You may know Steve Cohen’s work through some of the mega tours that he’s designed lately – Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake… But you may not know that inside the business-savvy exterior of the man beats the heart of an artist who sees his craft as an extension of the music, who approaches the console like a band instrument and his job like performance art. After running the gamut from the early days with Billy Joel to the over-the-top productions of late, Cohen is settling back into the groove of a pure lighting show and loving every minute of it. He’s currently on the road with Billy Joel again, running the console and getting back to his roots. We caught up to the tour at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas where we spoke with Cohen.
PLSN: How long have you been working with Billy Joel?
Steve Cohen: I started with Billy in 1974, some 32 years ago. I owned a lighting company then, whose first two clients were Earth, Wind & Fire and Billy Joel. After that first tour, I sold the company and joined the Billy family and worked pretty much exclusively for him through‘70s and the ‘80s. That’s why all of the material performed on this tour is very close to me. I was around when it was born.
After all these years, what brings you back to this artist and this tour?
I look at my contemporaries in the business—guys like Marc Brickman, Allen Branton, Peter Morse—and though our styles differ, we have a common thread in that we started out touring with artists that allowed us to grow our craft along with their careers. So, that being the core of my relationship with Billy and having a vested interest in protecting the integrity of how these songs have looked over the years, I feel responsible for continuing that legacy. On this tour, I’m rediscovering the art of rock ‘n’ roll lighting again. After doing these multi-media productions, coming back to my roots in lighting is really gratifying.
With this resurgence, I made the decision that I was going to call the show and be on-site for every performance. We only programmed about 25 songs out of a menu of about 50 on purpose, because I knew that 10 or 12 songs every night were going to be on the fly. And to have an automated system with 200-some moving lights and being able to run those the way I would run an old Avo console is very challenging and exciting. We’ve done about 30 shows, and now it’s a piece of performance art to me.
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What’s different about this rig compared to your other shows?
I’ve got a lot of equipment I have never toured with before. (Martin) MAC 2Ks are the majority of wash lights, Vari*Lite 3000 profiles, VL 5 arcs, 3K Syncrolites with modified scrolls. And if you talk to my longtime collaborator, Joel Young, when he saw this plot and saw 80 some-odd hard edge instruments, he thought I’d gone crazy because I never use that high a percentage on a touring rig. It’s also my first tour with the Maxxyz console and wing. It’s become a well-honed, executable console. I’ve never in my career had a company spend so much time and energy on writing software specific to the operation of this console as it pertained to me running this show. These guys were writing code for this wing, and we were re-installing software, and adding features as this tour was progressing. There were teething pains, but I’ll tell you, very rarely do you find a company that builds hardware that understands how creatively these pieces need to interface to the artistic sense of executing lighting cues. It’s been really, really good. I’ve become a big proponent of the Maxedia media server. We got one of the first units, and have built thousands of video elements over the past six, seven months on the server itself, and the user interface has grown due to our input. It’s really nice to have a company as big as Martin throw that kind of care and support towards an individual designer.
You’re also the lighting contractor on this tour. How did that come about?
Steve Cohen Productions has been my company name for 28 years, roughly. I started it when I was in New York, and it was basically a design house in the early years. About six years ago, I started general contracting television projects and tours with companies that had serviced all of my clients over the years. As the designer, my clients would come to me and ask me why certain things worked or didn’t work, why certain crew members were good and others weren’t, and basically, where was the quality control? I realized, if I’m the one who’s on the firing line with clients I needed the vendors to react quickly to my needs as well as the needs of the tour, but with the project’s creative aspects as a priority. Otherwise, as was the case many times, the shows would suffer.
How has this approach been received?
In the beginning it was difficult to establish the precedent, as it was not the traditional way tours were mounted. But I found that, as the tours got bigger, managements jobs grew more complex. To a certain degree, I became management’s creative arm in the fact that they could come to me, I could design a show, contract it, do the line producing for my departments, and deliver them a complete package based on their budgets. They had a comfort factor knowing that if my interest in providing a quality production was met, so was theirs. At the turn of the millennium I did these huge pop spectacles for *NSync and later Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Usher—big productions that had a lot of elements. I was able to do quite a bit of volume which allowed me to receive great attention, good service and competitive pricing.
Has calling the show given you a different perspective than just designing and turning it over?
What I have re-discovered this time around with Billy Joel is the simple joy of interpreting music with lighting. That’s where I started. This type of lighting for me was always equal parts of timing and composition. This show is just an expansion of that practice.
Has the artist noticed anything different about this show compared to past shows?
Billy has noticed my re-engagement in the overall creative process. He can’t really see the lighting from his vantage point, but the reviews are good, both professionally and from his friends and family. I have been involved with shaping this show for years, collaborating on and writing the set list every night, working on pacing and the flow of the show. Multiple shows in N.Y., Philly, Boston, Hartford and Florida have forced us to do different shows on different nights, and yet keep the pace of the show intact and impactful. Not a small feat. You can end up with a great song order, and find out that you have 5 blue songs in a row. So it’s a challenge both musically and visually. But he has been in peak form every night and I hope that my work has contributed to that.
What have you taken away from this experience that you haven’t taken from other tours?
This tour is unique. It’s been a very long time since the only production value is lighting, with songs and a performer that I know so well. I have fallen in love with pure lighting again. I like the tools again, am enchanted with color again. The next project will reflect both compositional nuance and musical timing in ways that I haven’t explored in long time.
Do you suppose any of this might carry over into other tours?
One thing that has become apparent to me over the last few years: With computer lighting so accessible, flashing color and ballyhooing a lamp head has become almost common. Airports, churches, night clubs, even supermarkets get the application of lighting in ways that were the narrow purview of musical concerts. And just like everything in media these days, a certain amount of desensitizing has occurred. But an art form exists and when it’s presented with quality it can transform the sum of its parts. I know I can remember what Pink Floyd looked like at the Coliseum in L.A., and that was a perfect zeitgeist of sound and light. The Rolling Stones and the Academy of Music in New York in the early ‘80s, Brown Sugar with all white light. Seeing Genesis and the first all Vari-Lite rig with the dichroic color changing perfectly on beat. The early works of Branton, Brickman, Bennet, Morse, Jonathan Smeeton, Patrick Woodroffe, Howard Ungerleider, and a handful of other artists, helped create musical happenings that transformed the arenas to art installations. And the work was ephemeral. It could never be translated accurately on video without eviscerating it, so there is no record of it, just the memory of the concert-goer. That’s what this tour has been for me. A chance to give someone a visual memory, triggered when they hear a particular song on the radio, a moment where sound and light marry and produce pure emotion.
