The Inaugural Adventure: A lighting crew chief's tale
Howdy! What a whirlwind these last 5 days have been.
Sunday: arrived at the Warner Theater in DC at 6pm with two 24' trucks loaded with gear. Spent five hours getting the majority of it rigged, cabled, and flown... we used 44 Vari*Lite VL3000 and VL3500 moving-lights, 13 Martin Atomic3000 3000-watt strobes, and 8 Molefay "audience abuse" 8-light blinders. Here's a picture of a Vari*Lite VL3000, with a 20oz. water bottle included to indicate scale.
On Monday we returned to the theater at 6am to set the rest of the gear (all the lights that sat on the stage could not be set until all the musicians' equipment was in place). A few hours later, we were ready to go, and the artists scheduled for Monday night's performance (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Mary J. Blige) began their soundchecks. Here are some pictures I snapped during Mary's soundcheck:
[click image for full-size version]
[click image for full-size version]
The show wasn't until around 8pm, so in the intervening hours I departed the theater and set up the event lighting for a private party the concert promoters were holding in the atrium of the adjacent office building... nowhere near as complex a setup, but it was still pretty sexy. Sadly, I took no pictures of this as I was in a bit of a rush to get it up and running.
At about 1am the show was over and we departed for our "crash space" via the Metro: a friend of ours lent us the use of her house in Hyattsville, MD for the evening.
The next morning was a spectacle. The train into town was PACKED (I believe the best colloquial term is "assholes and elbows"), and the station at our destination was a giant bottleneck. Miraculously, EVERYONE was being well-behaved, and there were no incidents whatsoever (ZERO arrests, man.). We got to the theater and basically sat around for a few hours watching the Inauguration ceremony on a TV backstage... and thanking any available deity that we weren't on that Mall with the other 1.4 MILLION people. That's some history, folks: 1,400,000 humans, of all ages, colors, faiths, ALL GETTING ALONG. It can happen, cynics... It can happen.
The interesting thing about the gig that night is that NO ONE, including the promoters, knew exactly who the any of the acts (including the headliner) was going to be. The event was a charity ball to benefit TAPS and the USO, and the event itself had reportedly been a "go" then a "no-go", then at the last minute it was a "go" again, so there was a lot of "make it up as we go along, guys... this is what we get paid to do" happening.
For a few hours in the late afternoon, I set about tweaking the setup in the office-building atrium (the USO/TAPS folks were having a dinner party in there that night), then returned to the theater to discover that the headliner had been confirmed: George Clinton And The P-Funk All-Stars! The afternoon progressed with more soundchecks, and as I was backstage I heard a familiar set of voices from my youth, singing lines that still move me: "How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea? How many years must some people exist, before they're allowed to be free?"... Peter, Paul and Mary?
Well, Mary was unable to make it (complications from her leukemia, apparently), so they had Ben Vereen (!) singing in her place. Here's a shot I snapped during their soundcheck/rehearsal (performing "Blowin' In The Wind"):
[click image for full-size version]
The evening's festivites kicked off with an introduction from Larry King (yeah, the guy with the bowtie from CNN), and wrapped up with an INSANE performance by the P-Funk... talk about going through the spectrum from one polar opposite to the other :)
As we prepared to start pulling down the rig to haul it over to the next gig (a private event for the Obama campaign staff at the DC National Guard Armory), we received news of an unexpected complication: one of our two trucks had been impounded! We had parked it in a location given to us by the event's organizers as a known "good" lot, but apparently that wasn't the case this week. $400 and several hours later, our truck was back (a good thing too, considering the truck contained half of our empty road-cases and we couldn't pack anything up).
Hours later, at 5:30am, we were ready to roll out to the next gig (an 8am load-in at the Armory). Notice there was no mention of sleep -- because we didn't.
After a 4-hour load-in of the rig for Jay-Z's performance, everyone had to clear the building for 3 hours to allow Secret Service to sweep the premises. We were invited by Jay's manager to catch some rack time aboard Jay's bus (with the caveat that we were not to make a mess, which we were more than agreeable to). Check out this shot of me on the bus:
[click image for full-size version]
I've been on buses before, but this thing was SLICK. That's a wine rack over my left shoulder. Jay has a recording studio complete with a vocal booth set up in the back (where the bed suite usually lives). I guess that's what you get when you're the president of a record label like Def Jam.
After our nap, we headed back in to do tweaks to the setup and get everything finalized. Here's a shot of the interior of the Armory before doors opened:
[click image for full-size version]
You can't see it in that shot, but our stage was just out-of-frame on the left of the image. You can see it in this photo, however (and hey, there's the Vice President in the picture as well):
[click image for full-size version]
And finally, after Vice President Biden... #44 himself, President Barack Obama.
[click image for full-size version]
He gave a great speech (didn't sound very rehearsed -- as this was a private function attended by his campaign staff, i think he was more "himself" and off-the-cuff, and his charisma definitely showed) , and it was absolutely one of those moments you will never forget in a lifetime: I was here, on this day. I was part of this. I watched this happen. Not on TV, not in photographs. There he is.
Wow.
We packed up after Jay's performance capped off the evening, and enjoyed some Patron Silver and a beer with Patrick Dierson and Drew Findley (the lighting and video console ops, respectively) before getting on the road home at about 1:30am on Thursday.
We got back to Philly at around 5am, dropped the trucks at the shop, and went home to sleep for a few hours before returning to the shop to empty the trucks and put all the gear away. As of 9pm Thursday everything was back in its proper place: I left, locked up behind me, and drove home to work on the designs for the show i have coming up this next weekend (OhayoCon, in Columbus, OH), as well as two shows in February (one in DC, and one in northern NJ).
No rest for the wicked!!! :)
-ian
Sunday: arrived at the Warner Theater in DC at 6pm with two 24' trucks loaded with gear. Spent five hours getting the majority of it rigged, cabled, and flown... we used 44 Vari*Lite VL3000 and VL3500 moving-lights, 13 Martin Atomic3000 3000-watt strobes, and 8 Molefay "audience abuse" 8-light blinders. Here's a picture of a Vari*Lite VL3000, with a 20oz. water bottle included to indicate scale.
On Monday we returned to the theater at 6am to set the rest of the gear (all the lights that sat on the stage could not be set until all the musicians' equipment was in place). A few hours later, we were ready to go, and the artists scheduled for Monday night's performance (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Mary J. Blige) began their soundchecks. Here are some pictures I snapped during Mary's soundcheck:
[click image for full-size version]
[click image for full-size version]
The show wasn't until around 8pm, so in the intervening hours I departed the theater and set up the event lighting for a private party the concert promoters were holding in the atrium of the adjacent office building... nowhere near as complex a setup, but it was still pretty sexy. Sadly, I took no pictures of this as I was in a bit of a rush to get it up and running.
At about 1am the show was over and we departed for our "crash space" via the Metro: a friend of ours lent us the use of her house in Hyattsville, MD for the evening.
The next morning was a spectacle. The train into town was PACKED (I believe the best colloquial term is "assholes and elbows"), and the station at our destination was a giant bottleneck. Miraculously, EVERYONE was being well-behaved, and there were no incidents whatsoever (ZERO arrests, man.). We got to the theater and basically sat around for a few hours watching the Inauguration ceremony on a TV backstage... and thanking any available deity that we weren't on that Mall with the other 1.4 MILLION people. That's some history, folks: 1,400,000 humans, of all ages, colors, faiths, ALL GETTING ALONG. It can happen, cynics... It can happen.
The interesting thing about the gig that night is that NO ONE, including the promoters, knew exactly who the any of the acts (including the headliner) was going to be. The event was a charity ball to benefit TAPS and the USO, and the event itself had reportedly been a "go" then a "no-go", then at the last minute it was a "go" again, so there was a lot of "make it up as we go along, guys... this is what we get paid to do" happening.
For a few hours in the late afternoon, I set about tweaking the setup in the office-building atrium (the USO/TAPS folks were having a dinner party in there that night), then returned to the theater to discover that the headliner had been confirmed: George Clinton And The P-Funk All-Stars! The afternoon progressed with more soundchecks, and as I was backstage I heard a familiar set of voices from my youth, singing lines that still move me: "How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea? How many years must some people exist, before they're allowed to be free?"... Peter, Paul and Mary?
Well, Mary was unable to make it (complications from her leukemia, apparently), so they had Ben Vereen (!) singing in her place. Here's a shot I snapped during their soundcheck/rehearsal (performing "Blowin' In The Wind"):
[click image for full-size version]
The evening's festivites kicked off with an introduction from Larry King (yeah, the guy with the bowtie from CNN), and wrapped up with an INSANE performance by the P-Funk... talk about going through the spectrum from one polar opposite to the other :)
As we prepared to start pulling down the rig to haul it over to the next gig (a private event for the Obama campaign staff at the DC National Guard Armory), we received news of an unexpected complication: one of our two trucks had been impounded! We had parked it in a location given to us by the event's organizers as a known "good" lot, but apparently that wasn't the case this week. $400 and several hours later, our truck was back (a good thing too, considering the truck contained half of our empty road-cases and we couldn't pack anything up).
Hours later, at 5:30am, we were ready to roll out to the next gig (an 8am load-in at the Armory). Notice there was no mention of sleep -- because we didn't.
After a 4-hour load-in of the rig for Jay-Z's performance, everyone had to clear the building for 3 hours to allow Secret Service to sweep the premises. We were invited by Jay's manager to catch some rack time aboard Jay's bus (with the caveat that we were not to make a mess, which we were more than agreeable to). Check out this shot of me on the bus:
[click image for full-size version]
I've been on buses before, but this thing was SLICK. That's a wine rack over my left shoulder. Jay has a recording studio complete with a vocal booth set up in the back (where the bed suite usually lives). I guess that's what you get when you're the president of a record label like Def Jam.
After our nap, we headed back in to do tweaks to the setup and get everything finalized. Here's a shot of the interior of the Armory before doors opened:
[click image for full-size version]
You can't see it in that shot, but our stage was just out-of-frame on the left of the image. You can see it in this photo, however (and hey, there's the Vice President in the picture as well):
[click image for full-size version]
And finally, after Vice President Biden... #44 himself, President Barack Obama.
[click image for full-size version]
He gave a great speech (didn't sound very rehearsed -- as this was a private function attended by his campaign staff, i think he was more "himself" and off-the-cuff, and his charisma definitely showed) , and it was absolutely one of those moments you will never forget in a lifetime: I was here, on this day. I was part of this. I watched this happen. Not on TV, not in photographs. There he is.
Wow.
We packed up after Jay's performance capped off the evening, and enjoyed some Patron Silver and a beer with Patrick Dierson and Drew Findley (the lighting and video console ops, respectively) before getting on the road home at about 1:30am on Thursday.
We got back to Philly at around 5am, dropped the trucks at the shop, and went home to sleep for a few hours before returning to the shop to empty the trucks and put all the gear away. As of 9pm Thursday everything was back in its proper place: I left, locked up behind me, and drove home to work on the designs for the show i have coming up this next weekend (OhayoCon, in Columbus, OH), as well as two shows in February (one in DC, and one in northern NJ).
No rest for the wicked!!! :)
-ian