Last month I had the best work assignment in the company, hands down. I was asked to travel (OK, traveling sucks but it got me that last Southwest roundtrip I needed to qualify for a freebie, and anyway, it gets better…) to New York to cover the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concerts.
My reason for saying “yes” is that I knew the show was being done by Firehouse—a regional power player, and over the past few years they have grown into an important national touring company. But because of distance or time or whatever I did not have a “go to” person at Firehouse, unlike pretty much every other big soundco in the country, and this was an opportunity to change that. I will admit that leading up to it I was not excited, just another show, right. Another “day at the office.”
But the coolness quotient had started to ratchet up from the minute I was asked to do the show, although I did not know it. The PR company that set this all up had asked me to do a similar thing a few years ago, but it was a Jimmy Buffett show at Jones Beach in New York. And the person who set it up—evidently not knowing the area—put me in a hotel on the edge of a really dicey neighborhood. I always walk a lot when I am in New York, and when I set out to do that, I realized inside of five minutes that it really was not a good idea, and spent the rest of the trip in a taxi on my way to and from the show, at the airport and in my room.
So they said they wanted to make it up to me and asked what was “my hotel in New York.” And I didn’t have an answer. Usually someplace not too far from the business I am conducting and where I can find a good price on Mobissimo. I was told that they knew exactly where to put me up. “It’s not fancy, but you will appreciate it.” Which is how I ended up in the infamous Chelsea Hotel, a building that has been everything from luxury apartments in the late 19th century to a hub of bohemian culture to a seriously scary flophouse, and somehow retains the spirit of all of those things. An amazing place full of creative energy. And they were right. Not at all fancy, but I loved it.
The show itself was great: CSN with Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne (who I had seen at the old-school guitar store downstairs the night before) and James Taylor. Then Paul Simon and Little Anthony and the Imperials, and James Taylor again, and then a set with Art Garfunkel.
But wait, there is—believe it or not—more!
Stevie Wonder turned what could have been a horror into a treat when there was an audio glitch that meant no audio at all on his side of the rotating stage for a good 10 minutes. He got a wireless mic that was working and an acoustic guitar—likely from the other side of the stage that had just turned away after Simon and Garfunkel finished—and said, “We are having a couple of problems, so we are going to start a little differently than we had planned.” And then he did an acoustic guitar and vocal version of “Blowing In the Wind.” They got the audio up (yes, I am finding out what happened, and we’ll really cover the show next month) and he turned in a stellar set that included John Legend and Sting, and, as he launched into “Superstition,” Jeff Beck walked onstage and just wailed.
And then it was Springsteen, with a horn section and backup singers, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine and Sam Moore doing “Hold On I’m Coming” and “Soulman,” and Darlene Love, and finally, a Bridge and Tunnel Summit with Bruce representing Jersey and, representing New York, Billy Joel (who Bruce called the “King of Long Island”), and after they threw down for four or five songs, they ended up with 20+ people onstage doing Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love Is Lifting Me Higher.” It was an amazing evening.
Now this is nothing like a “normal” column for me, if such a thing is even possible. The reason I am writing from this point of view is that something very rare happened. I got to be a punter for the night. It was an HBO production, and passes had been locked down weeks earlier, and so I got an actual ticket and an actual seat and actually sat in the audience and just watched and heard the show.
I had been at the Garden the day before and know the army of people and myriad decisions that had to be made on the fly to make a show like this happen. It was a huge undertaking, but with the exception of the audio glitch (word on the street is that a console catastrophically failed and the mix from the recording truck had to be rerouted to FOH), all of those people and all of that work would have been invisible.
As it ought to be.
We can get so tied up in the craft and technology of what we do that it is easy to forget that we are there in service of an artist who people have paid money and often made other sacrifices to see. They are not there to so our shiny toys or how awesome our sound system is. We used to call it “sound reinforcement” cuz our job was to make it loud enough for lots of people to hear. That has changed radically to the point that, in many cases, the audio team is almost part of the band, because they play such a huge role in shaping what the audience hears. But still, our job is to be invisible. And it took a night on the other side of the stage, away from the console and the mechanics of the show, to remind me of that.
