Keith Stein: The Guy Who Invented the Rollaway Bass Cabinet, By Jon Magidsohn

By guest contributor Jon Magidsohn, a Canadian writer and musician living in London. He is the author of a 2024 book on the enduring influence of the Aussie/Kiwi band Crowded House. Visit online at jonmagidsohn.com.

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It might have been enough for recording engineer Keith Stein to know that he’s had a long and fruitful career in music.

Photo provided by Keith Stein – posing with his prized vintage P bass

As the staff engineer at Vancouver’s Mushroom Studios from 1972 to 1998, he worked with some of music’s legendary artists, including Bachman Turner Overdrive, Ringo Starr, The Irish Rovers and, most notably, Loverboy for which he won a Juno award in 1982. He was at the board when the Incredible Bongo Band recorded ‘Apache’, the instrumental track that famously provided the sample for one of the earliest hiphop recordings (Stein even appeared in the documentary Sample This: The Birth of Hip Hop). But ask Stein what his musical legacy is, and he’ll say, ‘I’m the guy who invented the rollaway bass cabinet’, which he achieved long before he ever stepped foot inside a recording studio.

‘I came up with the idea,’ Stein, now eighty-one, says from his home in Vancouver, ‘while working as a design engineer for Acoustic Control Corporation in 1968. But it all started when I began playing guitar at the age of fourteen.’

Enraptured with the new guitar heroes of the day – Link Wray, Buddy Knox, Duane Eddy, The Ventures – the young Stein bought himself a Stewart arch top acoustic with the F-holes and distinctive trapeze tailpiece in 1958. It didn’t take long for him to take a stab at inventing a way of electrifying it.

‘I tried attaching a phono cartridge to the face and playing through the family hi-fi. That sort of worked. Then I discovered DeArmond pickups and fully electrified it with volume and tone controls.’

Constantly on the lookout for better and newer gear, he upgraded to a Fender Stratocaster after seeing Buddy Holly play in 1959 and went on the search for the best amplifier to put it through. But he couldn’t afford the Fender Vibrasonic that he wanted. Ever the industrialist, Stein found a JBL fifteen-inch speaker – the kind used in the Vibrasonic – in a local shop along with a sixty-watt power amp with EL34 tubes and, relying on the wood shop skills he picked up in high school, built a cabinet that imitated the Fender look. A few more tweaks, adding a pre-amp and tweeter, nearly got him exactly what he wanted at a fraction of the cost.

Ginger-haired and slight in stature but bursting with self-confidence, in 1962 Stein moved to Los Angeles to attend engineering school at Northrop Institute of Technology (now Northrop University) with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. ‘I took my guitar and homemade amp with me,’ he says, ‘to try and get some gigs while going to school. I wanted to put the proper JBL speaker in my amp and that led me to seek out the JBL factory.’

At JBL, Stein befriended Harvey Gerst, their Director of Promotions. Gerst, like Stein also a musician, introduced him to the LA music scene, getting him backstage at The Troubadour and The Whiskey a Go Go where they rubbed elbows with the likes of Hendrix and Joplin. Stein, with his nascent guitar skills and his eyes on an endless horizon, not to mention his appreciation of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, knew he wanted to be a part of that landscape.

Meanwhile, committed to continuing his engineering studies, he found a job drafting schematics at an aircraft design company in Torrance, California. This was followed by six months in Seattle, Washington drawing up ‘castings and forgings’ for Boeing.

‘All this experience added up to a knowledge of industrial design and my engineering school courses included electronics and physics of sound,’ Stein recalls. ‘I became well equipped for what came next.’

Returning to LA, his friend Gerst, who had been hired by Acoustic Control Corporation, recruited Stein to come on as a designer draftsman to create production drawings for their new line of solid-state amplifiers.

‘They were basically blueprints. My aircraft experience gave me the knowledge to make the metal chassis designs, control panels and the final details on the cabinets. My early teenage cabinet experience was paying off.’

The first amp he worked on at Acoustic was the 260. With two fifteen-inch speakers it rivalled the Fender Dual Showman, according to Stein, ‘but it was really about the styling. The power head featured the famous blue label on the control panel.’ He likes to tell the story of how, in 1967, he helped deliver the first six 260s to the The Doors directly before one of their gigs in Santa Barbara. ‘Somehow Vince, their road manager, got us to put them on the stage where their stacks of Jordan amps were already set up. The band used them from then on.’

Soon after, Acoustic realised they needed to maintain the competition with their competitors and craft an equally desirable bass amp.

They enlisted the help of Gene Czerwinski, founder of the speaker company Cerwin-Vega, to lead the team and he designed a four-foot-tall cabinet using horn loading to increase to audio output. As Stein explains it, ‘the sideways “W” cabinet design allowed for two theoretical horn paths of about three and a half feet to emanate from one eighteen-inch speaker. The speaker faced backwards clamped in a wedge-shaped sealed chamber in the middle of the cabinet. Across the back at the midpoint of the speaker cone was a sideways “V” splitter to divide the sound top and bottom and give the effect of two exponential horn paths, one above, one below the speaker. The inside rear corners each had a wooden baffle at forty-five degrees – essentially an interior bevel – to better reflect the sound around the corner.’

‘It just shouted “bass”’, Stein reflects, ‘and it sounded amazing.’

Bob and Steve Marks, the father and son owners of Acoustic, were delighted with the design but they marched into Stein’s office one day with a challenge: ‘This thing is big and heavy. Figure out a way to put wheels on the bottom or the side but do something.’

‘I had recently spoken to a roadie named Lee Housekeeper,’ Stein remembers, ‘who was the equipment manager for a band called “The United States of America”. He told me that he’d moved their Hammond organ by himself using a two-wheeled dolly, what we used to call a hand truck, with the handles on the top. I looked at the drawing of the amp on my board and realised the top and bottom rear corners were unused space because of the forty-five-degree ducting pieces inside. If I cut the corners off at forty-five degrees and mounted a pair of rigid casters there, then it would sit on its own bottom and the wheels would engage with the floor when it was tilted back and it could be rolled away. If I installed two handles on the same cut-off area at the top then it was its own hand truck.’

Drawing provided by Keith Stein

‘I made the drawing and showed it to Bob and Steve. They jumped up and down and said, “Wow, pure genius.” So we built one and the Acoustic 360 Bass Amp was the first rollaway sound cabinet in the industry.’

Photo provided by Keith Stein

Stein admits that the inspiration for his design was suggested by the original cabinet construction – a design Acoustic still uses to this day – but, with his engineering background and innate resourcefulness, he is responsible for adapting it to meet the company’s needs. And, as it turns out, changed the priorities of sound cabinet design forever.

‘At the time I just thought it was a logical thing to do,’ Stein says when asked how he reflects on that moment of ingenuity. ‘But maybe nobody else would have thought about it that way because they wouldn’t have known about the internal design of the cabinet. They might have just put four wheels on the bottom. Of course, now manufacturers all over the industry have adapted the design to other more conventional types of cabinets as well and since then I’ve seen them all over the world.’

Soon after Stein’s inventive contribution to Acoustic, they fired him for sleeping on the job, having spent too many late nights playing guitar on the Sunset Strip. He went back home to Vancouver and, after a long story involving Leonard Cohen’s girlfriend, landed his job as engineer at Mushroom Studios. ‘I’ve worked with everybody from the most famous people in the world to complete unknowns, and we’re all just musicians,’ which is about as philosophical as Stein gets.

Still, he can speak at great length about the music of his era, engineering and production techniques to a super-nerd degree, and he never fails to exhibit his pride at inventing the first rollaway bass cabinet.

‘One time in the 80s, I asked a roadie, who was wheeling a bass cabinet along, if he ever wondered how it first got its wheels. He said, “Haven’t they always been made that way?” I just had to laugh.’