I recently took my wife to go see Pearl Jam in Quebec City. This was a bucket list show for her. I toured with Pearl Jam back in 2005 as a dimmer tech. I met my wife in 2006, and she had to hear several stories about how great it was for some of my other friends to come and sit stage right and watch her favorite band up close. We waited a while to see if they would come to Vegas, but alas, the Pacific Northwestern band has no plans of coming to the blazing desert anytime soon. Therefore, I knew that we were going to have to travel a bit to go see the show. I still had the contact info on several people who work for the Jam, even though I had lost touch with most of them over the years. For example, even though LD Kille Knobel and I toured together eleven years ago, we have only seen each other once since then, and that was on a gig. So we are not so close that I can just shoot a quick text “Coming to your show in QC, I need four VIP passes for me and my friends.” Instead, I reached out to Liz Burns-Good, the production manager, and offered to trade tickets to one of my shows in return for some working passes to Pearl Jam. She was extremely polite and said that, since the guest list in Quebec was minimal, she could offer up four working passes. Those passes were like gold to my wife and made for a night that she will never forget. When we arrived at the show, we brought a bottle of vodka for Liz for the passes and a bottle of wine for Kille for allowing us to loiter in her FOH kingdom. Everyone in my party was respectful, and no one asked for more than what we had already been given.
—Chris Lose from “LD-at-Large,” PLSN, Aug. 2016, page 60
