Campton Hills deputy clerk is producer on the side

Once when he was just a boy, William Beith wired together several radios with the idea of making one big, loud one.

It didn't work - not in any literal sense, anyway. But at only 7 or 8 years old, Beith was somewhat successful.

There, in the mishmash of speakers, wires and radio dials, Beith tuned into what would become a lifelong passion for music, electronics and the art of mixing the two. "I guess I was bitten by the bug," he recalls.

At 55, Beith still experiments with sound production and engineering, despite his day job as Campton Hills' deputy village clerk.

It's a hobby few people seem to realize the public official has, he says, and one that is perhaps more unusual because of his ties to notable musicians, including Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Van Halen and others.

Over the years, Beith also has written for music industry magazines, produced dozens of demos for regional artists and even was granted a patent for a brand of reverb - an echoing effect for guitars and other instruments.

The walls of his home studio are lined with vintage concert posters, modern art and photos of Beith's ear-to-ear grin alongside heavyweights such as Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney.

"I still get all giddy" about music, he says. "I can't help but get all excited again."

A descendant of Scottish immigrants, Beith has spent most of his life pursuing music in the Fox Valley while working in the mental health field, from which he is now retired.

Beith grew up in Elgin, where his mother's interest in art and piano playing kept him engaged with music, even when he wasn't listening to Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley on his bedroom radio. Later on, while taking piano lessons, Beith became enthralled with Hammond organs, which always seemed to be around wherever he went.

Inspiration came in other forms, too.

Beith still remembers watching "Victory at Sea," a television documentary featuring a score of the same name by Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and being overcome by the sound.

"Of course, then the Beatles happened on Ed Sullivan and everything changed," he remembers. "It was almost like you had somebody from your own generation. All of a sudden, you had a contemporary or a peer."

Around his freshman year of high school, Beith took the Vox Continental organ his father bought for him and joined a group that played live music for a YWCA dance class. That led to his first paying gig: a girl's birthday party.

Once he was old enough to drive, Beith and his friends began hanging around rock clubs such as the Cellar in Arlington Heights, where he once saw the Who; the New Place in Algonquin, where he still laments having missed a performance by Buffalo Springfield; and the Graffiti in Aurora, where he first met progressive-rock guru and keyboardist Keith Emerson.

Back then, Beith says, concert admission was about $3.50. And by just hanging around and helping out, young music nut like him could finagle their way into rubbing elbows with big-name acts like Jefferson Airplane and Deep Purple.

He says popular music at the time wasn't as narrow in its focus as it is today, so it was easy to get hooked on a variety of genres and styles.

"You go back and you look at the old (radio) playlists, and you had all these different things," such as jazz, folk and rhythm and blues, he says. "Today, everything is so narrowcast. Nobody gets any cross pollination, which I think is a huge loss."

Beith played keyboards in several different rock bands - groups Source and Cannon were among them - and eventually began picking up recording equipment here and there. When he wasn't working in intensive therapy or administration at the Elgin Mental Health Center, Beith spent hours recording his own bands and a few others in a basement studio that quickly went from being a starter setup to having all the bells and whistles.

"There was no business plan," he says. "All I wanted to do was record myself. It never occurred to me I could actually have a real studio."

In the early 1980s, he and a business partner started Brick Audio, a company granted a patent for its own brand of reverb, which since has been used by artists such as Rod Stewart and Van Halen. He also took a freelance journalism job with his wife, Karen Kelly-Beith, covering four Farm Aid concerts and writing articles about sound technology for several trade magazines. Beith's wife, an experienced photographer, took the photos.

In 2001, he moved back home to a piece of property long owned by his family in what is now the village of Campton Hills and soon got involved in local government.

Today, Beith continues to record demos for local acts in a variety of genres, including rock, thrash metal, ska, blues and even opera, all under the name Brick Audio. He charges $45 an hour for the use of his studio, but the fee is mostly to offset his expenses.

On the side, Beith teaches an audio recording class at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove and is pursuing a degree in public administration at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

For Beith, there's something almost paternal about making music, he says. Even if it doesn't make him famous, he feels good to have had a hand in its creation.

"Of course, everybody wants to do the record in the basement and come up with a Grammy," he says. "But that's not going to happen - at least, I don't think it is."