While the Grateful Dead officially called it a career last fall at 50 years old, nobody really expected them to fade away. For this side project, they brought in John Mayer to take the place of the late Jerry Garcia while going by the name of Dead & Company. Guitarist Bob Weir shared the playing and singing duties with Mayer as they plowed through two sets of Grateful Dead music. Original drummers Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart handled the rhythm section.
LD Chris Ragan has lit several Dead side projects over the years. Jon Pollak designed the lighting structure for this tour, but he had accepted a gig with another artist. When the scheduling conflicts arose, Ragan was quickly called upon for his expertise at lighting the jam band genre.
Chris had spent seven years (and 700 shows) with moe, another popular jam band from upstate New York. Over the years, he has also designed for Government Mule, the Strokes, hip hop’s Common and several others. But where he’s really made his niche is in the festival scene, working on more than 15 of those projects per year.
“Let me guess, you’re punting the lights for the whole show?” I ask Chris.
“But of course. How else do you light a jam band?” he replies. A month ago, Ragan was sitting comfortably at a desk at his BML-Blackbird office. Now he’s running lights on a tour that is utilizing Upstaging gear. “How does this work out for you?” is the next question. “It’s weird, but I feel perfectly at home here. I had worked with Phil Lesh on some solo projects as well as on the Further tour. But for the last few years, I tried something different with this desk job and enjoy working at BML-Blackbird helping to put projects together.
“For this show I have two arched trusses that frame the ‘Steal Your Face’ set piece in the center. They are lined with Clay Paky Mythos and [Martin MAC] Viper AirFX fixtures. Lining the front of the arches are Chauvet Nexus 4×1 LED strips. Robe Pointes are located under the video screens while GLP X4’s line the sides. I use X4’s to illuminate the skull itself and Robe BMFL’s to keep the band lit from the front from a 50-foot trim…My programmer Chris Coyle, operates the grandMA2 next to mine. We are separate users linking our consoles together, it’s been great having him out here.”
There are two portrait style screens upstage, on either side of the Dead & Company skull.
All of the video gear came from Filament productions. They sub-rented the V-9 Lite video walls and racks from PRG Nocturne. There are two long lens cameras at FOH, two handhelds in the pit with more lipstick and robocams. Director Charlie Harris cuts the cameras.
In the center of the Dead’s Steal your Face skull is a circular RP screen that is lit by double stacked 22K Barco Projectors. Located at FOH is another grandMA2 running the video content. Video Director John Singer punts all the imagery as well. He builds all of his own content. He also has developed his own software that utilizes Real time 3D. He has plenty of the original Grateful Dead artwork on files that he manipulates with effects from his own software or the Hippo media servers he uses.
Constructing the Steal Your Face Set Piece
In 1976, The Grateful Dead adapted a logo created by Owsley Stanley and Bob Thomas. The red, white and blue pic of a skull with a lighting bolt forehead became their iconic “Steal Your Face” logo. So when the Dead & Company decided to tour this fall, John Mayer had the idea of building a set piece that could incorporate the logo, but replace a circular projection screen in the forehead.
With two weeks until the scheduled first show, production manager Chris Adamson called John Bahnick over at Upstaging. He was told he had 24 hours to see if Upstaging’s scenic shop could design and build the piece. Bahnick turned to Travis Shaffer, who leads the scenic shop.
Having been a fan of the Grateful Dead for years, Shaffer sat down at his desk. There was one particular request being made by production. The sign had to be visible from 360° as the tour sold all the way around in arenas. They could rear project onto the RP screen in the center and audience members either side would see the projection. But they needed to see the skull itself as well, making it a two-sided face. Within a few hours, Shaffer had a plan. This is how he fabricated the piece.
“The first thing I needed was a size to go by,” explains Travis. “I started with the circular screen. I wanted to use a 12-inch-by-12-inch circular truss to hold the screen fabric on and based the size around that. Production dictated a 15-foot ID circle truss that Tyler Truss built for us in five days. Once I had the size, I put it into the CAD drawing. I then superimposed a PDF of the ‘Steal Your Face’ logo on another layer and scaled it until the forehead matched the truss. I now had the exact size and specs I needed for the perimeter.”
Travis knew it would need to be broken down and fit on set carts. As you can see in Fig. 1, Travis designed an aluminum frame that could attach to the circle truss via some half-couplers. He then attached plywood cutouts of the face’s perimeter to the aluminum frame. Upstaging owns a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine. Shaffer feeds the coordinates of the cad drawing directly into this machine which precision cut the pieces of plywood perfectly to the AutoCAD specs. He now had the plywood frame of the outline of the skull.
“Once we had the plywood outline, we took large blocks of foam and cut them down. We attached them to the plywood so we could start sculpting the actual 3D face,” says Shaffer. There’s a reason these guys are called scenic “artists’. They would indeed have to work as sculptors to carve the 3D structure out of the foam.
To cut the large foam blocks to a workable size, Upstaging used a hot-wire device. They stretched a nickel cadmium wire across two points and applied electrical current to the wire, heating it up. The wire sliced right through the foam, cauterized it and kept the edges even. Once the blocks were cut to the depth of the face, they were attached to the wood board on the aluminum structure. The crew could then just follow the outline of the wood board to cut the white blocks into a surface. (see Fig. 2).
It was time to sculpt the skull, and Travis had a clever idea. He hung the set piece as is, straight up and down. Then he projected the Steal your Face logo on the front of it, adjusting the zoom on the lens until it matched the perimeter. The scenic department then traced the projections right on to the foam, giving them a foundation to start. (see Fig. 3 and Fig. 4.)
“We utilized quite a variety of tools to carve away at this piece. Knives and chisels for sure, but we ended up with rasps, Sawzalls, sanding blocks, drills, you name it,” says Shaffer. “All we ever had to go by was a 2D picture. The way the artist rendered the picture, I could kind of tell where the chin should jut out, but not how far. In the end, I think we pretty much nailed it.”
Once the modeling of the foam was all done, the pieces were sent out to be hardened with a fiberglass coating, then painted a bone-white color. A hard fascia lined the front of the truss and a cloth perimeter around the sides to hide the aluminum structure.
More Dead & Company tour photos by Paul Guthrie at http://www.prolightingspace.com/photo/albums/dead-and-company-gallery-shots-by-paul-guthrie
