LD Joe Labbe is concentrating hard on the stage. The lights are out and he’s waiting for the band to come back into a song. It’s just like any other night until Of a Revolution’s lead singer Marc Roberge says to his bandmates, “Let’s go into another song.” Labbe, who is on his first tour with the band, hears about the switch in his personal monitors and panics. “In a matter of seconds I had to find the right page where the song is,” he recalls. “I thought, “Why are you doing this to me?’ It turned out to be a fun night. I made it through and got it to where it needs to be. It was one of those nights that I walked away feeling awesome.”
Taking a set list or a song in a new direction is nothing new for Of a Revolution (O.A.R.), an upbeat jam band that’s currently touring to support their latest offering, All Sides. The quintet includes singer/guitarist Roberge, guitarist Richard On, saxophonist Jerry DePizzo, bassist Benj Gershman and drummer Chris Culos.
Labbe got the gig after submitting a design idea to production manager Kevin “Gigbut” Cassidy and started with the band in mid-June. He immediately realized the challenges of working with O.A.R. included becoming familiar with the band’s 72 songs, learning how the bands likes to jam during the show and then designing a show that can follow the fluidity of the band while entertaining a rabid fan base.
“They do play from a set list, but songs can go in different directions depending on the way the vibe is going,” Labbe explains. “Almost every song can go in totally different tangents. On one night a song will last 20 minutes, the next night it can last five. Their music makes for a very involved lighting show with a lot of cues and there is a lot of crowd interaction from an audience that knows the songs backwards and forwards.”
Initial design ideas, Labbe says, came from listening to the band’s catalog and then catching their vibe. “Then I had to ask about the concept for the new tour and what they were looking for,” he says. “They wanted to incorporate some video elements along with the lighting elements and go a different route.”
That different route meant that Labbe started thinking about a variety of design ideas. The one that stuck had him video mapping the entire rig, using 132 Element Labs Versa Tubes, 18 one-meter by one-meter Versa Frames, 12 one-meter by two-meter Versa Frames, 16 PixelRange PixelLines and a Catalyst V4 Media Server with Pixelmad software. The system is run off of two ChamSys Magic Q100 consoles with a ChampSys Magic Q Wing using an ELC dmXLAN.
Lighting includes 24 Vari*Lite VL500 80v Wash fixtures, 14 VL2500 Spots, nine Martin MAC 2000 Profiles and six Martin Atomic 3000 Strobes.
Zenith Lighting out of Orlando, Fla. supplied all the lighting, video and rigging gear for the tour and Labbe has not had to supplement his inventory as the band moves from sheds that seat anywhere from 2,000 to 24,000 fans.
“Part of my design included looking at the venues they were about to play,” he explains of his rig consistency. “I wanted it to stay the same for all of the venues. There may have been two shows where we changed something a little, but besides that it’s the same for every show.”
The show was first designed on VectorWorks and then Labbe did the pre-programming and visualization with ESP Vision. “I was quite impressed with how easy it was to go from VectorWorks to ESP,” he reports. “I’ve never done that before and after a couple phone conversations with the guys over at ESP Studios they had me up and running in about two hours.”
The ChampSys consoles are new to North America, but Labbe liked them immediately because of the ease of use and references back to older consoles. “Also, the way it will directly connect to the media server and give me a preview of what the server is doing,” he explains, “and the speed of it has been phenomenal.” Estabon Carralaccio and Tim Brennan from PRG introduced the LD to the ChampSys products.
The ChampSys board became an important pick during Labbe’s early shows with O.A.R., especially since this is a band that can push or pull a song from concise to jam in a moment’s time. Sure that’s great for a fan, but for a LD it’s a potential nightmare. To ensure that there were no snafus, Labbe programmed a handful of standard looks and then dedicated a wing-it area on the Magic Q. “So, if the band goes one way I’ve got different stuff and if they go another way I bring up other stuff,” he says. “The hardest part was getting it to work with the video elements.”
That specific issue was overcome, he explains, by pre-programming certain looks before the band hit the stage and then by listening carefully to the band during the show. “I had to get to know them and their style,” he says. “There were a couple of nights where I was like, ‘Hey, where is this going? I didn’t know about this.’ They are a very energetic band and they go a lot of different directions. It’s like hearing a different story every day.”
The board’s speed and adaptability also helped, he says. “The way you copy and move cue stacks on the fly is very helpful,” he says. “When the band would go a different way during a song I’d go back into the library and quickly copy that cue onto a page in a matter of seconds. That was very handy.”
As far as the video portion of the show, Labbe aimed for a new look for the band without going too far afield from industry norms. Standing at the FOH position, he explains, the Versa Tubes are denser on the left, center and right parts of the stage but lighter in between. “So, your eyes fill in the gaps,” he says, “and the Versa Tubes don’t line up top to bottom, so it’s kind of unique.”
According to Labbe there is no live acquisition during a show, but there is a part during the song “Lay Down” from the band’s 2005 release Stories of a Stranger where he will take an audio input from the stage and create a custom VU meter using the lighting rig. “When Chris [Culos, the drummer] goes into a little drum break we take the audio signal from a wireless belt pack and plug it into the audio input on the Catalyst,” he says. “The video reacts to audio, bouncing up and down with what he plays. That’s the only element of the show that incorporates video, lights and sound all together as far as one specific item. That’s kind of cool.”
While “Lay Down” has been fun to play with each night, Labbe has liked the songs “Shattered” and “This Town,” which was the theme song to this year’s College World Series broadcasts on ESPN. “Some of the older songs are fantastic, too,” he says. “I dig a lot of their music. The greatest part about their show, I think, is that there’s nothing depressing or sad. It’s all upbeat, crowd oriented, and let’s have a good time tonight kind of thing.”
And as the first leg of the tour comes to a close in early October, Labbe is already looking forward to the winter and 2009 dates. In fact, so is the band, and they’re coming to him with ideas for the next run. “They are getting more involved every day, because they understand it better now,” he reports. “They come up with some ideas and then I give them input with my ideas. Everything has its pros and cons, so we talk about it and then we come up with a compromise that works for them. That helps the overall show.”
At the same time, the new ideas are going to keep him busy during the break. “Now that I’m more familiar with the band and understand their music a lot better, I’m going to revamp my show,” he says. “The overall concept is not going to change, but it’s going to be better designed for their purpose. I haven’t gotten too far in planning it, but I’m thinking about fixture locations and fixture purposes. Everything I have for them works great now, but there’s always room for improvement and that’s what we’re going to do.”
