Karrie Keyes is an outlier in the music industry is just about every way. Not only is she a female working in a male-dominated field, she works behind the scenes as a sound engineer, where women are even rarer, and finally, she’s held onto her job for three decades.
“I met the owner of Rat Sound at a Black Flag show and he showed me that you could make a living on the road with a band,” she told The Women Who. “I started working shows with him and learned on the job how to do sound.”
“I spent 20 years working at Rat Sound, and over that time started working with first Red Hot Chili Peppers for 10 years and meeting Pearl Jam when they opened for RHCP. I continued to work with RHCP until 2000 and have remained with Pearl Jam since 1991.”
Karrie is still with the band and she can often be seen at Pearl Jam shows before the band takes the stage. “Half our fans, they know who I am because they see me come out on stage,” Keyes told NPR. “The ‘microphone girl,’ because I’m checking the mics.”
Keyes has been Pearl Jam’s monitor engineer for the past 25 years. As NPR notes, the monitor engineer’s job is to control what the members of the band hear, mixing the sound that comes through their earbuds and speakers when they perform live.
Part of Keyes’s job is to remain in constant contact with the band members, particularly frontman Eddie Vedder. Using hand signals, Vedder can instruct Keyes to turn his sound up or down or add different elements to the mix.
In order to pursue what she loves, Keyes has put in the hard yards. At one point she was living on $50 a week and working every gig she possibly could from punk shows to mariachi performances, frequently running into sexism.
Keyes is also a mother of two. “It took me probably till they were three or four to actually come to terms with, ‘You know what, I’m actually a better mother if I’m doing what I love doing.’ So that when I’m here, I’m completely here,” she told NPR.
She’s also the co-founder of SoundGirls, a group that offers mentoring to women who want to work in the fields of live music and professional audio.
Keyes, who says her favourite tour was working with Fugazi, says a big part of surviving in the industry as a woman is feeling like you’re not alone.
