Last month I found myself peeved at somebody because they told me they knew how to operate a certain lighting console. But once they got on site my client realized they didn’t. This put me in a tight spot because I was not at the gig to help out, and I had assured my friend that my guy would be all over it. When the gig didn’t go well, I vented in this column. But then I had a consultation with Swami Candela, who pointed out that we all have taken gigs we may not be qualified for. And of course the Swami was right. One of the best ways to learn something new is to be “thrown into the fire,” where you are forced to learn something new…and quickly.
This applies to many aspects of the lighting biz. I remember the first time I had to focus PAR cans on a downstage truss. First of all, the truss was on a ground support system. Forty feet of truss was held aloft on two Vermettes, which were these horrible square tube industrial crank-handle lifts that bowed in as you lifted the truss. My crew chief on that first day told me the LD was waiting on stage to focus the conventional fixtures and I’d better get my ass up there pronto.
The first thing I noticed was that there was no ladder or easy way to get up on the truss. I looked over at my boss, Brian Lukas, and he just stared holes in me as if he were saying, “Don’t even ask.” So I grabbed onto some cold square metal, shimmied up 20 feet and hoisted my butt onto the triangle truss. Needless to say, we had no fall protection. Safety wasn’t standard issue on touring shows back then.
Once I caught my breath the LD started pointing fingers in the direction he wanted me to point the PAR 64s. Oh, this is simple, I thought. Then he started twisting his hand as if he was trying to crank the lamp up brighter. I was confused and too embarrassed to ask him what the hell he was doing. Finally Brian yelled up at me to grab the porcelain and turn the actual bulb. I was redirecting the shape of the beam. Gotcha! They eventually demanded that I twist some ACL bulbs. They don’t have porcelains on them, just wires screwed directly onto the bulb. I got the shock of my life and everyone laughed heartily.
I worked my way down the truss and thought I was doing fine despite the fact that I should have been done 30 minutes ago. Then the LD yells up at me to swap bubbles, whatever the hell that meant. Apparently I had mis-lamped a couple of PARs during the prep and needed to put the medium flood bulb in the yellow PAR and the narrow spot in the green. Cool, I know how to do this. But I had no gloves and the PARs were fricking hot from being on for too long. Again, Brian looked up at me with this look of shame. I think I still have calluses on my fingers 20 years later.
I started working for this production company as an audio guy. But they used me as a lighting tech when they were short on lighting dudes. And of course, being young, I would do anything to go out on the road with a band. Then one day I found myself having to tie in power tails and patch some dimmers. I had no idea what I was doing. So I went to the house electrician and told him so. He laughed and called me a greenhorn, but he said I had to learn somewhere. So he explained the difference between ground and neutral and why it was important not to plug the green Camlock into the blue one.
This was all good, but patching? We didn’t have DMX512 back then. We had consoles that spit out DC voltage on tiny little wires that triggered dimmers. You had to patch the little DC banana jacks into the right dimmer in order for the right handle on the console to turn on the proper light. As if that wasn’t confusing enough, you also had to patch the dimmers to the right circuit on a multicable for the correct bulb to fire. I was totally lost until Tommy Blancato came over and asked me what I was doing. I just looked up and gave him a blank stare; “I have no idea.” Fortunately he was there to teach me, or the LD would still be yelling at me.
In the 1980s I was sent out to fix some moving lights on a tour. I had no experience at all, and was getting thrown into a big fire. But I was not afraid. I got a quick hour-long lesson in the shop and put on a plane. Once I started opening these things I realized that they really are pretty simple to fix. You just needed the parts, which I had brought along. The funny thing was that after I got them all working, the LD demanded that I stay on the tour for the last two months to fix stuff. What I really got out of this was some good “on the job training.”
Pretty soon it was time for me to start running moving lights from consoles. I was clueless about this. My first show happened to be a Lionel Richie show with Peter Morse as the LD — just a little pressure there. But Michael Keller explained that it was pretty easy; I just had to focus the lights every day and hit the Go button at the right time. All the same, I was scared out of my mind. Peter knew this and he, being the master of the “wind up,” did his best to convince me that we would all be going to hell in a bucket that night. But the show went fine with just a few scorching looks thrown my way.
I remember the first time I had to use media servers on a gig. I was no longer scared of anything new, but at the first gig I could not get the Catalyst to work at all. I went over all my notes and still could not figure out what the hell I was doing wrong. Of course I was a PC guy, and the Catalysts were running on Macs, so I was at a disadvantage when it came to troubleshooting. Finally I called my friend, Tyler Roach, who figured it out. My hard drive had bit the dust. No problem; I had a backup Catalyst. But of course once I got that working, I realized that none of the client’s custom footage had been loaded on the spare hard drive. So in between designing light cues during rehearsals I hand fed all the images from my PC to a USB stick and then loaded them onto the backup Mac.
I was totally up sh*t creek that day, but I pulled it off. And I also learned that sometimes being thrown into the fire may not be a fun experience, but it can be the fastest way to learn.
