Bob Heil’s innovations enhanced the sound of rock

Bob Heil’s career as a groundbreaking sound engineer who brought thunder and rich sonic coloring to tours by rock titans including the Grateful Dead and the Who began behind a pipe organ in a 1920s movie palace.

Heil, who helped usher rock into its arena-shaking era by designing elaborate sound systems that allowed rock juggernauts of the late 1960s and ’70s to play at volcanic volumes, first learned to appreciate the full spectrum of musical tones as a teenager, when he took a job playing the massive Wurlitzer pipe organ at the opulent Fox Theater in St. Louis.

“We had to voice and tune 3,500 pipes, from 1 inch to 32 feet,” he said in a 2022 video interview with audio entrepreneur Ken Berger.

“Voicing taught me to listen. Very few people know how to listen. Listening, you’ve got to mentally go in and dissect.”

Heil died Feb. 28 of cancer in a hospital in Belleville, Ill., his daughter Julie Staley said. He was 83.

Although he worked behind the scenes, Heil was enough of a force that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland credited him with “creating the template for modern rock sound systems”

In 2006, the Hall installed a public display containing his mixing boards, speakers and other items.

“The concert business became what it is today because he made the experience so much better for the customers,” Howard Kramer, who at the time was the Hall of Fame’s curatorial director, said in an interview that year with The Houston Chronicle. “No one made the leaps in live sound that he did.”

Heil got started in the business in 1966. Up to that point, top rock ’n’ roll bands often had to rely on feeble sound systems that were drowned out by screaming fans. That roar, Keith Richards

of the Rolling Stones wrote in his 2010 autobiography, “Life,” was often so deafening in the band’s early days that audiences could hear nothing more than the drums: “We used to play ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ some nights, and the audience didn’t know any different.”

Heil gave rock shows the sound arsenal they needed. “We were the first company back then to build a package P.A.,” he said in a 2008 interview with audio magazine Tapeop.

“You could come to Heil Sound in 1972 and leave the facility with a complete system: snakes, road cases, everything — even a modular mixer.”

HEIL SOUND VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES Audio engineer Bob Heil opened Ye Olde Music Shop in Marissa, Ill., in 1966. Before long, he was supplying musical instruments to country acts including Dolly Parton and Little Jimmy Dickens as they went through St. Louis. Heil died Feb. 28. He was 83.

CARL LENDER VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES The Heil Talk Box, an effects pedal designed by Heil, was a signature of Peter Frampton’s monster-selling 1976 double album, “Frampton Comes Alive!”