What started as simply a promotional gimmick for a new movie turned into something much more, to the obvious joy of everyone involved, from the performers to the sound guys and the soundco, which may just end up with a new long-term client. We are talking about the 10-city tour mounted to promote Beyond the Sea, the new Bobby Darin biopic written by, directed by and starring Kevin Spacey. Traveling with FOH and MON engineers and a production manager with an audio background, the tour carried no production besides mics, personal monitors and a small rack of processing gear. Even many of the musicians were picked up in each town, with just the core rhythm section and two backup singers along for the entire ride. FOH caught the show on the second-to-last night in Las Vegas at the Stardust's Wayne Newton Theatre. A more apt venue would be hard to imagine. While Spacey is known primarily as a "serious" actor, he obviously has the soul of a song-and-dance man. And just as his hero Darin was a Vegas fixture for many years, the performer and the town seem tailor-made for each other.
It is easy to see when the crew knows they are working on something special, and that vibe came through strongly with everyone involved.
But regardless of the obvious fun everyone was having, mixing in a new room and on an unfamiliar system every few days is no easy gig. Add to that the fact that, even though Spacey is very good, he has basically zero experience in the world of concert sound. We sat down with Masque Live's Lucas "Rico" Corrubia
(FOH), Jimmy Good (MON) and system engineer/production manager Mitch "Bubbles" Keller to find out how they get that old-school Vegas vibe with sound that meets the standards of a much more advanced era.
I've heard that this is a 10-city tour, and that it's been extraordinarily well received.
Mitch Keller: On the Internet, the message boards are packed. People are looking for tickets that can't be found. As soon as they open up tickets, they're gone.
Lucas Corrubia: When we first started the tour, back in Ventura, Calif., by the end of the day there were lines around the block and the entire tour was sold out. It was like a domino effect, all across the country; everything sold out.
How is Kevin Spacey taking to the concert biz?
MK: Kevin is really enjoying himself; that's the main objective. When Mark Robbins (tour consultant) brought both Lucas and me in, the objective was to make Kevin comfortable. Because we were not carrying production, I contacted my friends at Shure and got wireless PMs; we introduced Kevin to them, had molds made…
LC: We got Westone molds. The first set he had made were a beige color, and he said, "I hate the way these look down to the last fiber of my soul," so I called them up, and changed them to clear. They re-did them in a day, and it was wonderful.
Is it all PMs? Because I see a couple wedges down there.
Jimmy Good: No, there are wedges. Kevin uses one PM, for vocal. Lately I've been eking little things in, and he's starting to like it; all the nuanced stuff, all the lead stuff that comes up, I drop that in his ear, and he likes that a lot.
LC: The show was put together by Phil Ramone. In the beginning, we were sort of showing Kevin a snapshot of concert sound and how it works. In rehearsals, I had wedges across the front, and I was mixing monitors and house. Kevin saw another show with two engineers, and Phil Ramone told him it's great to have that separation, and to have someone like Jimmy here. But we had to fight to have the extra man. It's much better because I can really concentrate on Front of House, especially because it's a potpourri of equipment everywhere we go.
JG: We brought some proprietary tube stuff over from Masque. Almost all the mics are Shure, except an A-T 5400 is the front mic.
Let's talk about consistency when you're not carrying any production. You guys have been to some radically different venues.
MK: On the first three stops, we carried the same four wedges. They were custom-made by these guys out of Center Staging. Kevin used them and liked them, so once again, it was what he knew, without knowing, so I was able to emulate that for the first four shows. It was consistent. And with Shure on board, we carry all our own microphones, so that's a start.
Then we carry our own PMs, and we carry the effects that we use–the TC 3000, we have that at Front of House and at monitors, and Lucas is carrying proprietary stuff from Masque–the Valvetronic Lunchbox–and a CD burner so we can document every show, to see where we needed to go with it every day. I try to keep it consistent, whether we end up with a 12AM or something like a Rat, or Meyer, because that is readily available everywhere.
Also, being a sound systems engineer for Lucas made it a lot easier for these guys. I'm not just the production manager, going, "yeah, yeah, yeah;" I looked at the sound first and foremost, and everything else came
secondary to that. As far as stacks go, it's been everything from V-DOSC to Meyer.
LC: V-DOSC, EAW Slam in Boston. We went from that to Apogee here, Martin in Florida… I mean, you name the system and we demo'ed it. I was on the phone with Tom Young, who does Tony Bennett. Tom and I just had a long talk because we're good buddies,
and he goes, "so you see what I go through," because Tony doesn't carry production either. Tom and I talked about how we have both done some difficult rooms lately. Mostly installs that are just not right for the room. My whole philosophy is that a line array in an acoustic room is the wrong approach. The room is made to breathe. The acoustician is making that room breathe, and you're sitting there slamming it.
MK: Small boxes distributed properly is better than force-feeding a large line array in your face.
LC: We all come from the school of Martin Levan, who did Phantom of the Opera. We turn the whole theatre into a speaker. He let the room breathe. He listened to the room, and did some extraordinarily eccentric stuff. If you look at Phantom, there are 25 Tannoys, which are coaxial 15s in a tube, and they're all around the proscenium, and he's got JBL bullets on the balcony, and he lets the whole room breathe, and when you turn the whole rig on, it's amazing!
What is your take on the difference between the theatre and concert markets?
LC: Masque has been around since '36 and has a long Broadway history. Then one of the brothers comes up to me and says, "Do you want to get back into concerts?" I initially left the concert world to come to Broadway. Anyway, he says, "come start the rock 'n' roll division," and I kind of liked that, because going from show to show and having them close on Broadway and being unemployed, I've become allergic to starvation.
So we tried to start this, but let's face it, the business is tough right now in terms of production, and going up against the other six big companies. Not so much going up against them, but finding tours and loyalties, because people have loyalties to companies, and we respect that too.
Large sound company mergers are going to change everything. But we want those little shares, the couple little second- or third-tier clients. Then again, we have our own niche. How many other companies do you know who own 54 Cadacs? How many other companies do you know who own more than 400 Neumann microphones? That's just a start. More importantly, there's an attitude that's different, because of doing theatre. There's an attitude towards the sound, and it's not about the gear. We've got all the gear, because on Broadway, we were a boutique shop.
But the technology is changing so fast that the live world is becoming like recording was in the early '90s–everyone wants the latest, greatest thing whether or not it's necessary.
JG: I don't understand that. As far as I'm concerned, and I may be wrong, but I don't think digital has it together enough to beat out a good analog desk.
LC: It's transitional and going through growing pains. At the last venue we went to, a little club in Miami, all of a sudden I was on an InnovaSON, and the guy had Summits on all the outputs to warm up the sound. There's got to be that kind of mixture of both, I feel.
JG: That's where it's going. We have no choice in the matter. I'm just the guy from the old school.
What is the big challenge of this tour?
LC: You walk into these rooms and go, "oh my god," because you're not bringing in your speakers, and then you're not bringing in your power. And then in Boston, there's dirty power in the building. All of a sudden, the movie would start downstairs, and the popcorn machine and the soda machine were on, and it was cutting into my power. All of a sudden, the ground just goes for the whole show. I look over at the system guy, who's with the local sound company, and he goes, "What's wrong, dude?" so I keep closing my gates and opening them… like musical mics, to keep that buzz down. Finally, as Kevin walked off stage before the encore, the whole system went down.
JG: I see the Clearcom light flashing after Kevin walks off stage, and Lucas is going, "it ain't gonna come back, I just know it," and sure enough, the guy hit the stage, and "beeep," that was it. I muted. It's coming up in my wedges, and we knew it was a ground problem, because everything's off, right, and it's being fed to me. As soon as they killed the Front of House P.A., my system went clean, I turned it back on, and what did we finish the show with?
LC: We tried it with the UPAs that were installed as front-fills, and they were clean just for that song, it was so nice, we finished it off, it was a very soft song that Bobby Darin used to do, so he finished it.
JG: The curtain falls.
MK: Kevin is wonderful. He is a true trooper. Another funny incident was when we were playing at the Wiltern. Sold out, huge show, we go through everything. Kevin walks out on stage, decides whether he wants to use his handheld or his hard-wired, and he says, "Okay, let's use the hard-wired." He walks out, picks it up, and you hear (crackling noise), then he's fidgeting, and you hear "pop" as he unplugs it, he
lets the cable drop, and he's holding the mic. He looks at Jimmy and smiles, picks it up, swings the cable, pops it back in, and says, "hi!"
The next day, he looks at me and Jimmy and says, "Well, maybe I should tape that, because you guys looked like you were going to have a heart attack." He likes to play, but he knows that we are taking care of him and he'll roll with the punches. He's not going to scream and yell.
LC: He's almost excited to roll with the punches, because this is the first time that he's done this.
So it's just you guys.
JG: It's us; we run everything.
LC: It's us and 13 pieces of extra luggage for all our gear.
MK: We've done this with a potpourri of gear. A potpourri of speakers and boards.
JG: Well, there's where you and I get to blow our own horns. I'm tired of seeing all these guys out on these tours with the same crap every night. We're the cowboys. Not that we're the only ones who have ever done it.
Three brave cowboys? This kind of a tour is proof that it's not the car, it's the driver.
MK: It's not the gear, because anyone can go out and purchase the gear, it's us. It's our personalities, between Jimmy Good, Rico and Bubbles that make this thing float. It's the chemistry.
