I had helped a friend do a little work on his father’s home, and in the process, injured my hand. I didn’t think too much about it, and figured I simply jammed or possibly broke a finger. Weeks passed by and the finger didn’t hurt any longer, however, the tips of the ring and middle fingers didn’t work properly, not to mention a nice-size lump was growing on my palm.
One evening I received a call from a booking agency and they wanted me to bring in sound for an old national act that was hired for a college event. That gig was booked for a Friday evening two weeks out. About a week later, I received a phone call from the same agency needing me for yet another old national act for the following Saturday, which gave me two shows back-to-back in the same town and only a couple blocks apart. I loved hearing that!
On the Monday prior to the show dates, I had an appointment to see a doctor about my hand. After the examination, he told me that I had broken a tendon in my hand along the ring finger. He scheduled me for outpatient surgery for that following Thursday. I’m thinking it should be OK. I’ll go in, have the surgery early Thursday morning and be back home early afternoon. I can still be ready to leave Friday morning and get to the venue in plenty of time for load-in and setup. NOT!
In the end, I woke up with a cast that covered my entire hand all the way up to my elbow. The doctor told me to go home and make sure to stay laying down for three solid days and to be sure to keep my hand higher than my heart at all times. He mentioned that I must not let my hand get wet at all, and I must not use or bend any of my fingers or the surgery will have been done for nothing. Even though the doctors told me I had to stay in bed, there was no way that I was going to cancel.
Since none of my crew have ever driven big trucks or hauled extremely heavy loads or trailers, I was forced to do all the driving myself. Over two long hours of bumpy roads and driving in extreme pain, I had to keep my hand up about head high the entire time!
The show begins and everything is fine except for the mind-numbing pain I am in. Due to the circumstances, safety and requests of the venue, we were asked to set up and mix from side stage. It was a little unusual, but we didn’t mind. I’m glad that we did this because that building packed in about 700 people and normally only held around 350, cramped. Everything is going well until about 30 minutes from the end of the show. My lighting guy looks at me with a very strange look, holds up the lighting board by the rubber control cable, and it was literally pouring water out of every crack. It looked like someone dunked it in a five-gallon bucket of water. He’s yelling over the music and asking me in a panic what to do. I told him to unplug the cord and let the board drip-dry. He had no clue where the water came from.
A few minutes pass by, and suddenly out of nowhere, I get knocked over the head by something very heavy and hard, which landed me about 10 feet over to my right! My other tech caught me just as I was about to hit the floor. I quickly looked around in an effort to protect myself from whatever it was attacking me, and that’s when I noticed one of those Coleman patio heaters about eight feet tall had gotten knocked over by some drunk fighting. The upper part of the heater literally broke in half when it hit my head, and the gas line was spewing propane everywhere! One of the kids reached over and quickly turned it off. I looked around and could not find a security guard, even though there were at least 15 of them in the building.
Suddenly, again out of nowhere, here comes a huge wave of water that completely covered the entire left half of my Allen & Heath console, me, the lighting guy standing to the front-left of me, and even worse, the power distro was soaked! Well as they say, third times a charm. I had enough chaos and BS. Since I was standing right next to the 200-amp power distro, I quickly reached over and cut the main power switch, which killed all sound and lighting — and luckily — it didn’t electrocute me. The band is saying they still have two songs to play, people next to me are asking why I shut down the system, and I started yelling, “That’s it… The party is over and I’ve had enough!”
A lot of them were mad and became even more upset when I called the police to write up a report so that I could turn in the repair bills to the venue
It was about 5 a.m. when we finally were able to leave. Since neither the agency nor the venue booked a hotel room for us (they were supposed to take care of this), we had to drive over an hour away just to find a room. We made it to the hotel, but only had about four hours to get any rest before we had to be back on the road to the next gig.
Jason
JGS Productions
Anniston, AL
