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The Blockchain Executive With A Rock N’ Roll Past

This article is more than 4 years old.

Richard Titus is a serial entrepreneur and Interim President of blockchain conglomerate Transform Group. In addition, he is also board advisor for the Creative Destruction Lab (a founding member of LIBRA Association).

Titus told me at CoinAgenda 2019 in Las Vegas how he thinks people should either join the military, the Peace Corps or a Rock N’ Roll band. “Some way to go out there and experience the world when you’re young and you can,” he told me. 

Before forging a career in technology, media, and—most recently—blockchain, Titus worked in the music industry, collaborating with some of California’s most accomplished musicians. He plays the cello, bass guitar, and sings. His interests ultimately turned more to being behind the mixing console and stage than on top of it.

His Rock N’ Roll past included “crazy adventures” while living in hotels and flying around the world. “It was transformative for me in terms of understanding both how big and how small the world is,” he says.

Back then, he spent a lot of time working with  MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows you to connect a synthesizer or keyboard to a computer. He spent  a lot of time playing with this. Ultimately, a band he was in was dropped from its label on his 18th birthday. He decided to go to college, dropping out of five or six of them while launching his first startup—building recording studios for aging rock stars and professional songwriters on the west coast. He did this mostly in Santa Barbara, but all over the west coast, too. He built studios for numerous artists, including Wayne Carson, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, as well as Mike Love, and Bruce Johnston—members of the Beach Boys. Titus and Johnston hit it off. 

When the Beach Boys’ keyboard tech left the band to become an executive for Atari computers, a job opened up with the California band known for its tight vocal harmonies. Johnston asked Titus to go on tour with them as a keyboard tech, taking a chance on someone who was about 20 years younger than the next youngest crew member. Titus jumped at the opportunity, later becoming the band’s sound engineer. 

He ended up working on and helping mix the very last studio album the band ever recorded as a band, Summer In Paradise, which incidentally was the first “tapeless” album recorded on Pro Tools. That album came out in 1992, seven years before Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca” would become the first No 1. Single recorded, edited, and mixed fully with the digital audio workstation. 

Titus had been primed for digital recording his whole life. His Dad worked in the defense industry, which meant he could get his hands on computers sooner than most kids. He navigated comfortably in Dos, Apple, Atari and Unix/Linux environments and spent years in the BBS industry. Through the contacts he had made in the music industry, Titus came across an early, four-track beta version of ProTools. His computer chops came in handy. 

The Beach Boys initially recorded tracks at Producer Terry Melcher’s Carmel home. Melcher is the son of Doris Day, the American actress, singer, and animal welfare activist. Titus was living at Day's hotel in Carmel at that time. He would go up to the studio early and get all the gear running. It was the first record ever recorded on Pro Tools, on a hard drive, and so it took a bit of setting up every day. 

“We were using beta hardware, beta software, and nothing worked,” he said. The ProTools edition, which ran on a Mac, was buggy. Considering the software was brand new, Titus had only thought it would be an interesting tool for editing part of the album, not record the album. 

“I just wanted to do the tape editing and splicing,” he said. 

When he showed it to the Beach Boys, they got a little too excited. In fact, they decided they were going to record the whole 44 minute-plus record on ProTools. And that’s how the band became the first group to record an album on ProTools, though in many ways they blended digital and analog recording techniques. For good measure, the recording engineers made sure to run 24/7 a DAT machine, a digital audio tape, to ensure all takes were recorded if anything went wrong with the nascent software.

“The system would crash and come back up and you'd lose the track,” he said. “But, on the flip side, using technology that was so bleeding edge, you just knew you were part of the future.” Today, everything is recorded on ProTools or one of its successor programs. 

People today often yearn for the warmer sounder of old records. Titus agrees. There’s a lot to critique about digital recording methods compared to analog methods of yore, he says. Later on, while he still worked in the business, engineers would actually put record scratches back into digital recordings to make them “feel more warm and alive.” 

Titus has more than a few stories from the experience. One day as Mike Love, an original member of the Beach Boys and cousin of the Wilson’s meditated (a rare thing in those days), the phone rang. Titus answered it.

“Hello,” said a man in a British accent. 

“Hello,” said Titus. 

“Yes, so let's talk to Mike or Bruce,” said the British man. 

 “Can I ask who this is?”

“Its George Harrison.’” 

Titus dropped the phone. The Beatle was direct dialing the studio, not through an assistant. Titus picked the phone back up. 

“Are you there?” asked George, whose solo hits include “My Sweet Lord” and “Got My Mind Set On You,” which was a song written by Rudy Clark and originally recorded by James Ray.

“One second,” riposted Titus, as George, one of his idols, chuckled on the other end. 

Though it was against company policy to interrupt Mike during meditation, Titus figured for The Beatles it was probably alright. Apparently not. Mike said he’d call George back. 

“I had to go tell George that he would call him back,” Titus recalls. 

Later, when the band played at Rio at the Earth Day performance, George walked over to Titus and he asked: “Are you the chap from the studio?” He was introducing himself and had questions about ProTools

“I'll never forget that moment,” said Titus, who is forever grateful to The Beach Boys for experiences like those and many others. 

“By that point, The Beach Boys were on the declining edge of their careers in many ways,” he said. “The inner politics within the band was fascinating; the delta amongst all the band members, the good and the bad. After all, these guys grew up together. While they could be very difficult employers, to be sure, they were also magnanimous and giving.” 

Titus has since left his Rock N’ Roll days behind him. Bitcoin OG Michael Terpin recently tapped him to be the interim Chief Executive of Transform Group, which at present is comprised of three businesses: an events business, a PR business, and a strategic consultancy business. He is also an angel investor.

Still, after all these years, music has been the primary driver for teaching Titus how to think about things in a unique way.

“It really exposed me to a lot of the world at a very young age,” said Titus.