When Bill Sheppell flew home to Ohio in mid-June, he was looking for a little R&R before undertaking what was to have been the gig of the year, if not the decade, as FOH mixer for Michael Jackson’s 50-night This Is It stand at London’s O2 arena, likely to be followed up by a world tour with the same massive stage and troupe.
Sheppell, who had come to the attention of the Jackson show producers as a result of his FOH work on Prince’s 21-night run at the O2, had been rehearsing for seven weeks at several Los Angeles venues, culminating in full production rehearsals at L.A.’s Staples Center.
Then everything changed. Less than three weeks before the start of the London dates, Jackson died. What had been carefully planned rehearsals suddenly would become harried preparation for the biggest televised memorial service since the one for Princess Diana over a decade earlier.
The Meyer MILO system that had been slated for the O2 shows was to be provided by Major Tom Ltd. and comprised of four hangs per side: mains, side, subs and upstage, totaling 64 four-way MILO cabinets, four MSL4 long-throw speakers and 18 Meyer 700-HP subs, as well as another 18 700-HP subs under the stage in a cardioid block. The console was a 112-input DiGiCo SD7. Meyer’s Galileo zoned and controlled the system, which was tuned with a Dolby Lake Contour processor. Michael Jackson had been using a Shure Beta 54 headset and Beta 58 handheld microphone through a Shure U4 wireless system.
For the Staples rehearsals, a scaled-down version had four MILO enclosures stacked per side on risers and a mono sub block was on the ground in the center, and when they were finished the set and system had been struck. “We had a blank arena and we couldn’t even get to it until Monday, the day before the memorial,” Sheppell recalls. And all of this was surrounded by television crews that were setting up to broadcast one of TV’s greatest reality shows to date.
Starting Monday at 7 a.m., Sound Image got a JBL VerTec system in place in the same four-hang configuration as they had used with the Meyer system as new lights, video and staging were also erected. Sheppell remembers the load-in of all the gear as simultaneously “intense and slow-going,” as PA flight cases were blocked by trusses waiting to be winched up.
Rehearsals went to 11 p.m., but Sheppell and Major Tom’s Chris Marsh stayed well after midnight to help the Sound Image system engineer tune the main hangs and assist the ATK Audiotek engineer in time aligning the delay hangs. “We had started rehearsing without a line check or a PA properly tuned or time-aligned,” says Sheppell. “That didn’t happen until well after midnight.”
The next morning, 24 hours after they first started on Monday, many crewmembers, including Sheppell, were trying to convince an army of LAPD officers that they were who they said they were.
“No one outside the arena knew what a valid credential was supposed to look like,” he says. After several frantic calls to the production office, they were vouched for by video crewmembers already in the Staples center. Several Sound Image crewmembers were detained until the doors opened for the crowds at 8 a.m., as Sheppell was still reviewing his automation snapshots from the night before. The PA was fired up and the lights fine-tuned even as the venue filled up.
Once the event started, Sheppell was pleased with the professionalism that characterized all the performances, including his own. “It was a very difficult show to do,” he says. “Not just because it was put together at the last minute but also because of why we were all there. Michael was a sweetheart, and it’s hard not to have an emotional attachment. It was shell shock.”
