"We just pass the time in our hotel rooms,and wander 'round backstage,
til' those lights come up and we hear that crowd
and we remember why we came."
-Jackson Browne, The Load-out
The Daily News
1 This one goes out to my tech crews throughout it all. You know you guys are the champs.
2 It is from this amazing book called Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison.
3 The backstory is that Robison lived with Asperger's his entire life, and eventually learned to live with this situation, despite a dysfunctional family and his own inability to think he could do things well.
4 Well, he soon began studying, learning, playing with technical things, and eventually learned SO much about technical things, particularly sound and lights for rock bands, that he became a lighting/sound designer for KISS.
5 Here is an excerpt of one of his finest moments. He did the entire lighting design for a KISS concert, and reported pretty much exactly what light design/execution is.
6 Here is the excerpt. I send this out to all my techies over the years. Without you, those shows would never have been anywhere near as memorable. Here's to long Saturdays designing and enjoying. Hope you guys get a chance to check this one out. Here it is; it's long, but wonderful!
7 Enjoy!
Becoming the brain of the lighting system takes intense focus and concentration. It's easy to say, "Push the button and the lights come on. But the reality is much more complex. The lights need to be brought up gently to keep them from burning out. To turn up all the lights, you must do a dance over the keyboard, bringing up first one, then another, because if you move too fast you could overload the system, and blow a breaker, and you'd be left with nothing at all. Darkness. Your worst nightmare in the middle of a show. Darkness is when they riot, and you must never, never let that happen. You must develop a sixth sense for your system, to feel how it's doing, to be really great.
And now you're doing it. Cones of colored light are reaching down from the ceiling to the stage, washing over the scenery. The cones are moving and changing as you switch from light to light in a constant dance that follows the music. Fog machines behind the stage are generating clouds, and your lights are making patterns in the mist.
The faces of the crowd are visible, and they're all staring at the stage. There is action up there, and it's loud. And you'e like the Wizard of Oz. You're right there in the open, and no one sees you.
You feel a chill as the lights change in response to your commands. You've brought a million watts of lighting to life by leaning forward and moving two fingers. Just a gentle push and you've moved enough power to light the whole neighborhood. For now, all of your mental energy is focused on that lighting system. Once the show has started, there is no time for daydreaming. You know the color and focus and aiming point of every one of the three hundred lights that hang from your truss. Now you concentrate and pick out each one, one at a time, and you make small adjustments as you scan them.
Now that you're working, your concentration is so intense that you don't even hear the show.You don't see the crowd. Instead, you're seeing each of those hundreds of lights as individuals, and it's all you can do to keep them following the music. It's just like playing a huge musical instrument, and your hands never stop moving on the dimmers.
If you had been backstage, near the electrical panels, you'd have heard the hum as the power surge hit the panel when the lights came up. Fifty feet above the floor, three hundred lights came on and a wave of heat rolled off them like someone just opened the door to a furnace.
When the show started, everything happened at once. The lights came up, the cannons fired, and the band started playing. From up high in the back of the hall, the follow spots--ten-foot long spotlights with powerful xenon lamps--came on and picked out the musicians with long fingers of white light. Next to you, the sound engineer watches his meters as they turn from green to red. The fire chief holds up his sound pressure meter and frowns and waves it in front of the road manager. It's too loud to talk. It shows 124 decibels, about the level of jets taking off the Detroit airport. It's too loud to be legal, but now one hears the chief. The crowd roars and the music gets even louder.
And it's never enough. You can always have brighter lights, bigger amplifiers. These are machines that run at 100 per cent, every show. One million watts of power, right there under you finger.
There's nothing like it in the world.
8 This is a shout out to all my techies. Stand and take a bow.
9 You know you guys are the champs.
10 That's it. You guys all deserve it.
11 Peace.
~H~
www.xanga.com/bharrington
"We just pass the time in our hotel rooms,and wander 'round backstage,til' those lights come up and we hear that crowdand we remember why we came."-Jackson Browne, The Load-out
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