Robert G. “Bob” Heil, Inventor of the Talk Box, Dies of Cancer // Other Notable Musicians’ Deaths

Photo: Bob Heil | Robert G. Heil (October 5, 1940 – February 28, 2024) was an American sound and radio engineer most well known for creating the template for modern rock sound systems. He founded the company Heil Sound in 1966, which went on to create unique touring sound systems for bands such as The Grateful Dead and The Who. He invented the Heil Talk Box in 1973, which was frequently used by musicians such as Peter Frampton, Joe Walsh and Richie Sambora, and is still in use today.

Heil was an innovator in the field of amateur radio, manufacturing microphones and satellite dishes for broadcasters and live sound engineers. In the late 1980s Heil Sound became one of the first American companies to create and install home theaters, and Heil has lectured at major electronic conventions and taught classes at various institutions.

Heil won multiple awards and honors, and in 2007 he was invited to exhibit at the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame.

Bob Heil was born in 1940 in St. Louis. He resided in Marissa, Ilinois. He became a proficient theater organ musician at a young age, beginning to perform at various local restaurants at the age of 14. At the age of 15, he became house player for the Wurlitzer theater organ in the Fox Theater in St. Louis. During that time he learned how to tune and voice the thousands of pipes in that great Wurlitzer. It was the platform that taught Heil how to listen – mentally dissect discrete tones which became so important throughout his several careers .

In his teens he also became an avid amateur radio operator, and began designing and building homemade transmitters, amplifiers, and antenna systems. His call sign was K9EID.

Career
In his early twenties Heil began designing and building various theater pipe organ installations in the Holiday Inn North restaurant in St. Louis, playing the instruments six nights a week. After having played the organ for eight years solid, Heil opened a successful professional music shop in the small town of Marissa, Illinois.

In 1966 he founded Heil Sound, experimenting with live sound systems and becoming the technician to several venues around St. Louis, from auditoriums to bowling alleys. Large sound systems at the time were comparatively weak and primitive; in 1965 The Beatles had played New York’s Shea Stadium using only a Shure Vocalmaster PA system plugged into the baseball park’s announcement system.

The Grateful Dead concert
On February 2, 1970, jam band the Grateful Dead were scheduled to play a concert at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. For the tour they were using a sound system run and developed by “Bear” Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Owsley, who had a pending drug charge for producing copious amounts of LSD, was under orders not to leave the state of California. Owsley had been arrested on February 1 for leaving the state while at a Grateful Dead show in New Orleans, with police detaining most of the Dead’s sound system as well.

George Bales, a stage hand at Fox Theater gave Jerry Garcia Heil’s phone number, and Heil remembers Garcia calling to say “Hey man, I heard you have a really big PA.” Heil had been toying and tinkering with the large speakers that the Fox had replaced months earlier with a new system. Heil, one of the two organists at the Mighty Wurlitzer in the Fox (dating back to 1956) was given their old speakers which Heil built into his new sound system using the massive Altec Lansing A-4 speaker cabinets. Heil replaced the 15-inch speakers with JBL D140s, and added an array of four radial horns and ring tweeters all driven by McIntosh amplifiers. He has stated “That made a huge difference. It was like a big ‘hi-fi’ system. No one was putting radial horns into PA systems; they were just doing speakers in columns, like the Vocalmaster. The horns are what give the system intelligibility — you can actually understand the lyrics.” His stack riggings resulted in an unusual frequency range from below 200 Hz to well over 15 kHz.
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Heil Sound
Heil founded Heil Sound which is based in Fairview Heights, Illinois, and manufactures a variety of microphones for professional use as well a variety of gear for Amateur Radio enthusiasts.

Heil Talk Box
The Heil Talk Box was made famous after being used by Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, and Richie Sambora. It was the first high-powered talk box on the market, which could reliably be used on high-level rock stages. The first Heil Talk Box was built for Joe Walsh’s Barnstorm Tour. It was developed in 1973. Heil later sold the rights to Dunlop Manufacturing, Inc. Frampton frequently used a Heil Talk Box after receiving one as a Christmas present from Heil in 1974, and it can be prominently heard on his 1975 album Frampton.
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Personal life
Heil lived with his wife Sarah in Metro-East St. Louis. He has two daughters and one stepson. He continued to play the Wurlitzer Organ at the Fox Theater, and had a classic car collection, chiefly of 50s Thunderbirds. Heil additionally performed his organ music on Lebanon, Tennessee-based international shortwave station WTWW’s 100,000 watt 5085 kHz shortwave frequency each Saturday at 8 PM central time (192 kbit/s stereo internet stream also available). Heil’s program was discontinued when WTWW’s music programming moved to WRMI in 2022.

Heil died from cancer in Belleville, Illinois, on February 28, 2024, at the age of 83.

Awards
From the 1980s, Heil won a number of awards and honors. He was the “International Amateur Radio Operator of the Year” in 1982, an award which had been held by Barry Goldwater the year before. He was later awarded the 1989 “USA Satellite Dealer of the Year” by the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association in Las Vegas. In 1995, he received the very first “Live Sound Pioneer Award” at the Audio Engineering Society Convention” in San Francisco.

Heil won the Parnelli Award for Innovator of the Year in 2007. Also in 2007, he was invited into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to put up a display of his historically important gear, which included the first modular mixing console (the Mavis), his custom quadraphonic mixer (originally used in the Quadrophenia tour), and the very first Heil Talk Box. He was the very first manufacturer to be invited into the Hall. December 20, 2014 Bob Heil was awarded an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Music and Technology from the University of Missouri.
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Read more of Mr. Heil’s extensive biography here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Heil

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OTHER NOTABLE MUSICIANS’ DEATHS

Mary J. Blige on Entertainment Tonight, 2/24/24: I was going to commit suicide then I realized that my family was more important to me. (She grew up in the Projects, and was sexually molested).

If you are thinking of committing suicide, please think of how much it will hurt your family and friends, and maybe cause them a whole lot of trouble and financial problems. Warning Signs of Suicide – National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 and 888-628-9454 for Spanish. Learn the signs of someone who may be contemplating suicide.

If you want to know more about any of the musicians we lost, please check them out at http://www.wikipedia.com

March 2024
6: Dimos Moutsis, 85, Greek singer-songwriter and composer; Aleksandr Sibirtsev, 88, Russian operatic tenor.

5: Linda Balgord, 64, American stage actress and singer (The Pirate Queen, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera); Amnon Weinstein, 84, Israeli luthier.

4: Jean-Pierre Bourtayre, 82, French composer (The Game Is Over, Arsène Lupin, Les Maîtres du temps); B. B. Seaton, 79, Jamaican singer (The Gaylads), songwriter and record producer.

3: Eleanor Collins, 104, Canadian jazz singer, television host and civic leader; Oscar Ghiglia, 85, Italian classical guitarist; Amjad Parvez, 78, Pakistani singer and writer; Presto, 31, German rapper, cancer; Félix Sabal Lecco, 64–65, Cameroonian drummer; Makoto Shinohara, 92, Japanese composer, stomach cancer; Brit Turner, 57, American drummer (Blackberry Smoke), glioblastoma.

2: Jim Beard, 63, American keyboardist (Steely Dan); W. C. Clark, 84, American blues musician; Anastasia Ledwith, 57, American disc jockey, traffic collision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Beard

1: Ernest Berger, 73, Czechoslovak-born British drummer (Heatwave), cardiac arrest.

February 2024
29: Eugen Šváb, 87, Slovak swing musician.

28: Cat Janice, 31, American singer-songwriter, cancer; Bob Heil, 83, American sound and radio engineer; Eugen Indjic, 76, Yugoslav-born French-American pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2024

Photo: Bob Heil | From Heil Sound’s Facebook page