Smashing Pumpkins Install Their System into the Legendary Fillmore Auditorium for an Extended Run
As one of the most legendary venues in the land, The Fillmore in San Francisco has hosted many of yesterday and today’s music legends. Pick your era, pick its definitive band and the odds are they have performed on the hall’s hallowed stage. So, it made perfect sense for the Smashing Pumpkins to reintroduce themselves to fans during an 11-night run at The Fillmore.
And while it made sense for band and fans alike, it proved to be a challenge for the production team at the venue as well as for Jon Lemon, who has served as the Pumpkins FOH mixer on and off since 1995. See, the Pumpkins didn’t want to play through the Meyer M3D line array that the venue had installed. Nobody had been granted that option before.
“Ever,” affirms Morgan Pitman, who serves as The Fillmore and The Warfield’s production manager. “We didn’t even do it for Eric Clapton. It was a big thing for them with the resurgence of the band, so after some negotiation, we were able to come to an agreement.”
P.A. Shootout
FOH Engineer Jon Lemon had experienced the Fillmore’s three-a-side M3D array in 2006 when he was working with singer Sia Furler. “So, I knew the P.A. and, realistically, the Smashing Pumpkins are a loud rock band. I approached the production [people] there and said, ‘We’re going to be there for so long, why don’t we put in our own P.A.?’ Of course, it came back that we couldn’t do it because nobody had ever done it. That has never really been a good reason for me, and we kept chipping away at it, throwing it up to the senior management of Irving Azoff and the people at Live Nation. Then they agreed to it.”
It wasn’t just a matter of taking down the M3Ds and flying a new line array, though. A team of structural engineers, riggers, city engineers, house engineer Nathan Harlow and Derek Featherstone from Pro Media/UltraSound had to check and double-check the venue’s structural integrity. After an initial inspection, the team determined that all new hang points would have to be established, and that a new structural beam would have to be installed in order to support those. “That all ended up being a real rush in the last week,” Lemon reports with a laugh, “in true rock ‘n’ roll fashion.”
The move-in points meant the P.A. would hang three feet down stage from the front line rather than a couple of feet up stage. Was this the end of the story? Hardly, since these dates also became a time to experiment with the P.A.s. A Clair Bros./Showco i3 rig was the first setup and lasted for the first half of the 11 dates. Then the crew brought in an L-ACOUSTICS dV-DOSC line array system — 12 per side with four dV-DOSC subs. As a side note, after hearing the different systems in the room, Pitman decided it was time to upgrade and has since installed a Meyer Sound MICA line array.
Flying the two different P.A.s didn’t pose a problem, reports Lemon. “The i3 flies really well, it goes up quickly, and it happened in a short period of time,” he says. “The difference is that the dV-DOSC is a lot lighter. But, it was really a quite simple exercise. I thought it would have been more of a hassle, but we did it, turned it on and it was all there.”
Housecleaning at FOH
In addition to racks and stacks, Lemon swapped out every piece of gear at the FOH position for these shows. While that’s not über-unusual, moving a DiGiCo D5 console into the position was crucial for Lemon. “By the time we landed at the Fillmore, we were choosing from a palette of 77 songs for the set,” he says. “Some of [the songs] are just Billy with an acoustic [guitar] through to the whole band fully rocking out, and you need to be able to make adjustments to present them in the best light.”
In addition to its flexibility, the D5 was selected because Lemon recorded every show from a MADI split off the board. At the Fillmore run, another pair of engineers was tracking the shows into two 96K Pro Tools rigs for potential special releases. A camera crew also came in toward the end of these shows for a DVD release.
The goal, says Lemon, was to make sure that everything was done correctly. After all, the band was playing three-plus hours a night with set lists that stretched to 25 songs. The P.A. was crucial, but so was the feel of everything from staging to lights. In fact, after a one-off show in Santa Cruz in the middle of the run, Pitman received a call from the tour manager that the band wanted to lay sheets of plywood over the carpeted stage.
Then there was the lighting rig. “That’s the biggest pile of lights I’ve ever allowed in this room,” Pitman reports laughing. “I had structural engineers come out and redo my stage and spec it all out for me. I don’t normally put 6,000 pounds worth of lighting on the stage.”
At the end of it all, that goal was achieved. “The band wanted to make these shows special for the audiences, because they were using them as experimental writing sessions and extending jams to tighten up as a band,” Lemon says. In part, he adds, this is the sound of the Smashing Pumpkins in 2007. “There’s so much more texture now. There’s no doubt that all of them are better players, and the new ones are great players. It’s a natural progression and it’s quite good.”
Pitman was happy with the end result as well, adding with a laugh: “I’m sure this was a great learning experience for everyone to take an arena-sized production and cram it into a small little club.”
