From tonysounds@yahoo.com Fri Oct 05 08:31:24 2012
Subject:RIP Steve Hayes

I “met” Steve after purchasing one of his preamps (I can’t remember if it was used on ebay, which it probably was, or new from him), one of the baseline footpedal jobs. It had 2 lamps in it, both amber, one for “On”, and one for “fast”. In talking with him, I told him it would make more sense to have the “fast” lamp green. So he did it. And then he busted my balls for years because of it. :) 
 Why are you even looking at the footpedal while you’re playing???”  Of course he was right, but he entertained my mania.  We struck up a solid friendship after that.  He would help me over the phone improve my then current leslies (a pair of single rotor short boy Orpheus Model 25s turned into dual rotor leslies, one of which was named The Bulldog, so named because of the grunting tone it had…I had gotten lazy on that one and decided not to expand the 12” hole and just mounted the 15” speaker on it, and it really did growl and grunt!).  I was touring then, and I didn’t think anything of calling him at 7pm from Ames, Iowa “Hey Steve, this thing just died, what the hell do I do?!!!” He’d talk me off the ledge, patiently walk me through the troubleshooting, and would tell me how to MacGyver it for the night, and then instruct me how we were going to fix it properly the next day.  He’d send me parts anywhere.  Eventually, he
talked me into shipping him both of those leslies so he could go through them with a fine tooth comb and make them Speakeasy indestructible. 
 
Eventually I became his guinea pig for his new designs (he preferred “test pilot”). Because of the music and bands I play with, LOUDER!!! was always an issue.  So he built me what eventually became the Dominator (I think Mate Stubb still has a version of it), separate rotor boxes, and an AMA/power amp rack to go with it.  Retarded loud at 600watts!  We went through a few iterations of that to get it to where it was, but it was awesome!  When gas hit $4.00 a gallon in the Bush years and it cost me $75.00 to fill my van with gas, I decided it was time to finally streamline the rig.  “Steve, we need to make this thing smaller, a LOT smaller!”  So that begat the final project: dual box leslie only slightly larger than the Motion Sound Pro145.  My requirements were that it had to fit in the hatchback or back seat of a car, and it had to be at least as loud as The Dominator.  That was a six month project that made UPS a lot of money, between
the actual rotor boxes, then all the drivers and components that were being shipped.  It sounded great, but just didn’t have the volume I needed, especially because it was so short.  The final version, I’m not kidding, had 4 Kevlar drivers in the upper rotor box!  It was small, but that upper rotor box now weighed 90lbs.  CRAZY!
 
One day we were talking about pizza.  And being from Chicago, I know a little something about pizza.  And he was going off about pizza, how great it was because of the cheese in PA.  I guess he didn’t factor in that Wisconsin being 30 minutes away, we have some pretty good cheese at our disposal.  And really, the big advantage Chicago has when it comes to pizza is sausage. We have a huge Italian enclave, and we used to be the meat packing center of the world.  Chicago slaughterhouses used to reek out the South Side summers until 30 years ago.  I decided he needed some schooling about pizza.  So I FedEx’d him 5 deep dish pizzas from Giordanos, 3 sausage and 2 of his beloved cheese pizzas. (They put ground beef on pizza out there.  Blechhh!)
“Tony, what the heck is this?”  “That is PIZZA mthrfkr!  Feed your staff, and put the rest in the freezer until you’re ready for a second helping.”  He ended up cooking the rest of those pies within the next week.  Now he knew what REAL pizza was!
 
Even though I never got to meet him in person, we spent hours on the phone together.  We talked a lot when he was sick, and I think I appreciated those calls as much as he did.  He didn’t make his illness public for a long time, I don’t think until his doctors had a handle on it, and he was getting his strength back after the first couple of rounds of chemo. But we shared a lot in that time, and we got to feeling like brothers. 
 
Relationships wane and resurge, and life has a funny habit of getting in the way of living sometimes.  It’s downright strange to think we had a real bond though we had never met in person, but we really did.  
 
My wife said we were gear homos.  Of course she was right.

"The meek shall inherit nothing."  -FZ 
"Hitting 'play' does not constitute live performance." -T
www.myspace.com/tonyorant

________________________________
From: proto8
To: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, October 5, 2012 9:59 AM
Subject: [CWSG] Re: RIP Steve Hayes

 
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Steve NEVER turned down a technical challenge no matter what craziness I threw at him, and there was plenty.
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