CRITICAL THINKING
ROADS LESS TRAVELED
If the PS Audio gig doesn’t work out, McGowan could always get back into business as his alter ego Woody Short. Back when he was the program director for the local rock-and-roll station, before PS Audio became his bread and butter, the owner of that station also owned an AM station with a country and western format.
McGowan agreed to do a talk program—this was long before radical rightwing talk radio came to rule the AM radio waves. “I won’t bore you with the whole story but it got pretty crazy. It was a very conservative town and I am not a very conservative person.” A call-in show without callers wasn’t going to last, he reasoned. McGowan, as Woody Short, would espouse views antithetical to those of the listeners just to wind them up, “and people would call up and pray for my soul and they would yell at me.”
Once, in a shop, he overheard folks talking about his show. “I said, ‘So you listen to that Woody Short guy?’ and they said ‘I hate that [so and so]. If he ever walked into my store, I’d shoot him.’” McGowan asked, “‘If you dislike the show so much, why do you listen?’ He goes, ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I gotta know what he’s doing. That guy is destroying our community.”
There was money in it. But McGowan’s sights were else- where. “As an entrepreneur you do what you’ve got to
do,” he said. There were other directions his life could have taken, as well.
He had a buddy during his AFN days in Germany named Giorgio Moroder, a musician, producer and “a big synthe- sizer guy,” which is how McGowan had got to know him.
Moroder had a studio called Musicland where most rock luminaries of the era recorded albums—Queen, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones among them.
At that time, Moroder had a side business that he was trying to get out of, McGowan said. He recorded German- language versions of popular music for radio play in Germany. McGowan and Terri were going to take that over from Moroder.
Instead of taking over Moroder’s business, McGowan, undisciplined and impulsive, disastrously bungled that opportunity. After a blowup with his superior officer, within 24 hours he was on his way back to Fort Benning, Geor- gia, “and my life was over.” Except, of course, his life was really just starting. (For the full scoop on that bit of McGowan short-sightedness, his memoir has all the sordid details.)
—STEVE STARK
professionally. He was a salesman, something he hated. “He was an artist, a sculptor and a painter, but he just couldn’t support his family doing that,” McGowan said. His sense of frustration as McGowan grew up was responsible for McGowan’s stubborn unwillingness to settle.
“I determined from that experience with my father that I would never do something that I didn’t want to do unless it was in the service of getting to something else,” he said.
All of the steps and missteps in his career were in the end all step- ping stones to his dream of a remarkable sound, recorded music with presence, image, a force of nature reproduced that can sweep you in and keep you within its dream.
Now, with PS Audio, McGowan is himself an artist—a sculptor and painter of sound, and absolutely in his element.
For more information on McGowan’s company, go to
PSAudio.com. For more information on his personal life, go to
paulmcgowan.com.
STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. He is Level II certified in program management. In addition to more than two decades of edit- ing and writing about the military and science and technology, he is, as Stephen Stark, the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer health-oriented books and an award-winning novelist.
https://asc.ar my.mil 83
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