The horror… The horror.
A New Year presents itself as an opportunity to hold out the torch of understanding and tolerance with those you may have had “misunderstandings” with in the past.
Exes…Former Employers…Promoter production reps.
I’m a guy lucky enough to be allowed to do my own lighting and video advances for my shows. My PMs would prefer to have that headache off their plate and know that, with my PM experience, the job will get done properly. And if it isn’t, I will be the first to suffer the consequences — especially when I will be relying exclusively on local production. One-offs and tours get the same attention to detail — a plot, some basic information about the preliminary needs, contact information and a request for the same courtesy about the venues. If you have any info about the venue, you become my best friend for the day. If you understand a little about lighting, you are now ten steps above that.
January is when I start my initial wave of “Hello, It’s Me…” correspondence with the venues that are on the whiteboard that sits on the far wall of the office. I brush up on my foreign phrases for wherever I might be in the first four months of the year. Right now, Spanish — both Mexican and Castilian — are on my “dust off that corner of the memory banks” list of things to do. Translating an equipment list from a foreign language is something everyone should do, at least once. Kudos to ETC; Source Four is a universal description (even when the Lekos provided aren’t even manufactured by their company).
In the cases of one-offs, where I am relying on the kindness of strangers — or more specifically, the promoters — for all of the production’s budget, a knowledge of geography is key. I will determine who I know in a cost-efficient trucking range who will do me proper for my pittance of a production budget, without having to spend it all on fuel and a truck. I’ve already had great chats with Adam from Zenith Lighting, Duck over at PRG/ Atlanta and Scotty Plummer at TLS/Performance Systems about how poor I am on these shows for my longtime client, Alan Parsons, and they are doing me a solid for the gigs coming through their towns. Good people. I can only hope I know someone in the Canary Islands… soon.
The venues that are handled by one of the megalith promoter corporations are usually the ones that occupy most of my office time; the correspondence thread that goes from buyer to promoter to promoter production rep to on-site production manager and, finally, venue LD/ME, can be about as tangled as a road case full of single cables after a festival. I always realize that in addition to representing my firm, I am also representing my client, and professionalism and basic politeness — at least initially — has the tendency to make the first shot over the bow a bit more of an invitation to correspond than the alternative of battling over why not enough money was put aside for a proper production budget.
In the Black
And then there is the top of that food chain.
The dollar. That is all that matters. And those whose duty it is to make sure that the most dollars are in the proper pockets at the end of the day are the ones that have to be convinced that your concept is actually a viable, necessary expense. The companies at that end of our entertainment spectrum (in lighting terms, their existence is somewhere around 380nm, or in the blackness that is a Spinal Tap album cover. None more black…) may have been in the business since single cell organisms decided to form a band and hit the road, but they have earned themselves a position where the quality of your presentation is almost exclusively in their hands. Problem is, sometimes those hands are more suited to holding an overstuffed bank bag filled with the night’s gross than they are at understanding the value of production on the performance as a whole. Many understand lighting as a somewhat necessary aspect of a performance; some do not.
Last year, while advancing the Todd Rundgren Global tour, my second most confrontational correspondences were advancing the requirement for a single follow spot — the item that would allow the adoring fans the ability to see the person they paid to see. The response from the promoter’s representative was that there was “front light” that should be sufficient. When questioned about what kind of front light was available, and how it was circuited, the response was … crickets. No technically informative response, just the assumption that, since there was light in front of the artist, it would suffice.
Another issue comes into play when advancing a date in a venue that has lighting equipment that would work for a play, but woefully incorrect for a one-off fly date that would be better served with a small moving light package and conventional fixtures more suited towards a high energy rock, country or R&B show. Mastering the politics involved with how a good design can enhance a performance while maintaining a civilized budget is an art form unto itself. And with that premise, I propose the following:
A Bright Idea
I would like to initiate “Bring A Promoter to LDI Day.”
Choose your favorite, technically challenged promoter/ budget-creation specialist/ accountant; present them with a two-day accommodations/flight/per diem (that last one would be ironically funny…) trip to Las Vegas for the LDI show, and take them on a personal tour of the show floor to explain the reason why we passionately specify a different kind of spot fixture that is not 10-15 years old (yes, I am still told that 1995 ProSpot 250 units constitute an efficient moving light when advancing), or why there is a substantial difference between the RGB LED party lights that one of their venues has as its “technically sufficient” lighting rig and why it doesn’t exactly match up with your requirements for eight Robe Robin 600s. I truly believe that most of the exposure that many of these promoters and their reps get to current lighting production standards are when they are being chased off the stage by a group of case-pushing stage hands or when they are staring at the invoice from the local production company and trying to decipher whether they actually saw all that equipment being put into use…
By giving these special guests an up-close-and-personal experience with all the quality equipment that the industry has to offer, as well as the chance to speak with the engineers that conceive a more efficient light for us, the education could be a small, but influential, moment in our industry.
If nothing else, in the future when they are sitting in their office establishing the value of a specific act’s technical rider against the potential (a huge word in their world) gross and net profit, they could have a moment of clarity and realize that maybe, instead of shooting it down, they could add a few more pennies to the pot of the lowly lighting designer to allow a good design to come to fruition and give their audience just “that much” more of an evening of quality entertainment. Oh, the horror….
Martin Thomas, principal bottle-washer at Relentless Entertainment Design, LLC, is coming to a one-off near you. Almost guaranteed, based on his artists’ booking agents’ map-reading skills.
