After the supermarket closed because of wartime rationing, Jacob's father and his uncle George opened a Mexican restaurant in 1946, named Club 21, which operated for the next 73 years.

[18][19] In 1955, Jacob moved with his father and new stepmother to the Haddon Hill neighborhood of Oakland, California, where he attended Catholic school classes and served as an altar boy at Our Lady of Lourdes along with his new best friend, Tom Gericke.

[20] Graduating from high school, Jacob worked for McCune during the summer of 1962, then in September he moved to Los Angeles to enroll in college classes at Loyola Marymount University, where he earned a B.A.

The 1965 year was different as Jacob worked the stage manager position for the first and last time, shepherding four productions: Leslie Uggams in The Boy Friend, Godfrey Cambridge in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pearl Bailey in Call Me Madam and Richard Chamberlain in Private Lives.

[23] Jacob designed the sound system for the whole festival, and he incorporated the stage requirements of the various bands on the bill, after which he determined that he would need a total of 24 microphone inputs on his mixer, which was unheard of at the time.

He augmented the proprietary 16-channel stereo sound console designed by McCune head engineer Bob Cavin with two 4-channel mono Altec 1567 tube mixers to get 24 inputs.

[25] Both McCune and Meagher were Altec dealers, so Jacob combined their inventory to create a loudspeaker array appropriate for the Monterey County Fairgrounds main stage.

A number of people involved with Jimi Hendrix were impressed with Jacob at Monterey, including managers Chas Chandler and Michael Jeffery, producer Jerry Goldstein and concert promoter Tom Hulett.

[23] After Monterey, Hendrix's road manager, Gerry Stickels, called McCune to request Jacob as sound designer and mixer on tour.

After this, while Hendrix took a break to record Axis: Bold as Love, Jacob mixed sound for Simon and Garfunkel for three dates in Oregon in October 1967.

San Francisco had been Jacob's new hometown since early June 1967 when he moved into an old Victorian flat with housemates Doug Leighton (future co-founder of RTS Systems intercom products), Ben Fong-Torres (editor at Rolling Stone) and his old friend Tom Gericke.

[29] During a break in which Hendrix stopped touring to record Electric Ladyland, Jacob mixed sound for some Peter, Paul and Mary dates, notably their March 15, 1968, performance at Carnegie Hall, and he worked for McCune on various assignments such as the Sky River Rock Festival in August–September in Washington state.

He helped Heider record the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe, and in October he supported Cass Elliot in concert at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

He remarked later about this turning point that he felt exhausted from too much touring, and not just rock and pop music, but also corporate events for Holiday Magic, a multi-level marketing firm that organized meetings across North and South America, supported by sound systems from McCune.

With this success in Boston, Fisher and Jacob were sent to other cities to assist in the mounting of new productions of Hair, including overseas travel to Europe where they helped local lighting and sound crews attain similar results, modernizing musical theatre in the process.

He also replaced the insufficient JBL Paragon home hi-fi loudspeakers with the McCune JM3, rigging two over the proscenium, and flanking the stage with two more to bring the spatial imaging down to the level of the performers.

"[37] For his work on Jesus Christ Superstar, Jacob was credited as sound designer in Playbill, the leading Broadway theatre industry magazine.

[36] As Jacob was working on Jesus Christ Superstar, Hendrix's former manager Michael Jeffery asked him to serve as president of Electric Lady Studios.

Declining to take sides, Jacob ended his contract with the studio, and shifted instead to a new venture with Chip Monck: CMI Consultants, a company for producing conventions and large events.

One notable effort in 1973 was the National Lampoon comedy Lemmings, which ran for a year, and launched the careers of John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Chevy Chase.

[39] In 1974, Lou Adler asked Jacob to lead the sound design for a new production of The Rocky Horror Show at the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood.

[40] Choreographer Bob Fosse was impressed with Jacob's work on Jesus Christ Superstar, and asked producer Stuart Ostrow to hire him for Pippin.

Jacob assembled a quadraphonic sound system based on a four-bus mixer from England of the sort used by Pink Floyd in 1973 for their touring production of Dark Side of the Moon.

[42] Jacob specified that the piccolo trumpet part in "Penny Lane" would be panned around the room to four speaker locations, an enhancement to the Beatles' stereo recording.

Jacob had previously argued for better mix positions, but with smaller victories such as moving the sound operator from the stage wings to the rear of the balcony seating.

This was the first time that a wireless microphone was hidden at the hairline – a now-common technique popularized in 1985 when Andrew Bruce pioneered a large-scale implementation for all of the principal performers in the original London cast of Les Misérables.

Jacob put a row of shotgun mics at the front edge of the stage, and Bennett devised a choreography to fit the very visible microphone positions.

[47] The show opened at The Public Theater off Broadway, where there was no orchestra pit, and the offstage band was squeezed into the loading dock to which Jacob had applied soundproofing.

Unusually, the mix position out in the audience was joined by a cast member: Zach (Robert LuPone), the show's authoritarian director, ostensibly conducted the auditions from a desk next to Otts Munderloh, the sound operator.

During the performance, Jacob's sound design required a building engineer in the basement to switch off the air conditioning system for a few minutes while the dancer named Paul (Sammy Williams) gave a personally revealing speech.