Barry Claxton is a well-known player in the live entertainment business. While he’s spent years touring and mastered the art of project managing shows with lighting, and then video gear, he may will be best known as the man so many people called looking for work. In fact he reckons 60 percent of his job revolves around finding the right person to fill the right role on a gig. And, of course, balancing the tons of resumes and phone requests from work seeking roadies can weigh heavily on one’s soul. “But the good aspect of my job is, you get to give people an opportunity to excel.”
His love for the theater goes back to the seventh grade. Barry had just changed schools, and one day a student was showing him around the new school. The student was a member of the stage crew and showed him the theater and lighting system. Barry joined the stage crew and he decided he liked theater productions.
Raised in the Philadelphia area, Claxton was one of those kids that liked to go to concerts all the time. “It didn’t really matter who was playing — we would go down to see whoever was at the Spectrum that week. Raised in a big city in the ‘70s meant I could see all kinds of acts. I had a paper route, which meant I had money. Then one day, when I was in the ninth grade, I watched as a lighting roadie at a Yes concert climbed the front truss, walked over to a couple of par cans and gave them a slap, making them come on.” Realizing that, “Hey, I can do that,” a spark was ignited. “At that concert I became aware that people were working behind the scenes. I purchased a program to the show, one that listed credits. The lighting director listed was Michael Tait. I would meet him later in life while working at Nocturne.”
The Way In
Claxton enrolled at UMass in Amherst, MA after high school. He became a part of the local stage crew for all the shows at the university. Because of their ‘kick ass’ attitude, the stage crew ended up becoming part of the house crew at the Orpheum as well, a theater in downtown Boston that hosted many rock shows. Barry did a lot of the non-union stagehand work that promoters like Don Law needed to do shows in the area. “We used to joke around a lot on that crew. When I started working there, I was told that if you were really good, one day you may get picked up and taken on tour. That was like the big time, in our minds. Legend be known, they had a crew guy there once who went on to work with the Rolling Stones.” That crew member was Danny O’Bryen, who is now Claxton’s boss and runs Screenworks.
“So one day, I’m gigging at a Motels show, and a company named Nocturne Lights was the lighting vendor. The dimmer guy (John Lobel) and the truss builder (Val Dauksts) came over and gave me a business card, saying “If you’re ever out our way in the Bay area, give us a call.” Three years later, Barry went to California for a vacation. He ended up spending the next five years in San Francisco at Nocturne Lighting.
He started out as a lighting shop tech, working on cables, color changers and other shop work until finally he was on tour, in 1985. He worked with REO, then the final legs of the U2 Joshua Tree tour, before he got a gig on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour. “I got to work with Benny Collins and some other legends.”
This led to a great relationship with Benny and future work on tours as a carpenter and stage manager after he left Nocturne in ‘92. “This meant I could live anywhere. I had always fancied Europe, and since Benny didn’t care where I lived, I moved to Paris.” He got married and had two kids. But the toll that touring took on family life was a lot harder back in the days before cell phones, Facetime and emails. “There simply was no connectivity other than Sprint calling cards back then.” Eventually his family moved back to the States, though his kids didn’t speak a word of English.
The Way Out
By 1995, Claxton had seen the world and had just finished a Luther Vandross tour when he realized, “I’d had enough. I was done with touring. I was sitting in Philadelphia, wondering what I’d do next. Then I got a call from Val Dauksts to see about my availability for another tour. I explained, ‘I’m done.’ and thanked him for his interest anyway.” Dauksts called his partner Lobel looking for someone and told him Barry wasn’t touring any more, and the next thing you know Lobel bought him a plane ticket to L.A.
“I showed up in Newbury Park at the offices of Light and Sound Design (LSD) and was offered a gig in the office. It was August of ‘95 and Dak Harris was the labor coordinator. He was leaving the company, and they handed me his role. I had great support from Tim Murch, Nick Jackson and John Lobel, people who trusted me with my job.” Barry chuckles at this. “I reckon they just needed someone else to blame when things didn’t go well on a project, so they handed me the ball and let me run with it.”
He stayed with them through the PRG acquisition, the Fourth Phase lighting name change and, eventually, PRG Lighting. After 13 years, he left, as many of his colleagues had before him. “Nick Jackson and John Wiseman had started up a video company called Chaos Visual and brought me in as a project manager and crewing guy for video.
“John Wiseman had been training lighting techs in how to set up video walls for a while, so we had a bunch of people in addition to my Rolodex. It was refreshing to change from lights to video, and I tell you what, I’ve never heard a video guy say, ‘I think I’ll go back to being a lighting guy.’”
When Chaos was sold, Claxton headed over to VER to project-manage and, later, staff shows. He saw the writing on the wall and left before the company merged. He is happily employed at Screenworks now, where “I get to work on some really cool shows. I had never done EDM type shows, where massive amounts of LED displays are the norm. I’m having fun and working with some really great people.”
The Art of Crewing
Labor staffing at LSD/PRG was almost a full-time job. When Barry started at LSD, they had a large amount of core freelancers who worked for them and covered their shows. He looked after payroll as well. Independent freelancers, of course, were around, but it was nothing like it is today, where many vendors depend on the freelance pool over having core employees.
“There’s a couple of different layers to labor management,” he declares. “Finding freelancers that are not known to you personally is probably the most stressful part of the job. In the old days, you would look at a resume and decide if you hired someone or not. But now I have to vet any candidate for a position. Resumes are great, but not always accurate. Sometimes I’ve had great success with someone I didn’t know, other times I strike out.”
According to Barry, “the best resume I ever got was a simple one. A guy sent me a fax and all it had was his name and a phone contact on it. Under that was a picture of all his touring laminates. I laughed pretty hard…then I hired him.”
What does Claxton look for in new employees? “I like to hire people with some stagehand experience. They have worked in many departments and see the big picture, but what really makes them appealing to me is if they also worked for some other small vendor. You see, as a stagehand, your ass is never on the line with a project. But if you’ve also worked for a company, you understand it’s all about making that business work. Making the most of your local labor and keeping costs down. Plus, when you hire these youngsters, it’s like having fresh blood in the company. You can mold them to how your own company likes to get things done.”
How does one deal with freelancers and determining rates? Claxton explains it in layman’s terms. “The independent guys know who to call when their last job is winding down. They have their contacts at Screenworks, Solotech or wherever, and they are going to hit all of them up. In a way, it’s like free agency. I may get a call from a tech and offer them a position for an amount of money, but they will bring up ‘Well so and so paid me ‘X’ last time, but you are only offering me ‘Y’. I’d rather have ‘X’. Can you match it?’ But there are factors similar to free agency. Like, ‘is this a one-month-long event, or a year-long tour?’ Someone has to look at the total income gained and not the weekly check. Myself, I have to weigh the decision. ‘Should I use this person and give him money I may not have allotted in my budget, or find someone else and lose him from my freelance pool for a while?’”
Speaking of keeping people busy so they don’t wander to another employer, that’s always in the back of Claxton’s head. “Look at Screenworks. We have a core of outstanding techs. The company deals in three different sectors of shows. We have the touring stuff, the festival circuit and the constant one-offs. For some people, they want to tour all year long. For others, tours aren’t their bag. They like getting to go home every week or two. The festival work suits them fine. That never seems to end for us at Screenworks, but there are gaps. I’m constantly juggling to fill spots for one-offs, which keeps people paid and not hitting the phones for work.”
“When tours wind down, the crew always wants to know what’s up next,” Claxton continues. “I may have to tell an employee who’s important to Screenworks that I don’t have another tour gearing up right away. But, they can have a little downtime mixed around a slew of one offs I can put them on to keep some income rolling in. My feeling is that If I show a commitment to them, maybe they won’t go calling my competitors.”
The problem facing Claxton is affecting everyone in the business. “There’s just a lot more work these days, and the vast majority of technicians out there have become freelance. With insurance costs being what they are, it’s impossible to offer all your techs full-time benefits, especially when most are part-time employees. We try and take care of our perma-lancers the best we can. People that are freelance workers. If I can keep them busy, they know I’m looking out for them and they don’t bother looking elsewhere.”
At Screenworks, Barry spends a considerable amount of time mining talent. “I like finding new people with a keen interest in getting into video. We train them, get my hooks into them and keep them working. Hopefully, after giving them an opportunity, those people will remember me for the rest of their career, and it will pay off. I’ve had people that I hired 20 years ago come around and pay me back. They may be LDs or production managers now, and they are looking for a vendor. They know I gave them a shot when they needed a gig, and now it comes full circle.
“I learned early that you need to respect everyone, whether you need them or not, because one day you are going to need their services,” Claxton adds. This also relates to Claxton when he’s had to fire someone from a particular tour or rid a company of an undesirable employee. “This is indeed the hardest part of my job. But I have to set up a relationship with this person going forward. Sometimes there is just a personality clash, and it’s nobody’s fault that a person wasn’t a good fit for a particular production. But that same person may be the greatest asset to some other tour. So I often have to console someone and explain that this is not the end of our relationship, we just have to find some project more suitable to their talents. The one thing I will say is that when I have to cut someone loose, I like to make sure it’s justified. Because I am messing with someone’s livelihood.
“On the flip side, we are in a business of camaraderie. You have to get along with almost everyone if you want to succeed. A good crew chief knows how to get the best work out of each crew member. If you can’t get along, and I hear it from too many people, well, maybe you need a different vocation.”
Although backstage touring hasn’t always been a paragon of demographic diversity, Claxton’s happy to give it a nudge in that direction. “There was a time at LSD when I made a conscious decision to train more female technicians as Icon techs. The management backed me 1,000 percent, and I’m proud that we were able to help infuse the touring industry with women. When you look around now, you will be hard-pressed to find a tour that doesn’t have women staffed on it.”
As he grows older, Barry would like to offer some mentoring for more urban people to have an interest, a chance to enter the theater arts as he did as a youth. What’s the best advice he could give a youth that’s gotten his foot in his door? “You want to impress me? I’m looking for the guys who are willing to stay late on a Friday to get stuff done and at the same time show up on time Monday morning wanting to work. You can tell a lot about a person’s work ethic and if they will make it in our business. Sure, we end up losing a lot of people to the hard work our business demands, but I bet I keep three out of every five.”
In closing, Claxton has one word of advice for those like him in the business of crewing. “Don’t be afraid to give a kid that one shot they need to be successful.”
