and music but a lot of new slides. A lot of East Coast cars. I also did the show at the third convention in Pasadena in 1978. SAAC: What happened next in your professional life? SERB: I sold my Cobra in 1978 to buy Pro Media, the company I was work- ing for. It was a very small company; there were only three of us. We sailed along installing church sound sys- tems, corporate training rooms, corpo- rate board rooms, school gymnasiums and at the same time we had a sound system rental. We did a lot of corpo- rate work and local gigs in the Bay area. In 1988 Luciano Pavarotti came to San Francisco. We supplied the sound system for his concert. From then on we traveled with him. That put us on the map. I bought the com- pany that did The Grateful Dead in 1997. It was kind of a typical MBA story. Jerry Garcia died in ‘97 and the sound company that was working for The Grateful Dead only had one cus- tomer: The Grateful Dead.When Jerry died the whole thing stopped. They were going under, so I bought them – they were right across the Bay, in Marin. About the same time the Dave Matthews Band was a bar band and those guys were working for Dave Matthews also. He hit a home run and pretty soon he was doing stadiums and the company ended up being stronger than it had been just working for the Grateful Dead. SAAC: So you did all of the sound for concerts in stadiums and everything that entailed. SERB: Yes.We did all of the Pavarotti stuff, too. We worked for Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Primus and all the Dead bands at that time. We also did a lot of corporate work. That’s re- ally where the money was: IBM, Coca Cola, Pepsi. SAAC: What would you do for them? SERB: They had what they called a “Golden Circle.” It would be the top hundred sales people from around the world; they would fly them off to Bermuda and have entertainment every night and business meetings during the day. We would provide everything for the business meetings and for the entertainment at night. SAAC: That’s not too tough, working in Bermuda. SERB: They always picked great spots but we were kind of locked up in the ballroom. We went to Zurich, Maui, we went all over the place. All of the garden spots. But I was never home. SAAC: Yeah, you pay for it one way or the other. So, this company got bigger and bigger? SERB: It got bigger and bigger, but at the same time the company started with permanent installations. With built-in sound systems. Back then it was slide projector and 16mm. It even- tually got into tele-conferencing and very large sound systems. There would be board rooms or corporate training centers; big contracts; millions of dol- lars. In 1990 we did our first football/baseball stadium, Candlestick Park, and we ended up working on about thirty of them after that. All the broadcast facilities, sound systems, twenty-eight hundred TVs in the sta- dium and all the network distribution for all the AV systems. Miles and miles and miles of wire. Those systems helped us grow the company. SAAC: When you set up a sound sys- tem at an arena do you have to take it down after the concert? SERB: Oh yeah. We roll in at eight o’- clock in the morning and eight o’clock that night there’s going to be a show – whether you’re ready or not.When you roll in there’s a big army of guys to un- load the trucks and set everything up. You do a sound check about four o’- clock in the afternoon and the doors open at 6 or 7 and off goes the show. It lasts until about 11 o’clock and then you load the trucks back up. SAAC: When we were on this past Oc- tober’s GT350 tour, one of the stops was at the Claire Brothers. We had no idea anything like that even existed. [ For those who may not know, the Claire Brothers and Tate Manufactur- ing operate a large business that pro- vides special effects for concerts and shows. They have a hundred-acre cam- pus in eastern Pennsylvania that has numerous buildings, a fully-equipped hotel and a huge, six-story hangar- type sound stage where everything is set up and tested in advance of a con- cert or tour, because once the show starts, everything has to work flaw- lessly. Gone are the days when a band would set up on a stage and just play their instruments. Today there can be a light show, pyrotechnics, videos and whatever else someone can dream up, in addition to the professional sound system (think Super Bowl Half-Time Show.). And when the show starts it all has to work like clockwork. It’s set up The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 40