As I stood there in
the raging snow and gusty winds, freezing my tail off in the cold, predawn of
February, the man with the welding rig was yelling at me to get over there
quickly. I cursed under my breath,
stumbled through the snow and held the stray chunks of aluminum while he welded
the lighting rig back together for me.
Dawn was coming, breakfast was a fading dream and the warmth of my bunk
on the tour bus was now a distant memory.
This is quite the life, I thought.
This is the life I chose and now lead 300 days a year. The show had to go on that night, but the
likelihood seemed remote in my mind.
There was a tremendous amount of work left to do, and we were just a few
hours away from the load in. I knew that
I and the other three crew members would be on the hook to get the truck
repacked once the lighting rig was welded back together and I dreaded the
feeling of freezing my hands onto the gear while shoving it up the loading
ramp. Winter was raw. Days were long on the road and this day shouldn’t
even have officially started yet.
The prior night, we
were playing in Milwaukee. The band was hot, the weather was cold, but
we had a great audience to keep us warm in the grand old theater. I had a visit from friends of my Dad who had
opted to bring their entire family out to the show. A good time seemed to be had by all and the
kids enjoyed learning how to punch buttons on my lighting board. As the lighting director (LD), I held the
primary responsibility for the design of all the lighting systems and effects
then held the touring role of ensuring that all this gear was properly
maintained, set up, operated and repacked for the next show. This particular night was to be somewhat
extraordinary for me. With the show
closed down and the audience mostly gone, we would pack up the gear and restore
it to its rightful place in the trucks.
Usually this involved sending the stage instruments and set out first,
then the sound system, and lastly, the lights, which were always “first up,
last down” in order to more efficiently use space and time on stage. As the LD on this particular show, I was
responsible for about a 120-lamp show. It
was good size for a touring band – not huge, but big enough that I could have
fun, be creative and make the band look good. When fully packed, our
lights took up roughly half a tractor trailer.
While sound and
staging are being torn down, the LD would typically get the dimmer rack
disconnected and get the main power distribution packed into its cable
trunk. For this show, our power
distribution cable was 300 feet of quad, four-ought welding cables and weighed out
at about 1200 pounds - just for the cable!
As we were mostly playing small theaters, one difficulty was trading off
between a full “flown” rig, versus something that could be cranked up from
ground stands. Not all of our locations
supported flying the rig, so we used Genie lifts to lift the lighting trusses –
usually about twenty-five feet into the air.
The lifts have a nice, reliable set of safety features to keep the
weight from accidentally being dropped down the pole. As I was to find out, this safety mechanism
was not infallible. On this tour, we used
four lifts to hold up a box truss setup.
When raising or lowering the lifts, we had to keep all four corners of
the truss system at roughly the same height.
I would assign four folks to the lift cranks and then would stand out in
the auditorium and use hand signals to guide them in order to keep the corners
moving up or down at the same rate.
This night, due to a
worker that ignored my ever-more frantic hand signals, one corner was lowered
too rapidly. The lift on that corner
eventually jammed – temporarily, as it turned out, and then unjammed when the
other three corners were lowered sufficiently.
Sadly the inattentive worker had continued cranking mightily and had paid
out enough cable that there was an excess of loose cable. His lift eventually came unstuck but the corner
went into a freefall but eventually came to a screeching halt when it fell
through all the slack line. It hit with
such force that it snapped the cable and so, began a new freefall. This time it fell all the way to the stage, causing
such stress on the box truss that it bent trusses, toppled the lifts, smashed
lamps and ripped the aluminum truss welds apart. The falling trusses narrowly missed the other
stage crew as they came to rest in a useless heap. We were all shocked, but thankful that no one
was injured.
The next day’s
predawn raid on our neatly packed truck was necessitated by a desire to get the
broken trusses welded back together before our next show. Later that day, as we arrived at Wheaton College, I pulled the truck into the parking
lot. The loading dock, I was informed,
was on the far side of a parking lot which was full of student vehicles. There was absolutely no room to maneuver a 48
foot semi with an extra-long cab without running over a few vehicles in the
process.
After surveying the situation
for a while, I decided that the best and only way to get to the loading dock
was to pull the truck off the parking lot and into a snow-covered field,
straighten out the tractor and trailer in the field, align with the dock and
pray that the eight-wheel drive of the tractor could get the trailer through
the snow and up to the door. Of course,
it didn’t make it as it sank into the snow bank and spun the wheels. After a few rocking attempts, I gave up and jumped
down from the rig and began rounding up an army of volunteers who eagerly lined
up and took their place for the impossible: push a 60,000 pound semi out of a snow
bank … “right, that will work”, I thought.
Much to my surprise, the truck came free and the volunteers cheered
mightily as I backed into the parking lot – now on to the unloading ceremony.
I called for some
strong volunteers to play teamster then I took my place at the back of the
trailer to call out the order of unloading – case by case and truss by truss,
day after day, this was a familiar routine.
Normally a big show would play big halls and use the local union
teamsters and stagehands. We sometimes
bypassed this formality to play the promoter’s favorite, low-budget venue and
in so doing, we would bear the burden of eager volunteers who just couldn’t
wait to help, in hopes that they would meet the band. Volunteers come as a mixed blessing for a
road crew. Some are fantastic, but some
are even dangerous to the crew and to themselves in their eagerness to help. Their lack of experience in moving large,
heavy objects could wreak havoc on both the objects and on themselves and
others around them. I’ve had my fingers
crunched, been knocked off a stage backwards, had things dropped on me and
generally, suffered the results of such eagerness. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciated the help
and met many a fine person on the road.
It was so often the richness of the folks we met that made my day and
broke up the monotony of this hard life.
This day, we had a great crew: eager, plentiful, and ready to be
helpful. It was up to us to apply them
well, monitor their progress and try to keep everyone safe. Unfortunately, I was somewhat preoccupied
with the repair of the previous night’s damages on this particular day.
A normal day would be
busy for a good 8-10 hours before the show.
We often used every minute of that time, just to be ready by curtain
time. On this day, we were running late
from the very beginning. Once the
trusses were slowly assembled, inspected and raised off the stage, we still had
the task of replacing broken bulbs and other collateral damages that had
occurred. Being an electrical engineer, I
had designed and built a custom on-stage lighting board that I used during
setup in order to make the lighting focus more efficient. We could power up the lighting channels
without running back and forth to the house lighting board to turn up next
channel on the board. The house lighting
board was usually placed half-way out in the theater, so I probably ran many
miles just getting to and from that board.
The on-stage board was a great time saver, but also increased the
communication with an operator when I was up in the trusses doing a focus. One of the worst things for the LD was when we
were late enough that the band got into sound check before we had finished
focus. When the on-stage volume got loud
enough then I would need to depend on hand signals to get the operator to turn
on the next lighting channel that I wanted to focus. Of course, the operator was often a
volunteer; prone to being star struck and wanting to watch the band do sound
check far more than they wanted to watch me focus the lights. Focus was a necessity, but sometimes a dangerous
part of the job, as it had to be performed from a swaying piece of aluminum
truss, sometimes as high as forty feet off the stage.
Once we got the trusses up into position and
focused, they were not to be moved or lowered for the duration of the show,
else the focus would be in jeopardy. I
developed quite an aptitude for climbing up to the trusses by holding the
bundle of cables and hauling myself up hand-over-hand. If you do this enough times in a day, and for
days at a time, it tends to build great fitness, but it also wears one to the
core by the end of the day.
On this particular
day, the focus went poorly as we were generally behind schedule on
everything. The crew was late in getting
the sound and band equipment set as the lights were in such a mess that no one
else could get on stage until we had sorted our gear out and flown the trusses. This meant that we were trying to do the
focus with a full 125dB of sound onstage; the operator was paying way more
attention to the band, than to my hand signals.
Eventually I got it done, climbed down a pole and instructed him on how
to hook up the main lighting board in place of the onstage adjustment board. While he worked on swapping out the multi-pin
cables, I headed out to the auditorium and worked on getting the main lighting board
set up. When I powered up the board, I
noticed that most of the lights on stage came up – without my even turning up
my faders. Powering down again, I rushed
back to the stage and found the embarrassed volunteer staring at the end of the
cable and the stump of a connector with wires twisted off the back of the
connector. He had over tightened the
connector to the point that he tore the cable out of the back of it. Delay that focus check for a while more -- off
to get the soldering iron and tools! Fortunately,
I’d had much experience with soldering multi-pin connectors, but they are still
a pain. This particular connector was a
72-pin connector, connected to individual strands of 20-gauge solid wire. All wires are color coded, but to recover
from this fiasco, I then had to de-solder each of the 72 wires, carefully
noting and recording its color code if possible – the remainder of some of the
wires were so short that I couldn’t tell what the color codes were and had to
do trial and error to figure out which pin to solder them to. The connector had to be completely cleaned
out with a solder sucker, then each wire must be, cut, stripped and re-soldered
into the proper location. This would be
a tedious process in the best of times, but I now had about an hour left before
the show was to begin.
We had a miserable
light show that night – less than 25 percent of the lamps worked by show time. I frantically tried to make do with whatever
I could but these are the times that make you feel so small and helpless –
nothing more could be done, but I still felt bad for the band and of course,
for all those fans that came out to see a great show. I felt I’d just let them down, despite all
the heroics we did to overcome the day.
Load out was
uneventful, if I recall correctly, but I opted to go straight to my bunk rather
than waiting for the first truck stop and my only free time to eat since I had
arisen at 4AM. I was depressed, but …
some days are just like that. Better
times would return and life would go on.
As the expression goes, “the show must go on”; this doesn’t necessarily
mean that it will go smoothly.
During this phase of
my touring days, I was also the backup driver for the semi and when not
driving, would sleep in the sleeper behind the main cabin. With as much weight as we carried and despite
the air-ride suspension, the bouncing was so fierce that I would occasionally
wake up when I was thrown into the air.
Amazingly, I was so tired after our brutal eighteen-hour workdays that I
would typically sleep right through this.
I am pretty sure that I never woke up that night.
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