LD at Large

As another year closes, I have lined up a birthday party at a stadium, followed by a tour with an old client of mine. Kid Rock is turning 40 and wants to throw a party with one set and light configuration, then go on tour with another one. I have designed every tour he has done since 1999 with the exception of a six-week run he went on last year. I agreed to actually go on tour with this show and make everything look stellar again. I believe this artist is among the most gifted performers in the world, working a crowd like few can. So after a long hiatus of actually touring with a band as an LD, I have agreed to go back on the road.

I got a call a few months ago from my old friend "Shakes." He has been the production manager for Kid Rock forever, it seems. And his boss is turning 40 this year. He wants to have a big party, followed by a week of rehearsals for a tour to promote his album. But he wants two distinctly different looking shows. The party was booked in Ford Field and was all about special guests and being a big party for 55,000 of his closest friends. The tour will last two years and come back to Detroit this summer to play the baseball park across the street. Hence he needed to come up with separate designs to mix it up.

Every year, I find myself at some stadium lighting something. If it's not a rock show, it's often the halftime entertainment or pre-game ceremonies of some sporting event. The gigs vary drastically, but the one thing that they all have in common is that it is broadcast on live TV, and you only get one shot to do it right. Plus, it's inevitable that I'm gonna end up gigging with some folks I haven't seen in a long time.

When I was a young man, I toured with the Talking Heads. They were a "new wave" band with a big following and a light show that was out of the ordinary. The show consisted of all white light – no gels, except for one song where the rear cyc turned red, and all tungsten fixtures except for one HMI 2.5k fixture we used once. Wherever we went, there was always some older stagehand who would question what we were doing at the time and then remark, "Well, I guess we just did it differently in my day."

Sometimes I think that no concert-going audience enjoys a good light show more than the hippies who attend "jam band" concerts. These bands don't follow a set list like 99 percent of the other bands on tour. They usually start one song and then drift into an avant-garde jam session before finding their way back into the original song, or segue into another. They also tend to cover other artists songs at a different tempo than the original version. And the audiences tend to dance along as if they were in a trance.

Every once in a while, we take on a gig where it becomes evident that we are dealing with someone who cannot handle his or her job competently. We witness some questionable decisions being made by someone in charge. It's politically correct to grin and bear it, as we work long hours to make the best of an errant design. In short, part of our job description is not to laugh, but just deal with the amateurism of what I call "the hack designer."

Over the years I have seen tape used in just about every conceivable way to prep gear, label road cases, truss and cables. I don't claim that any particular way is best, but I have certainly seen a lot of wasted tape. And any production cost waste peeves me.

Every year, I design a few festival-type tours. Normally I design the lighting rig, then the lighting director for each band programs cues on the console of their choice. It's normally about camaraderie between each band, and all of the lighting directors get to know each other and have a swell time.

It's been 20 years since I had anything to do with country music. This is not by choice; it simply never played out that I got a chance to light any artists in this music genre. So when a friend asked me to design the first annual Country Throwdown tour, I immediately replied that not only would I like to design it, I'd go out and run it.

Someone wrote to me last month asking about the term "ACL." He asked why a lot of new moving lights were being touted as moving ACLs. Outside of the lighting industry, they would think we were referring to a ligament in the knee.

One of the first places I found on the Internet to meet people was the lighting forums. I found a place called the Light Network years ago, and through this site I exchanged a lot of lighting questions and answers. While we chatted about light fixtures, media servers, various CAD programs, etc., we were making friends. This was the start of social networking through the World Wide Web.

Lighting is a team sport. Designing the lighting for any event is a process that depends on a number of variables and answers to a lot of questions. The questions must be answered by venue employees, electricians, rental inventory managers and many more. Clients depend on us for a spectacular show. But designers depend on everyone else's support.