A major tour is like a living organism. And like any organism, it will occasionally have accidents. So what happens when the tour stubs its toe, or worse, breaks an arm, just before showtime?
When multimillion-dollar tours walk into a door or trip on the stairs the day before a show, it’s as much an economic disaster as it might be a physical one. That’s what happened on Nov. 5 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles as Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet roadshow was setting up her elaborate staging. An equipment malfunction caused damage to the top of the stage and some of the lighting. With the tour averaging $6 million gross per city, a lot was at stake.
Enough of the staging was in place for the show to take place the following night. Said Madonna through a press release, "Even though my stage roof was damaged and some lights and effects aren't working, I want to do the show anyway because I don't want to disappoint my fans." Love her or not, Madge doesn’t miss a show.
The Show Must Go On
There have been plenty of similar near-disasters that sound systems crews have been put on the spot to take care of, each of which might also have had enormous financial repercussions for the tour, the artist and everyone else. Here are a few of them.
In 1974, Bob Heil was providing sound for The Who’s Quadrophenia tour in the U.S. He was working with one of the four legendary Mavis consoles ever built by Bill Hough and I.E.S. in the U.K. The Mavis was huge — over 300 pounds each — and as the first true modular circuitry design desk with an external power supply that could be switched between 110-volt and 220-volt mains, relatively complex for its time. Perhaps that’s why one of the house electricians fed 220 volts into it despite the fact that the power supply was set for 110. “An hour from soundcheck and the power supplies were wiped out,” Heil recalls. “What do you do? Cancel the show? Who’s going to tell Townsend?”
But Heil’s ham radio instinct suggested a dodgy though possibly viable fix: hook a pair of car batteries back to back to the Mavis’ 18-volt DC power input. A car battery can generally crank between 13 and 14 volts, just enough to get through the performance. “We didn't even tell the Who until afterwards; didn't want them to worry,” says Heil. “Isn't that the real job of a sound engineer? To keep things calm and cool during the show?”
A Painful Lesson in Japan
Miles Davis’ return-to-Japan show at Shinjuku in 1987 drew a full house, and 20 minutes into the show it looked like it would be one for the books. And it was, though for a different kind of book. Without any warning, the sound system turned into a 1-kHz oscillator blasting at 120 dB through 120 15-inch cabinets flown LCR above the stage. Audience members covered their ears in pain. FOH mixer Ron Lorman looked back at the rack but knew there was little he would discover there, as all markings were in Japanese. He quickly flipped off every channel, group and bus on the Yamaha PM 2000 console while the Yamaha-supplied crew (Yamaha was a sponsor on the show) ripped at patch cords. “Normally I’d solo every channel, looking to isolate the problem, but this problem was so massive that we just had to try to turn everything off at all costs as fast as possible,” he says.
It took 20 more minutes before someone pulled the right cable and the tone stopped. Several drivers were damaged but Lorman found he had enough of a system left to limp through the rest of the show. (The band never heard the problem through their monitors and had kept on playing throughout the emergency.) It was later discovered that one of the third octaves in the speaker processing system had shorted, driving the amps to full power. “I have no idea how it got past the crossovers,” says Lorman. “There’s no way we could have tracked that down during the show.”
The crew then spent that night repairing damage caused by the short and later typhoon-level wind and rain. Then, in true samurai style, they offered to resign right then and there. Lorman instead complimented them on their dedication to repairing the system for the next night’s show. “I told them that gear can always fail and there’s no one to blame,” he says. “The important thing isn’t fixing blame – it’s fixing the system as fast as you can.”
A Mid-show Mishap
Lady Antebellum FOH mixer Brett “Scoop” Blandon watched in horror as the entire left side of the PA went completely dark three songs into a festival show in Salisbury, Md. Before the end of the song the crew had traced the failure to the driveline from FOH to the amp rack. “The PA company was using old passive crossovers even though there was DSP out front,” he says. They quickly put an XLR jumper from house right to house left. “We were back by the next song.” That was a faster recovery than he had at a Ty Herndon show in Longview, Tex. The PA company assured him his rider would be fulfilled, including the 16-mix monitor console he asked for. The next morning, however, the box truck brought what he calls the equivalent of a clearance sale from a local music store, including boxes with bad connectors and a 16-input rackmount Spirit mixer. “We found two Radio Shacks 45 minutes in either direction and we cleaned them out of XLR connectors,” he says, creating a new PA split and starting the show only 12 minutes late.
Everybody loves happy endings. Especially the accountants.
