A day in the life: Harlan Rivers, musician and sound engineer

Harlan Rivers, dressed in an oversized black button-down shirt, baggy pants, one of his several “randomly purchased” Goodwill ball caps and dark glasses, his legendary Martin HD-28 guitar hanging from his shoulders like it’s always been there, looks down for a moment, looks out at the small crowd, then strums.

G, B minor, C, G.

A few chords in, he starts to sing. He has a powerful voice that is also warm and smooth. It’s Americana with country roots, a hint of a twang, and a classic rock soul — with just enough grit. 

He sways to the music. Maybe his eyes are closed behind the dark glasses he always wears. For this first song he keeps the sound mellow, his voice sweet, a kind of front-porch delivery that fits the venue. 

I can hear her heartbeat from a thousand miles
And the heavens open up every time she smiles
And when I come to her that is where I belong
And I’m running through her like a rivers song

It’s Van Morrison’s 1970 romantic ballad, “Crazy Love.” Rivers, who performs solo and as a duo with percussionist David Johnson, begins every gig with this song. During the summer and fall months, he performs three to four nights a week at wineries and brew pubs in and around Eugene and down the valley.

His favorite gig is playing at the downtown bus station. His classiest gig is at Oregon Gardens Resort in Silverton.

The backdrop on this late Saturday afternoon is Hayworth Estate vineyards, 5 miles north of Coburg. He also plays regularly at wineries: LaVelle, Sarver, Bennett, High Pass and Territorial . At 51, he has been performing for the past three decades, from dive bars in the Deep South to busking at Seattle’s Pike Place Market to this packed Lane County schedule.

He does his own booking (no manager), transports, sets up, and breaks down the equipment (no roadies) and runs the sound board. He is not only his own sound engineer, he is also the lead audio engineer for the Oregon Country Fair’s Main Stage. In July, it was three days of exhausting work — two sound engineers, three stage hands, six bands a day, with barely 20 minutes between acts. From early April to early November he manages the Saturday Market music stage, and, during November and December, he’s at the Holiday Market working the two stages there. During the week, he sets up sound at The Wine Lab for that venue’s popular open mic nights.

Tonight he’s playing The Band, Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, John Fogerty and Chris Stapleton, but his repertoire is vast.

“If played for four hours straight starting on a Monday, I could sing a different song every day until the following Monday,” he says in between sets. It’s not a brag. He knows the chords and has memorized the lyrics of more than 300 songs.

When he was first starting playing in bars along the East Coast, he did in-the-trenches research to discover what people wanted to hear. This involved quizzing bartenders along the way, with special attention to a particularly knowledgeable woman at one of his favorite venues, the Airport 747 lounge in Jacksonville, Florida.

He was telling his mother about this during one of his visits home to Georgia.

“I’m disappointed in you, kid,” he remembers her saying. “You ask all these people what their favorite song is, but you’ve never asked me.”

It was a good-natured scolding. His mother played guitar and fiddle, was a singer and a painter and was the creative force in the family. She had a particular interest in her son’s career as the one who bought him his first guitar, a cheap bass, when he was 14.

Rivers loves to tell the story. On the bus home from middle school one afternoon, he overheard two boys behind him talking about a band they were starting. They needed a bass player. He turned around in his seat. “I’ll do it,” he told them. It was a bold and baseless (that’s a pun) statement. Not only did he not know how to play the bass, he had never picked up a guitar. His mother bought him one the next day. And the rest is history?

Not quite.

When he showed up to the band practice with his new bass and hastily acquired knowledge of a few chords, one of the boys in the band told him his cousin wanted to play the bass. They no longer needed a bass player, thank you very much. So Rivers taught himself how to play the guitar. And now, the rest is history.

Very many years and thousands of gigs later, after a not-so-gentle prompting, he asks his mother what her favorite song is. “Crazy Love,” she tells him. She was in poor health at the time and had been sick for a while. Ten days after that visit, she died. It took Rivers two years before he could perform the song in public. Now it begins every show.

Riding the faders

Earlier that day, the morning of the Hayworth Estate gig, Rivers shows up at Saturday Market at 8:30 a.m. The vendors are busy setting up. And so is Rivers. He is working sound for the stage where five acts will play during the day.

He’s in charge of selecting the acts — every season he works his way through hundreds of submissions while paying special attention to long-time, “legacy” performers — and he’s in charge of setting up the stage: the mics and mic stands, the monitors, the speakers. He’s walking back and forth, uncoiling cables and cords, lugging 45-pound monitors, plugging and replugging connections. He moves to the 16-channel sound board he’s set up by the side of the stage with its rows of toggles and switches. Earlier in his career, he worked massive 84- and 108-channel boards for major acts.

His movements are swift and purposeful as he “rides the faders,” which is industry talk for sliding the vertical controls used to adjust the volume levels of both individual audio channels and the master mix. He stands at the board, listening to the Spotify tune he has playing through the speakers, adjusts, listens again, walks out to the food court, positioning himself first left, then right, then center.

“How is it sounding to you?” he calls out to the Afghan food vendor. “Loud enough? Too loud?”

He walks back to the stage to adjust for the third time. He plays the sound board almost like an instrument. And he plays it by touch and by memory. That’s because in 2008 he lost much of his sight to a neurological autoimmune disease that attacked his optic nerve. He sees the world mostly as a gray blur. Yellow is the only color that seems to come through. He recognizes people by their voice or, when they approach, by their gait. He has learned to navigate space carefully. He used to use a cane, but he found that made him a target.

Watching him walk with assurance, watching his hands dance over the sound board as he finds just the right fader, turns just the right knob, watching as he bends over the monitors to adjust cables and plugs, it’s impossible to imagine that he has diminished eyesight. He is a man who knows how to pivot. He is also a man with a tidal wave of a work ethic.

His first EP

A few hours later, and 12 miles away at the Hayworth Estate gig, he is riding that tidal wave, performing song after song without much chatter in between, launching into tunes on the fly after just a brief word with Johnson, the percussionist. This duo, rather than the four-piece band he used to perform with, is working for him now.

“Keeping a band together is damn hard,” he says. “It’s not that the talent isn’t here. It is. It’s everything else.” He shakes his head. Personalities get in the way. Egos get in the way. Work ethics differ. Musical tastes differ. With many musicians also holding down day jobs, finding times for rehearsals is challenging. The duo is, in many ways, a psychological and creative exhale. It is also a financial decision. Performing is barely sustainable. A gig might pay a few hundred dollars. Rivers always divided the money equally among his players. Now he only has to split it with Johnson.

It’s in between sets now at Hayworth Estate, and Rivers could rest, he could sit, he could take a quiet moment to sip a beer. He doesn’t. He goes out and works the crowd, talks to people, jokes with them, remembers them, asks questions, circulates. Some are fans. Others may well become fans. The light is fading. He wears his dark glasses.

In between these performing gigs and the work he does as a sound engineer, Rivers is busy recording his first EP in a little studio in Coburg. He’s gathered local talent around him and has taken his time setting down basic tracks, overdubbing, adding vocals, comping, balancing, polishing, mixing, remixing, and doing all those half-technical, half-magical audio tricks that make a recording sound rich and assured. The EP features three original songs and two covers. The covers are, not surprisingly, Van Morrison songs. One of them is “Crazy Love.”

A week later, he and Johnson are playing at LaVelle Vineyards on a cool, on-again-off-again rainy afternoon: Bill Withers, Stealers Wheel, George Johnson, back-to-back Tom Petty, two of the original tunes from his upcoming EP, and a trio of Rolling Stones hits. Mick Jagger sings “Satisfaction” with a cynical snarl, a defiant swagger. Rivers sings it with a mixture of regret and yearning. It makes you forget that Mick owned the song.

Rivers ends the last set — the duo has played three this afternoon with their signature combination of ease and energy — thanks the audience, unhooks his guitar, pulls down the faders on the sound board, and walks toward the tables that were set up in the barrel room for the event. An older man who’s been sitting at a nearby table drinking a white pinot, gets up and catches Rivers midstride.

“It sure would be nice to hear that Bob Seger song,” he says. Apparently he is a Harlan Rivers fan, referencing a favorite tune. Rivers shakes his head, smiles.

“Oh, what the hell,” he says. He walks back, picks up his guitar and starts to play.