After a decade or so of touring, I’m eternally surprised at the sheer variety of problems that I get confronted with on the road. It seems there’s no shortage of new and creative ways that things can be mishandled, plugged in incorrectly, and perhaps even not plugged in at all. As denizens of the great and wonderful frontier known as The Road, it’s important that we develop a skillset of improvisation and problem solving while never breaking a sweat, or at least stoically pretending we haven’t, even in the face of moist and obvious evidence.
Lighting Under the Influence
A few years ago, I had the great misfortune to wake up with a feeling of slight sluggishness hanging around and over me. I trudged to catering to nibble on a plain scone and sip some water, dreading doing the load-in while feeling this way. The feeling didn’t abate as the day wore on, so after setup and palette updates were complete, I retired to my bunk with hopes of sleeping off The Funk. That hope fell flaming from the skies in the form of a wave of unpleasant nausea about fifteen minutes later, and with my GI tract doing its best impression of an M.C. Escher drawing, I grabbed a conveniently-placed trashcan from the back lounge and made my way to the venue.
The next few hours were spent in such misery as you might imagine, and by the time doors and then showtime rolled around, I was looking forward to the day being over. I had all my cues to my show memorized to help me get through the show that night, and a great production team to lean on while I recovered. And thanks to a hoodie borrowed from the merch guy, I was able to steel myself against the onslaught of whatever was in the previous night’s egg rolls.
A Case of the Empties
Another time I was sent by a production house to light a gymnastics event. The rig consisting of several Vari-Lite VL3500 washes and some Color Kinetics ColorBlasts for lighting the participants as they entered the arena. This was a last minute gig — I wasn’t in town to prep any of the gear or load the truck, so the shop did it for me, and I showed up at 5 AM to drive the truck to the venue and set up the rig.
Load-in started, and things were going swimmingly. Fixtures were uncased, cable was pulled, my console was set up. All this efficiency came to a screeching halt, however, when two of my hands walked up to one of the dual VL3500 wash cases, pushed it a few feet with what appeared to be remarkable ease, then shuffled over to me to inform me that it felt light. I walked over, undid the latches, and pulled it open to look into the depths of a completely empty case that had somehow made it onto the truck without anyone noticing that it had no lights in it. As the day proceeded, I realized these two lights weren’t the only things that were left off the order: none of the ColorBlasts were there, although the cable for them was. Even more spectacularly, I had been shipped feeder tails with male ends on the three hot legs. (Though I’ve pondered this many times over the years, I still have yet to comprehend why someone would make tails like that.)
My company contact had no explanation for the shortages, saying simply that it was “a bummer.” Bummer indeed, as I was the one there standing under the ever-deepening glare of an unhappy client. I had the hands adjust the position of all the vertical trusses around the top level of the arena to compensate for the missing fixtures, as we quickly determined that sourcing those lights in this part of the country on a weekend would have been a futile exercise. I didn’t even tell him about the Cam-Lok issue, as one of the venue guys informed me on the down-low that he had some house feeder that I could cannibalize to fix the tails and make the show happen. After conferring with the client to source some local LED PARs to replace the ColorBlasts, I left for the night and dropped by Home Depot to pick up the tools I need to fix the tails. The next morning I set up the new PARs, hastily wrote a working profile in the grandMA for them, and we were able to pull off the show without anybody in the audience being the wiser.
Things happen on the road all the time that require changes in plans: gear breaks, a lamp explodes, the house manager insists that his wife be allowed to perform her own 12-minute rendition of “America the Beautiful” on her kazoo before your show opens, or you eat some bad food. Learning the fine art of accepting what’s thrown at you and reformulating on the run is a skill that — when mastered — will only be of help when the situation suddenly changes on the job. Other times, however, your skillset suddenly becomes irrelevant, and you might be asked to fill a completely unexpected role.
Switching Places
I was working for an up-and-coming artist who was holding a concert on a beach near his hometown. Load-in day was beautiful. I had a huge rig of Vari-Lites and Martin fixtures. I had spent the whole week programming looks on a pre-viz setup. Unfortunately, come show day, we awoke to a tropical storm pounding the coast. Gear and stage alike were soaked, and the show was canceled as we tore down the rig in the rain. Soggy fixtures were loaded onto trucks, and we dried instruments as best we could.
Unwilling to admit defeat, the artist moved the show to a tiny bar that he knew. The stage in this place was barely large enough to hold the band; my lights were out of the question. As the guitar tech (who was forced by space constraints to literally toss the artist’s guitars through an open window) was swarmed by throngs of adoring fans, he bellowed at me to “Keep them off of me!” Just like that, I became the de facto security guard. My taking on this role should be especially hilarious for anybody who knows me in real life, as I’m about as physically imposing as a sheet of tissue paper. The rest of that night was spent doing a bad impersonation of a basketball guard and informing large, angry drunk people where they weren’t allowed to go.
I’ve learned a few things since these experiences. These days, I have a global labeling system in my programming so that anyone who sits down at my console can, after learning one or two songs, be able to understand the system and apply it to the rest of the show. If I can’t be there to load a truck, I make sure a trusted associate confirms everything is on there for me. And when the tropical storms of touring force the unexpected on me (like spending my night yelling at people twice my size that they can’t put their drink there) I try to remember two things: I sincerely love what I do, and being flexible in the face of adversity — and bellicose drunk people — makes the unexpected infinitely more tolerable.
Craig Rutherford can be found behind the console at any Alan Jackson show. He can deal with the unexpected at craig@blueshiftdesign.org.
