Sound Engineer. Born 1938. Died May 5, 2005.
John Judnich began as a recording engineer during the early 1960s for folk acts such as Tim Hardin. In 1964 he designed and built the first ever portable, high-fidelity concert sound system for The Beach Boys. In 1965 he recorded comedian Lenny Bruce's "The Berkeley Concert." In 1966 he designed and installed the sound system in the Whisky a Go Go in Hollywood. At this time he was sharing a house in the Hollywood hills with Lenny Bruce and it was Judnich who found Bruce's body, dead from a heroin overdose.
In 1968 he was one of the founders of Tycobrahe Sound Co., which built a second portable hi-fidelity sound system to Judnich's design for Pinnacle Productions, who were producing concerts at the Shrine Auditorium . By the late 1960s he had built the mixing board at Larrabee Studios where he engineered several sessions for John Mayall. He worked on many concert tours during the early 1970s, with bands from The Beach Boys to Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, plus most of the "second English wave" bands, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, ELO, Faces with Rod Stewart, Jethro Tull, Procol Harum and Ten Years After.
In the 1990s Judnich suffered a head injury in a fall from the roof of his family home in Apple Valley, California. He died in 2005 of natural causes at age 67.