“Michael Tait is the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci — an artist, an engineer, a sculptor, a true genius,” says production designer Steve Cohen. “He single-handedly raised the bar on production design in my lifetime and stewarded the growth of our little business into the gift that keeps on giving.” That’s just one description of Michael Tait, the visionary whose indelible imprint in the live event industry is seen on almost every concert stage today — from rotating stages to light towers, down to the guitarist’s foot pedal box. His remarkable career has helped forge an industry before there was one, and his work ethic and creativity has touched many, from contemporaries to the superstars of the concert arena.
“I will always remember this moment in time,” Yes front man Jon Anderson told PLSN in an exclusive interview. “Mickey Tait had been Yes’ driver, roadie, and general dogsbody for a year. He’d had enough, and was ready to return to Australia. We’d just returned from a Yes show in a pub in the north of England, where Mickey had spent the evening side stage switching lights on and off, after putting gels on them, and making the show infinitely better.
“So I said to Mickey, ‘Please don’t go to Australia!’ and I begged him to stay and become our lighting engineer. He then started to tell me of these wonderful ideas he had for lighting the band, which would become known as ‘Genie towers.’ He was so excited that the following day we arranged some cash for him to get the towers built. Such was the inventiveness of Michael. He became an intricate member of the Yes experience that lasted for so many years. I cannot tell him enough how grateful I am to have had him in my life — as in ‘You bet your sweet bippy.’”
“From the first time I met Michael 20 years ago I knew he was special,” says Bruce Rodgers, a Parnelli Award-winning set designer who worked with Tait on several Bruce Springsteen tours. “His legendary mental abilities, his positive attitude and fearlessness in solving design challenges, his awareness of the needs of the production design and the people who move our shows, and his engineering instincts always come into play regardless of the size of the project. You always knew Michael would give you the smartest and coolest solution.”
“Tait Towers has built a ton of stuff for me over the years — for tours, MTV video awards, all sorts of things,” says Parnelli Award-winning lighting designer Roy Bennett, who is currently working on Madonna’s tour. “I’m a detail man, and also totally into innovation, and the thing about Michael and his company is they do pay attention to the details. He thinks about everything, and everything is important on every level. And I always feel safe walking into his shop with any kind of idea knowing that they will figure out how to make it work.”
Tait was born in Melbourne, Australia, where he attended the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. There he studied electrical and mechanical engineering but he “got bored pretty quickly.” His first foray into the entertainment business was opening a nightclub in Queenland’s famous seaside town of Surfers Paradise, which was very successful right up to the minute the authorities noticed Tait hadn’t bothered to get a liquor license and shut him down. The restless young man then set off for a six-week vacation to England, which became a permanent move.
That was the year 1967. Upon his arrival he immediately found out which was the hottest nightclub in town, the Speakeasy, and got a job there. Soon he was in the presence of the likes of the Beatles, The Who and Jim Hendrix, among others. “My very first night working, my first table included two of the Beatles, who I didn’t recognize at the time,” he smiles.
Not unlike other Parnelli honorees, his new career in live events would begin with those five magic words: “Can you drive the van?” The band in need was Yes, then a still-obscure group.
The band was immediately drawn to Tait’s imagination, work ethic and easy-going nature. Tait, in turn, was drawn to the band’s vision and ambition, finding a unique home for his skills in electrical and mechanical engineering. “Because I have a very technical background, I started working on the gear and improving it,” Tait explains. “Yes’ music was totally revolutionary. Jaws dropped when the band played.”
In the late 1960s, the technical side of the concert industry was still in its infancy. “Those were primitive days,” Tait says. In fact, at the time, instruments weren’t miked, only vocals, and many of the pieces of gear that are commonplace today weren’t even invented. “As Yes got bigger, I started building equipment and redesigning things.”
“The first system I built had auto fog lamps in coffee cans and homemade wire wound potentiometers for dimmers,” he says. “When PAR 64s came out, we made our own square cans out of sheet metal. Later on I made round ones out of air conditioning duct.”
On Yes’ first American tour, Tait had only six Strand Pattern 23 lights and everything else was “homemade,” including the controller. “One of the early ones I built,” he said, “had bump buttons with micro switches that could be played like a piano. This allowed me to ‘play’ in time with the music.”
As Yes grew in popularity, their lighting and stage show grew in complexity. To enhance the concert experience, Tait began working with towers and multi-celled PAR cans. “I created self-contained units that you could roll in, put one on in each corner of the stage, push a button to raise the lamps, a quick focus and you are ready for a show,” Tait explains. The cans on the towers had four lamps each with a different color gel, which allowed focusing in one-fourth the time, which was startlingly innovative at the time. Eventually, the towers became known as Tait Towers.
In the mid 1970s, Tait devised the in-the-round rotating stage. The idea came from an unlikely source: A film canister.
Tait was in the studio with the band one day while they were filming a documentary. Tait picked up a 35mm film can that was nearby and realized how easy it would be to recreate the band’s studio setup on a round stage. “We were talking about what we would do for a stage set and all of a sudden, this idea came to me,” Tait says. “If we played in the center, everyone would be closer and everyone could see better.” The financial advantage was not lost on anyone — the “front row” was now 85 seats instead of the usual 42.
“So, I came over to America and built the round stage in Lancaster County, Penn.with the help of a local engineering company.” While building a stage in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country might sound unusual, it was already home to Clair Brothers Audio. “Roy Clair was on tour with Yes most of the time and we became very good friends. That’s why I decided to move to Lititz.” The decision would make the modest town, population less than 10,000, an unusual but formidable live event production haven to this day.
But the rotating stage brought new challenges, like lighting.
“Since the band kept moving, I had to rethink how light the band,” he says. “And there were no real production rehearsals, as I was always building stuff right up to load out! Consequentially the lighting had a more dynamic feel and it was different every night.”
Jake Berry was working as keyboard technician for Yes’ Rick Wakeman at the time, and today, he is a production manager who has worked with the best talent in the business, from the Rolling Stones to U2. “When we did the Yes stage, Michael was full of ideas,” Berry says. “Because the stage was in the middle of the arena, everybody was stressed about how the building would be able to clear the chairs in time to get the show out. So Michael came up with this fantastic idea of a barricade, which, in actual fact, was a barricade with drawers, and slots that stored all the drums, the keyboards and guitars that you could pack from the inside. So you could actually work and pack away your instruments while the crowd was still in the building.”
The stage also made his phone ring. Once Yes premiered the stage in the round, Tait got a call from Imero Fiorentino and Associates. They asked him to design a rotating stage for Barry Manilow when Manilow was at the top of his popularity, packing arenas. “They asked if I could make a round stage for them that would incorporate a small orchestra and backup vocalists in addition to the band,” Tait says.
Although Tait had success with the rotating stage in the round, Tait Towers was really a lighting company. “The company really consisted of all of the lights I built over the years for Yes, and, at the time, apart from FM Productions, there were very few set building companies outside of Broadway.”
It was also during this time that Tait developed the swing-wing truss — a truss system in which the instruments remained inside the truss while the sides hinged to create a safe walkway for focusing. Tait added to it a distributed dimmer-per-circuit system, which was revolutionary at the time. “There were test buttons on the full length dimmer raceway, so you could turn the lights on to focus without having someone at the control board.”
Control boards were also of interest to Tait, who designed one of the first pin matrix boards in Europe. “I realized that I needed more than just the standard A and B preset scenes; I needed to be able to switch large quantities of lights to be able to keep up with Yes,” Tait explains. The pin matrix board, created in 1973, had twenty channels, A and B scenes, ten pin matrix presets and 12 high speed preset bump buttons.
Bennett likes to point out that while it was years before he actually “met” Tait, he had an encounter of sorts with him when he was just another Rhode Island kid with a ticket to a Yes concert. Bennett happened to be seated in close proximity to the gentleman behind the light board.
“I was 14 or 15, at a Yes concert at the Providence Center,” Bennett recalls. “I happened to have had a seat sitting across the aisle from Michael [who was running the lighting board] in a suit jacket and bow tie. He had this home made lighting console that was most impressive, especially the two cigarette lighters, one on either side. That way he could light his cigarette with either hand if the other was busy running the lights!” he laughs.
Tait remembers that console well, and says it was a 100-channel monster that no one else had, if even if he didn’t need all those channels. “It was a bit like Spinal Tap,” he jokes. “If someone else had 60 channels, I needed 100.”
Bennett adds that it would be years later, on a Luther Vandross tour, when they actually met. “That was the first time I got to spend time with Michael and see how they do their stuff.”
The 1980s kept Tait busy building his client base, which included the Grateful Dead, U2, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. The concert industry had outgrown its infancy and was headlong into its proverbial teenage years, acne and growth spurts included. When automated lighting came into play, “I saw the writing on the wall, and I knew to be in that business, it would take millions of dollars.”
That was when Tait seriously looked at his finances and had a startling realization. “All those years, the set building had been subsidizing the lighting rental, and that’s why I had no money in my pocket,” he admits. He sold all his lights and then took his 15 years of road experience and focused all his energy exclusively on set design and production.
The firm began to expand, and Tait used his experience to create sets that could be assembled quickly and easily by anyone, no matter what their level of technical expertise. Through the 1990s and beyond, he continued innovating, and a new facility, more employees, and more designers knocking on his door would create further growth. Over the years, Tait Towers clients have included Reba McEntire, AC/DC, Roger Waters, Ozzfest, Pokémon Live and Britney Spears, just to name a few.
Tait also worked with noted set designer Mark Fisher on numerous projects, including U2, Metallica, AC/DC, the Rolling Stones and Janet Jackson. “Michael Tait is a clever engineer/inventor/rock-show designer who has done everything there is to do in this business except play and sing,” Fisher says. “Consequently, Michael is very wise about what works and what doesn’t. He’s been on the road, building and tearing down late every night, so he knows it’s the little things that count.”
As the years passed, Tait Towers constructed some of the most notable and innovative sets in the entertainment industry. Bennett tells a story about Faith Hill’s tour, where the original idea was to hide a support structure behind a black curtain. But before the cloth could be hung, Hill saw it. “Oh my God, that’s so beautiful we have to leave it,” Hill exclaimed to Bennett. “Michael makes even the parts that people aren’t supposed to see look great,” Bennett says.
As of late, Tait has taken a bit of a step back, allowing his partners “Winky” Fairorth and Adam Davis, who “have the benefit of youth,” to run the show. His hands aren’t totally clean though, as he’s still involved with tweaking designs and allowing his formidable imagination to run wild; he’s just free from the day-to-day grind that running a business that Tait Towers demands. He’s getting to spend more time with his family, too. Tait has been married to his wife Anne for 27 years and has a daughter, Lucia 26; and two stepchildren, Brooke, 32, and Ben, 30.
“Unlike other industries that go through complete design phases to generate their final products, our industry builds from the concept phases” Rodgers sums up. “Therefore it takes a special engineering mind to create a finished product that can tour around the world from this phase. That's the reason our industry is the most exciting design industry and that’s the reason Michael is one of a kind in the world.”
