Before automated lighting, media servers, and LEDs, there were a handful of pioneering individuals who took truckloads of conventional lights and figured out how to rig them, power them, and run a show on the road. They borrowed heavily from the theatre industry and the school of hard knocks to put together the first touring packages. One of them was Bob See, founder and CEO of See Factor Lighting in Long Island City, New York. About 40 years after See starting working in the entertainment production industry, PLSN decided to take a look back at the genesis of the industry from a pioneer’s point of view.
PLSN: Where does your career in this industry start?
Bob See: It’s a very long and involved story. In the beginning, when heaven and earth was not quite built yet…Or at least in the rock ‘n’ roll and entertainment business, people used to have to go to Madison Square Garden as one of their venues, from the circus on down. There was a man then by the name of Norman Leonard who was the head of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), and he also carried the electrical license for the building. After a couple of traveling rock shows had been in his building and they had some grounding problems…
What kind of grounding problems?
Grounds didn’t exist; everybody used a two-wire system. Three-wire came into existence only 25 to 30 years ago. And Norman Leonard single-handedly changed the industry. Before any show could come into the Garden, they had to rewire everything and make it right or he would have his crew do it for you. I can remember going to all the shows that we were doing in the Garden to find out what was new regarding how Norman Leonard wanted things done.
I had a good knowledge of electricity and the code, having worked for a licensed electrician as well as having gone to NYU School of the Arts for numerous years. And I’d have battles with him, sometimes, over grounding. He demanded that every piece of cable be three-wire. When we first started grounding, we would take a #2 conductor and run it directly to the truss from a ground. And he allowed that for a short period of time.
Remember the Rolling Stones STP tour in 1971?
I’ve spoken to Chip Monck, the lighting designer, about it.
He brought a ground off the truss. And I built what was referred to as “the icebox,” which was a giant box full of 3-16 camlocks, a big power distribution system. But grounding had only started to come in then.
Right after that, Norman Leonard became really impossible — you know, you have to do it his way. Various tours came through, and they got nailed. So all of a sudden the industry was aware that if you’re going to play the Garden, you better be Garden-proof. Because he wouldn’t let the gear in the building. It had to be three-wire equipment. If it did come in the building, because he got pressure from upstairs, he would make them make it safe. And he had major league fights with management. I remember seeing and hearing a few of them myself.
But Norman would literally go around and look at your distribution and make you pull covers off. In those days we all used to use bull switches or rocker arm switches. And if you didn’t take the neutral and ground it through the bus — if you just ran it straight through and didn’t run it through the box, even if there was ground on the box, he’d make you do that.
A bull switch is a disconnect, right?
Yeah, like a 200-amp rocker arm switch like they used to use on the wall. That’s what we all used. We’d go out and buy an ITE switch, whether it is a 400 amp or 200 amp or whatever, as your main disconnect, and then you’d go through that to your equipment. Later on, he made us all have distribution panels, so that if you were taking 400 amps and you wanted to go into a 100 amp circuit, you had to breaker it down to 100 amps; there were no “Y” splits. You had to do it right. If you didn’t do it right, you didn’t get to come to the Garden to play. And everybody had to follow suit. It took a while for the West Coast companies to come up to snuff, because they didn’t have to deal with it every day like we did.
But in the beginning, people would make custom-made distribution, like when TFA Lighting was in existence, Tom Fields made a lot of custom-made stuff that Norman Leonard actually had some hand in, as I recall. And basically, Normal single-handedly changed the industry. He made the circus change. And remember, the circus has offices there. Feld has an office there, and they’re a very important part because the ice shows, the circus, all of it, is run by one producer out of D.C. He made everybody change over. If they owned their own equipment, they had to change. It all became three-wire. That’s why you see two neutrals on a rack. Because of electronic dimmers, the neutral current can actually be higher than the load on any one of the legs.
The whole grounding debate became a major league issue. He would go up and make you drop a truss and he’d put a meter on it and see if you had any current coming off the truss.
He would meter it from the truss to the ground?
Well, he’d check the truss to make sure it was grounded properly and make sure the cables were grounded. He’d do things like put an amp probe on the ground, and if he saw any current going through to the ground, he’d make you tear the system apart and make you find out what the hell was going on. And if you just came from an outdoor gig and all the wire was damp, because back then the lights were wired with asbestos leads, so the asbestos would hold moisture, so you could get current going through the wire cover.
When the asbestos-covered wire was outlawed, everyone had to get rid of the asbestos leads. So we dyked them off all the PAR cans and stuck new high-temp wire in their place. When the English companies came over and ran the systems at 208 volts, it was a different story. But he still would make them ground it properly.
I would have to give him credit for changing the industry from two-wire to three-wire, almost single-handedly. He would come out with his big amp probe and he liked to bust balls. He and I got along okay, because he thought I was some hippie who came in, and didn’t know what I was talking about. But I could come in and quote code at him because I had been an electrician early on. It took years, but we bonded.
What kind of connectors were you using for feeders?
In those days – and this was another thing that Norman Leonard made us all change – we were using all Twecos.
Those are welding connectors, right?
And welding cable. With welding cable, unless you buy welding cable specifically rated for 600 volts, it was rated for 60 volts, or whatever. Well, Norman decided Twecos were no good because they didn’t meet code and because of the little bare metal set screws sticking out of them. He said that we must use a connector that’s fully encapsulated, so he came up with the camlock. I think he was the one who said, “This is the connector I want you all to use,” or somebody came to him and said, “We want to use these; is this okay?” And he gave them the nod. And camlocks became the industry standard because Norman wouldn’t let Twecos in the building.
And we had barrels of Twecos when we changed over to camlocks. We had a lot of feeder cable and distribution, because I would do all the power distribution at Shea Stadium and at the Garden. So, because I was up to code, everybody took our gear. As time went on, obviously, everybody else came up to code.
So that’s really the history on power, and power distribution, the demands of breaking down the power as it came in to you, as he handed you 400 amps on a set of feeder. And if he was really having a rotten day, he’d be pissed if you didn’t run double feeder for everything. Four-ought, in those days was rated for about 190 amps. And the fact that we all run it at 400 amps is not okay, because you’re not supposed to -— even the new stuff, the entertainment cable. The only thing that might be okay is the Type W.
But that’s what it’s listed for, in the NEC book, 400 amps…
Yeah, but that’s in open air. That means you suspend the cable from a non-conductive surface, eight feet in the air, so it has free air movement around it. That’s why you’ll see a lot of big dimmer racks have double camlocks and double feeders.
I don’t know what you’re required to do these days, but I think on a 400-amp service you should be running double feeders, but most people just run single. The theory is that, because the lights are flashing on and off, you’re never pulling the full amount of current. But that’s not always true because, in fact, you can have any one of the hot legs or the neutral go above 400 amps if you are loading the legs with more than what they are rated for because of the way the loads are balanced or how the dimmers are firing. Norman would allow about 20 percent overload. In other words, you could take a 400-amp service and put 480 amps on it. But he’d sit there, and he’d write down what you said your loads are and he’d figure out the math. He was dogged about it — dogged! But you know what? He single-handedly made the industry safer. And I think electrically today, we are safer because of him. If he had not been so demanding…He had the power in the building — he carried the license. If he got really heavy with the people coming in to play the building, he’d say, “No, it’s under my license, and it doesn’t meet my specs. If somebody gets hurt, I could have my license taken.” And he’d refuse to allow it.
Good for him. We need more people like that in this industry.
When Production Arts came into the industry, they followed the same path. And then there were conversations with the people from ETC, back in the day when it LMI, and they’d come down and there were a lot of meetings to change the code. Steve Terry was involved, there was a whole bunch of people; a guy from Strand, a guy from Kleigl, and we had the NEC code rewritten.
