Kenny Chesney has embarked on his 2015 trek across America. It’s his 14th headlining concert tour in support of his 16th studio album, The Big Revival, and some of the different stadium gigs will also feature a long roster of co-headliners/supporting acts including Eric Church, Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, Cole Swindell, Jake Owen, Brantley Gilbert, Chase Rice and Old Dominion.
As Chesney and crew were heading out for these mega-events — a must-see on the 2015 country music fan’s tour season calendar — we were able to catch up with the lighting design team.
Mike Swinford, Ed Wannebo, Mark Butts and Phil Ealy all played an intricate role in designing the whole production. But they are quick to point out that Chesney himself is the master behind all decisions. “We have a fine team,” Swinford says. “It starts with Kenny and production manager Ed Wannebo, and it all trickles down.”
Swinford has served as the lighting designer for all of Chesney’s shows since his first headline tour in 2001. He recalls that, back then, after he had been called in to design the lighting for Chesney, “I remember a lot of people being skeptical of whether Kenny could hold his own on the big stage back then. But he killed it, and has been doing so ever since.”
But this year has been different than in the past. The music has reached such a high level of energy. Chesney took 2014 off from touring and came back with a storm. He and his band are including surprise cover tunes that work the crowd into frenzy just as much as the country hits he plays while working the audience nonstop.
Designing the Tour
For the first time since he has designed the production elements, Swinford was able to design a show predominantly for a stadium. Once he got Chesney to sign off on the basic layout of the video segments, lighting trusses and band positions, he had six months for Wannebo and himself to architect the whole stage layout, from vendor specs to risers to artwork for scrims. Along the way, Wannebo and Swinford knew they had to design a structure that would easily conform to an arena setting as well.
But let’s start at the beginning. When Chesney announced the plan to tour this year he got ahold of Swinford. Instead of something brand new, he asked Swinford to gather photos and renderings of all the tour designs they had done through his 2013 tour. His thought was that perhaps they could mix and match parts of previous shows, but maybe with today’s technological advances. Swinford draws in AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max platforms. He regenerated all the artwork so they could sit down and sort through past ideas.
“One thing Kenny kept going back to was a year when I had some lower res side screens, off stage of the main rear video wall. I think they were made of MiTRIX panels, if you can remember those?” Chesney also went back in time to 2012 when he and Tim McGraw played stadiums together. He really liked the big wide look of the stage and Swinford knew what he had to do to get that all together. One of Chesney’s major statements was his desire to see his audience more evenly in the whole venue. Traditionally, stadium shows are lit from one end, and the light falls off as it goes far. This makes it hard to see the back of the stadium bowl, and Swinford had to work out ways to overcome that obstacle. They built large vertical towers in the house for speaker arrays to hang from. The FOH spots hung on the other side — four Lycian 2.5K long-throw units hung per tower, one on top of each other. On the sides of these towers he suspended Tyler GT trusses full of Clay Paky Mythos and Solaris Flares to light the back of the bowl more than adequately.
The plan was for six weeks of rehearsals. They need all that time because the boss is a perfectionist when it comes to his live production. Chesney is a hands-on lighting designer himself. He sat with the programmers for up to six hours every Sunday and, quite often, for more than an hour daily, describing lighting scenes through his eyes. He knows what colors and positions he wants for every part of a song. He dictates when the lights should move or settle down. He is aware of every hit and every beat that needs to be accented with lighting. Which is one of the reasons that programmer Mark Butts has been working with this team since the get go in 2001. Swinford tells us about that. “I trust Mark implicitly. He knows the rulebook of colors and what we do out here. He feels what Chesney is saying and interprets it into the show. He and lighting director Phil Ealy have their fingers in a lot of this design and work with Chesney, who knows what he wants, but is open minded to some new ideas. Phil talked him into using the color purple this year. We even flash a little magenta once in a while, something we have rarely, if ever done on this show. Chesney had told Swinford that he wanted to change it up a bit this year and he seemed to be even more hands on lighting wise, than ever before.”
The Light Rig
On the last time out, Chesney voiced his opinion that the big moving lights they were using did not move fast enough. Swinford explained “We do a song called ‘Young’, which has a bunch of lighting sweeps in it. Kenny needed half the lights to kick out from the stage to a high focus, while the other half black out, reset themselves and get ready to sweep again. Unfortunately the fixtures I had spec’d couldn’t move fast enough for this effect. I was instructed that whatever I spec’d next year had to do what he requested.”
So Swinford did his homework. He researched all the latest fixtures through shoot out comparisons to photometric charts to readings on his own light meter. He looked at the Sharpy and thought it was a great light that does one thing and it does it well. But he had yet to see what Clay Paky had in store for the future. This took a visit to Clay Paky’s homeland as Swinford, Mark Butts and Dave Haskell (who runs Morris Light and Sound) went Italy to see what they had brewing with this new fixture. When he got his hands on a prototype of the Mythos, Swinford knew he’d found what he was looking for. “In the Mythos, I found the real deal. A bright light that moves quick, has color mixing and a good zoom that combine to give me the best of all worlds.”
Swinford asked Chesney to come down to a lighting fixture shootout at Morris Light and Sound’s shop and he accepted the offer. All Swinford had was a Mythos prototype to hang next to all the other fixtures to test. As he showed the artist different functions of lights Swinford would get quizzed on where each type of fixture was hung and why. In the end it was settled and Haskell had one heckuva Purchase Order heading over to A.C.T Lighting, the distributor of Clay Paky gear in America. For overhead wash lights Swinford stuck with a large number of Vari*Lite VL3500 and VL3500 Wash FX units. He wanted the brightness of the beams for their punch with the video elements. But he also had a need for wash fixtures that could move quickly too. So he incorporated 30 Sharpy wash fixtures into the design.
The touring rig consisted of 10 straight overhead trusses resembling fingers. These trusses alternated with Mythos and VL3500 fixtures. The Mythos can run in a beam mode (where the light gets a pencil thin 2° beam) or in zoom mode where their light beam size is variable. Butts chose to keep them in zoom mode for this show. Swinford agreed with him that the tiny zoom aperture on the tight beam was thin enough for them, and they did not like the effect of the lens popping in when they switched modes live during songs. For the stadium show, Swinford had the lighting company build ladder structures that held one VL3500 FX, two Sharpy wash fixtures and two Clay Paky Stormys (LED colored strobes) each. He hung three of these pods down to make lighting ladders, which separated the video screens. In the arena shows, these single pods hung off a high side truss so they would not impede the 270° sightlines.
At the downstage end of each finger, Phil Ealy had Morris Light and Sound combine three Solaris Flares into a single pod to act as audience lights. “Once Kenny saw how bright these were, we had additional Flares mounted to the audience trusses in the stadiums to wash the crowd more evenly,” says Swinford. Working out the crowd light was another thing that took a lot of thinking. In the arenas Swinford designed trusses that ran the length of the hockey dashers that had predominantly Mythos fixtures lining them. But in stadiums there would be no hang points for these trusses. So Swinford took those same side trusses and relocated them. He hung one 32-foot section of the Tyler GT truss above the PA scrim, then took the other 48 feet of truss and hung it vertically just off stage of the PA. More Mythos lined the decks off stage of the band to give the stadium shows a massive wide look that they were seeking.
Video Elements
All of the video components came from Screenworks, the California based division of NEP, which supplied Daktronics 10mm LED video elements. They started out with a 48-by-17.5-foot wall (WxH) upstage, then accented it with additional screens surrounding that one. Above the front truss was what they referred to as “The Header”, a 12-foot-high section of video that went across the same 48-foot width. Added to this were two more segments of video measuring 24 by 17.5 feet (WxH), extending outward from the sides of the main upstage wall.
“We had never expanded past the 60-foot width mark on any arena show before,” says Swinford, of the visual expanse of LED video that stretched nearly 100 feet in width. “It was a cool experience to design something this huge.
“In stadium shows, we could rake the screens sideways to make for an enclosed stage area and give people on the sides a straight on view to I-Mag behind the band,” Swinford continues. “But in arenas, that would have just killed sightlines and seats. So rather than use the typical scenario where bands’ hang some projection screens with I-Mag to add close up camera shots for the fans, we chose to just keep going straight.” In the stadiums, they opted to add two more LED walls for I-Mag measuring 30 by 24 feet (H x W) that could be seen by audience members seated at the side of the stadium. The design team also opted to keep the luminance the same on all video surfaces.
Jay Cooper has been directing the video for quite some time now. Through his Ross switcher, he plays back all the media files as well as calls the camera shots. Mark Butts explained that, for years, the lighting guys were responsible for playing back media through various media servers and playback systems. A few years ago, they gave it all back to the video department, and they were quite glad to hand off the responsibility.
The video is obviously a huge part of the show, and Chesney enjoys it as well. As Swinford points out, “there’s a fine line we walk with light beams, haze to see such beams, and the fact that we can never have the lighting beams over shadowing the video picture. We are running the walls at about 20 percent brightness at night and constantly monitor the view to make sure both lighting and video are working in tandem.”
The Button Pushers
Mark Butts and Phil Ealy seem to make for a good team of board operators, and they both can program the console as well. Ealy lauds Butts’ programming knowledge and skills, and as for Ealy’s timing, Butts states, “This guy is killing it.” While Butts has been programming with Swinford since day one, Ealy just came upon the gig in 2013. With Swinford and Butts’ constant workload of shows, they needed a real pro who could step up to the plate and run the show daily. As Ealy tells it, “I had recently finished another tour and was gardening outside. My old friend Ed Wannebo called the house to see what I was up to and asked if I wanted to go on tour. I asked when. He said to pack my bags. I asked for 24 hours to confer with my wife, and I was out here the next day.
“The thing about this show is the energy Kenny projects from the stage. It is amazing,” Ealy continues. “I have to stay with him at all times. He can mix it up at any time, and I need to stay on my game with what he wants at the moment. I can tell when he wants a big lighting hit right there by his body movements. Originally, the use of time code for running the consoles had been figured into the show. But we decided we were better off with spontaneity and the ability to keep up with the artist, no matter what he throws into the mix during his show.”
They had six weeks of rehearsals, seven if you count the time it took Butts to get the previz system and console layouts together. From the beginning, the design team made a decision to program both the arena show and the stadium one simultaneously. They required four grandMA2 full sized consoles for rehearsals — one for Butts to program on while networked with another that Ealy would use to play back the cues back on stage with the band. They set up a grandMA 3D visualizer system off to the side with another console plugged into it. They patched a whole new set of audience fixtures into this console to program all the audience looks. As soon as Butts finished programming the cues for Ealy to play back, he slid his chair over to the other console and rewrote the cues with the fixtures in their stadium configuration. The fourth console was used by the lighting crew to tech the lights up in the rig at any time.
According to Butts, “Kenny has always been a hands on with every facet of the production. He is literally directing the lighting cues I write. It’s a little nerve-racking at first, as you know how valuable this guys’ time is, and he’s choosing to spend it programming with you. This was a really incredible experience for me as I get to see what’s inside the performer’s head. I mean, he’s willing to spend six hours at a shot reviewing every light and video cue. It really taught me how performers view what we do and how it affects their performance on stage.”
While the cue structure was similar to past shows, the looks were all different from anything this group had done in the past. Phil Ealy brought a new set of eyes to the show, and this was a good thing for everyone, it seemed. He was the new guy who came to the party late last tour. As Butts states, “Having Phil on site from the beginning was a godsend. We could always look to him for fresh ideas to treat a song and get new input.” The gang all decided to approach this tour differently that the past ones. They wanted a stripped down rock ‘n’ roll thing rather than the giant spectacles they have done in the past. This writer can only add that for all its stripped down looks, the general consensus is that the show still looked large and spectacular.
Kenny Chesney 2015 Big Revival Tour
CREW
Production Manager: Ed Wannebo
Lighting Designer: Mike Swinford
Lighting Programmer: Mark Butts
Lighting Director: Phil Ealy
Lighting Co: Morris Light and Sound
Lighting Crew: Allen Gibson (crew chief), Ryder Deas, Travis Edwards, Jerome Thompson, Austin Schussler, Kevin Lichty, Ryan Hodge (console/network tech)
Video Co: Screenworks NEP
Video Director: Jay Cooper
Video Crew: Brian Littleton (crew chief/screen engineer), Bob Larkin (EIC), Jon Bailey (lead camera), Autin Smith, Chaim Chavarria, Alex Keene (LED/cameras), Will Cabral (jib operator), Ryan Rushing (camera assistant)
Stage Manager: Tom Nisun
Assistant Tour Manager: Robin Majors
Production Assistant: Jill Trunnell
Automation: Mark McKinney (Lead), Daniel Wright, Nate Loftis,
Rigging: Dwayne “Buzz” Gibson (load master), Robbie Sheene (power and motor systems), Jimmy Vaughan, Marc Knowles
GEAR
4 grandMA2 consoles
181 Clay Paky Mythos fixtures
60 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash fixtures
28 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash FX fixtures
40 Clay Paky Stormy LED strobes
24 Clay Paky Sharpy Wash fixtures
78 Solaris LED Flare fixtures
12 Solaris LED Flare Jr fixtures
3 3000 spot fixtures
6 Lycian 2.5K spot fixtures
1 Center LED video wall (Daktronics 10mm, 48’x17.5’ WxH)
1 Header LED video wall (Daktronics 10mm, 48’x12’ WxH)
2 Side LED video walls for stadium shows (Daktronics 10mm, 24’x17.5’ WxH each)
For more Kenny Chesney 2015 Big Revival Tour photos, go to:
http://www.prolightingspace.com/photo/albums/kenny-chesney-gallery-released-by-kenny-chesney
