LD at Large

I’ve been asked several times about what smaller bands playing nightclubs should carry for lighting gear. These questions come from cover bands to newly signed acts to old touring professionals who are reuniting for a club tour. The two things they all have in common is a lack of knowledge and a shortage of cash for lighting. Long gone are the days when bands put colored PARs in coffee cans and connected lots of wires to a foot pedal board for the guitarist to trigger.

Last month I found myself peeved at somebody because they told me they knew how to operate a certain lighting console. But once they got on site my client realized they didn’t. This put me in a tight spot because I was not at the gig to help out, and I had assured my friend that my guy would be all over it.

Times are tough. People and lighting companies are running short on gigs. For the first time since 9/11, shows that I normally do each year are scaling down their productions, if not cancelling them all together. Empty spaces on car show exhibition floors say a lot. Empty venues and minimalist shows coming in say just as much.

The subject of lighting really covers a broad scope of fields. The best lighting designers are folks who pay attention to detail. Whether they’re lighting a car or a rock star, certain de-signers will spend hours on minute things, but they all add up. That’s why they are good.

I’ve lit a lot of things before — televised events, concerts, trade shows, cars, boats and planes. But I’ve never lit a church. In fact, I have never had any contact with this whole side of the lighting industry (though I wish I did). So I had to smile when I got a call to light some choirs. But they were not in any church; they were in a touring arena show.

Nowadays everyone is concerned with power consumption for two logical reasons. One, we want to save ourselves some cash, either at the pumps or in our house with heating oil, and, two, we want to save our planet by lowering our fossil fuel consumption and emitting less toxic waste into our atmosphere. I firmly believe that the time has come to start getting rid of incandescent light bulbs, not just in our households, but also in our stage work. We are facing obstacles in doing this, but really, is it something our industry cannot overcome? I don’t think so. It seems we are well on our way.

I’ve been having a lot of fun this year doing something I don’t often do — lighting heavy metal tours. While it’s not my favorite kind of music, I am having a blast. I mean, what other genre of music enables you to hit 160 cues in a three-minute song?

Often enough my work takes me abroad. And just when I thought I’d played a gig in every corner of the world, some band has found a new locale.  There was a time when South America seemed like a distant land, an impossible place to do a proper show. But that’s in the past. Now I get to teach the locals how to do shows in lovely places like Ethiopia and Kazakhstan.

In the last issue (PLSN, June 2008) I joked about the usefulness of being able to BS your way through a difficult gig. But while I was pondering what I wrote last month, I realized that what is important in our profession is just the opposite. I think what makes someone good is that they run a fair business, earn their money the old fashioned way and don’t rely on BS to save a few bucks on a gig.

In every business, there is a lot of scheming and plotting to get accounts. Presentations mean a lot. Not just the financial charts or 8-inch-by-10-inch glossy renderings of a stage, but of the presenter himself. Whether we like to admit it or not, lighting and set designers are salesman. And as we sell ourselves to any potential client there is one thing we must be able to deliver on demand without any hesitation whatsoever — BS.

Every month I see new products on the market. It seems the latest LED and media server technology is constantly outdating last year’s cool stuff. Automated lighting manufacturers are dueling to keep up with each other in terms of lumens while trying to come up with new features. This stuff is impressive, but it makes me wonder…“Why don’t people concentrate on making new cooler versions of existing gear?”