At the dawn of modern live concert touring, when it was evolving into an actual business, Tom Field found himself a leader of a team whose pioneering innovations and influences would last far beyond the company that bore his name. While he had been active in the Boston live event scene for a few years, he officially founded Tom Field Associates (TFA) in 1969 as a small theatrical lighting company. He would exit the company and the business by 1976 when England-based Electrosound bought TFA. Yet TFA is still highly spoken of often today, and it’s no wonder. Acts whose touring shows they supported include Chicago, Elton John, Beach Boys, Emerson Lake & Palmer, John Denver, Bruce Springsteen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac and The Rolling Stones. TFA provided equipment and personnel to Woodstock and the Newport Jazz, Folk and Opera festivals. Then there was California Jam, two early years of Milwaukee’s Summerfest, the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, and the theatrical lighting and concert venues and festival stage setup for Barbra Streisand’s A Star is Born.
By Field’s own admission — insistence, really — it’s the people whose careers were launched at TFA that marked its greatest achievements. First on our list is, of course Rick “Parnelli” O’Brien. The nickname was given to him by TFA’s shop foreman Tom Kipphut, because, according to another key TFA employee, Tim Mahoney, “not another living soul could move gear around the metro Boston area like Rick.” O’Brien would go on to become stage manager and production manager for acts like Queen, and after “Parnelli’s” untimely death from cancer in 2000, he would become the namesake for the Parnelli Awards, which was launched in 2001. “It was a great honor to have it named after him,” Field says.
Mahoney ran the shop for its new U.K. owners when Field sold the business, and although it would fold in 1980, the company continued to serve as a springboard for industry innovators. One case in point: scenic designer John McGraw, designer of groundbreaking rock ‘n’ roll sets, who would go on to support impressively designed tours for Madonna and serve as president of noted design firm Planview. Kevin Wall, who got TFA into the staging business, would form Stage One, and would go on to work for Disney. Then there was George Travis, who started out at TFA and went on to be Bruce Springsteen’s longtime tour manager, earning a Parnelli Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013. Chris Lamb, another Parnelli Lifetime Achievement honoree (2015), worked for TFA as well … and there were so many others.
Putting a Team Together in Boston
Field is a Jersey boy who went to the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. He would earn an associate degree in engineering during which he did some part-time freelance work in Boston’s thriving theater district, which at the time was the hub for shows headed for Broadway. This would turn into a full-time gig, which turned into TFA.
“I met Tom when I was a student at Harvard and he had a contract with the Hasty Pudding group to bring in additional lighting,” Mahoney says. Mahoney was well on his way to becoming a doctor when this meeting made him take pretty much as big a U-Turn as one could. Field would need help with different projects and called on the kid. A few years later, after graduation and serving a stint in the army reserves, Mahoney was in New York City when he called Field looking for some work. It just so happened TFA was starting to grow its off-Broadway business there and had a satellite office that Mahoney would run. Mahoney would meet McGraw and bring him into the TFA fold.
“John McGraw was an off-Broadway carpenter genius,” Field says. “He has the rare talent to not only create the design that the artist and/or producer have requested, but also the ability to create the means and mechanisms that will bring the design to a working reality.” An example: while at TFA, McGraw realized that a truss out made out of aluminum rather than steel would have a lot of advantages, but none of the New York scene shops would make it for him. “Well, we went elsewhere and got it made. McGraw was just amazing — I don’t think he had any formal training, and always had the sense to send what he was thinking of building to a qualified engineer who would inevitably suggest minor changes and then tell him to go build it. We would get into the scenic business because of him.”
Oh… That Chicago
Field and his team would also handle the occasional rock act that was doing local one-offs in the area in those early days. But the first tour, the one that would push the company onto a trail-blazing path, would come via a misunderstanding.
Kipphut was a theater graduate of the University of Rhode Island who was friends with a fellow student involved in booking acts on that campus. “You have to remember, back then, rock ‘n’ roll tours consisted largely of playing college campuses,” Field explains. That friend — whose name is lost to history — would come to work for TFA and bring his list of contacts with him. As Field recalls, he understood that this guy had landed a Chicago gig. Field shrugged, happy to do something in Chicago… but “when it came time to deal with it, I realized it wasn’t in Chicago; it was the band Chicago.” As in taking care of their entire tour. Rather than move from city to city pulling together whatever the college and/or local lighting company could scrounge together, it would be TFA lights with a McGraw-designed set going out for what would be TFA’s first rock ‘n’ roll tour. “It was a time when we didn’t know what couldn’t be done, so you went out and did it anyway.”
Clearly this adventure worked out, because Chicago’s manager also managed the Beach Boys. Off TFA went with them, and their list of rock ‘n’ roll clients flourished. At around the same time, there was another important development: TFA had taken over both the Folk and Jazz festivals in Newport. In 1969, Newport’s early Jazz festival had as good a lineup as Woodstock had advertised: Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, Sly and the Family Stone and Led Zeppelin. But comparisons to Woodstock stopped there, because far fewer could attend that one. “Newport’s Festival Field a had a legal capacity of 20,000 people, and at least 10,000 additional non-ticketed folks appeared each day. Saturday’s group overran the place, damaging Festival Field’s fencing, seating, and even backstage gear and Sly Stone’s bus. Saturday had turned into a nasty riot.”
A month later, Woodstock was to happen, and would involve TFA via that New York satellite office. (That New York “office” was actually a room they rented in a house owned by future Parnelli Lifetime honoree, the brilliant lighting designer Chip Monck; and both Monck and TFA would use a small storefront on East 5th Street as a shop that was shared by other Parnelli honorees, including Bill Hanley of Hanley Sound and Bob See of See Factor — a lot of future Parnelli Award honorees in one small space.) Although Field personally was hesitant to go, his friend Bill Hanley supplied and worked Woodstock’s audio system. His wife, Judy, who was a partner in Hanley audio, relentlessly badgered Field to go and eventually wore him down. “I was so glad I went — it was an unbelievable experience.” The production team would infamously realize that, right before the show started, they had no emcee, and picked their gregarious lighting and set designer Monck to do it.
For that festival, Monck infamously brought in 250 lights from Altman that he never got to use. Because the location was moved at the last minute, plus sudden last-minute doubts that the roof could hold all those lights, those lights spent the show under the stage. This made the 14 Super Trouper followspots Monck had ordered from Strong Lighting even more important. TFA supplied two of those, and almost all of the crew to run them, as “Chip realized at that point he needed highly skilled operators.”
The Big Tours
Then there was Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s big 1973-1974 tour. It carried almost 40 tons of gear and including a rotating drum platform. McGraw designed the audacious set. “One thing that was needed was a grid to fly over the stage for the lights,” Field says. McGraw used the scaffolding, along with some mechanisms used by skyscraper window washers, to lift, hold, and then take down a truss. In addition to the design and equipment, TFA provided the crew. One was Judy Rasmuson, who would go on to sever as lighting designer for Broadway shows like Annie. “We wanted her to do the lighting design and Tom [Kipphut] to be production electrician. Well, [ELP] said there was no way they were going to have a woman design their show.” In a sleight of hand, the two switched titles, though not job duties. The band loved everything that was happening, and eventually figured out the ruse. “When they did, they loved her so much that when she wanted to leave the tour later for other opportunities, they convinced her to stay.” She would be part of future ELP shows as well.
The following year was arguably TFA’s most famous: The Rolling Stones Tour of the Americas ‘75. At this point, Mahoney had moved to Boston to help Field keep up with the demand of the rock ‘n’ roll business, but while he was in New York, Mahoney had developed relationships with two of Broadway’s biggest technical stars: lighting designer Jules Fisher and stage designer Robin Wagner. “Mick [Jagger] had fallen in love with Broadway,” Mahoney says. The band hired those two to design that tour, and they, in turn, sought an assist from TFA. “It was all crazy. We were making it up as we went along, and it was a lot of fun.”
Field credits Mahoney as “a great personality who went on to do great things.” As noted above, when Field exited TFA in 1976, Mahoney ran it for TFA Electrosound until 1980. Then he managed Frances Ford Coppola’s studio lot in Hollywood when a Canadian company bought it from Coppola. “It was a successful operation doing film and television — he is just tremendously talented.”
The People
While not as well known, another key factor in TFA’s success was Lenore Gessner, who would go onto to marry George Travis after both worked together at TFA. “I met Lenore while working at Julie Portman’s Theater-on-the-Wharf in Boston where we were providing the staging lighting and crew,” Field says. “She was apprenticing for the summer before heading off to college, and then, shortly after graduating from college, she came to work for us, becoming heavily involved in the administrative aspects of the company with staff, crews, and vendors. Customers loved working with her.” When Field sold the company to Electrosound, that company sold off the staging part to Mike Brown Grandstands in California (another Parnelli Awards Lifetime honoree). Lenore and Kevin Wall would follow that division to California (now Brown United), and George, too, would do some work for Brown. Wall would go on to form Stage One, a portable staging company among many other entertainment-related ventures. “He was one of the world’s best salespeople, and he thought we should get into the staging business,” Field says.
By 1976, Field had become exhausted. And while he took a good offer from Electrosound and moved on, many others stayed. Field then pursued film and became an associate producer on some movies and did other film industry-related work. He would become an associate producer on several independent films and television projects, and later became a producing fellow at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
“I first met Tom in 1976, when TFA was at their height,” Marshall Bissett tells. (A native of Scotland, Bissett was brought to the U.S. by Electrosound/TFA in 1980 to run their L.A. office; he would co-found TMB shortly after that.) “I came over with a British act playing Schaefer Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts and they were all there — Rick ‘Parnelli’ O’Brien, Chris Lamb, Jeff Mason — all working on a show that included Elton John and the Beach Boys. Tom had put together a fantastic group of people. His ability to attract a great working crew was a gift.”
“It was luck or charm that I got key people,” Field says of his time at TFA. “It was an amazing time to be involved in that business.”