Part 1 of this anecdotal tale relating our experiences in Lagos, Nigeria (FOH, Jan. 2014, page 39) ended at the moment we discovered that the Mariah Carey production crew had become secondary players in a turf war between the Eko Hotel special events staff and an outside vendor. The conflict over which party could best provide the stage sound equipment and band gear had caused our production schedule to succumb as collateral damage. It was a struggle that the better-prepared hotel staff was most certainly going to win. The outside supplier was well intentioned but very much out of his depth — obviously under-experienced and woefully under-supplied.
My Kingdom for a Couple of Mic Stands
In the early afternoon, I dejectedly sat on the drum riser, hoping to see enough mic stands to deploy the microphones from which I had spent the past half hour removing the bits of melted, disintegrated packing foam. As I waited, a feeling of incipient anxiety began washing over me. My premonition of impending disaster soon evolved into the reality of resignation. All signs pointed to sound check being very late and quite possibly reduced to line check only. There were several other performers scheduled to appear before Ms. Carey, and there had to be adequate set up time before the doors to the venue were opened. My hopes for a successful and painless debut as Mariah Carey’s FOH engineer were rapidly fading.
The harried stage gear guy eventually showed up with three mic stands and three boxes containing generic clamp-on mic holders for the Beta 98s. When I asked if he had the actual Shure clamps and goosenecks that came with the microphones, the question was answered with an insistence that the generic products would be adequate. I unboxed one of the clamps and immediately knew I was in trouble. The articulating arms were so long that the Beta 98 ended up in the center of the head when I bent it over to an effective pick up position. Moving the mic away from the head to a spot where our drummer would not be impeded by its placement resulted in the Beta 98 being about seven inches above the drum, where it was more of a cymbal underhead than a tom mic.
At that point, I started rummaging through all the boxes that had contained the microphones in search of anything that I could adapt to the purpose. I breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered three Beta 98 screw-on mic stand clips. Although one was partially broken, I knew I could make it work with the creative application of gaffer’s tape. Simultaneously, our drum tech had given up trying to invent a stand for the second floor tom and had decided to just go with two rack toms and one floor. Three toms and three Shure mic clips meant that immediate problem was now artfully solved.
I had been provided three tall boom stands that I could use for the two overhead SM81s and the high-hat TLM-103. Still required were the short boom stands for the Beta 52 in the kick, the two Beta 57As for the top and bottom of the snare, the three Beta 98s on the toms and the SM81 for the ride cymbal. I asked our equipment person for seven short boom stands, preferably with tripod bases. I might as well have asked for the Hope Diamond. He brought me three rather unattractive tall straight stands and two more tall boom stands that looked as if they had been constructed from used pole lamp parts.
At this point, I turned to our production manager and local site coordinator for help. I was now two hours into this one task and no nearer completion. A few minutes later, five short tripod boom stands miraculously appeared on the stage. I inquired about the source of this gear and was told that the hotel crew had provided them to us. I was then able to complete placing the mics on the drums using one or two compromises, but we were at last ready to wire them up. My celebratory mood was quickly diminished when my requests for mic cables and stage boxes elicited the same blank response that had accompanied all previous wishes.
By now, I am angry enough on the inside to kick a puppy, but I strove to keep the negativity internalized as much as I could and went off in search of XLR cables. Backstage, I discovered a large caddy filled with mic cables the hotel crew was using for wiring the lighting and video intercom systems. I then found our site coordinator and asked if I could grab some cables from this trunk. With his permission, I took as many as I could carry and headed back to the stage.
When I returned to the drum riser, I saw that a stage box had appeared on the upstage side. Unfortunately, one third of the female XLR connectors had been taped over. I found another similar stage box behind the keyboard riser with no obviously unusable inputs and performed a rapid swap. Paul Jamieson, Mariah’s long time drum tech, and I then wired up the drum mics, drum electronics and the two bass inputs as quickly as possible. The entire of process to miking and wiring the drums and the bass rig had now taken well over three hours. The stress was beginning to show on all of us as I moved to stage left to plug in the last of our keyboard inputs.
The Horrors Continue
On stage left, monitor engineer Ian Newton was going through an analogous torment as he attempted to assemble all the necessary in-ear monitor systems and the three handheld wireless mics for our singers. Once again, it took an infusion of gear from the hotel audio staff to complete these networks, but the long hours it took to create a fully functional setup was totally unacceptable. Our patience was far beyond wearing thin as we finally began line check.
When the process of line check began, we were still hoping to get the band going at 5 p.m. — two hours late, but still workable. That hope faded when every transformerless DI box in the rig was humming uncontrollably. We valiantly tried nine different DI boxes on the bass rig alone as time continued tick away. We were once again rescued from futility by the hotel audio crew, who brought enough Radial JDI transformer-equipped DIs to make the various interfaces work. With the extraneous noises now purged, we learned that one of the Mackie keyboard mixers had no working main bus or group outputs. Keyboard tech Tim Myer and I thankfully discovered that two aux buses outputted the necessary signal, but the price we paid in additional troubleshooting time was again far too high.
As John Denver once wrote, “Some days are diamonds. Some days are stone.” This was a Paleolithic day if I had ever had one. The doors to this event had been scheduled for 6 p.m. We began a very abbreviated sound check at 6:15. Of course, I now had no time to ring out any of the mics Ms. Carey would be using at her position 30 feet downstage of the main P.A. arrays. My first show with a new artist was going to be an all-out scramble. To say that I was bummed out was a vast understatement.
No one was happy as we relinquished the stage to the other performers. I would like to say that this bad dream had a happy ending, but the screwball comedy in which we were trapped dragged on until we finally flew out of Nigeria at 8 a.m. the following morning. The feeling as the plane left the tarmac heading to Angola was so uplifting.
Safe travels!
