Imagine that after years of banging boxes on one-show-a-night tours, you land in a venue and manage to stay there for three decades. Everything is where you left it the show before, from input lines to coffee mugs. All you need to do is show up and put the key in the ignition.
Then imagine coming in one night and finding most of your universe floating in four feet of water. That's what Tommy Hensley, FOH mixer for the Grand Ole Opry, saw from a dinghy he shared with Pete Fisher, the Opry's GM, on a Sunday night as Nashville was experiencing its worst flooding in history after a weekend of relentless rain. The 14 inches of rainfall that covered much of the city converged into 46 inches inside the Opry House, the structure on Gaylord's Opryland property that's been the Opry's home since 1977.
"Oh, Boy."
"We just looked at it all and said, ‘Oh, boy,'" says Hensley, recalling the monitor console, preamps and the entire backline floating in the murky darkness. That began a brief but complicated chapter in the Opry's existence, one that would take it to four separate venues over the summer: the War Memorial Auditorium and the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, both in downtown Nashville; Two Rivers Baptist Church near Opryland; the auditorium at Lipscomb University in south Nashville; and at the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry's original home. And there wasn't a lot of time to prepare: the Opry's next show was scheduled for Tuesday, May 4, barely 48 hours after the rains ended.
"It was like taking the Opry on the road, but with no notice," says Hensley, of the scramble to relocate, starting with the War Memorial Auditorium. Skipping a few shows was not under consideration: the Opry has a tradition of never missing a performance in its 85-year existence, and it's known for fining performing members of the Opry if they miss any of the shows they are scheduled to do.
"We'll Get What You Need"
Mark Thomas, the Opry's monitor mixer, was asked to specify the PA system. His first call, to Roger Gibbons at Clair, was made around 2 p.m. on Monday, May 3. "Roger said don't worry, we'll get you what you need," Thomas recalls. "We had it by 10 a.m. Tuesday morning."
The stacked system would be comprised of four Clair I-3 boxes per side, plus 12 Clair AMS floor wedges for the 13 cue mixes, two BT-218 subs as well as the two Yamaha consoles and Shure wireless systems. Clair scaled the system as needed, adding more I-3 boxes and a second pair of subs for venues that required flown systems, such as the church auditorium.
Studio Instrument Rentals (SIR) supplied a backline to replace the instruments and amplifiers lost in the Opryland flooding. Microphones came in from all over, including from the Ryman's mic closet. Shure had also donated an additional six channels of wireless microphones and four channels of in-ear wireless monitoring.
Hensley would have to go from 64 inputs plus another 16 channels of CobraNet coming to the analog Paragon II console (with recall faders) to a rented Yamaha PM5D that he had to use FX sends/returns just to get it up to 48 inputs, and with no network. Fortunately, the recall used 5D-compatible files, which helped Hensley configure the console for the show. Another PM5D was rented for monitors. Operationally, the sound crew had to first figure out how to allocate the lower number of inputs for a show that has as many as eight acts in two hours on a Tuesday night show and a dozen to 16 in the same time period during weekend performances, each doing just two songs. "We dropped the microphone on one of the toms, under the snare, we went from 10 DIs to 8 and some of those were multi-function, for the clock and a loop," Thomas explains. "It took a while to figure out, but we come from a background of touring, so it's still in our blood. We can figure stuff out on the fly."
Traditionally, no one gets a sound check for Opry shows, but since so many of the performers are members and play it often, their settings are saved in the FOH and monitor console snapshot automation and can be called up when needed. However, with both house consoles out of commission, Thomas didn't have access to the 400 or so artists' settings he had stored on his PM1D mixer. The PM5D monitor consoles used at the Ryman, however, did have settings saved for about 20 artists, which gave him a starting point at least for some of the Opry regulars. "If it's a new band on the show, I tell them I'll have their monitors down by the middle of the second song, then I'll have it saved for future use," he says. "But these shows were starting almost everyone off that way."
Adjusting to Different Venues
Moving from venue to venue also had its challenges. The Municipal Auditorium's concrete dome, for instance, required additional boxes from Clair and an extra day to load in. As CMA Week arrived (June 7-15), Opry shows were compounded by scheduled artist fan club meet-and-greets, and Clair found itself fabricating some equipment, such as stage power boxes, on site as their inventories were squeezed by the CMA shows at the LP Field – the NFL Titan's stadium, and elsewhere. Roger Gibbons, the account rep at Clair on the project, says he still marvels at the fact that within four weeks of several major venues being under water in Nashville, including LP Field, Clair had systems up and running all of them. "I have to give credit to Jason Swartz and Rusty Davis, our scheduling gurus, who were genius at finding all of this stuff," he says. "But Clair has a long history with the Opry, and we all wanted to keep that tradition going."
The Opry is also a broadcast, and has not missed a WSM-AM radio broadcast in its 85 years of existence. At its home, one of the three splits from the stage goes to the Opry House's state-or-the-art broadcast control room, which feeds a stereo mix to WSM, the same broadcaster the show has had for all 85 years. But that control room isn't portable. Instead, a traveling broadcast/record rig was built from surviving gear. The FOH feed was used for radio broadcast for the Tuesday night show after the flood. Chief technical engineer Kevin Reinen and broadcast engineer King Williams managed to bring the Yamaha M7 mixer from the Opry House's Studio A for the radio feed. Three MADI cards and eight Omni feeds were used to multitrack the shows 56 channels to Nuendo via RME MADI cards for archive purpose. The broadcast feed was sent to WSM via telephone line. MIDI timecode from a multitrack rig sent through a Euphonix 007 MIDI-SMPTE timecode converter fed a time clock on the stage. The first shows' commercials were read live until the commercial playback system (360 Systems Instant Replay) could be retrieved from the Opry House. Reinen, another touring veteran, talks about how the challenges brought back memories. "All of your road chops come back pretty quickly when you really need them." In fact, the Grand Ole Opry might have more touring veterans on board than any other major stationary show in the U.S. Even 35 years after the show had settled in at the Opry House, the touring experience of its staff proved invaluable.
