Lighting designer Chris Stuba tells the story of how he was once riding around in a car with legendary bandleader Billy Gibbons. It was early in his tenure as the designer for ZZ Top, and Gibbons wanted to talk to him about an upcoming tour. So he drove to Stuba’s house in Houston, where they both live, and picked him up. They were driving around, talking about the upcoming tour, when a ZZ Top song came on the radio. It was one of those moments when time stands still, and Stuba’s thoughts turned inward. “I grew up listening to ZZ Top, and here I was, driving around with the man, listening to his music on the radio,” Stuba recalls.
Stuba started working with the band in 1994 on the Antenna Tour. Larry Sizemore was the lighting director then, and Stuba was the Wybron Auto Pilot tech. He started lighting the band after Sizemore left in 1997. Today, Stuba humbly acknowledges his good fortune to be in his position. “I am very lucky to work with these legendary performers,” he says.
We caught up with him and the legendary Texas trio on their Hollywood Blues Tour at an arena date in Sacramento, Calif., and at a rare theatre show in San Francisco.
“I did the first WYSIWYG design drawings for this tour while I was out with Bob Seger. Troy ‘Lovey’ Eckerman did the original MA Lighting grandMA console programming for it on ESP Vision. He set me up with a logical console setup and gave me some fantastic cues. Brad Schiller did the original Catalyst content, and this summer Brad and John Dickson came out to get us up and running with the (High End Systems) DL.2s.”
“The band purchased a Catalyst system a few years back, and we have been adding content for some time. I love the functionality of it, and the GrandMA makes it simple to work multiple video values. It is really interesting to have an idea, get the image and use it during the show that night. I carried around a Nikon camera, and our video technician, George Keim, kept a digital video camera with him; we used a lot of that footage. I’m a newbie to the video convergence thing, but I have learned a lot about lighting from it. Now, I find myself looking at television and films more and more for ideas about how I can use this medium.”
“It was a perfect match — having a (Main Light Industries) SoftLED curtain for a band that has been known for a lot of visual imagery. I love the video wallpaper that it does — it creates a lot of movement. Because of the fact that it is not high-def, I find it doesn’t distract from the band’s performance.”
