Sometimes I think that no concert-going audience enjoys a good light show more than the hippies who attend "jam band" concerts. These bands don't follow a set list like 99 percent of the other bands on tour. They usually start one song and then drift into an avant-garde jam session before finding their way back into the original song, or segue into another. They also tend to cover other artists songs at a different tempo than the original version. And the audiences tend to dance along as if they were in a trance. The Ultimate Punt Page
Most jam bands play two or three sets of music each night and have a couple hundred songs in their repertoire. It's tough to program individual lighting cues for that many songs, especially since the arrangement of each song can change at any given time. What most of us who light these acts do is create the ultimate punt page (or several of them) to be able to grab cues on the fly and keep up with the musical changes as they come. The hardest part of this task is making the lighting non-repetitive. I hate seeing the same lighting effects over and over at any show.
I am an old "Dead Head" – one of those people who followed the career of the grandfather of jam bands, the Grateful Dead. I attended many of their shows since I was in high school. When I started working at Morpheus Lights in the 1980s, Candace Brightman, the Dead's lighting designer, used this company as the lighting vendor. Candace and Dan English ran the lighting consoles, and each controlled different sets of moving lights. Candace designed the lighting rig and concentrated on keeping the band lit while Danny constructed the lighting system and then used his console to light air. He didn't light anything in particular; he concentrated on making light beams look really cool and mixing cool patterns of gobos on assorted cycs and set pieces.
Two LDs Better than One
I covered for Danny on quite a few gigs and soon grasped the reason why two lighting directors are better than one with a jam band. With two operators controlling different type fixtures, it's a lot easier to not repeat your light cues, because the chances of both of you bringing up the same look twice is unlikely. Plus, I like to do something a little different with jam bands. I like to give the band a bit of a light show that they can watch while they are playing on stage. I like to fly some structure out in the middle of the arena that can light the crowd, the ceiling or any multitude of fabricated scenic pieces I can fly from such a structure.
Last month, I got a call from an old friend. He was doing production for a jam band called The String Cheese Incident. This act has been around for quite some time, but they don't like to tour anymore. Instead, they play a few "special events" every year. They were going to play two nights at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia to celebrate Halloween. Andrew Carroll had looked after lighting for the band for 10 years and was very much involved. But they were looking for someone to help him out and design something extraordinary and wanted to know if I could pitch them an idea. I jumped at the thought of spending a few days grooving to some tasty jams and opened up my Mac and my imagination.
The band had a video guy who ran an Arkaos media server through his laptop and was able to find some great deals on renting some 10-millimeter (pixel pitch) video panels. I contacted "Tweaker" and asked him if he could feed video content from his media server to some projectors as well. He assured me he could.
Space Pumpkins
What the band had in mind was a big spaceship. What I had in mind was a big pumpkin. My idea was to morph one into another.
So I took some curved truss and decided I needed a garage door-type opening of the show. I ran five 45-degree sections of truss from top to bottom, with the ends landing in the barricade area. I stretched 10-by-18-foot rectangles of white fabric between each truss finger and put two 10k lumen projectors by my console and projected them 100 feet to illuminate the garage door in the down position. Tweaker projected jack-o-lanterns and other assorted Halloween stuff on them while the crowd walked in. The fabric hid the band's entrance to the stage. As they started tinkering with the first song, I raised the fingers to reveal the band and a plethora of LED fixtures, moving lights and various shaped video panels. Once the truss stood up on end, I had two more 12k projectors to illuminate the big screen as well.
I knew very little of the music they were playing. A lot of it was bluegrass infused with some rock melodies. Andrew knew who sang each song and played which solo. He controlled a wall of Martin MAC 301s as well as some MAC 2k wash fixtures and Vari-Lite VL3k spots that I splattered around. He chose an Avolites Diamond 4 to run his lights because he likes having tons of faders. With this, he had enough fixtures to have a well-lit band and then some. I designed the rig to have vertical rows of i-Pix BB7s and Martin Stage Bar LED fixtures. I ran all of these from an MA Lighting grandMA so I could emulate a spaceship with tons of blinking lights. I also controlled the FOH "docking station."
Creating a Frenzy
I also designed a gyroscope-looking structure with a couple of circle trusses interwoven at angles. I hung a bunch of LED pars to tone the truss and a bunch of MAC 700 profiles along the outer rings. In the center of the structure I built a conglomeration of mirror balls that rotated in different directions at various speeds. At my riser position, I placed a bunch of Robe 2500 spot fixtures to under-light the mirror balls and splatter gobos across the roof of the arena. At key moments in the show, we blacked out the whole arena and just lit the mirror balls in various colors and spinning gobos. At other times lights roved thru the dancing audience, working them into frenzy.
I simply followed the other guys' leads. If the lighting got stagnant, or Tweaker was looking thru his library for the next video clip, I would start dancing the various LED fixtures in one of the many effects and chases I had programmed. I filled three pages full of various spaceship looks and various timed cues so I could match the tempo of each song. The grandMA was the perfect console for this event because of the many executor buttons and faders on which I could stash cues.
In the end, I used every button I had programmed, and everyone was visually stimulated. In fact, the hippies in the crowd were the most stimulated, perhaps in more ways than one.
