…unpublished EQ submission. A retraction of all the locations I’d suggested. Apparently they were all wrong and I (and everyone I worked with) are unreliable sources for such information. I was fishing for a short series based on this, but they didn’t bite.
OK, OK. It is a very nice new building. It was really amazingly non-reverberant. And the purple seats are groovy. But there was most definitely NO rain on the DoubleTrouble show in Waterbury’s new Oakdale Musical Theatre. I’d like to extend my sincere apologies to the theatre’s management and to anyone else who might have been offended at my mistake.
Some of my cohorts on tour read the article I wrote for EQ and immediately set about lambasting me for my error. Not that I was alone. Actually none of us was able to recall where it was that the show I described occurred. We recounted several shows of rain and storm and general unpleasantness but found ourselves unable to locate any mental landmarks to place the show. The fact is even the most memorable circumstances tend to blend into each other. We do so many venues each year to keep an accurate account of each one is a job unto itself. And even though each venue is different it is our job to make it look like our show when they shut off the house lights.
Which is not to say that they don’t earn a spot in ones heart. Quite the contrary in fact, the venues most remembered by traveling engineers and techs are often those which are most indifferent to our needs. Like in that place in West Virginia, where all the gear in the trucks is unloaded onto a 20’x20′ platform in the parking lot and reloaded into one of two smaller trucks – which then shuttle the gear through the 200 foot tunnel winding down to the show floor level. Truck drivers stare longingly, but none dare try backing a 45 foot semi into that ridiculous hole. The famous RedRocks Amphitheatre outside Denver is similar. I heard a story about a driver that managed to get his semi up the mountain to the stage but had to call a rescue helicopter to get it out. He can be found peddling push-ups and bomb-pops in Nashville.
Many concert venues are actually sporting arenas designed to suit the needs of basketball, hockey and even football teams. These buildings are sometimes so old they were built before the Beatles played Shea Stadium. Naturally they aren’t suited to the needs of a modern concert production, but that doesn’t seem to slow promoters eager to bring the current hot tour into their hometown. Since sports teams rarely require more than one tractor trailer for jock straps, uniforms and t-shirts it’s unusual for these buildings to accommodate more than one truck at a time, or to have a truck-loading dock at all for that manner. (Some tours have a specific driver that assures the procession of rigs in and out of the building in the proper order – you can’t load a rigging truck when the lights are still in the air and the speakers are in the way.)
Once the gear is inside the building the true tests begin. Power is the first thing to track down. Most venues that host major performers now have large distribution panels capable of delivering 200 to 400 amps of power. Unfortunately large tours are capable of sucking far more juice than that. Often multiple tie-ins will be tapped off the same transformer, which means even though accesses are separately fused, lights and sound and bus power are all tied together – sometimes along with the building’s heating/air-conditioning system, the microwave in the coach’s office and the big billboard flashing the band’s name out front. This can result in humming and buzzing in audio equipment. These phantom clicks and burps are usually found by feverish tracing of ground-loops and one of those 45-cent AC ground adaptors in the offending equipment’s AC circuit, but it’s almost never fun. (Please note that interrupting AC ground in this manner is both dangerous and illegal, but it sounds better than “aahhnntt!”) Alumium foil may also be wrapped around noisy gear for isolation, but be prepared to endure chides and isolation from those unwise in the ways of electo-magnetic interference.
Once power is tied in and as much as 1500 feet of cable is laid to carry juice to the stage, the rigging can be powered and motors begin to haul the speakers into the air. This sounds fairly straightforward but it’s only through the heroic acrobatics of certifiably insane riggers that any concert gets put in the air. These guys hang from all sorts of places most reasonable people would deem inaccessible. P.A.’s can require anything from two to twenty (or more) hanging points per side, and lights and set… well, let’s say they use more. So naturally sound points don’t always show up first.
Sometimes buildings are not physically capable of holding all the things that normally goes up. Weights per point can regularly amount to 4400 pounds of dead weight. Riggers have to know the restrictions of the building as well as the various formulas for ciphering weight distribution of different hanging techniques.
The solutions used for rigging problems in different buildings are as unbelievable as the people that implement them. They range from people crawling upside down like bugs on the ceiling (usually without safety lines) – to swinging back and forth in harnesses like Peter-Pan. There are a few venues that are so difficult to rig even smaller tours will send a crew in front of the rest of the production to do a “pre-rig” for a little head start.
The depth and specifics of touring different styles of venues is a complicated business. If the good editors of EQ magazine agree (and if you’re reading this apparently they do) I’m going to spend a few months sending in some of the bright spots and loathsome moments through the eyes of those who were there. Next time out we’ll look at the top five worst load-ins according to some notorious road dogs, even a couple that may not need to be anonymous. In the future I’ll cover things like rigging and juice and trucking – maybe even catering, who knows?
Generally the smaller a tour is the more malleable it needs to be, especially in terms of how specific needs are met. The huge tours can literally build their own venue with the staging that they carry, while some acts carry only band gear and people. The bottom line is always the bottom line, and compromise is always the result. The most important thing to remember is the sound of money. As a late great friend of mine once said, “You know, money sure does sound good, don’t it?”
Yes it does.
Copyright © 1996 JPArmstrong