Just because they’re “weekend warriors,” as production manager Sean Gary humorously calls them, doesn’t mean that edgy country music veteran Gary Allan and his band and crew are not busier than a cat on fire. They spend most weekends of the year headlining in clubs, casinos, parks, theaters, rodeos, auto auctions, hockey arenas and festivals in seemingly every corner of the country. If you were to draw lines on a map between Allan’s gigs, your diagram would look like a ball of twine that had exploded from within.
Crazy-Quilt Itinerary
In March, Allan performed in Coeur D’Alene, Seattle, Louisville, Atlantic City, and Salamanca, NY, as well as on Late Night with David Letterman. First on April’s itinerary is Las Vegas on the 6th for an appearance on the Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards telecast on CBS, then it’s on to Grand Prairie, TX; Biloxi, MS; and Dothan, AL, followed by June junkets to Chattanooga, TN; Sioux Falls, SD; and Oshkosh and Cadott, WI. The rest of the year will follow suit. You could almost write one of those road songs, like “Route 66” or “Willin’,” naming the cities visited by the band. Their audiences range in number from 1,000 in clubs to 16,000 at festivals.
Sean Gary got his start in high school in Lubbock, TX, working for local production companies, doing monitors for bands, front-of-house, PA tuning and production management for regional acts and festivals. He graduated to flying PAs for companies like Sound Image and Rat Sound, where his talent was spotted two years ago by Allan’s FOH engineer Chris Sullivan. He was recruited to do PAs, moved up to monitors, then became production manager.
Typically, the band and crew arrive on their bus in each city around 8 a.m. on show day, have breakfast, and begin loading in at 10 a.m. “By 2 or 2:30 p.m.,” Gary explains, “we do a sound check, then let the opening act get in to make their preparations. Shows usually start at 8 or 9 o’clock, unless we’re in Texas — those guys like to start at midnight!” Because of the help he got when he was coming up, Allan likes to return the favor by allowing opening acts to share his staging gear. With the variety of venues, locations and budgets, local loading help has come from everyone from professional stagehands to a girls’ softball team to a Boy Scout troop.
This year is a big year of many big years for Allan, who began his career at age 13 singing in honky-tonks around his La Mirada, CA birthplace. His audiences then were a motley mix of cowboys in western boots and Goth punks with piercings and spiked hair. The singer and guitarist’s 2013 Number One hit “Every Storm (Runs Out Of Rain)” from the Billboard 200 chart-topping album Set You Free earned an ACM Award nomination for Song of The Year. Allan’s nine studio albums have produced 26 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including four that reached Number One and seven more that reached the Top Ten. Three of the albums were certified gold and three went platinum.
A One-Truck Production
Despite these accolades, Allan’s is a one-truck operation — a 53-foot semi with about 76,000 pounds of audio, lights, video, backline and set. During the week, when he’s off the road, Sean Gary works from his base in Nashville preparing for the next weekend’s shows, communicating with local promoters about stage dimensions, sight lines, power, obstructions, safety measures, weather issues, etc. He sends a list of questions to each venue about the equipment it has on hand or can get from local production houses. For example, because there isn’t room on the truck for a full lighting rig or PA racks and stacks, he tries to have those provided at each locale.
“Since every location is different,” he says, “it makes things very interesting and I have to really plan ahead when advancing the shows. We want to do a big show every night without having to rely solely on what we can bring in ourselves. However, we don’t always know what we’re going to get in those local markets. One night it will be an EV XLC line array, the next night it will be an L-Acoustics K1, then the next it is JBL VerTec. For lighting movers in the air, it might be [Martin] MAC 700s or Vari*Lite or Elation.”
Small Rig, Big Looks
In their own package, they carry 16 Clay Paky Sharpys, 16 Martin MAC 101s and six Showline SL Nitro 510 LED strobes provided by Nashville-based lighting and video vendor Elite Multimedia. Lighting designer and one-man lighting crew Brandon Quisberg, whose résumé includes stints with the Charlie Daniels Band, Phil Vassar, Rodney Atkins and Alabama, has programmed the lighting sequences song by song into the group’s new LSC Clarity LX600 console, also provided by Elite. It enables him to alter elements on the fly if songs change unexpectedly. “For instance,” says Gary, “when the guitarist takes a solo, he’s often nowhere close to (the spot) where he was the night before. Our show is not choreographed — there’s nothing about it that’s the same every night. It’s old-school raw — just get out there and play!”
Gary and Quisberg designed the lighting and video with two goals in mind. They had to be big and impressive, but also had to be manageable by one person. After some input from Allan, the duo worked with Elite to make it happen. Among the tools Elite introduced to them was the PixelFlex LED curtain. “It fits our needs extremely well,” said Gary. “It folds up very small and truck packs very well, allowing us to have a lot of video without taking up a lot of truck space, unlike most rigid tile LED products out there. And because it’s lightweight, it’s ideal for venues whose structures can’t take a lot of weight. We use 4×8 panels across the stage for visual effects and video, and because the PixelFlex is so flexible, we also use 1×4 custom panels curved in half-circles with a Sharpy fixture inside to make video pods.”
He likewise applauds the shrinking of other components. “The Sharpys are extremely compact, but pack a huge punch, and even though they are small, they are still quite impressive in arenas and stadiums. The MAC 101s are also very light and compact. You can put eight of those in one case. Those kinds of advances in weight and size have allowed us to have a bigger show in a smaller space.”
