“Danny O’Bryen is a visionary with a promoter’s mind,” says Mark Haney, video director and Parnelli Board of Advisors member. “He saw video as a way forward and a way to bring more value to the ticket buyer. He saw that this was the future and is really one of the biggest innovators in our field.” O’Bryen of Screenworks will receive the 2016 Parnelli Visionary Award Oct. 22, at the Parnelli Awards gala in Las Vegas. He’s the ninth live event professional to receive this annual award for career achievement, and the first from the video side of the industry.
O’Bryen had already established a solid career as a lighting designer and a promoter rep before envisioning the power of big video screens for large rock tours in the late 1980s and helping make it all happen. He was there for some of rock’s biggest moments, from groundbreaking Madonna and Rolling Stones tours through some of the biggest festivals and events such as Electric Daisy Carnival and Coachella and special events like Star Wars: In Concert. He’s also has produced and directed live concert DVD’s for Madonna, the Dave Matthews Band, Eric Clapton and George Strait.
In 1989, Danny co-founded BCC Video with Tom McCracken, which would become Screenworks. The company revolutionized mobile video using broadcast-quality fly packs as well as mobile trucks. Screenworks has won four Parnellis for Video Company of the Year, among other industry awards. O’Bryen laughs. “In the beginning, video packaging was stupid — they were in awkward cases that didn’t fit well into trucks. And it was just a bunch of small pieces that would be put together on some table.”
Rush’s longtime designer, Howard Ungerleider, who received the Parnelli Visionary Award in 2014, met O’Bryen as a lighting tech working for See Factor in 1976. “Danny was always one of my favorite guys — and funny, too. I always referred to him as the Phil Silvers of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Ungerleider says, also noting that “Danny had a great work ethic.” Years later, when O’Bryen launched his video companies, Ungerleider didn’t hesitate becoming a client. “He always delivers above and beyond what you need — that’s why we stuck together!” Ungerleider notes how O’Bryen threw himself into that video world, from day one until now. “It blew me away how he followed and understood the progress of the technology. Danny’s always been on the front end of the R&D. He is always looking for a better LED product.”
“I was running a lighting console on a Madonna Tour when Danny brought the first video elements into my world of touring,” says LD Nook Schoenfeld, editor of PLSN magazine. “I looked at the giant I-Mag side screens flanking either side of the stage that first night and knew they were going to be a staple of my life from that point forward. Every show I’ve done with O’Bryen’s teams, from the old days to the present, has just been spot on, with flawless gear and great teamwork from his techs.”
Long Island Beginnings
O’Bryen was born the third of 10 kids in Rockville Center, NY, on Long Island. He grew up in a Irish Catholic family headed by his father Bob, who ran a nursing home by day, but was primarily known for his big personality and adventures saving lives as a captain of the local volunteer firehouse. The senior O’Bryen had a love of film and was often making homemade 8mm movies with audio. “He was Mr. Showman,” O’Bryen says. “And it’s funny, when you look back — obviously his filming with that 8mm camera all the time made a dent on me!” In high school, O’Bryen was a self-described hippie who ended up singing in a garage band that never made it out of the garage. But he did put together a couple of floodlights and jerry-rigged them to create a primitive strobe.
A teen of his times, he attended events like The Concert for Bangladesh and wallowed in the mud at the 1969 Woodstock. In June of 1971, he snuck into the last show at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East by hijacking a beer keg and pretending to be a delivery guy. After a year at Aeronautics college, he realized it was “a waste of time,” so he moved to Boston. In 1972, he ran into a promoter working the Aquarius concert hall (now the Orpheum). O’Bryen said yes to an offer to get $50 to hang up some posters at all the local colleges for a Hot Tuna concert, and thus the adventure began. He moved up to usher and shortly after that became a stagehand.
O’Bryen went on to work for promoter Don Law, who was booking acts in places like Schaefer Stadium and the Cape Cod Coliseum. He tells one story of doing a stadium show in 1973 featuring Chicago and the Beach Boys outdoors that had Tom Fields & Associates (TFA), putting up an outdoor roof in a manner that would not pass code today. “It was a very early version of today’s roof structure and was unfortunately bending trusses as they tried to keep it up in the air. They ‘secured’ it by guy wires, attaching them to rental cars parked on the Astroturf field,” he explains. Then a tremendous rain came. “We got a call at 3 a.m. that the entire roof canvas was bowed — when we got out there, it looked like a swimming pool! We took a knife and cut the belly to let the water out.” The show still managed to go on, but Law made a point of his displeasure by paying TFA’s Lenore Travis part of the bill in bags of pennies.
In 1976, with Law, O’Bryen worked theater, arena and stadium shows with acts including the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Elton John. “I would drive the band members in a van, be a stage manager or security guard — whatever was needed,” he says. “At one point I was sitting on the side of the stage next to the piano at the Boston Music Hall while Traffic performed with Steve Winwood right there, and it hit me that this was the business to be in.” Later that year, See Factor hired him on his first tour with Foghat. O’Bryen took the $350-a-week gig, got on a bus with 18 other people and shared seedy hotel rooms. Having already run spotlights and set up gear, he got more involved with lighting, including running the first moving light, the brand new Cyclops. “I was on the road, touring in the South during the winter, where the weather was warm, and I thought it was great!” Next came that first tour with Rush, and for that, O’Bryen would drive all night and work all day.
One day he got a call from Northwest Sound’s Bob Sterne. They developed a lighting division and needed help with a Crosby, Stills & Nash tour. “For that, I’d fly to the gigs, get my own hotel room, and get a raise to $450 a week!” he laughs. This began a transition to more lighting responsibilities, including touring with the likes of Joni Mitchell, and then various Neil Young tours, including 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. For the latter, O’Bryen and the other roadies were pushed on stage as “Rodi.” “We would wear hoods and moccasins, put black face makeup on and go out on stage and creep around the amps,” he laughs. “Other crew members were dressed as doctors. The lighting board operator was dressed as a Conehead [from SNL]. The local stagehands saw us and thought, ‘These guys have been on the road too long!’”
Transition to Promotion
O’Bryen would go on to light other acts including America, Dan Fogelberg, Bob Dylan and Joe Walsh. By the end of 1982, O’Bryen found himself working as a promoter rep. He handled that first season of the new Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, then did the same the year after under Brian Murphy of Avalon Attractions. He worked 250 shows a year at venues including the Roxy, Pasadena Rose Bowl, Dodger Stadium and the Forum. “I remembering working the seven nights when Bruce Springsteen was at the L.A. Sports Arena back in the 1984,” he says. “Just watching a Bruce show is another reminder of why you got into this business.”
Another historic moment came in 1987 when he was on the set during U2’s filming of the video, “Where Streets Have No Name,” on the rooftop of a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles. A crowd and the police tried to shut it down. Channeling his father, and also foreshadowing what was to come, O’Bryen got out his own camera and shot the happening personally, editing a different version of that classic video for himself.
On a personal note, O’Bryen first met Marcene Peterson when she was assistant tour manager and roommate of Heart’s Nancy Wilson. They crossed paths again in Denver when he was advancing The Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984. Danny and Marcene married later that year and have been together ever since — quite an accomplishment in this business.
“I Think I Have a Video Company”
Glimmers of O’Bryen’s future could be seen as early as 1983, when he was working at Irvine Meadows. While doing radio station shows with KROQ, he was renting video cameras and flypacks from Tasco, a local vendor. “Everything was analog back then, so that switcher had all of eight buttons. I figured I can push eight buttons, and started being a ‘Video Director.’” Friend George Travis (who won the Parnelli for Lifetime Achievement in 2013) noticed what he was doing and asked him to teach lighting designer Carol Dodds how to direct Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love tour.
Down the road, Travis called O’Bryen and McCracken to do the video for Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition tour, which they did under the name BCC Video. Another friend and PM (and 2009 Parnelli Lifetime Achievement honoree) Jake Berry, called with the same request for AC/DC. “During this period we built up three systems, but I was still a promoter rep for Avalon,” he says. “One day in 1992, I was loading in at the Roxy [in Los Angeles] and it was confirmed that I got the Metallica account. I thought, ‘I think I have a video company!’” In 1994, he turned in his Avalon keys, and he and McCracken officially launched Screenworks.
O’Bryen was uniquely positioned to come to the forefront of the video movement. First, he was a lighting designer. Secondly, as a promoter, he saw that big screens could enhance the concert experience and sell more tickets. Finally, he was aware how heavy and fragile all the gear was. He saw the key to success was going to be figuring out how to package it all for road life. He also had a clear understanding of the technological limits and challenges of video at the time.
“We were using the old GE Talaria 5055 projectors with Hitachi cameras, and it was all analog and tubes,” he says. “You had to watch the way you lit it, because the tubes caused saturation.” He had a Fairlight analog computer video “media server” that was operated with a set of sliders and a small graphics pad, which allowed the director to paint over the top of video footage and had an extensive series of effects.
“It cost $5,000, and those 10 faders were cool because you could manipulate the images in many ways.” O’Bryen says. “Marcene ran it for a bunch of Oingo Boingo shows, and we used it to do the song, ‘Weird Science.’” Specifically, they would make Danny Elfman’s image to appear on the screen with just one eye. “It was crappy in one respect, but people loved it. Marcene would say that’s she’s just pushing buttons, and I’d tell her, ‘Don’t tell them that!’ I would buy a 100 of them today if I could.”
In 1992, after providing a camera system for Genesis, he borrowed their Jumbotron designed by Marc Brickman and Morris Lyda. “I flew it to Montreal for a Guns N’ Roses/Metallica show in a deal sealed with just a handshake,” he says. The show was a disaster. Metallica guitarist James Hetfield got horribly burned in a pyro accident. Guns N’ Roses started two hours late, and then Rose walked off stage early because of throat problems. The crowd rioted. “We go running out on stage to stand in front of the screen, because I’m thinking, if they trash it, I’m screwed, because I hadn’t even paid for it yet!” Luckily for O’Bryen, the rampaging crowd moved out into the streets.
Then came a call from Berry to work on The Rolling Stone’s 1994/1995 Voodoo Lounge tour with designer Mark Fisher. “The only thing that existed at the time was soft LED curtains, which wouldn’t work outside,” O’Bryen says. He came up with LED sticks he got out of Japan when nobody knew they even existed. “It was really the first big low-res video wall put to use, and it was groundbreaking. Everybody loved it.”
A Defining Moment
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted “that which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Just prior to the Voodoo Lounge tour’s opening show at RFK Stadium Aug. 1, 1994, O’Bryen was served up with a defining moment, as Charlie Hernandez explains.
“We were building this show and were two days out from a world press conference,” says Hernandez, the Parnelli Lifetime Achievement winner for 2012. “At the time, using that kind of video at an outdoor stadium hadn’t been done,” Hernandez adds. Two days out from show, one day out from the press conference, at 2 a.m., Jake Berry calls for a crew break. As Hernandez turns away from the stage, he hears the harrowing sound of destruction, and he turned back in time to see the massive video wall smash to the ground due to ill-fitting frames that did not come from Screenworks. (O’Bryen would never trust rigging systems for his screen to anyone else again.)
O’Bryen was directing a Barbra Streisand show in Los Angeles when he got the early morning call from Berry that would have caused weaker men to stay in bed indefinitely. “He sat down after the phone call, and told me later he was completely numb, thinking that his business was over,” says Haney. “But he got up and went to work and got a new screen to D.C. It’s amazing what he can pull out of his hat.”
As O’Bryen flew Washington, D.C., the onsite team salvaged what they could and brought it to an armory across the street. Meanwhile, O’Bryen was making calls, pulling pieces of Jumbotron from Michael Jackson’s tour at soccer’s World Cup, and off other tours of his all over the country, including Streisand’s.
Twenty-four hours later, the worldwide press conference that happened on the stage to show off the set had to do so sans video screen. Berry went to the Kennedy Center and borrowed a huge black velour curtain that hung in place of the screen. “But here’s the best part,” Hernandez states gleefully. “Dan Aykroyd was there with a camera crew as a correspondent for MTV, and Mick Jagger was showing him around the set, including the curtain “hiding” the giant video screen. When Aykroyd, on camera, asks if he could see it, Jagger replied: “Sure … when you buy a ticket.” The tour opened, as planned, on Aug. 1, 1994, complete with Screenworks’ video screen, and no one in the crowd knew what had transpired to make it all happen.
“Danny is so precise in his ability to pull things together and get the pieces in place, especially when it comes to rigging these screens,” Hernandez says. “He had to change the rigging and make very specific changes — basically recreate in three days what many worked on for a year. And he did all being cooler than Penguin’s balls! Then, at 8:15, house lights went down, the band came on stage, and it was epic.”
Video’s Changing Role
The late 1990s was the period of the industry’s history when video and lighting had inevitable conflicts. O’Bryen recalls a Van Halen tour where they had three projectors. “The lighting guys like to see their beams and control the stage, and then suddenly they were competing with the content coming off the video,” he says. “Now I’m an ex-lighting guy, so I got that, and when we went to the Jumbotron, which was a brighter light source, we would bring [the video] brightness down as low as possible.” The coordination between the two factions didn’t happen overnight, though O’Bryen notes that some of the “old school” guys like Patrick Woodroffe and Marc Brickman, among others, also got it right away.
Technology would catch up to make it better. O’Bryen was an early adopter of LED video screens, saying he remembers he saw his first one at Cree Research, a light bulb manufacturer in North Carolina. They were among the first to design LED for screens, and when he saw the first four-foot by eight-foot video panel in their basement, he knew he was looking at the future. “It changed the whole world, and I felt like I happened to be at the right place at the right time,” he says. “During this time, we used them as set pieces, creating content and not just using them for I-Mag.”
O’Bryen has never been completely satisfied with any product and gladly works with manufacturers to make their products better suited for live events. Through the years, he’s worked with many including Panasonic and Sony. Howard Ungerleider notes that it was O’Bryen who saw the work Daktronics was doing for stadium installs and saw its potential for live events. “Their product was like buying a Ferrari compared to what else was available at the time,” but making it suitable for touring was the rub. He helped them design a portable LED screen and took it on tour. In 2013, he hired Myron Linde, previously with Daktronics, to head Screenworks R&D. They built a custom 7mm screen that they could configure up to 40 feet high by 80 feet wide.
Those 10,000 Hours
In 2002, Screenworks merged with NEP, another established video company. “NEP has 140 production trucks and 70 percent of the premium sport broadcasting contracts,” he says, adding that their resources, support and global presence has been great. “The way we operate is, they are the broadcast guys, and we’re the rock ‘n’ roll guys. They let me run it the way I want.” Screenworks has sister video companies in Stockholm, Amsterdam and Sydney, and late last year, they opened a Nashville office.
In 2011, Rush was the planning stages of their Clockwork Angels tour. Ungerleider envisioned small video screens on trusses that moved around, at the time a novel idea. “Nobody could get their head around it, but Danny understood it and he made it work,” he says. “That’s the thing about Danny — he does a lot of homework, and goes to a lot of extra trouble that others don’t bother doing. He takes things personally and does everything with passion,” says Ungerleider.
“The pride I have for Danny is he started out driving trucks — then he was a roadie and a stagehand and in production and a lighting designer,” says Hernandez. “He knows the big picture. It’s all in his vocabulary. And I never saw him panic. He has grace when everyone else is going ‘WTF!’ He never looks back, always forward. He inspires everyone he works with.”
“It was really exciting to be at Screenworks in the ‘90s and the ‘00s,” says Haney, who would get his first big break in video working for Danny on a Bon Jovi tour. “The company was exploding with quality technology and quality people. They did things the right way. I learned a tremendous amount.”
“Honestly I felt I was at the right place at the right time,” Danny O’Bryen says of his success. “I put in what the experts say is 10,000 hours, which in reality is probably many times that, and worked from the bottom up. I did see when video was breaking new ground and took that opportunity, and I’ve been able to make it work in large part because of the relationships I built. I feel really lucky to be have spent my life in this business.”
Danny O’Bryen will receive the 2016 Parnelli Visionary Award at the gala ceremony on Oct. 22 at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. For more information and reservations, go to www.parnelliawards.com.
