How Jerry and Mindy Harvey saved Alex Van Halen's hearing (what's left of it), learned some important lessons about business, and built Ultimate Ears, a $22 million company that is deeply embedded in the culture of the music they love.
Van Halen always represented heavy metal excess, but at its peak the band was the American dream in a nutshell. It encompassed the hard-working immigrant story via the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Alex, sons of a classical musician who emigrated from the Netherlands to the San Fernando Valley. It also represented the classic P.T. Barnum showman story in the person of the band's original lead singer, the audacious David Lee Roth. Basically, Van Halen was the skinny Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis and the fat Las Vegas Elvis rolled into one. The boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last March.
Along the way, Van Halen also served as muse for a classic American entrepreneur story, helping to launch the career of Jerry and Mindy Harvey, co-founders of Ultimate Ears.
Inspiration arises from the craziest places, even backstage amidst the never-ending drama of one of the best-selling groups of all time. This is the story of a band, a company, an eardrum-saving audio device, and enough ups and downs to fill a month of VH1 programming.
Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to rock?1
The year was 1995, and Alex Van Halen was fed up with all that noise.
That wall of sound Van Halen creates is murder on the ears. It wrecks them physically, and at the same time it makes it damn near impossible for the musicians to parse out their individual instruments to know if they're in sync on "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." It's an age-old problem that inevitably leads to the "gas fires," as Alex calls them: Everyone onstage tries to play louder than the guy next to him, and before you know it, each amp, speaker, and microphone goes to 11.
"Ed and I play together the most," says Van Halen, "and if he and I are off in concert, it's apparent." What Alex wanted was a device that could isolate the sounds. He threw down the gauntlet during the rehearsals for the band's Balance tour, and Van Halen's primary audio engineer, Jerry Harvey, took up the challenge.
Harvey was an industry veteran who had traveled the world mixing sound for performers including Kiss, Morrissey, the Cult, Van Halen, and also David Lee Roth, who at this point had been out of the band for a decade.2 Harvey first met Roth at a bar in the 1980s, and he's been linked to Van Halen in one way, shape, or form ever since. "'Hot for Teacher' has been paying my bills since 1986," says Harvey. From his perch on the left side of the stage behind a black drop, Harvey's job, essentially, was to make sure the band members liked what they heard (as opposed to the person behind the big board out in the crowd, who only has to please the drunken audience). Harvey says the job was half engineering, half playing psychiatrist to rock stars, and well worth the occasional raging monster ego. "There is nothing like the adrenaline of 14,000 fans screaming when the house lights go down," he says. "I love mixing."
A tinkerer by nature, Harvey started spending his free time out on the road trying to solve Alex's sound issues. In Japan he found tiny electronic components; in the States he found a speaker designed for a pacemaker. He mixed and matched pieces until he had a prototype for an in-ear speaker system. He connected the earpieces via thin cables to a small receiver (the technology for which already existed) that Alex could wear on his belt. The receiver picked up the signal wirelessly from Harvey's mixing board.
His invention functioned as an in-ear monitor, basically a miniaturized version of the traditional onstage monitors--the speakers that point back at the band. These in-ear monitors had dual drivers--that is, two little speakers--to separate the output volume into low (for bass) and high (for treble) frequencies. And they fit into shells made from impressions of Alex's ears. The monitors used the ear's naturally closed system to lock out ambient noise, allowing the drummer to hear the instrument mix clearly and quietly, by metal standards anyway. "It was like night and day," says Alex.
Skid Row was opening for Van Halen on the tour. Sebastian Bach and company wanted the device. Unlike the guinea pig freebies Alex received, however, Skid Row paid $3,000 cash for six pairs. After a third client--Englebert Humperdinck, as it happens--requested his invention, Harvey sensed an opportunity. He decided to set up an S corporation. Thanks to a late, late, late night of spitballing over tour bus cocktails, the company already had a name. Within weeks, word started to spread throughout the rock-and-roll community about Ultimate Ears, the earpieces that would eventually change the music industry for the better.
Harvey was living his dream job, and actually running a company was as far from his reality as windmilling a guitar in Wembley Stadium would be from yours and mine. His wife, Mindy, though, was back home in St. Louis, working as a sales manger for a large office equipment supplier and looking for a change. She was the only woman on the sales force and was unhappy with the boy's club mentality. A former model who had once spent her nights at Studio 54, Mindy had more or less been on her own since the age of 16, and was taken with the idea of running a small business.
The Harveys were entrepreneurial novices, but they believed that rock star support meant the proof was in the product. "I love Ultimate Ears; they're nothing short of incredible," says Alex Van Halen. And if an exacting musician like Alex Van Halen approved, there was an untapped lucrative marketplace and only one thing to do.
Might as well jump.3
To set the stage, here's a quick story about Jerry Harvey and his Trans Am. In 1980, the Grand Slam Superjam tour, starring April Wine, Judas Priest, and Sammy Hagar, stopped at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Harvey's hometown. The Red Rocker wanted to make a memorable entrance to celebrate his anthem "Trans Am (Highway Wonderland)." Hagar's people scoured the streets until they found Harvey tooling around in his 1978 red Pontiac Trans Am. They pulled him over. He gladly turned over the keys in exchange for tickets to catch Hagar driving his car onto the stage.
