John Lyons and the Sound, Light and Spectacle Of Serious Business

Looking back to club sound systems of the ‘60s and into the early ‘70s is a bit like looking back at cars from that era or earlier. Even the sportiest ones could get you were you needed to go, but by today’s standards it was a spartan ride. You might break down, and the ride would be rough.
    It’s fair to say that this was the state of nightclub sound in the early ‘70s, when the idea of a DJ playing music, instead of a band, started to take hold in America.
“We had a DJ with a sound system and then we had a drummer who played next to the DJ on stage, to deliver the beat that wasn’t in a record,” John Lyons says. Such was the set-up on one fateful night when a young Lyons involuntarily discovered the first inkling of where his interests and passion, within a career in nightclub operation, would lie.
    John Lyons began his career in the bar, nightclub and restaurant industry as a bar back at the age of 14. Working his way up the ranks, Lyons entered
the management training program of his employer and quickly worked his way to the helm of Boston’s 15 Lansdowne St. Discotheque, with his brother Patrick.
    Before long, the Lyons brothers assembled an investor group to finance the buyout of the club, which they re-launched as what they call the nation’s first video nightclub, Metro. Cut to the present, and Lyons Group employs more than 4,000 people and serves more than 3 million customers annually at its Avalon clubs in Boston, New York and Los Angeles and the Spider Club and Honey in Los Angeles.
    “I started out in management at a very early age,” John Lyons says. “I was 18 years old, and it was a Saturday night. It was a large club, with 1,400 people, and the sound system went out. The drummer kept playing, and all we had was the drummer. I tried to figure out what went wrong, and nobody knew why it stopped working.
    At the time, there were four speakers, driven by one amplifier, and the fuses on the amplifier had blown. But I didn’t discover that in time. I closed the club and had to send everybody home on a Saturday night, because the sound system wasn’t working. I just said to myself that I never want that to ever happen again.”

If You Want It Done Right
In taking matters into his own hands, Lyons simultaneously took nightclub sound into his own heart.
    “The people who were doing the sound system were some local company that hadn’t engineered it very well and never answered their phone at night,” he says. “So I decided that I was going to learn how a nightclub sound system worked, just so I’d never be in that horrific position of being the guy in charge and not knowing how to get the sound working again.
    “I started studying what went into the system, and it occurred to me that it was really simple,” Lyons says.    
    “As the years progressed, and I took a personal interest in the sound, I found out that the people who were selling their services as the ‘sound experts’ didn’t really know what they were doing, and it started to bother me, as I owned my own clubs, that they were trying to charge so much money, when I felt like I knew more about sound than they did at that point.”
    As confident and strong of mind as Lyons was, he also was smart enough to know he’d need help in his quest for sound system enlightenment.
    “I just started tinkering and perfecting and eventually found Richard Long and Lou Feldman, two very talented sound designers out of New York City,” he says. “I spent a lot of time working with them on systems for my places. I couldn’t really afford them, but I made an agreement where I would do all the heavy lifting and pull all the wiring and install all the speakers, and they would come in and tune it.”
    Along the way, Long and Feldman liked the way Lyons did the work so much that they asked him to help them on some of their other installations.
“Our company started growing with more and more units, and I just fell into handling that part of it,” Lyons says. “It was a natural progression.”

En-light-ened Thought
    As his depth of knowledge grew, and his passion became more driving, the budding sound wonk Lyons did not suffer from tunnel vision.
    “I also have an interest in lighting and effects because I believe in having a room be an exciting place visually,” he says. “You have to stimulate people, because there are people who want to just dance, and then there are those people who don’t necessarily want to or know how to dance but want to be entertained and be part of the environment.”
    As with his mission to improve sound quality, Lyons’ endeavors with lighting were born out of necessity, dissatisfied with what was available in the formative stages of his career.
    “At the time, all of the really cool things you could do were just out of
my budget, and I didn’t want to do without them,” he says. “For example, there was the idea of visual projection. The video projector had not yet been invented. The only visuals you could do were either with a film projector or slide projectors that had some sort of mildly intelligent changing system. I wanted to have something like a drive-in movie screen and a giant projector.”
    Lyons met Henry Klauss from M.I.T., who was developing a means of projecting a live camera feed onto a 20-foot screen.
    “That was groundbreaking, because most people at that time only saw news anchors and stars on TV,” Lyons remembers. “It was impossible to see yourself on-screen. Now it’s commonplace; you go into any Circuit City and see yourself on screen. We took this prototype and projected images of people dancing while they were in the club, and it was an enormous hit.”
    The budding technician Lyons continued hanging around M.I.T., specifically its special imaging lab.
    “That’s how we got our first laser show,” he says. “Lasers then and even now are very expensive, but back then, there’s no way a 21-year-old nightclub owner could afford a $50,000 laser show. But the parts that went into a laser show were not that expensive. When someone put them together and sold it as a system, it all of a sudden became sticker shock. So I put the component parts together and built my own with some of the people at M.I.T.”
    If it sounds like Lyons and friends were creating a lighting equivalent of Frankenstein, in a way they were. But it worked.
    “It was kind of like a nightclub meets a science museum, but it was very effective, because there were things people wouldn’t see in everyday life,” Lyons says. “I always thought that really was what made a great nightclub.”

A Meeting of Minds
    In the early ‘70s, to hear Lyons tell it, scientists and club impresarios existed and progressed in two separate vacuums. Hanging around with scientists informed Lyons’ mindset across the board, including his ever-growing knowledge of sounds systems.
“When you looked at how sound was being done in a typical nightclub, there were so many laws of physics being violated,” he says. “I could never understand why no one had built a product to address that.   
    “The funny things is, the people who really knew sound — the true brainiacs of audio — weren’t on Rock ‘n’ Roll tours and in nightclubs. They were doing NASA stuff. They couldn’t get their arms around that. They thought of it as a wasteland. So I made it a point to learn everything I could from them and apply it to where I was.
    “One of the things that was painfully evident was that on a dance
floor you have 4-6 speakers pointing at each other and the inherent cancellation that happens when you do that. Also, speakers that were commercially available tried to reproduce the ratio of high- and low-bit information as a flat response.
    “And the ratio of those two for dance music doesn’t want to be flat. The more boxes you put, the more you have that ear-bleeding mid frequency screaming at you. The only way to get rid of that was to take an equalizer and dial it out, but that takes away a lot of the information. So, the basic good sound system  of the day is something that just had a lot of boom and a big hole in the 2k range. That was just accepted as what a dance floor was supposed to sound like.”
    Lyons wanted to figure out how to reproduce in a nightclub the sound quality he experienced in his own living room, so he put together designs for speakers and they went over well in his properties.
    Later, Lyons would take his designs to the president of EAW and point out that no one made speakers designed for dance floors; speakers instead were designed to be at the left and right of a stage, not pointed at each other. Soon Lyons and the engineering staff at EAW set about perfecting a speaker from the prototypes he had built at Avalon.
    Eventually, the team came up with the right speaker line and released it as the Avalon Series.
    “It’s not anything magical or mysterious, but it solved the problems in a dance floor setting,” Lyons says.

The Hired Gun
    When other club owners visited Lyons’ properties and experienced the superior sound, they wanted to hire the person responsible.
    “When they were told it was me, they just couldn’t get their arms around that, because I was the owner,” says Lyons, who in addition to wearing the hat of club owner and operator is head of John Lyons Systems, a firm with two divisions: Avalon Sound, which specializes in the sales, design and installation of audio systems, and Moonlighting, which which focuses on lighting systems.
    Over the years, John Lyons Systems has turned some comers down but has ended up doing sound systems for 15-20 venues. Most recently, the firm, has partnered with high-profile architects and designers to create some of the world’s most elite restaurants, nightclubs, bars and lounges including area, HYDE Lounge, Social Hollywood, LAX, Concorde, Suki 7 (all in Los Angeles); Martini Park (Dallas); and Light and Caramel in the Bellagio, JET Nightclub, Japonais, Bare in the Mirage, TAO in the Venetian, Body English in the Hard Rock Hotel and Mist at Treasure Island (Las Vegas).
    “It depends on what the place ultimately is meant to be used for,” Lyons explains. “When I look at the plans and what they’re doing, I kind of look at it as if I own the club. I don’t have too much interaction with the owners about that, or if I do, I tune it out. They have a very different idea many times of what it ought to be. For the most part, I get good cooperation from the client.”
    Somewhere along the way, Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of Hard Rock Café, approached Lyons with his idea for what would become the House of Blues. The goal was to make nightclub sound quality better for live music than any band might expect — and then to get them to expect it, at the House of Blues.
    “It was a matter of trying to create a better mousetrap, in that bands were doing a certain experience when they were touring at that club level, and once they got to an arena, everything changed (for the better),” Lyons says.
    “Our attitude was to take a club and give these bands touring at a club level the same experience they would get if they were in a large theater or an arena. It worked and started taking business away from traditional halls in the cities that they went into.”

All Part of the Business
    Lyons’ passion remains in operating nightclubs rather than designing systems for other clubs. “I want to make sure I don’t get pulled too far to one place to where I don’t get to do what I really enjoy, which is putting on parties and spectacles for people.”
    As dedicated to sound and lighting as Lyons is, he says it’s just an element of his overall zeal for the business of bar operation as a whole. And he has a clear vision of what a “superclub” should be.
    “What a superclub should be is a bar, where you can drink; a party or social gathering, where you can meet people and interact; a place where you can dance; and it should be like a Broadway show where you can be entertained by the spectacle of it all.
    “The death of the superclub happened, I think, when people didn’t really understand that, and they just thought if they had a big room they could have more people and more cover charges and make more money.”                 NCB