WELLFLEET – Chris Blood is a sound guy.
He stays up late and turns knobs and makes many people happy. He moves levers. He pushes buttons. And he talks to and deals with bands, often the best bands on Cape Cod.
He is not just a sound guy. He is perhaps the sound guy on Cape Cod, having worked for the legendary Cape band, the Incredible Casuals, the most famous Cape beach bar, the Beachcomber, and Payomet Music Tent, which hosts world famous acts, among others.
On the roof of the Beachcomber. CAPE COD WAVE PHOTO
And as a sound guy, he works with musicians, something that is not always easy, according to Lou McMurrer a stage manager and sound guy who has worked for decades with Blood.
“It’s hard working with musicians on a regular basis,” McMurrer said. He answered the follow-up ‘Why?’ question with a pause and then said, “because they’re musicians. I don’t know how else to explain it other than they have their own set world and Chris has been dealing with it for a long time.”
McMurrer added, “I’ve only seen him get mad once.”
While that anger was an unusual blip, McMurrer said it was Blood’s professionalism, steadiness, and technical talent that kept him doing sound on the Outer Cape for 30 years.
“He’s a really good studio engineer but he’s an amazing live engineer,” said McMurrer. “He can make just about anybody sound really good.”
The DNA Of An Artist
Blood, 59, of Orleans, spent his first 14 years in Darien, Connecticut, a place he alternately called “a typical suburban town,” and a place where kids in high school found their entertainment by “driving around and shooting at mailboxes.”
He did not like Darien, or the other little Connecticut towns he moved to during his youth. “It was not tolerance-oriented down there. It was more prison-like,” he said. “More regimented.”
His father, William Bourn Blood, was a New Yorker, an equity actor and screen writer and his mother, Ruth Fitts Blood, was “a free spirit,” he said. They were divorced when he was 10. His father lived in New York.
While the culture of the small towns he lived in while in Connecticut did not interest him, his parents were artists who were interested in music and theater and so he was exposed to such things at an early age.
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