— This small town in Pennsylvania Dutch country, in the midst of cornfields and dairy farms, would seem an unlikely home for a warehouse filled with the detritus of rock concerts past and future — a large section of the stage for the next Black Eyed Peas tour, the sets for an Elton John concert and gigantic lips from the Rolling Stones. But Michael Tait, whose stage-building and designing company Tait Towers, owns the warehouse, said life in Lititz was too good to move elsewhere. Tait said, if any of his employees are ever interested in going elsewhere for a job, he’ll pay their expenses while looking. “It’s worth it,” he said. “They almost always come back. You could go to L.A. Or New York, but it would never be as comfortable and it would surely be more expensive.” Lititz (pronounced LIT-itz), population 9,000 and about a dozen miles north of Lancaster, is a haven of sorts to other small businesses., which says it is the biggest rock sound-system company in the country, is there, as is, which does a lot of the backdrops for music and theatrical staging.
To Barry Miller, the director of retail banking for, Lititz is a natural business haven. Susquehanna itself is now a $14 billion enterprise, but its headquarters remains in Lititz, where it was founded at the turn of the last century. “There is just a formidable work ethic in Lancaster County, the hearty farmers who saw the Amish and the Mennonites around here working so hard,” Mr. “Then there is an innovative, entrepreneurial streak here, too. Finally, there is the loyalty. The owners want to give jobs to local people and keep them here forever.” Photo. Michael Tait’s company, born and based in Lititz, Pa., builds sets for rockers like the Rolling Stones.
Credit Laura Pedrick for The New York Times The rock business, for instance, started just that way. Free Serial Number For Magix Music Maker 17 Premium more. Roy Clair and his older brother, Gene, who grew up in Lititz, got a rudimentary sound system as a present from their father when they were in their teens in the 1960s. They started setting it up for pin money at high school dances, and then for events at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster.
In 1966, they did the sound for a Dionne Warwick concert, and then one for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. “What we didn’t know is that the concert just before, they were at the Fontainebleau in Miami with Herb Alpert, and Herb, an engineer, wouldn’t let them use his sound system,” Roy Clair said. “So when they got here, they sounded so much better, their wives were impressed.
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They asked us to do the rest of their tour — we may have been the first sound guys to tour with a band — and the rest, as they say, is rock history. We kept getting word-of-mouth business.” But the Clairs also loved Lititz and found ways to truck their sound systems, as they became more elaborate, from there. They hired local people and taught them how to enhance and modify the systems — louder, crisper, more hidden or more out-there, as the rockers wanted. Along the way, they met Michael Tait, an Australian who was doing production and lighting for the British band Yes. He wanted to go out on his own and, he said, ended up sleeping on Gene Clair’s couch until he could get his business going. He, in turn, persuaded a British artist friend, Tom McPhillips, to come to Lititz and do the artistic part of the stages, as Atomic Design, while Tait Towers did the engineering.