Circa 1995, I had a booked a show at a local watering hole in Scottsdale, Ariz., called The Rockin' Horse, a cool, mostly wood place that was probably constructed in the early to mid-'70s. Smaller, more eclectic national acts played there all the time, as well as some good local talent. There were house stacks and racks, and we just brought in a four-mix monitor system and Front of House. This particular night, we brought in our Soundcraft SR200. (Sidenote: Did you ever have one of those pieces of equipment that was above itself in sound quality and just plain fun to use? Yes, we all have, and this console was mine.) We performed the soundcheck for the headliner and went about soldering some cables and doing those last-minute sound guy things. Food always seems to be forgotten, but The Rockin' Horse had great ribs. My partner and I weren't running the show that night, but we had a very competent guy manning the controls, so we took off while he went to use the phone.
We were gone not 20 minutes when our engineer reported to us that the place filled with smoke, and fast. He said that it took under a minute, and he had to hit the floor and escape. Yes, you got it–The Rockin' Horse burned to the ground. We had our best mics in there, half of our "A" monitor system and amp racks, the SR200, all of the EQs FX, processing, snake, stands and all the support equipment, such as speaker cables, mic cables and distro. We also lost our personal tool boxes, CDs and playback decks, and our truck was sitting about 18 inches from the building with all of our stacks, racks, monitor console and our large FOH console on board.
Luckily, there were literally no guests inside the building at the time. There were maybe five or six employees and our engineer, all of whom escaped without so much as a scratch. The fire was caused by the four to six inches of tar that had built up on the flat roof of the place from all the times it had been redone. Once the roof caught fire, the firemen just stood by and let it burn, making sure no neighboring buildings ignited. A real bummer.
My partner heard about it before I did and was there when I arrived. He jumped in our truck and barely got it started and moved before the firemen were going to get him out of there. The truck got so hot it melted the side marker lights on the box.
Being a small rock 'n' roll sound company, we learned that insurance would have been a wise investment for us because the club didn't give us a dime for the destroyed equipment. They did, however, give us the $200 for the show. After an investigation (and much speculation, on our part, about whether the soldering iron had been unplugged), it was discovered that the rib cooker had caused the fire, and we had no recourse to collect damages.
But I learned a lot that night. Even with losing all of that gear, things could have been much worse. About three months earlier, I had lost my girlfriend of six years to the flu (of all things), but that night, none of my friends, the bartenders, our employees or my partner suffered any injury. Even though much was lost, it was all just things. Stuff that could be replaced.
After the huge loss of life in the recent Great White fire, I consider myself and all involved very lucky that The Rockin' Horse didn't burn down later in the evening when patrons were in the venue with the drinks flowing and the band rocking. It would have been infinitely harder to get everyone out safely.
Pat Hoffman
Scottsdale, AZ
