Exit Interview: Chris Dunn on the Decision to Close Dreamhire

In many ways, the studio economy is a rental economy across the board. Many studios rent their spaces from a landlord. Artists and producers that don’t own a studio, or want to use a different one than their personal facility, rent a recording/mixing/mastering in the form of studio time. They rent assistance in the form of engineers, paid hourly or by the session.

Renting to the renters are audio rental houses — purveyors of short-term access to desirable compressors, keyboards, PA’s, and more — who depend in large part on a thriving studio economy to turn a profit. But as the tradewinds in audio have shifted, so have the fortunes of those who rent to this tricky vertical.

The fact that Dreamhire, a mainstay of pro audio rentals to the New York City region since 1989, is winding down operations doesn’t even qualify as an open secret – it’s alluded to right there on the homepage, via notice of liquidation of an equipment selloff. Go one page deeper, and it’s there in black-and-white: “PLEASE NOTE THAT DREAMHIRE IS CURRENTLY LIQUIDATING ALL STOCK AND WE PLAN ON BEING CLOSED BY END OF JUNE 2017.”

Chris Dunn launched Dreamhire NYC in 1989.

The seeds of Dreamhire were sown by founder Chris Dunn in London in the mid-1980’s. It’s been a long and fascinating transcontinental journey for Dunn since then, one that took him through the highs and lows of the music business, transforming from an artist to a crafty entrepreneur to a by-the-numbers businessman whose brainchild finally hit the wall.

In this conversation with SonicScoop, Dunn speaks frankly about many topics. The factors that drive audio rental economics; two of the surprising items that fueled Dreamhire’s business for years; and the tricky balancing act that comes with winding down a rental operation – it’s all here, out in the open.

When does a sense of duty to audio become simply unsustainable, and how does Dunn feel about exiting an industry where he’s been a dominant player for decades? Read on for all that and more.

Chris, when did you start Dreamhire — how did an audio rental company fit into the NYC recording scene at that time?

It goes back a long way. I actually started Dreamhire in London in 1984, when I was working for Zomba Recording Corporation, while I was managing Battery Studios. Before that, I had been in a group called City Boy. I would make five albums produced by Mutt Lange and that’s my connection with Zomba: (Zomba Records co-founder) Clive Calder managed Mutt Lange.

I ended being offered a job and I handled a couple of different projects for them before they offered me a full-time studio management position at Battery. During that time, I saw Mutt renting in craploads of gear for the Cars album that he was producing at Battery in London, the one called Heartbeat City. I went to Clive and I said, “Hey Clive, you should just give me some money so I can go out and buy some of this gear and we could rent it under these sessions ourselves, instead of renting in from these other companies.” He said, “That’s a damn good idea. Here’s some money, go spend it.”

That’s a good way to start a business!

It was set up as a little in house rental operation for Battery Studios initially. Then I thought, “There’s no reason why we can’t do business outside of Battery.” I went out and got a pager, had a little catalog printed, and started mailing it out to all the studios. Business started coming in. I employed a driver and bought a small van to handle deliveries and pickups. That’s how it all started in London.

Down the line, it was suggested by my superiors at Zomba that I find someone else to manage the studios so that I could concentrate on running the rapidly expanding Dreamhire operation myself. It became one of the top three rental operations in London. Then Clive pulled me into his office one day and said, “Hey Chris, we’re planning on building studios in New York and Nashville and I think a rental operation may well complement these studios. I want to know if you are interested in moving back to the states and setting up rental locations in New York and Nashville.” I was already familiar with the USA as City Boy had toured here in 1977 and 1978….66 gigs supporting Hall & Oates!

Dunn’s roots as a rock ‘n’ roller led to the rental side.

I thought, “Why the hell not, let’s do it”.  August 1^st, ’88, I got off a plane and I was in New York to help oversee the design and build of Battery Studios New York. We were in the early stages of that and the building on 25th Street was not ready to move into yet, so I just hopped on another plane and went to Nashville and proceeded to set up that operation. We already had a publishing office in Nashville so there was a base I could work out of with someone who was very knowledgeable about the Nashville community.

I got that set up and then I came back to New York and we finally got Dreamhire in New York off the ground by July of ’89, having got Nashville up and running at the end of ’88. We kind of waited to get New York up and running because we wanted to make sure we had flight cases and cables made so that we would appear to be a professional operation from the get-go.

We’d gone through all the vintage equipment that I purchased, testing, replacing tubes where necessary –many items were bought in England from Malcolm Jackson and brought over here. I found a lot of useful stuff at the Media Sound auction when that studio closed down. I needed a car so bought myself a 1989 Mitsubishi Galant (Motor Trend Car Of The year!) and put an EMT 250 on the back seat that I’d bought in Nashville and drove it up overnight. That got the New York operation up and running.

Tactical Operations

What was the scope of Dreamhire’s operation when you got it off the ground in 1989?

It was just a three or four man operation in the original days, with local studio manager, Ken Thornhill as my sort of cohort and salesman, who was out in the field schmoozing with people. Informing them about Dreamhire, who we were, and getting the business. We bought him an Isuzu Trooper as a company vehicle and he actually handled many of the deliveries initially which was his impromptu way of getting his foot in the door, so to speak. Brian Macaluso was our first technician.

Did the company take off quickly? What were the challenges to moving it forward early on?

I had been over to New York a few months earlier to do a bit of research. The main reason was, they wanted me to look at the building where they were planning on setting up the studio and record label offices because they wanted me to check if the freight elevator was big enough to get some digital machines in. They said, “Go over there and take your measuring tape.” Okay!

Early on, tape machines just had to make it into the elevator.

I visited a few studios and talked to several people and the general consensus of opinion was that the status of pro audio rentals in New York was not great. There was Martin Rentals, there was Toy Specialists. I heard horror stories about how certain rental companies would send out gear and it wouldn’t work and they would still charge you anyways. It was just a bit of a nightmare by the sound of it. I thought, “I’m going to come to New York and I’m just gonna weasel my way in and clean up this town.” Make it a little more respectable.

The only other guy who was sort of my competition was Jim Flynn. That was about it. There were really only those three companies. Scharff Weisberg was just getting out of the pro audio studio rental business and getting into corporate video walls and that kind of thing.

Did your instincts prove correct that studios were ready to embrace a new rental company? Did you see that things did take off quickly once you were there?

The sneaky way I did it is I informed other rental companies that I was there and I had all this new gear and really good vintage gear and it was all ready to go. They were very starved of a sub-rental source.

They started sub-renting gear from me and delivering it to their clients. This gear arrives, brand new flight cases with “Dreamhire” stickers on them. Eventually the customers said, “Well, we’re renting from Rental Company X. When we sub-rent this extra gear from Dreamhire and it comes in, it’s fantastic. Why don’t we just call Dreamhire directly?”

That’s what ended up happening. We started getting calls directly from these people, just because we’d got the equipment into their studio by sub-renting it to other companies.

The Peak Years & Pro Tools

That’s quite a plan. When would you say Dreamhire experienced its best years, what was going on at that time?

We were kind of down in the dumps at the beginning of the ’90s as business was very sluggish.  I remember having a chat with Bill Tesar from the Toy Specialists. He said, “Hey, yeah you know, it’s cyclical, it goes like this sometimes. But ya know, you just need to hang in there because, believe me, it will come back.” He’d already been running the Toy Specialists for a few years, so he knew the story. The peak year was probably 1999.

Pro Tools was a big plus for audio rental houses when it was introduced.

It was pretty much when Pro Tools came out, and all of the sudden, all these sessions were booking studios and they had to have Pro Tools. The studios either didn’t have Pro Tools or they couldn’t afford to run out and buy it right away or were a little bit reticent to do so.

We started renting out Pro Tool rigs. I remember that Puffy’s Daddy’s House often had two or three rigs sitting in the studio and they kept rolling them over from one session to the next session, to the next session. I think we did about $250,000 worth of rentals with Daddy’s House, just in 1999 alone.

That was the peak year. We were still owned by Zomba unfortunately. Now it’s my company and I wish we had a 1999 going on this year, I’m telling you that much! We ended up turning over something like $3 million and making $2 million profit. Of course, the two million all went into Jive Records’ bank account to pay for advances to Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys and ‘Nsync and R. Kelly what have you.

So in 1999 the advent of Pro Tools was actually very, very good for Dreamhire, as much as people think of rental companies today especially, in the context of analog gear and hardware.

Yes indeed. That was one of the things that was fueling our high growth.

Were there other things that were popular items and which were the markets you were serving then?

We were pretty much renting almost exclusively to recording studios then. I mean, back in those days, there were 50 or 60 studios in Manhattan alone that we were servicing. Now there may be four or five and they’re dropping like flies, as you know.

We didn’t have to worry about any other kind of rental business but we got into that later. When all the studio business dropped off, which was pretty much after 9/11, which was the death knell for a lot of studios, because of the fact that people stopped flying. Nobody was coming in from Japan or Europe. All you had left was the jingle and the hip hop business in New York and that was it.

That’s when we had to start getting into other things like prop rentals and DJ gear and powered speakers. We started catering to weddings and some clubs and things like that.

I imagine that was a challenge. Even though you’re expanding the number of people you work with for a rental company, I take it that means you’re taking on additional overhead right? You have more gear you have to own, more space to store it in, and more people to move it.

We didn’t actually have to expand our space. A lot of these powered speakers, they take up a bit of space, but it wasn’t space that we didn’t have available. It wasn’t too big a problem. My technicians just had to learn how to update firmware in Pioneer CDJ2000’s and stuff like that.

Got mic pre’s? A deep supply of the right gear is the name of the game in audio rentals.

Audio Rental Economics

Along the way, how does a rental house decide what equipment to buy for rental? What gear would you choose to invest in and when would you decide to sell it?

That’s the tricky question. There’s no real art to this. The obvious answer is, when you start getting three or four calls a week for something, you know that you need to go out and get it. If you only get one call for something once every three or four months, you get the impression that maybe people only want to rent it for a day to try it out to decide whether or not they want to buy it. Quite often I will have a piece of gear at the back of my mind and then we will get a call for a two or three week rental and that will be the impetus to go out and buy it.

Obviously it’s customer-driven: All of a sudden, you’ll start getting calls for things like MPC 3000’s and you’ll think, “Oh, we gotta go buy one of those.” Before you know it, you’ve got 20 of them because the demand just explodes. Once people know you’ve got them, then you’re getting more calls for them.

The Alesis ADAT was a mega mover for Dreamhire.

The other thing that took off like a rocket was the Alesis ADAT, bless its cotton socks. I’m telling you that thing was supposed to be an almost professional digital recorder but really wasn’t because it they used a very basic consumer VHS transport — they were always giving us trouble. The recording studios were renting them in, four and six at a time. People decided they wanted to record digitally and they wanted to do it on the cheap. They thought it was on the cheap, but it really wasn’t much of a deal when you’re having to rent that many machines.

Again, that was all happening before Pro Tools really took off and before the studios started buying Pro Tools. People wanted to record digitally. They started off with ADAT and then they moved on to DA88s and DA98s and DA98HRs which are Tascam machines that were somewhat more professional and a little more reliable.

The thing that amazed me was the period when people were renting DAT machines for every mix session: They were using the DAT as their master. Really! Talk about taking a risky route because those little DAT tapes were pretty fragile and DAT machines used to eat them all the time. I didn’t think they sounded that good either.

You mentioned the impact of 9/11 on the recording industry. It sounds like another thing that grew to be detrimental to Dreamhire was when studios began to buy their own Pro Tool rigs, rather than rent. How did that impact your business?

The Pro Tool rentals did kind of slow down a bit. We find today that we do far more Pro Tools rentals actually for live recordings and remote recording setups than to just studios. Every studio has got Pro Tools right now. It’s the industry standard for recording.

On the cases.

In fact, the funny thing is that a lot of these studios that moved over to Pro Tools either got rid of their analog tape machines or shoved them in a closet and forgot about them. On the odd occasion that someone would come in and say, “No I’m going to actually record analog. Get your two-inch machine out.” They’d go pull it out of the closet and fire it up and the bloody thing wouldn’t work, because they hadn’t touched it in years. All of the sudden, rentals of two-inch 24-track machines started taking off again.

How many of those machines do you have today?

We have two Studer A827’s. We had a couple of Otari MTR 90’s, but they’re not working too well. One of them we’ve got rigged up as a one-inch 8-track, but we just use it in the transfer room whenever we need that. The Studer machines, the 24-track analogs, have been fairly busy. One of them lives in the transfer room because (Dreamhire Transfer Specialist) Mark (Berger) uses that quite a bit. He does a fair amount of two-inch 24 track transfers to Pro Tools files.

Crossfade to Black

When did you make the decision to decide to close Dreamhire?

I had this idea and started discussing with another company, during the latter part of last year, to see if there was a way we could either merge or they would be able to essentially take over the company. In the end, the deal they were offering just didn’t seem to be substantial enough to make it worth my while doing it that way.

I had a chat with Chris Roberts, my CFO, and he said “Well, you know, your current lease is up at the end of June 2017, so why don’t you make that a target date and then why don’t you start selling off your gear? That way you don’t have to have a last-minute crazy kind of auction deal where you’re giving away 35% to an auction company. If it’s an auction, often the stuff sells for a lot less than it’s really worth anyway.”

As we’re still continuing to operate as a rental company, the money coming in from the rental business is going to be hopefully just about enough to cover our overhead while we’re doing this. We’ve got such a lot of stuff here, to try and shut down in a space of a month or two  would just be an absolute nightmare and put me in an early grave, I think.

How much gear are we talking about?

Not just available for rent — Dreamhire’s entire inventory is being sold off.

You’ve only got to look at the Website, Dreamhire.com to see how much equipment we’ve got, it’s a lot. Some of those pieces we’ve got many multiples of as well.

I often find people in this business are very quiet about the fact that they are closing until the last second, but you’re going public about it.

I’ve been putting the word out. I’ve been putting posts on my personal Facebook page and the Dreamhire Facebook page to let people know it’s happening. That way, people are coming to me and asking if I can sell them something.

I’m selling some stuff on eBay. It’s very labor intensive but I’m going to have to use eBay. I’ve not much choice in the matter. For the more expensive, vintage equipment, I’m been getting quite a lot of contacts. People have been sending me emails, listing what they’re looking for. I’ve been replying to them, saying some of the stuff is still renting, so we’re going to be selling it maybe early next year and I have added them to my waiting list.

We’ve obviously got to continue to maximize our rental income to cover the overhead: “This, this, this, and this hasn’t rented in over a year or two years,” so I’m ready to sell it now and here’s what I want for it.

Have you seen any clear trends in what people are buying up from you first?

The first two things I sold were my last two Fairchild 670’s. I used to have seven Fairchild 670’s and two 660’s at one point. When I bought the company in 2003 and we moved all the equipment up from the Nashville location, which we shut down because it was losing money, we actually ended up with seven Fairchild 670’s.

I sold off four to pay off a short-term Merrill Lynch loan which I had to take out to buy the company. I ended up with three. One of them needed some work, so I sold that to a gear retail specialist and they rebuilt it and sold it on. That left me with two, one of which I bought in 1998. I paid $20,000  for that Fairchild. It was the city’s most favorite Fairchild of all and it made me $102,000 in rentals. Then I sold it to Switzerland and I got $44,000 for it.

All my LA-2A’s are gone. All my LA-3A’s are gone. All my (AKG) C12s, C24s, (Neumann) U 67s, all gone. My M 49’s gone. I’ve sold them all off. I think I’ve turned down one U 67 rental since I sold all those mics.

What’s the common thread among those pieces of gear – why do you think that they’re so appealing in the market?

I think that a lot people who are setting up studios still want some of that vintage gear to be in the studio. Not everybody wants to rely purely on plugins. They’ve just got that certain sound like vintage Neve modules, the 1073’s especially. I’m being more aggressive about selling off my 1081’s, they really don’t rent much anymore. I’m holding on to at least one pair of 1073’s. I had 14 modules at one point because they still rent.

Reflecting on Rentals – the Bitter with the Better

As you’re starting to wind Dreamhire down, can you say what are the best parts about the audio rental vertical — what are your best memories about being involved in the business?

When did it feel great? Step back into my early days in London when I was doing some crazy things. For example, when I was wearing two hats, I was managing Battery Studios and running Dreamhire. All of a sudden, I started getting calls from these studios saying “Would you by any chance be able to rent us individual SSL channel modules.” I thought, “Huh? Well wait a minute. Let me call you back.”

Loading up SSL desks was an early inspiration for Dreamhire.

I went around to various studios with my studio manager hat on and said, “Hey, how many channels are you using in this console?” “Oh, we’re maybe using the first eight or ten.” “Okay, so you wouldn’t have a problem if I crawled underneath the console, powered down this bank of eight over here and just removed the modules and borrowed them for a few days would you?” The engineer’s looking at me like, “What?”

That’s what I did. I started renting out individual SSL modules to studios in London that had short-loaded consoles. They bought a console but only bought so many modules with a plan to expand and some point. Then all of a sudden, this session comes in and wants 64 channels and the modules are not available to buy off the shelf from SSL. Quite often they couldn’t afford to buy another bunch of modules anyway, so they thought if we could just rent them in and charge the client extra for it. That’s what I did.

Probably the most ridiculous rental of all time would be when Mutt was mixing Hysteria by Def Leppard. His studio was down in Hindhead, which is about a 45-minute drive out of London. He had Nigel Green and Mike Shipley both doing mixes for him in the studio. They had on rental 85 pieces of equipment for three months.

Maybe two or three nights a week, I would hop in my car and drive down there with a replacement unit or an extra piece that they needed. They got my personal service and it was great. Sit in, listen to a couple of the mixes, then hop in Mutt’s pool for half an hour and go for a swim.

It sounds like there were times when you got the chance to innovate and also be integral to big sessions, which must have been very satisfying.

Yeah. We’d done a few fun things in New York as well. For about four years, we were doing these sound systems for these rooftop gigs on the 38th floor roof, on top of a building on the corner of 38th street and 6th avenue. This guy called us up one day and he says “I’ve been using SIR, but I think they’re a little expensive. Can you get me a quote?” I sent him a quote and it was exactly the same as the SIR quote that he sent me. I thought, “Well wait a minute, I better give him a little discount.” So I gave him a discount and he said, “Oh, this is great. Okay let’s do it.”

We would all go up there and it was this rooftop thing, which was just open for residents of that building and a couple of other buildings that were looked after by the same management company. They had a full open bar and the view was incredible from there overlooking the Empire State Building — well underlooking it really!

And you never know what kind of call you’re gonna get. You never know who’s going to walk in the door. I remember when Britney Spears was 15 years old, she walked into the office with her Mum to pick up a microphone. The variety of it — that’s the thing that’s keeps you going.

Conversely, are there aspects of the rental business that you’re not going to miss?

A lot of times you have situations, and it’s usually when Mercury goes into retrograde. All of a sudden, everything that could go wrong starts to go wrong. Gear that you know you tested perfectly goes onto a session and breaks down. You think, “What the hell is going on?” That gets to be a little frustrating. In the end, you just have to learn how to take all this stuff in your stride.

Mic check — Telefunken ELAM251’s ready to move out.

The important thing is to make sure that you make it right by sending a replacement piece or if need be, sending an engineer out into the field to fix it on the spot. One of the great things of Dreamhire is that we always had multiples of things. If you did have a problem there’s a darn good chance you have a replacement sitting here, ready to go. We eventually learned that we should just send spares anyway with the initial delivery especially if it’s a major artist or they are recording in a remote location. If you rent a 1073 you always get a second one in the rack at no charge.

That was really facilitated by the fact when I was working for Zomba and I set up Dreamhire originally, they just basically gave me carte blanche to buy anything and everything I wanted. I’d go to them and say “Hey, these (Sony) 3348HR machine rentals are really taking off. I think I need another one.” They said, “Okay. How much is it?” “I can get one for $218,000.” “Okay well do it.”

It was great to know that I could just buy whatever I want. I remember Clive Calder telling me one day, “Hey keep your ear to the ground, because if you hear of any deals on used gear that you can’t buy new, then you should go get it.” Most of my job seemed to be actually procuring equipment and then getting it booked into the system, and then labelling it up and everything. Then making sure it was put onto the rate card so people knew we had it.

Local Implications

How many people does Dreamhire employ currently? What’s the impact that Dreamhire’s closing will have on the employment of audio professionals?

Currently we have five full time people. My CFO is based in England, he’s a part timer. I only have one driver and he’s not even a full time member of staff. I literally bring him in when I need him and I pay him on an hourly basis.

If something comes up at short notice and I don’t have my driver scheduled for that day, I’ll ask the studio if they’ve got a runner to send for it or just call a messenger and we’ll ship it that way. Gone are the days where we had to have three or four drivers and would have staff in the office until 2 AM. That was a long time ago.

I’m trying to help my staff do what they need to do, move on. I’ve been telling them if they find another job, they should let me know and jump on that job and not let it slip by. Not feel they are obliged to hang out here until the end, because I’ll find a way to muddle through if necessary.

How do you think your closure is going to affect professional audio in NYC and what do you see next for facilities live sound and audio in general coming up?

There are quite a few things that we have that are not gonna be available in New York anymore. There really is nobody else renting the vintage tube mics that we have. But I can’t keep this company going at a loss every year just because I feel that it’s my duty to do it for the recording community.

I could see some young audio pro reading this and saying, “Well, Dreamhire’s shutting down. Maybe there’s an angle for me to start a new type of audio rental company servicing NYC in a new way.” What would your advice be to them? Should they try it?

They can try it if they’ve got money to burn. I mean it’s not an easy business to make money in. I’ve been trying to put my rates up gradually over the years, but there is a ceiling. People are more and more budget-conscious these days.

Here’s a common example: We take a call from someone, who’s got some event they are planning and they have no idea what they need. You have to try and glean the information out of them. Then you put together a whole package for them, which is mostly PA and maybe wireless mics and perhaps maybe some back line if there’s a band performing.

Then you have to quote them for delivery, setup, for an engineer and for late night breakdown of the equipment and extraction, what have you. You quote them whatever it is — $1500, $1600 maybe $2000 — which we think is reasonable for the amount of work and equipment involved. Then they say, “Wow really? I’ve only got a budget for $500.” You think, “Well there’s just no point anymore.” It’s really a waste of time.

We moved into PA because we found a niche for it. A lot of rentals we’re doing to someone like Electric Lady are PA systems now — they’re doing some kind of simulcast event or what have you in the studio. That studio has a certain cache, so people want to do things in the studio but they end up actually broadcasting live over the Internet or shooting videos in there or TV shows. They rent actual PA systems. We’ve been doing more PA rentals to them recently than any other recording type equipment.

I don’t know of anybody else that carries the kind of stuff we carry. I heard of one little rental operation that I’ve never done anything with in Brooklyn that has a handful of vintage tube mics. I really haven’t spoken to anyone that’s really used them, so I don’t know what their selection is like. There’s gonna be some gaps in the supplies of gear for rental that’s for sure.

After Audio

What do you plan to do after June of next year? Are you going to stay involved with rentals in any way?

Take a vacation. I can’t remember when I last took a vacation. My last trip anywhere was back to England at the end of December 2013 when my mother passed away. That wasn’t really a vacation as such. We spent a lot of time in the pub though, I’m telling you, me, and my brother and sister.

I’m going to do other things. I’m not going to retire, even though I am going to be 63 this year, I’m not planning on retiring yet. One thing I’m thinking of getting into, which I actually did at one time, is voiceovers. I haven’t had any formal voice training, but it’s in my genes. My Father, Leslie Dunn, worked for the BBC and he was in radio and TV over there in England. He had quite the announcer’s voice, you know and was an actor in The Archers, a BBC radio soap, for 27 years!

I can imagine this is a bittersweet time for you.

Not really. I’ve reached the mindset now that I’ve actually had about enough. I’m really actually throwing myself headlong into the sale of the equipment and I’m feeling really good about it.

The funny thing is, this is the way I felt when the option came up to buy Dreamhire off BMG which had bought the remaining shares of Zomba off Clive back in 2001. I thought, “BMG? You know what’s gonna happen if Dreamhire stays a part of BMG. They’re gonna shut us down because they don’t want us. We’re a little thorn in their side. They’re record labels and publishing. They don’t want us.”

I thought, “I’ve got a choice here. I can either just walk away and let them liquidate the operation, or I could consider keeping it going, getting backing, and buying the company. I did and I got it for a reasonably good deal. The purchase price was based on the depreciated value. Anything that was more than five years old was fully depreciated. It’s great, all the 3348s and 3348HRs didn’t cost me a damn thing and they haven’t rented at all since, except being used in the transfer room occasionally. I had that feeling then it was the right thing to do. Even though I knew the rental business was taking a serious dive after 9/11, and in November 2003 is when I actually bought the company.

I have that same feeling now. I’ve reached the point where I don’t really want to do this anymore. I want to do other things. I don’t want to drive from Tarrytown into Long Island City every day, five days a week. That was silly traffic. I want to do other stuff. I want to be able to go fishing more frequently with my fly rod in my hand.

If I get to do the voiceover thing, I can just hop on the train in Tarrytown, get off at Grand Central, take a walk, do my thing, get back to Grand Central. Have an oyster or two in the Oyster Bar, get back on the train and go back to Tarrytown.

These are the things that are appealing to me. I’ve been thinking about the scenarios of what life will be like after Dreamhire: For me, there’s no going back.

• David Weiss

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