For a long time I've been wondering why most Lighting designers stay away from the color green. They certainly like it on their currency, but they rarely use it on stage.
And it's not fair. Green is my second favorite color and I use it all the time. It goes so well with blue or magenta. It turns into a great rock color when joined by amber. At Christmas time is the only time I will use it with red, but that's because you can get away with it then. But mix some hard edge lights in green with a congo or lav stage wash and you have instant sexy colors. Pale green is fantastic to use in any stop cues in a music based show. So why are people afraid of it?
10 years ago I was doing the Eagles tour for LD Nick Sholem. We did a whole 3 hour show with no green or magenta. At first. I soon found out that the drummer, Don Henley hated magenta, and asked never to be lit in it. So Nick just basically did not use the color anywhere in any song. This was wasting one of the few primary colors it seems. So I decided to start using it on the backdrop and scenery. After all, the drummer never turns around to look at a backdrop when he's playing and I made sure his skin was never touched by the color he loathed.
So then I asked Nick about green. He didn't say he hated it, but with the exception of a few short cues, he never utilized it. And I had programmed a few tour for Nick. So when the Eagles added a few songs one summer (while Nick was off with Sting), I chose to write the new lighting cues in green. Nobody complained.
So a year later I find myself with Nick again and we're programming another Sting tour. Sting always does the old Police song "Roxanne" live. There's a part in the song where he sings the famous line "You don't have to put on your red light". For 20 years Nick would then bathe the whole arena in red light. Makes sense right? To me it was just so cliche' after seeing this for 20 years. So I pulled my all time favorite prank.
You see, I would always go and start up tours for Nick, then leave him after the first 3-5 shows. So as a parting gift one tour, I stayed a little late and rewrote the first "red light" cue. I set up the console to turn all 100 movers and every audience mole to green on that cue. I knew Nick would have a coronary when he saw this the next night. Of course I set up the next go cue to bring everything back to normal. I then got Tony, the crew chief in on the gag and showed him how to fix that altered green cue for nick the following day.
So I'm on a 36 hour journey home to California the next day as the show starts. Everyone was in on the gag and all the managers were standing at front of house when Sting launched into Roxanne. At the right time, all the green lights came on. Nick jumped up and started freaking out. Everyone was howling with laughter, but him. He screams at Tony saying the system was all fucked up. Tony simply reached in and hit the go button again to restore the color to red.
Finally Nick settles down and looks at Tony saying "what the hell was that?" Tony simply said it was a goodbye present from his old buddy Nook. By the time I got home there was already a filthy message on my answering machine about how payback was coming for me one day. But Nick is a good sport and we are still good friends to this day, even if green isn't his favorite color.
