As John Mayer moves toward the blues, the show borrows a warehouse look
John has revitalized my live concert experience,” Michael Keller says. “The last few years weren’t fun any more.” Lighting designer Keller is talking about how every night on this tour is new; as he works the show, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen until it happens. Not in a “these-guys-are-crazy” way, but more in the vein of musicians making music fresh at the moment for the audience, as opposed to every note, beat, light cue and song order exactly the same show after show.
It’s not the stuff of tabloids, admittedly, but good-looking pop star John Mayer is evolving into a respected musician with a blues edge that shuns pyro and explosions in favor of an environment comfortable enough to allow everyone to focus on the music. It’s leading to success on the road — so much so that his current tour was extended for a third leg.
“The tour was not supposed to be this long,” says scenic designer Jim Lenahan. “They weren’t prepared for it to be this successful.” As the tour prepared for an extension that would lead them through many venues they had already played, a new look was needed — and fast.
Borrowed Ideas
Keller grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, where he started working for Bill Graham’s organization when he was 22. “I was doing lighting in college, but didn’t really want to do theatre lighting,” he says. “I became house LD for Winterland, and then started with bands like Jefferson Starship, Santana and others.” He went to work for Morpheus Lights where he worked with the likes of lighting designer Peter Morris. Today he has his own Las Vegas-based company, Amo Lighting.
Keller was hired by production manager Rich Barr before Mayer changed management and brought in the current production manager, Chris Adamson. “They have been happy with the show now; that’s all you can hope for in this business these days.” Keller laughs.
The show has evolved since it first went out last year. Originally, Mayer was co-headlining with Sheryl Crow, and his creative team deferred to Crow’s lighting system. Crow was using Element Labs VersaTubes, while Mayer had been using VersaTiles. Once Crow stepped off the tour, Keller skipped both components and altered the rig to fit his needs a bit more. But when he was recently faced with another extension of the tour, Mayer told his crew he wanted something different. They turned to Lenahan.
Lenahan, who has been in the business for 33 years, came out of Florida with Tom Petty, lighting his early shows. He has a degree from the University of Florida in set design, and though he cut his teeth in the industry doing lighting design, he eventually he moved into designing sets as well. “When you start out, you do whatever brings in the bucks!” he laughs. “Bands always need lights — they don’t always need a set.”
Lenahan put some renderings in front of Mayer and got the gig, but the clock was already ticking. “We only had five weeks from when I first got the call for a set until we were loading in!”
One of Lenahan’s renderings that Mayer liked was a set of a city alley. But time is a cruel mistress and didn’t allow for it to be fully realized, so they took some tough, gritty textural elements of that idea and morphed it into a warehouse look similar to what Lenahan had done for a Petty tour years before. “It’s a warehouse with windows in the back, and then we added some vertical-format video. John wanted flat screen plasma TVs, but we did turn it to the portrait setting instead of landscape.” XL Video provided the gear and helped pull all the elements together quickly.
“The reason they went with flat panel screens was because it was literally something we could grab and go. The creativity really went into the format of the screen, this vertical format. And because they are ground supported, they could be moved a bit or changed if they had to be.” He adds that years ago for Petty he was able to break up the screens, make them different shapes and sometimes share one image and other times have different images on each piece. It was an idea that Mayer liked, but they couldn’t make that happen in time.
Lenahan was impressed with the ability of video director Phil Nudelman, given the simple set up. “He’s a real cool director, and right away he was pushing the envelope in terms of the visuals he was doing. I thought he’d get into learning the show for a while before he started experimenting, but he dove right in.”
The video content was developed by Marc and Catherine Brickman, and Nicholas Millitello came out to help load the content into a Martin Maxedia media server; it was all put together quickly and flawlessly, Keller says.
In addition to the upstage and downstage trusses, the Tyler Truss system includes four truss “fingers” that span the depth of the stage. They have articulating corner blocks that allow the fingers to arch slightly, creating a 3D look. The rigging and production services were provided by TMS Omaha. Crew chief Scott Wasson, first electrician Audra Breyer, lighting techs Mario Marchio and Philip Schulte, plus tour rigger Fred “Fritz” Breitfelder are all supplied by TMS. And according to Wasson, “Doogie (a.k.a. Doug Eldredge) is actually our fifth lighting tech.”In the early days of the tour, Wasson negotiated a trade whereby Eldredge, the tour carpenter, would rig some lights in addition to his carpenter duties in exchange for undisclosed favors. It’s obvious from their banter that all the techs play well together.
New Technology Meets Vaudeville
Though it’s not obvious to the casual observer, the warehouse backdrop is not an actual structure. “The backdrop was digitally printed, which I really like,” Lenahan says. “The printers today can print 16 feet wide and almost any length, so you only need one seam to make it 30 feet wide. I do it all on computer and print it out, so it doesn’t have to go to a scenic artist and then be ‘interpreted.’”
The drop is backed with heavy light-stopping black cloth everywhere except for the “windows.” “This allowed Keller to backlight the windows in a way that is as old as vaudeville,” Lenahan said. “The end result was a simple way to provide atmosphere and flesh out an otherwise two-dimensional backdrop.”
Rigged over the band are five garage lights, typical of what you might see in a warehouse, on motors. They are lowered toward the end — a gag also borrowed from a Petty show. At one point during an intimate moment, Mayer can reach up and pull the string, turning one off.
Keller’s lighting tools include 21 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots, with one extra in which the motors have been taken out so it can be used as a follow spot. A variety of other Vari*Lites are used in addition to Martin MAC washes and profiles. “I like the Vari*Lites. That’s what Sheryl Crow had in the beginning. I brought in the MAC stuff, but the 3000 is very powerful and very high in color temperature.” Everything is being controlled with a Martin Maxxyz console with a wing, Keller’s board of choice.
Mayer is evolving as an artist and this is no every-song-is-the-same kind of show. “He’s always changing the music,” Keller says. “One night a heavy rocker is suddenly turned into a ballad, and you never know who is going to take a solo or for how long.” The show is all cued, but Keller ends up using live playbacks a lot, which is just fine by him. “It keeps us on our toes and makes it interesting.”
But in the end, it’s all about the music.
“With every set for every artist, you’re starting over,” Lenahan says. “On the one hand, I’ve done transforming trusses, whistles and bombs for Toby Keith; for John, you don’t want that kind of stuff, but you still want to create an environment that goes with the music. All the{mosimage} visual guys are only there to service the music in the first place, and if it’s a party-down situation, then you want the set and lights to affect that.
“This stage, though, is the band’s living room two hours a night. They need to be comfortable there.”
