Chris Chandler matches up well with the wild rock show that is the Flaming Lips
Since the early ‘90s Chris Chandler has had an FOH seat for one of the most exciting and creative rock ‘n’ roll shows played onstage, led by Wayne Coyne and his merry band of pranksters known as the Flaming Lips. From the lead singer getting bounced into a crowd at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in a huge clear ball to space ships onstage to a cascade of balloons bounding down from the rafters to the entire band dressing up in animal costumes, Chandler has seen just about everything.
Indeed, it seems that Chandler (who handles tour management and production along with FOH duties) gets a head scratching phone call from Coyne before almost every tour. Right before the lads headed out for a small East Coast college tour in April, he got the word that the band was going to hand out small laser pointers to the audience and then at some point of the show Coyne would come out with a huge mirror to create a light show.
FOH: So, do you ever look at Wayne and say, “Dude, we just can’t do this”?
Chris Chandler: I used to, but then I gave up because he’s going to try it anyways. I know the confetti got to be an issue, because he would use so much that the clubs didn’t like that it got all over the P.A. and the monitors. So he changed that. The balloons got to the point where we had so many on the stage that they were knocking all the mic stands over. We ended up taking sheet rock screws and putting them at the end of the mic stands, so when the balloons would come in they wouldn’t knock the mics over. And instead of doing overheads on the drum kit, I just clamped the mics underneath the cymbals to keep them from getting hit all the time. There are ways around most of his crazy ideas.
Was it this way from the first time you worked with them?
A. Yeah, I started with them on the tour when we had 600 or 700 little Sony Walkman radios that we’d hand out to the crowd and then we’d do a separate mix for the headphones. Then we would broadcast it throughout the neighborhood.
How crazy was that?
A. That was crazy for a first tour. I had to mix five bands on it, drive the truck and set up that radio thing every day. It was nuts. We had an antenna that we brought in. We had a little transmitter. We would get to the venue, scan what frequencies were open and pick one. Then we would give all these radios out. Wayne’s theory was that if you wanted to go out to the balcony or out to the hallway, you could still hear the show the same as everybody else and you wouldn’t miss anything. Then, at the sold out shows, the kids would park out in their cars and get the show on their car radio, or the bar next door would tune it in and put it in across the speakers in the bar. It went over well. I don’t know how legal it was.
This band is known for pushing the envelope.
A. Wayne had the parking lot experiment where he had 30 or 40 cars that had a cassette tape of different parts of a song and he’d have them all play at the same time. So, you’d sit in the parking garage and you’d hear instruments coming out of this car here and it was supposed to match up to the other instruments to make a wall of sound inside the parking garage. Then he had the boom boxes that he brought onstage that were a smaller version of the car event. We tried an experiment on one tour where we brought a second P.A. and put it behind front of house, pointing towards the crowd. He wanted, at different times, to throw guitar solos in there or to throw different instruments, and he wanted his voice to come from behind you. We did that for a little bit. It caused a lot of weird phasing problems.
How do you prepare to work with him?
A. He is so hands-on with everything that it’s a big team effort. He gets people excited to work with him. He can rally up even the grumpiest union hands at a venue somehow. He’ll be the first guy at the venue in the morning — he’ll be on the truck helping to unload it. I think that gets people’s respect a little bit. He’s one of those guys who’s not going to sit back at the hotel until sound check. He tries to figure out how to put together the best show, so that inspires everybody else to do the same thing. He has some crazy idea for every show. He has a space ship that he’s built now — it’s a big flying saucer. He has a new video wall. He has some new lasers that we’re bringing out on the next run.
Is he pretty hands-on in terms of P.A.?
A. He just wants it to be loud. Not as loud as they used to want it to be, they used to want to be extremely loud. Now they just want to be really loud. He liked the NEXO line array, because of the look of it. It looked like a space ship to him. He wanted to buy one of those and paint it orange until he saw how much money they cost. I think he likes something that’s not going to take up too much space on the stage, so he’s more into the look of it and the fact that it can get loud. He likes a lot of sub and a lot of the high frequencies. I’m not sure if that’s because his hearing is going, but he loves the high-pitched frequencies.
What about other gear?
A. He’s not a fan of the digital consoles. We’ve had a few out, and he’s not thrilled with them. Maybe the analog stuff seems quicker, easier, it sounds better. He doesn’t really say, I just know he hasn’t liked some of the digital stuff we’ve had out before.
So what do you like to take out?
A. We’ve been carrying a Midas XL-4. I like that a lot. It’s probably one of my favorite consoles. The P.A. we got over in Europe was a d&b, and that was really good. On a couple of tours, we had the V-DOSC, and that was good. There’s a company up in Canada that makes a P.A. called Adamson that we use quite a bit, and it sounded really good.
Any outboard gear you take out?
A. I have a small 12-space rack. There’s a company out of England called Ridge Farm Industries — they make this compressor called the Boiler. I ended up loving that compressor, and I’ll put all my drums through that. I take them out of the stereo, put the compressor through a stereo group and squash all the drums. I have a couple of Distressors I use for the vocals. I carry a rack of the Midas XL-42s, the Midas XL-4 mic pre and EQ. I’ll have four channels of that, in case I show up to a venue and they don’t really have the greatest console. I also have a couple channels of old API pres that were rack mounted and a couple of old Gamble EQs from a Gamble console. Other than that it’s pretty basic stuff, like four channels of gates, there are a couple of effects like an M2000 and SPX 990. The Gamble EQ is real nice. It’s a six-band EQ, so I can really surgically get in and fine-tune some stuff out.
How did you get your start mixing FOH?
A. I started in 8th grade. I bought a little Crate four-channel mixer that had a built-in reverb and two Peavey speakers. I started to do sound at some of the high school parties. I pretty much figured it out on my own. I bought some books and had a paper route that helped me pay for the little mixer, and then the church in town donated a couple of old Shure mics to me that they weren’t using. That was my set up — I had four mics, four channels and two little Peavey speakers.
You were in 8th grade?
A. Yeah. There were two bars in our town that I could get in when I was working for bands, but then my dad had a fit and called the bars and told them they couldn’t let me in anymore. He didn’t want me hanging out there. I had a friend who was my age, but his sister was in college, so she introduced me to a couple of the bands that she knew through college. I would go to their rehearsals and put their effects pedals together, help put their amps up and mess around with the sound there.
What was your next step?
A. I moved out to Los Angeles to go to the Dick Grove School of Music, which I think is gone. They had a music school and a recording school, so I took about a year of the recording program. Then there was somebody there that mentioned John Tesh was looking for some help. He was working on Entertainment Tonight, and he had a couple of records that he was doing, so I worked at his recording studio. I would help do second engineer stuff, set up the drums, clean up the studio, help him with computer stuff.
How did you hook up with the Lips?
A. I was on tour with John Tesh, and we played in Oklahoma City, and one of the stagehands that was helping there worked for the Flaming Lips and we hit it off as friends. I hired him on the John Tesh tour because one of our guys had to leave the tour, and then he hired me on to the Flaming Lips. That’s how I transferred into the other side of the music business, doing FOH for Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse.
You’ve been with them for a long time now; what’s the secret to your longevity?
A. I don’t know. I probably would say a lot of it is that you don’t have to be the best sound guy in the world — I think you have to be easy to get along with, stay awake, don’t get to messed up in the drugs and the alcohol — then you can pretty much stay with bands for a while. The people I do see come and go is more because of personality issues than their capabilities of doing their job.
Now that you are on the road full time, do you miss working in a studio?
A. Yeah, I do. It’s a little more refined to sit and listen to mic pres and certain mics and really work on capturing the sound, than you do live where you are listening more to get less stage volume in your mic or get it up over the guitar amps. It’s a little different way of going about it, but if you have a bad show, you can have a good show the next day. It’s only lasts so long. If you do a bad mix in the studio, it sits out there for years.
