I’m a firm believer that just about any light fixture is worth something to a show. I like old conventional fixtures, especially weird stuff that nobody else is using… My best find ever was a pair of matching half mirror ball heads at a Meteorlites shop outside London. I was prepping a tour for Lenny Kravitz when I found these things in a milk crate under a shelf. They stood on end on a wobbly base and appeared to be hand made. I checked them out, and they worked. I stashed them in a junk road case with some packing blankets. Everyone comes back from catering, and Lenny starts playing a new trippy song we had not programmed. Jon brought up a blue wash and looked at me saying, “What do we do for this one?” I threw up the fader and lit the two mirror balls. I looked at Jon once more, with my eyebrows raised. He looked back with his classic dropped-jaw look and replied, “Perfect. Done. Don’t touch it.” Having all the technology on any show is great. But sometimes the biggest gasps would come when you turned it all off and lit some stuff old-school, for free.
—Nook Schoenfeld, from “Focus on Fundamentals,” PLSN, March 2016.
