Late in the afternoon, two days before Christmas, I got a voice mail on my cell phone from Howard Sherman, an NYC PR guy who does a lot of work in the pro audio market. "Bill," he said, "I know this is last-minute, but I have an opportunity to get someone in to cover the Kevin Spacey Beyond the Sea tour on its last stops in Vegas. The shows are the 26th and 27th. Can you do it?" Any of you other family guys out there don't have to be told that the days surrounding Christmas are pretty crazed. On top of holiday gigs, you are trying to make sure all the presents and other family holiday
responsibilities are covered, and it can get pretty hairy. I asked my wife if she wanted to go and she was game, but, being so last-minute, we couldn't find a flight that made any sense financially for both of us. I was going to pass until she said, "Look, I have a cold anyway and will probably just hang around the house Sunday. You go ahead and go." After the appropriate amount of protest, I agreed and made the arrangements.
I'm really glad I did. I was interested in the tour anyway because of a couple of things. A) I had seen some clips from the Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea that was the impetus for the tour, and I'd seen Spacey promoting the movie on a couple of TV shows–and I was pretty impressed with his chops. B) I went to high school with him way back in the day (he wouldn't remember me; hell, I hardly remember him. But we did sing in the same 16-voice small vocal group for a year). Plus, the guy mixing FOH was Lucas "Rico" Corrubia, who I met last year at Pro Production and who seemed like he knew his stuff. (He apparently got the nickname–I have it on excellent authority–when he played in a band in the olden days with Tony Bennett sound guy Tom Young.)
I got to the Stardust just as rehearsal/sound check was wrapping up and spent about an hour chatting with Rico and his teammates–monitor engineer Jimmy Good and production manger/system engineer Mitch "Bubbles" Keller (who reminded me we had met two years ago when I was covering the ballroom dance show Burn the Floor. We had a great talk, some of which will, unfortunately, never make its way into print (hey, we all need to keep our jobs…). The team had a lot of challenges. They were carrying no production except some mics, personal monitors and one small rack of Valvetronics processing gear. The system that night was an older Apogee and a Yamaha PM 4000. The stop before it was Martin and Midas, or maybe JBL and Soundcraft, or L-Acoustics and Allen & Heath… After a while it becomes a blur.
They also had to deal with the fact that, though Spacey is very good at this song and dance stuff, he has basically no experience with concert sound, so the team became educators as well as technicians. It could have been just okay or even flat-out cheesy, but it ended up being one of the coolest shows I have seen in some time. The sound was as good as you can expect from a system that has seen a lot of use and the production was pure Rat Pack Vegas. But the thing that really made it cool was passion.
Everyone there, from Rico, Jimmy and Bubbles to Spacey to Phil Ramone to bandleader Roger Callaway, was obviously enjoying the hell out of the gig. Spacey has been trying to bring the Darin story to the big screen for a long time and his passion for the music was obvious, but without the tech team, that passion would have been buried. As always, it was a joy to watch people who are good and who really enjoy what they do. I see a lot of passion out there when I go to shows and talk to the people who make it happen. It is, hands down, the best part of this job.
