Brian Herb

Credit: "Iron" Mike Savoia

Guitar Tech

Alice In Chains / Bush / Helmet

CHANGEOVER: Tell us who you are and what you do in the music industry.

Brian Herb: My name is Brian Herb. I've been self-employed in the music industry since I was about 22 or 23 years old. My main gig for the last couple of decades has been as a guitar tech touring with different bands. My main gig is with Alice In Chains. I worked for a long time for a band called Bush, but I also mix sound and was a front of house engineer for a long time. I also used to tour with a band called Helmet as their front of house engineer.

How did you get into the industry?

This is a true story. I fell over the side of an escalator and broke a bunch of bones in my body. While I was healing from this horrific accident, my brother convinced me to get a loan and start a recording studio. I thought it sounded like a pretty cool idea so I did. I built a recording studio in the basement of a storefront at 25th & Nicollet in Minneapolis. I started recording bands down there and that turned into running a punk rock co-op record label that released a few records that no one wanted to listen to. That turned into live sound mixing and then turned into the live sound company. The live sound company led to me touring with an off-off Broadway modern musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It was like musical theater but much more challenging than mixing rock bands, to be honest.

At some point I decided to move to Los Angeles for a brief period of time. While I was there, I landed some guitar tech gigs and took to that like water because I really enjoyed it and have always loved playing guitar. I've been doing that my whole life. I had a very strange path to the industry. I didn't wake up one day saying I wanted to be a rock and roll roadie when I grow up. I don't think anyone ever really aspires to that. You're lucky enough to stumble into it. It's definitely not for everybody. I don't think it's something that everyone could do, or want to do, if they knew what it was really like.

Let's talk about Alice In Chains. How did you land that gig and what is it like working for them?

My good friend Scotty Doc turned me on to the gig. He’s one of those guys that is one of the best friends you could ever know. He's also one of those guys that passes gigs to people when it really counts. He passed it on to me and I think I turned it down a couple of times. I didn't pursue it because I was doing the Bush gig for a really, really long time and was so comfortable there. I just never wanted to leave. People had said that it could be a difficult gig but Scotty was the person that was like, “no, it's a great gig. You'll love it.” I love the gig. Jerry Cantrell is one of my favorite people to ever work for. He's a good friend and a real person. The whole band and crew is great.

Where were you when COVID-19 hit and how has that affected your career? 

I was in Los Angeles. We were working on Jerry’s solo record. We were in the studio doing guitars and stuff. We had been off the road since, I think, September of 2019. I wanted to take some time at the end of that album cycle because it was long. It was in February and I was just getting my year planned out for 2020 and had a whole bunch of different gigs lined up that I was very excited about. We were in the studio and all of a sudden Coachella was cancelled. It was just in a matter of days they were talking about lockdown's everywhere. I left Los Angeles and drove home from the studio in a rental car, because I didn't want to fly at that point. Nobody knew anything that was going on and people were acting crazy.

I came home and was living in the back room of the house for two weeks to make sure I hadn’t been exposed before I hugged my kids. Then I was just trying to figure out what to do at home. I just started taking guitar clients. My wife put up a Facebook business page for it around 11:00 p.m. one night and tagged me in it and made me the admin. I thought no one was paying attention. The page wasn't even done yet. As I was finishing the details, over the first hour there were three or four hundred people responding to the page. In a matter of two or three weeks, I had more work going on that I could keep up with. The backlog started piling up and I had to start scheduling work into the future. It was very, very humbling. It was so humbling because people were trying to help me and my family stay afloat. There were no gigs. It wasn't like people needed it but people were holed up, wanting to get that old guitar fixed up and have some fun. It just kind of grew into this thing and it's been getting us by.

What else have you been doing with your time since COVID shut everything down?

I work on fixing guitars a lot. However we are also trying to get a company off the ground to build guitars here. The goal is to be able to build a dozen guitars a month out of the shop. There are four people that work at the shop pretty regularly every week. We've been working on the design for what the guitar looks like for a while. We got a CNC machine installed here on the first of the year. I think I'm on about version eight or nine of what it looks like. My goal was to be cutting guitar bodies by the end of March but we didn't quite hit that goal. We are trying to train people so that when we're ready to build a dozen guitars a month, we've got the people to do it. Plus, when I go back on the road there will be people here that can continue this work when I'm gone.

With all the businesses that I run, whether it was the sound company or the studio back in the day, there always has to be an element of mentorship and philanthropy. We did a thing around Christmas where we fixed up old instruments. It started off as just fixing up old instruments to give to kids but it turned into fixing up instruments and selling them and using that money to buy new Telecasters. Over Christmas last year, we gave away a bunch of guitars to kids. With the mentorship part of it, there's a kid named Jordan who shows up here every week. He's just graduated college and he's learning his craft and how to work on guitars. He does a lot of the work fixing up those guitars that people donate.

Credit: Paul Lundgren

Basically, I work pretty much every day and just fix guitars in the shop. Then I'll go in, hang out with the kids and have dinner with my family, then come back out at night and sometimes call friends to catch up. I might stay up all night messing around with the design software. A friend of mine at the beginning of the pandemic gave me the best advice and said to remember that it’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint. I'm not sure that things will ever go back to the way they were before. I hope they do. Everybody's excited. Everybody's so excited right now. Everyone's getting vaccines, and people are so excited, but we have to stay the course because we're not ready to jump back into a full concert mode. It's just not going to be that way for a while. We have to be smart about it and play our cards right. It's been a challenge for everybody. You had to reconfigure your whole identity and pivot on your skill set.

What is it that you're looking forward to the most when you get back on the road? 

That’s easy. Seeing all of my friends. When you're on the road all the time, you miss being at home. I miss my kids. I miss my family. I miss having my own band and trying to play my own stupid music and all that stuff. You miss all that. I really didn't expect to miss the travel as much as I do. I love being home. It's been a real blessing to see my children grow for an extended period of time. It's been amazing but I didn't think that I would miss the travel. And I miss seeing friends. It's like a tribe out there. It sounds silly but it's true.