Elton John Concert, Fall 1979

I got a phone call from the business agent for the stagehands union and he asked me which of two concerts the same day that I wanted to work on: The Police or Elton John.
I choose to work the Elton John concert.
The concert was to be in Hill Auditorium, the large and wonderful music hall on campus where I got to Carlos Santana  in concert the year before.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/hill/index.htm

The load-in call was 6:00 AM!

It was so early because there was a rehearsal for some university music group that could not be moved.

We needed to unload all items from the trucks that had to be flown over the stage, put them together and have them flown out before the Noon rehearsal.

I do not know why Elton John’s people would agree to the break in the middle of the load-in but it all worked out.

After lunch we came back and set up the rest of the sound and lighting equipment and also set up the musical instruments.
It is always fun to move a full size grand piano in a road case, even one that was painted orange.
Gee, maybe it was the organ that was orange and the piano was painted yellow, I forget.

As we continued to unload the truck I noticed that there was this young teenage girl standing at the top of the loading ramp.
Over the next hour or so she slowly inched down the load ramp toward the door.
When she was almost at the door one of the road crew turned to the girl and said “You can’t be here, you have to leave”.
You could see her heart break as she walked away defeated in her quest to see her idol.

I still have this pin I got at the Concert

I got a look at Elton when he came in a few hours later and stopped briefly to say hello to the crew.
He was wearing some odd jumpsuit looked like it was made from several strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups pasted together.

The road crew members were very cool, mostly very tall and thin and all from England.
There was one short guy who was the climber who was up and down the backs of the speaker stacks and up on the light grid focusing lights.
As the load-in was just about done I was asked to stay and help with the light focus as one of the all important ladder holders.
I was not really needed because once he was up the ladder he was climbing all over the truss focusing the lights, all without a safety harness.
Only when he was done did he step back on the ladder as he came down.
It was easy money and I also got to stay and eat with the crew.

The caterer was wonderful, there was a food table stocked with food all day long, but the dinner was even better.
It was November and he made a complete Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.
For a crew, mostly from England, thought that this was very cool, enjoyed it all, especially the wine.

After dinner I went home during the show and listen to The Police concert which was simulcast on the radio.
When I came back for the load-out there was a small group of people waiting at the stage door waiting, hoping to see Elton, but all they got was me.
As I neared the door it opened and I was let in.
It was cool to think that I had the right look at 25 just to walk right past all the other people.
Okay, maybe it was how I was dressed, the tools I was carrying and the fact that I had just been there a few hours earlier.

The load-out went well and we got done just after midnight.
Just as the last truck was done and the door closed we noticed that the caterer had also just finished packing up.
He saw our disappointed look and opened his van and gave us a six-pack.
I do not know what brand of beer it was or even if it was cold, but it was best tasting beer I had ever had.
It was a looooong day starting with the 6:00 AM call, but it was fun day and I enjoyed it all.


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Concerts and Road Shows

During my second year at Michigan I got to work on many outside projects, some of which even paid.
The local stage hands union (IASTE)  was not large and when a touring Broadway show or rock concert was in town they would often need to hire extra crew.
They would use faculty and staff from the Theatre Department to fill out their crews.

The Ann Arbor local was run by a bunch of cool people who were ahead their time and other locals because they were one of the first to allow women carpenters and electricians into the union.
The first show I worked on with the union was a tour of the musical revue Eubie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubie!

The master electrician, Janice, was from Ann Arbor and had worked with the local union and I had just worked with her as one of the three lighting designers for the summer theatre repertory.
Everyone on the load-in crew was excited for her return and wanted to hear how the first part of the tour had gone.
Everything was going well but just before noon there was a loud snapping sound and one of the pipe-end ladders with six to eight lights came crashing down to the floor.
As soon as we knew that nobody was hurt the crew chief called "Lunch!" and most of us were sent away as they tried to figure what had happened.

It turns out the batten pipes over the stage had been welded incorrectly without inner pipe sleeves at the joints.
The batten just snapped at the joint under the weight of the hanging ladder.
During the next school break the college had all of the pipes hanging on the stage cut apart and re-welded properly.
The Theatre had been open for about 8 years and they were lucky that it had never happened before and that nobody was hurt.
It was a relief to everyone that it was not Janice’s fault.

I also worked the load-in and load-out for the tour of the play Deathtrap.
The most interesting part of that show was that the road boxes that held the various weapon displays, an important part of the play, that were lifted up and fitted directly into the walls of the set.
The lockable cover could be taken off as needed and easily put back on and locked up after the show.
There were many knives, swords, axes, guns and other fun props that they wanted to keep safe and away from curious hands and stop them from walking away.

I also got to work to load-in crew for some rock concerts.
I worked on the crew for Chicago and Elton John.
The Chicago concert was held in the large Chrysler Arena on campus and one of the first thing I noticed was that the food was much better on rock concerts.
For the stage plays there was only coffee and doughnuts backstage, but for the concerts they brought in a local caterer who put out a wonderful spread of food.

The work was hard but fun.
I had to laugh when I saw a 98 pound woman on the crew trying to move a large rolling speaker cabinet down the loading ramp from the truck and just watched her slide the whole way down.
Oh course I had my own fun when I was a “Human Bungee Cord” as I held on to road boxes as I rode the fork lift up to the stage platform, unloaded them and then rode back down for the next one.

As part of the load-in crew you do not get to the show but I when I returned for the load-out I did get to see and few songs at the end of the concert including 25 or 6 to 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvX_YqiM-hc&feature=related
It was fun to hear the song live because it was one of the songs that my friends and I tried to play in someone’s basement back in high school.
I knew just enough to play the basic bass riff as it just repeats over and over.
Tony and the Tone-deafs never got to play a gig and it was a onetime only experience for those lucky few people in the basement that day.

Coming up next: The Elton John Concert.




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Sound Design

Idiot’s Delight opened in October of 1979 and it was my last major lighting design assignment while at Michigan but I still had plenty of other work to do before I graduated.

Oh course I still had to work on my MFA Thesis which had various deadlines all year long.
A rough draft of my Thesis support paper and preliminary set, light and costume design drawing were do several times before the final work could begin.
As it turned out that the one on the editors of the play collection book from which I got the copy of The Jew of Malta which teaching at Michigan.
The book was one that I had used in my Shakespeare class back at SUNY Buffalo.

I wanted it to look like I really researched the play, which I did, so I thought it would be good to talk with someone who really knew the script and I made an appointment to meet the English professor who edited the play collection and to talk to him about the play and see if he had any insights or thoughts about the play.
In a nut shell he could not care less, he offered some general comments about the period style and the play and at one point he said “I Think the other editor really worked with that play”.
I was able to include a few quotes from him but he was not really any help.

My first year I took costume design classes in addition to the lights ones and the second year I was in several scene designs classes and had plenty of class design projects to work on.
I moved from the scene shop into the electrics shop and I was now the department Master Electrician.
The job came with several duties that included general maintenance and repair of the stage lights and cables, supervising the lighting in the Arena Theatre and creating the sound effect and music tapes for all of the plays.

One of the first things I had to do was to quickly learn how to cut and splice recording tape.
The plays were not underscored with music as much as it is done today.
There might be preshow music, or change music, but it was mostly buzzers, chimes, dog barks and when possible many sounds were done live onstage.
I did some live recordings of actor’s voices, special music and sound effects I could not find on records.
I also had to figure out how to make long endless loop of tape so I could create 20 minutes of rain.
Typically the effect sounds on records last only a few seconds.
I ended up with a 12 foot loop of tape that ran across the electrics work room.

Sometimes I felt like I was doing an old-time radio as I had to make or record my own sounds for a play.
Today it is all done on the computer which makes much faster and a lot easier then back in 1979.
I remember that I had to go to the record shop and was surprised that they still had a listening booth so I could check out a few records to make sure that I got the right version of the music the director wanted.
It took me a while but I found just the right recording of the Lieutenant Kije Suite by Sergei Prokofiev, best known for his ballet score to Peter and the Wolf.

For plays in the Arena Theatre either I did a quick lighting design or most often I would supervise the student designer.
The designers were a mixture of undergraduate and graduate design majors and sometimes a directing student would give it a try.
Usually the small theatre was easy to take care of as there was another graduate student who took care of the scenic elements and I took care of the sound and lighting.

One time there was some excitement when someone who did not know what they were doing plugged the bare end of a speaker cable into a wall outlet thing it was a work light.
There was a big bang and the speaker caught fire.
Opps, you hope that they will not make that mistake again.


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Funny Incident and Hello World!

After working in Theatre for forty years you would think that I have seen almost everything.
Well in last night’s rehearsal something funny happened.
We were getting ready for our second technical rehearsal for our production that opens this Friday.

Boy Gets Girl, 2010

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1511.html

The scene designer had bought a new piece of furniture for the set and several students had just assembled it and placed it on the set.
It was a low shelf unit designed for shoes in a closet.

We use students from various Theatre intro classes on the run crews and a girl who was setting up props walked out on the set, across the office platform and stepped on the shelf unit and snapped it in half but kept going up into the bedroom platform without stopping, but when she did she just turned around looked back and said “What!” as everyone was laughing.

Then the student said “I thought it was a step”.

While working on my blog and posting a recent entry I found a button I had not seen before.
It gave statistics on how many people have read my blog and which countries they are from.
I was very surprised and happy to see how many readers that I have from all over the world.
The top countries outside of the US for readers of my blog are: Germany, Russia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Israel, Vietnam, Australia, Finland and Poland, but there are many more.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers and I hope that you will leave comments or drop me an e-mail and let me know who and where you are.

As soon as the current play opens I hope to get back to writing my normal, if you can call them that, blog entries.




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