Well folks, as of this writing, it is once again the time of season. The trucks are loaded. the buses are rolling and the tours are well underway with audio rigs small and large flying off the shelves and onto trusses everywhere. Engineers are back in the groove with full time work, and sheds and venues around the world are filling up with fans willing to spend their hard-earned cash to see and hear their favorite bands overwhelm them with hit tunes played through some of the best sound systems money can buy.
Tour Time
It’s summertime and the living is easy, schools are out, vacations are in and festivals are in full gear, with outdoor amphitheaters filling with people looking to enjoy languid nights being entertained under summer skies. The doldrums are over! It’s touring season, the employment is plentiful and everyone is flush with work and capital. It’s a happy time and, as long as we don’t drive directly into the abnormally weird weather that’s affecting this great land of ours, we can remain content and hopeful.
Spring is — by design — a naturally occurring time of hopefulness, and it should come as no surprise when we find ourselves charged with a positive energy due to the coincidence of flowers budding and tour buses rolling. Hope springs eternal, and if we’re lucky, the work will be plentiful and rewarding and our bank accounts will overflow. At the very least, we might be able to pay off some of our accrued debt and get up to date with our bills — although that just might be hoping for too much, and we should probably just set our sights on a more realistic goal, such as paying our bar tabs as we traverse the globe. Of course, now is not the time to get bogged down with petty financial details or esoteric questions such as the importance of rent vs. beer, because we are not looking into the future further than the next gig. Whatever the final outcome may be, it’s not a major concern as we are currently in good spirits and we remain giddily hopeful.
It may be an intrinsic part of our nature, or just the nature of our business, but as a whole — and I generalize here — touring engineers, much like musicians, are not known for their long-term planning. It’s a simple formula: no gig = despondent and suicidal; gig = happy and hopeful. Succinct and to the point, and if nothing else, we have the short-term planning thing perfected to an art-form level of excellence. On the other hand, there are some in other professions who are not as long-term challenged as those of us living gig to gig.
Bring on the Candidates!
While we set our short-sighted plans on making sure we get a shower at the end of a long day, there are presidential hopefuls looking down the road to a time when they can confidently lead their party in the pursuit of creating a better world for all. Ha! Just kidding, I mean they look forward to a time when they can line their pockets and fill the coffers of all their close friends with taxpayer dollars. All the while these long-term thinkers are spewing some ideology, it’s really just a smoke screen to distract the common voter from the corrupt manner in which they are misdirecting taxpayers’ hard earned cash. It may seem odd, but it’s a capital idea for some.
Okay, that’s the bad news. The good news is that our democratic process is working and, with a good 16 months before Election Day, the many presidential hopefuls have just thrown their long-term planning hats into the ring with the understanding that Hillary Clinton is our new president. Well, that’s probably a bit presumptuous at this point, because — with the proper funding and sound bytes — it very well might be Jeb Bush who becomes the next POTUS.
Naturally, this all rests on the assumption that there are no more scandal-free Kennedys who dare run for the job. If, by chance, there should be a Kennedy brave enough to put their name on the ballot, Hillary and Jeb might as well concede immediately. However, at this point in time, it’s doubtful a Kennedy will run for president and, due to our finely honed democratic process, it appears that — other than the mandatory 16 months of stumping — Hillary has won the job; at least this is what the media is reporting. Of course, let’s not count Jeb out just yet, as he does have some very influential long-term thinking friends who have deep pockets that stretch down to middle earth (where all the real money is kept).
The Reality of the Political Season
Speaking of real money, let me say that, regardless of the decided outcome of the presidential election, I am totally bi-partisan in regards to taking whatever money spills out of the deep pockets that are used for funding the candidates in their quest for world domination.
Election years are a great boon to the audio community’s livelihood. Just after the tours have ended and the holiday season comes to a close the political season will ramp up and all the candidates will be making stops to make speeches, raise money, shake hands and kiss babies.
This in turn means they will require sound systems for their events and, despite the rhetoric, they charismatically try to sell through the aforementioned speakers I will be there for them, cranking up the mix so that their platform can be heard. I will be there turning up the volume for their patriotic videos, and I will be there with my press box to ensure the multimedia circus gets a nice clean feed from my console which, in turn, they can then edit into sound bytes to either help or damage the prospective aspirant.
Despite their views or opinions, self righteous indignation, lack of veracity, arrogance and non-truths, I will gladly turn them up so that the clamoring crowds can hear for themselves what each of the campaigners have to say — thus ensuring that the voting public will then make an educated vote come Election Day. I am hoping that by my bi-partisan actions, I am doing my part to advance the democratic process. I am also hoping to get paid with cash or a credit card instead of a check.
