LD at Large

Please welcome this Month’s LD at Large, John Featherstone. He has been illuminating just about everything since he was a mere lad. He is a principal in the worldwide Lighting and Visual design firm known as Lightswitch. –ed.

This month’s LD-at-Large is Stosh Rickenbach, longtime house LD at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. He’s glad to help, but you have to give him a fighting chance. He has some guidelines that each club band should follow to ensure a well lit show. Good luck with that, Stosh. —ed.

Ever since grade school, I’ve been one of those people who preferred to ride in the back of the bus. Even when I was on tour, I always seemed to get my sanctuary hanging in the back of the bus, working or reading. Of course spending hours on the road, solving the problems of the world over a couple of beers with the rest of the road crew often required time in the back lounge. Likewise, I spent the last eight years feeling quite at home occupying the back page of PLSN. You had to look all the way in the rear to find me.

I had a lighting tech walk up to me one day and ask for some help. He couldn’t find a couple of gel frames that had fallen out of some PARs since the previous evenings’ performance. I asked him if he had any spare gel and frames in the work trunk. “Sure,” he responded. “But my boss will not let me have them because he thinks it’s my fault they disappeared, and he wants me to spend all morning looking for them. That’s why your light rig is still on the ground.” Not wanting to stir up any internal crew conflict, I told him that I wasn’t his boss. He replied, “You may not be the boss, but you’re our leader. Please intervene here.”

I successfully spent the summer as a fill-in LD. Running shows for various friends who couldn’t cover their own gigs during a particular time period. The size or particulars of the gig don’t really matter to me. What I found amazing was this turn-around cycle I am experiencing. Many of my friends that I had hired at some point during their careers were suddenly calling me up, looking for somebody to cover for them. This is nothing new, except this summer I took these gigs myself.

The majority of my work is lighting live entertainment. In the process of lighting design for these gigs, I have always thought that the main tools I needed were a bunch of wash lights and a few hard-edged profiles to make some pretty scenes. This would run true whether I was using strictly conventional or moving light rigs. But nowadays the daily advancements made in technology have brought us what I like to call “Accent Lights.”

As the summer goes by, I find myself playing lots of festival shows. Concerts put on with multiple stages, spread across a gigantic fairground. While festivals like these are really nothing new, the sheer number of them showing up in different cities is staggering. They are all huge, they all have to provide an infrastructure of a small city for a few days. And they all need a lot of employees to put it all together. But most of all, they need the SWAT team.

I’m one of those guys who likes to do everything himself. I like to draw my own plots. I like to make my own artistic renderings. I like to load in my own shows. I like to paint my own house too, but I don’t always have time to do any of these things myself. So for just about everything there is in life, I got somebody for it.

A few months ago I got an email from Kim Martin, an LD I met when she toured with Ringo, some 20 years ago. I had not seen her since she was the LD for Natalie Merchant in the 1990s. She inquired why I never seem to write about female lighting designers. I honestly don’t know why, as I have met and learned quite a bit from them my whole life. Looking back, I can’t believe how many great women designers share my job in the concert biz. And they all taught me something about lighting. They didn’t make it because they are women; they made it because they have talent.

I’ve opted to spend the summer lighting one offs for my bands. Between them, they are working enough to keep me busy. I will bounce around the world doing a large amount of corporate gigs, Internet broadcasts and TV jobs. And if I want these gigs to go smoothly, I am going to need some cooperation from the house programmers at all these venues. A little help from my friends can make things go so much easier for me.

For years, lighting designers have been matching lumens between the lighting and video elements. The video was always brighter. For most of my life, I have had to design live concerts by placing the lighting fixtures, and aiming their focal points, wherever the video wasn’t. It became a science to be able to design lighting that wasn’t washed out by the big TV upstage center. In the last couple years, much of that has suddenly changed. That’s because we lighting guys now have some powerful weapons in our fight against video dominance.

There’s an old line I like to use. “You cannot win if you do not play.” Some think that may refer to gambling, or playing the lotto, but I look at it a different way. I look at it as, “Nothing’s gonna happen unless you make it so.” Rarely will someone give you something without you asking for it first. Lord knows this is true about getting a raise in the entertainment biz. Nobody’s giving you one unless you ask for it. But there’s a lot of ways to help yourself in life, to win a few bucks back, if you just pick up a pen.