The most interesting man in the world

But even if Schaffer never says a word, his walls talk: I see a framed handwritten note from Arthur C. Clarke, the man who first conceived of using satellites for communications networks, calling Schaffer’s work with satellites “fascinating.” Another wall features a copy of the letter the musician Sting wrote to the editors of Popular Mechanics in 2005, politely chastising them for failing to credit Schaffer with being the real creator of one of their “Inventions of the Year.” Sting’s note reads, in part, “Kenny is an old, old friend of mine, a prolific, wildly eccentric, free-thinking inventor whose ideas are sufficiently distanced from consensual reality as to make them both a danger to society as we know it, as well as essential to its further evolution.”

It’s a tidy bachelor pad, with lots of windows. (Schaffer is divorced from Alla Kliouka, a Russian actress who is best known for her role as Tony’s one-legged mistress, Svetlana, on The Sopranos, as well as a recurring role on The Americans.) The living room is dominated by a long, narrow desk with an elaborate computer set-up where he works. Scattered on flat surfaces throughout the living room are a half-dozen old Morse code keys, and Schaffer has a nervous habit of leaning on the edge of the couch, fluidly tapping out messages on whichever key is at hand. He does this even while engaged in conversation, which is both distracting and mesmerizing.

And sitting inconspicuously on a bookshelf in the living room is an original Schaffer-Vega Diversity System, now a valuable collector’s item. Schaffer invented the system, the first (and many still say the best) wireless electric guitar signal transmitter. As inventions go, this may seem like a footnote compared to the iPhone, but the impact of Schaffer’s invention can’t be understated. The Schaffer-Vega Diversity System is largely responsible for arena rock becoming a cultural force. In fact, nearly everything you’ve seen on a stage in the last 40 years owes a debt to Schaffer.

When Schaffer was a Bronx 10-year-old, his father bought him a Heathkit shortwave radio, which soon became a lifelong obsession. “For me, ham radio was kind of like a cosmic slot machine. You never knew what hour of the day, what time of year, what part of the 11-year sunspot cycle, or what direction you wanted to go, you never knew the right frequency,” he says. “Not that I wanted to talk to Germany or Mongolia for any particular reason except that I could. You know, I could do that” — Schaffer clicks his Morse code key — “and I’m changing every molecule between here and Beijing. For a little kid, that’s amazing.”

Schaffer’s ham radio skills are legendary. “I have the world’s fastest Morse code speed,” he says, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him. Schaffer placed second in an international Morse code competition that was held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel when he was an adolescent, and the man who beat him died decades ago. While we talk, he pulls up a Morse code app on his phone. His fingers twitch for a fraction of a second, and he presents the phone for inspection. He’s typed the first 10 letters of the alphabet in sequence in less time than it would take most typists to find a single letter.

Schaffer likes to explain his affinity for Morse code using radio terms: He says it has an extremely low “signal-to-noise” ratio. “It’s the smallest movement a human being can make to record a thought. You could write it, but that’s very good coordination, with eye and hand and all that. You could speak into a tape recorder, but that’s kind of complex brain activity,” he says. “I could lie in bed mostly asleep, and from the bedroom, there was a wire into a computer … and in the morning, I could look at what I wrote.”

Not all of his late-night thoughts proved inspiring. “I had this profound revelation in the middle of the night,” he says. “Well, I ran in here in the morning, saying, ‘Whoa, what the hell was that?’ And I saw I had written, ‘There is a draft when the window is open,’” he says, laughing.

THE ROCK-N-ROLL LIFE

By the time Schaffer enrolled at City College to study electrical engineering, the young geek had decided to reinvent himself with rock-and-roll as his guide. Obsessed with music since the Beatles’s legendary performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, he thought that if he could procure an introduction to the world of rock, he could finally become one of the cool kids. His junior year in college, he seized his chance. Through a friend who was in a band called the Left Banke, Schaffer met Harry Lookofsky, the father of one of the band members and a well-known session musician in New York. Lookofsky was interested in building a recording studio, and Schaffer bluffed his way into getting hired by Lookofsky to help build it.

Schaffer knew nothing about recording studios; he didn’t even play an instrument. So, he enlisted his friend, Richard Factor, who had been doing electronics work for a government contractor as a way of avoiding the draft, and another ham radio operator, Steven Katz, whom he had met at a party in Queens, to help him. The three men ended up building what was at the time New York’s most advanced multitrack recording studio.

One of the first songs recorded by the Left Banke in the new studio was “Walk Away Renee”; it hit No. 5 on the Billboard music charts in 1966. After the studio was built, the three men stayed on as recording engineers. (Factor and Katz went on to found the company Eventide, which became famous for its digital effects processors still widely used in studios today.) But while Factor and Katz thrived in the studio, Schaffer discovered that even someone with his technical skills had limits. “A good producer or engineer can remember that the bass from the 43rd take goes really well with the chops on the drums in the 73rd take,” Schaffer says. “My brain doesn’t work that way. I just go, ‘That sounds nice.’”

He convinced Lookofsky to make him the Left Banke’s publicist. “In those days, there were no rock-and-roll publicists. They were all old guys who marched elephants down f—ing Broadway. There was no one who lived the life,” he says.

Besides, what Schaffer had liked most about being a recording engineer was meeting the musicians. He befriended a young singer named Steven Tallarico, with whom he would regularly drag race on an unfinished section of highway in Yonkers. A few years later, Tallarico changed his name to Tyler, joined a band called Aerosmith, and the rest is rock history. Schaffer also began working as a publicist for Steve Paul’s legendary club, the Scene, a home base for rock stars in New York. “You’d go in there any night, and there will be Jimi Hendrix and Stephen Stills and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison onstage,” he says.

Schaffer discovered that after the club closed in the early morning hours, Hendrix had a habit of walking down 8th Avenue to a studio to continue jamming with any musicians who showed up. Schaffer struck a deal to record those sessions, and for decades, tucked away in his apartment were 70 hours of unreleased Hendrix recordings. (He sold the recordings to Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen in the 1990s.) By the 1970s, Schaffer had A-list clients and was the publicist for the Hendrix estate. “I was lucky enough to get a few good clients who are so good that I didn’t have to be real smart,” he says. “They were so great I just had to not f— it up.”

Being an accomplished geek also made him invaluable to his rock star friends and their managers, who constantly asked Schaffer for help, whether it was improvising an electrical stimulus device to help his old friend Steven Tyler kick his heroin habit or installing an elaborate hi-fi system in John Lennon’s apartment.

Soon, he was hosting a rotating cast of musicians at his own place. He met Bob Marley when a mutual friend let him into his apartment without telling him. Marley proceeded to stare at him so intensely Schaffer got spooked and left. When he tells the bizarre story of how Geraldo Rivera stopped Lennon from buying his Jukebox, he gestures to the place where they were standing. Remembering the many musicians who had passed through his door, Schaffer laughs and looks around his apartment. “Oh, they’ve all been here.”

FROM PUBLICIST TO INVENTOR

Despite his career as a publicist, Schaffer never stopped tinkering with radios and electronics. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that Schaffer himself became known as an inventor. He was dating a girl who worked for the Rolling Stones, by then a touring juggernaut playing stadiums across America. These large venues presented a logistical challenge, however, because the Rolling Stones sold every seat for every concert — including the seats behind the stage. This meant that lead singer Mick Jagger had to use a wireless microphone and walk around the stage to be heard by all of the concertgoers. Wireless microphone technology had existed since the 1950s, but it was terrible.

With his extensive knowledge of radio signals, Schaffer had ideas for how to improve wireless microphones. He also realized that the same wireless technology could be used to transmit signals from electric guitar pick-ups back to their amplifiers, which would allow guitar and bass players to move around onstage as well. Working with the Vega corporation in California, Schaffer produced the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System in 1975. It consisted of two parts: a transmitter a little larger than a pack of cigarettes with a cable that plugged into a guitar, and a larger box that received the signals and was plugged into an amplifier.

The Rolling Stones were blown away after they were shown what Schaffer had done. They had their roadies put amplifiers and speakers in the windows of the building where they were staying in New York, grabbed their guitars, and walked outside and on to 60th Street. “They were walking up and down that short block to Central Park to Broadway to Central Park to Broadway, playing, and the sound would come out of the second-floor windows,” Schaffer told rock journalist Jesse Fink. “Nobody noticed. Not one car slowed down. I mean, only in New York.”

There was another, practical reason for the interest in Schaffer’s wireless guitar transmitter. Even when unplugged, the filter capacitors in the tube amplifiers favored by rock guitarists store enough electricity to kill you. Strutting around on an outdoor stage in damp weather, playing instruments with metal strings while being directly plugged into a 100-watt tube amplifier, is flirting with disaster. With a wireless connection, you don’t have to worry about being electrocuted. That’s how Schaffer made his first big sale.

He had approached KISS bassist Gene Simmons when he first devised his system. “I showed him my brand new, fresh invention I worked my ass off on, and he says, ‘So?’ He didn’t get it at all,” says Schaffer. But not long after that conversation, KISS was performing in Lakeland, Florida. The band had just finished “Detroit Rock City” when guitarist Ace Frehley grabbed a metal railing on the stage to steady himself and ended up completing a circuit. His body seized up from the current, and he was unable to let go of the railing until he fell off the stage. He nearly died. (Frehley later wrote a song, “Shock Me,” about the experience.)

“That night, I get a call,” says Schaffer. “It’s Gene. ‘Are you still making those wireless things?’ He wanted an insurance policy; it had nothing to do with staging. Of course, once they got them, they start running around the arena.” Schaffer goes on to note, with some satisfaction, that although KISS was the first band to purchase the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System, it was not the first group to use it. “The first set [of transmitters] I was able to deliver, I jumped the line and screwed Gene,” he says, laughing. “I gave it to Jeff Lynne, so [Electric Light Orchestra] was the first band to ever be wireless.” Rock stars soon lined up to buy Schaffer’s devices.

SATELLITES AND RUSSIANS

Schaffer had become a rock legend in his own right, but after just a few years, the restless Schaffer was eager for a new challenge. He found it in an unlikely place: the Soviet Union. In the late 1970s, when consumer satellite dishes became available, Schaffer bought a 12-foot-wide dish, put it on a trailer, and drove it out of the city on weekends to tinker. One day in 1983, he started picking up Soviet television signals. This wasn’t supposed to be possible, and Schaffer quickly became obsessed with peering through the cultural window he had inadvertently opened; he once characterized the USSR as “a dozen time zones that never heard of Phil Spector!”

He developed his own computer guidance systems to track Soviet satellites and devised unique methods for decoding the video and audio he received. In 1984, Columbia University’s Sovietology department bought one of Schaffer’s satellite installations so students could watch Soviet TV, and the installation had a major impact on Cold War relations.

It also changed music history. One Friday night, Schaffer invited his friend Sting to see what the satellite installation could do, in the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia. Sting showed up in a limousine with an attractive woman named Jenny, and Schaffer asked his friend Jonathan Sanders, who taught at the institute and lived nearby, to join them. The group spent hours talking and watching Soviet TV; owing to the time difference, it was mostly Saturday morning children’s programming out of Moscow. At 2 o’clock in the morning, they piled back into the limo and dropped Sting off at his hotel. Schaffer and Jenny kept partying into the wee hours. (Schaffer only realized later that the “Jenny” he’d been out all night with was Jennifer Beals, the actress who had just starred in Flashdance.)

“It’s like 10 o’clock now the next morning, and having gone to sleep little but late, there’s a knock at the door,” Schaffer told the podcast Amps & Axes. “It’s [Sting’s equipment manager] Danny Quatrochi, and he hands me a cassette that has a little label on it that says ‘Russians for Kenny,’ and I say, ‘Oh, I’ll play it later.’ He says, ‘You got to play it.’ As it turns out, what Sting had done when he got back to the hotel, he had a Synclavier [synthesizer] in his room, and he wrote the song ‘Russians,’ and I’m listening to it going, ‘Holy crow.’” The song, which borrows musically from the Lieutenant Kijé Suite by Sergei Prokofiev, is about Cold War tensions; its refrain is, “I hope the Russians love their children too.” Sting included the song on his first solo record, Dream of the Blue Turtles, and later performed it at the Grammy Awards.

Schaffer’s satellite work also inadvertently led to a bizarre incident involving CBS newsman Dan Rather. Late one night in 1986, Rather was leaving Columbia University, where he had been watching Soviet TV with Sanders, when he was attacked and beaten by two assailants, one of whom kept asking: “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” It was later discovered that one of the attackers was a mentally ill man who believed TV networks were sending signals into his brain; he wanted to know the specific frequency so he could block it. Many people speculate that the assailant mistook Rather for Schaffer, whose work on Soviet satellites at Columbia was by then well-known. The incident was later immortalized in the R.E.M. song, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

Schaffer’s work with the Harriman Institute eventually set his life in yet another direction. After making some contacts inside the Soviet Union, he became one of the founders of a company, Belka International. It’s often forgotten that before the Berlin Wall fell, Western businesses began to have significant interests in the Soviet Union. Infrastructure under communism left a lot to be desired, and Schaffer found many opportunities for work, such as setting up satellite phone networks for oil companies operating in Siberia.

Schaffer, who is at once jovial and touched by the kind of determined insanity Russians adore, had a talent for circumnavigating the fearsome Soviet bureaucracy. Western corporations soon depended on him for all manner of business dealings. In 1991, an unnamed president of a large corporation operating in Russia told the New Yorker, “I’ve seen people pull rabbits out of hats before, but Kenny is the first person I’ve met who could pull an elephant out of a jackass.”

As time wore on, his tinkering still proved fruitful. In the late ’90s, when he heard that his friend Sting wanted to follow his beloved Newcastle United football club while on tour, Schaffer created a device, TV2Me, that broadcast home cable television signals over the internet — the first successful effort to allow consumers to “placeshift” entertainment. Unfortunately for Schaffer, the makers of a similar device, the Slingbox, managed to raise a lot more capital and get their product on shelves at Best Buy. Schaffer received credit as an inventor; Slingbox made all of the money.

Today, Schaffer is a consultant and finds himself most energized by the prospect of using technology to help people. Among the companies he’s working with is Asius Technologies, a Colorado company founded by Stephen Ambrose, the inventor of wireless in-ear monitors, to develop technology for earbuds that don’t cause deafness. The company is rumored to be working with many A-list rock stars who are struggling with hearing problems as they get older; in 2016, AC/DC singer Brian Johnson credited the company for helping him get back onstage after hearing problems stopped him from performing.

More recently, he’s spent the past few years working on an electrical stimulus device that he says greatly reduces withdrawal symptoms in opiate addicts. Based on research from Scottish doctor Margaret Patterson, the device works by mimicking the signals the brain sends to stimulate endorphin production. The medical establishment has been skeptical of this approach, but Schaffer has been using it on high-profile addicts for years with success, and rock stars Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, and Eric Clapton have all made glowing statements saying similar electrical treatments cure them of their own storied addictions. Schaffer hopes to do further research on the treatment and eventually make it available through a nonprofit foundation so as many addicts can benefit from it as possible.

He also travels regularly to Russia and has spent a lot of time contemplating how a country that once seemed on the verge of cultural and economic liberation is now backsliding into darkness.

“Nothing works there. I think there’s physical energy coming out of the ground. Clocks break down. I had a rule in Moscow: I would not stay for more than two weeks. If I ever broke that rule, on the 15th day, I became Russian. If I have an early morning meeting, my toothpaste explodes over my only clean shirt, the toilet bowl overflows, a pipe bursts in the kitchen,” he says. “There’s a powerful something in the ground there that resonates at the frequency of Russia. I don’t know if it’s ions or electrons or qubits. I don’t care what it is. One day it will be discovered and measured.” Schaffer knows he sounds crazy saying such things, but he’s hardly the first inventor to promote unusual theories. “Marconi, when [as a young man] he told his mommy and daddy that he could send signals across Palermo, they put him in the nuthouse for three months,” he reminds me.

Schaffer, a ’60s-era liberal who’s no fan of Donald Trump, finds the resurgence of knee-jerk paranoia toward all things Russian particularly concerning. It seems obvious to him that the ongoing alienation of the two superpowers decades after the Cold War ended and capitalism and rock-and-roll came to Moscow is symptomatic of broader cultural and technological shifts. “Unplug Facebook, unplug social media. The world has changed. You can now destroy a country with a few [clicks]. … You can increase the noise level to the point nobody trusts nobody,” he says. “And that’s what’s happened.”

For a guy who has spent the last half-century optimistically participating in a staggering number of pop culture, technological, and international relations breakthroughs, Schaffer sounds worried about the direction in which we’re heading. How worried? A few years ago, after a fight with his landlady about installing antennae on the roof, he got rid of a large and expensive amount of his beloved shortwave radio equipment.

“The internet has kind of spoiled the game for me,” he says. In 2007, the FCC stopped requiring a test to prove Morse code proficiency before issuing a ham radio license. Schaffer found he had no one to talk to. Schaffer’s problem with ham radio is the same one he now sees plaguing the internet, our politics, and our culture. “There was too much noise,” he says. “And not enough signal.”

Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.