It’s really easy to tell when someone really cares about what they do. When I am out on gigs I see it all the time. The funny thing is that the bigger the gig, the more likely you are to find at least a few people who just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the gig. It is just a paycheck.
Then there are the folks who put everything they have into every gig. Last week (as I write this, it will have been a few weeks ago by the time you read it), I spent a few days in the sprawling metropolis of Johnson City, Tenn. The local event production company, Audio Video Integration, was doing a gig, as they often do, at East Tennessee State University. (Side note; Yes, the name of the company makes them sound like AV installers, but install work is less than half of their total work flow.)
I will be writing up a story on the company in an upcoming issue so don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that this was an A-list country artist whose management decided that — even though this was a one-off in a much smaller venue than they usually play, to bring in the whole show.
AVI is a small company and every person I met who worked with them was a “head.” You’ve heard the term before. When it comes to stagehands there are heads and there are hands. A head knows the job, can make good decisions and directs the flow of something like the complicated load-in of this show. For hands, they had some student volunteers and a bunch of guys they hire on a regular basis from the local security company, which I thought was a pretty cool idea.
But the thing that made the trip such a kick was the fact that every person I dealt with — from the owners of AVI to their office manager to their production manager to the woman who runs events for the school who was 36-weeks pregnant—was a head with their heart 100% into what they were doing.
I have come to think that this whole heart thing is a big reason I have stayed in publishing for most of my adult life. The fact that I get to publish about an industry I really care about is an added bonus. But in both publishing and live audio, if your heart ain’t in it, you will most likely leave and find something that is easier and does not require the stupid hours that are a fact of life in both live event production and publishing.
Bottom line is that it’s great to get to hang with people who care about and are really good at what they do — no matter what it is that they do. Passion is a wonderful thing.
Speaking of people with heart, we lost a big one in Las Vegas recently. Roddy Pahl, who did a number of Road Test reviews for FOH and who was both the head of audio at the MGM Grand and the main audio guy at the Fremont Street Experience, died on Friday, March 14. In addition to his audio work and friends in that community, Roddy was the sole provider for his wife, four kids and two sets of parents living with him at the time of his death.
We actually had a bit of a dilemma here because we had a story scheduled to run about doing audio in a new convention venue at the MGM Grand and Roddy is quoted extensively. We batted around the idea of not running it so as not to reopen freshly healing wounds, but after talking with his friends we decided that an audio guy talking about the job and doing something he cared about was a fitting goodbye.
If you knew Roddy, there is also a pretty moving tribute in the Big Daddy blog on the FOH Web site. I had to be out of town on a gig the day of the memorial service, but I hear that MGM did Roddy right and opened up a ballroom in the Conference Center and that coming up the escalator, pant legs were flapping as the sounds of Metallica and Audioslave came screaming from the room. Just like he would have wanted it.
