Every year, I design a few festival-type tours. Normally I design the lighting rig, then the lighting director for each band programs cues on the console of their choice. It's normally about camaraderie between each band, and all of the lighting directors get to know each other and have a swell time. I just finished the third annual Mayhem festival, a heavy-metal package featuring 14 bands playing on three stages. The main stage is the only one that is lit, because the bands playing on the "B" stages perform outside during the day. Metal bands seem to demand large sets, lots of pyrotechnic devices and large lighting systems. I design the main rig, but inevitably, all the bands bring in a few extra toys of their own.
Everything was going pretty smoothly until two weeks before the tour started. That's when I started receiving all the set designs from the various acts. It seems like they all forgot one thing: they are not allowed to take up the entire stage by themselves. There was no doubt that each band could have easily occupied a 60-foot-wide by 48-foot-deep stage.
Batter Up
The schedule had the first of the four bands starting at 6 p.m., right in time for the sun to shine directly on the stage. You would think that performing in broad daylight might persuade an LD to not care about lighting, but not my friend Brandon Webster, the scenic and lighting designer for Five Finger Death Punch. If you use enough smoke, you can see the light beams. Between the four Reel EFX DF-50 hazers, the two High End F-100 foggers and his various cryogenic CO2 spurting devices, the beams could be seen just fine. He chose an Avo Diamond 4 to run his lights.
But the set was what was simply amazing. For a band that was supposed to perform downstage on a postage stamp-sized piece of real estate, they certainly crammed it all in. The drum kit was attached to four Total Structure ground support structures that lift the drums 10 feet in the air. If that wasn't enough, the band had scissor lifts on each side of the stage that could lift the other band members 15 feet in the air. A double drop Kabuki of rags across the front truss was added for more theatrics. We informed the band that there was no way they could use all of this, as we needed to perform a 20-minute set change. Brandon blew us away. He was able to remove his gear from the stage in four and half minutes.
Next up was Lamb of God, the only sensible band of the bunch. Jay Chiari designed a nice, easy set with a well-thought-out gimmick. He had strategically placed various scenic cloth panels in front of a black backdrop. The cloths were held in place on a truss using some drape clamps. In between songs, he had roadies manually pull down various cloths, revealing new artwork. It was very cost-effective and nicely done. Jay chose an MA Lighting grandMA1 console. Four F-100s with high-powered fans blew the fog directly into the light rig.
Hellfire
Next up was Rob Zombie. He came to play with two-and-a-half trucks full of monsters and a giant video wall. During each song, his team of carnies would push out various contraptions that resembled science fiction characters from old movies. Strictly EFX, a special effects company out of Chicago, designed custom urns of flame. They looked great as they erupted, spitting flames to the very brim of the lighting fixtures. Miraculously, Reid, the guy shooting the pyro, never harmed a single fixture in the air.
Damien Rodgers is the lighting designer for this act. He followed a well-executed plan that he and the artist obviously concocted. They used no spotlights, and the stage was always bathed in either red or green. Damien used Philips Color Kinetics LED strip lights to front light the band. The performers would lean into the lights whenever they wanted to be seen, and then back into the green wash when they were done with their solos. Damien brought along several vertical towers of lights to augment lighting provided by the tour. He also used massive amounts of Martin Atomic 3K strobes with color changers. Damien also chose a grandMA1 to run his show.
Headlining the bill was Korn, longtime veterans of the festival touring circuit. Jim Lenahan designed their set. It was made to look like an oil field on fire, and Jim certainly achieved that. In the upstage corners of the stage were 25-foot-tall oil derricks. Strictly FX had custom-designed spiral flames to run through them. Jim designed a custom backdrop that looked like more derricks in the distance, complete with LED bulbs sewn into the fabric. Giant moving oil pumps spewed black smoke throughout the set.
After following Zombie, Korn felt the need to be huge. So they brought in a ton of additional floor lights. Jason Bullock simply called up the lighting vendor and asked for a list of everything they had left on their shelf, and he took it all out with him, including Philips Color Kinetics Color Blazes, High End Showguns, various moving LED heads, police beacons and every kind of Martin fixture he could find. For smoke, he used six F-100s and all the DF-50s running at full but pointed away from the band. Jason chose a ChamSys console to run his lighting.
Dodging Flames
Changing the set in less than 30 minutes was difficult for the lighting department. The crew ran like crazy trying to set up half of a semi truck full of lights in under 25 minutes. Show rules dictated that at exactly 10 p.m., the house lights would go off, and the theory was that whatever lights were set up and working is what the band got. Normally, I would have the techs keep working during the first part of the set to plug it all in, but they had a slight impediment – fire. Troy Smith and Blake Elkin did their best, but they certainly couldn't get close to some of the fixtures without suffering first-degree burns. Eventually they timed it out and knew when they could jump in to plug something in between flames.
By the second show, each band had doubled their pyro effects, and it was becoming a pissing match between the two headliners. Burning barrels of flames were moved to any open space on the stage every night. With much dismay, a High End Systems Showgun finally met its match. A yoke and the LCD screen on the side melted into a globular cinder. The next day, the pyro company simply whipped out their checkbook and paid for the damage. The remarkable thing was that the light never stopped functioning; it was just cosmetic damage.
As this tour is coming to a close, I have to put on my thinking cap to start the Uproar Festival. Just when I thought things couldn't get any bigger, I find myself in rehearsals with Disturbed and Avenged Sevenfold for yet another foray into a hard rock festival tour. From the get-go, it's obvious that the acts have learned nothing. This show is even larger, and yes, there's more pyro. Duck for cover boys, it's gonna be a hot one.
