I’m a 20+ year employee of Clair Global working for a popular Cuban born Miami resident and her 15 piece band as A2. (I’ll leave out her name to avoid litigation, but you can probably guess). We brought some gear with us (Board groups, etc), and got some locally (stacks and racks). We also carried a 45k.v.a. Transformer to interface with local 220 volt power (mostly generators). The entire tour was a non- stop nightmare of bad power, collapsing roofs, and all night runs to the airport to palletize air cargo after load out at the venues. They always save the best for last, and that takes us to Guayaquil, Ecuador. It was another dirty old soccer stadium with dirty old generators. The show had not sold well, and the owner of the local sound and light company was threatening to pull the plug if he wasn’t paid by noon, and he intended to hold our gear hostage.
Eventually, he agreed to play ball and we carried on with load in. As expected, it took a while to get power up, and at first it looked good. Meanwhile, it started getting cloudy. It was getting real dark as the band arrived for sound check. Also around this time, my friend Craig (band’s monitor mixer) noticed the U.P.S. on his control surface (PM1D) was acting up, so we bypassed it. The console power supply is still acting up, so I take a look at the meters on my a.c. panel and see one of my hot legs dropping 25 volts (as low as 95), and then going back and forth rather sporadically. I inform the band we have to stop sound check and sort this out.
As they leave for catering, it starts raining. In less than two minutes, it’s pouring and there’s lightning all around. Because of the generator problem, everything was off and we soon had everything covered or put away. After over two hours of rain, we begin to think about power again. I’m told we are on a spare generator. When I meter the 220 volt side, it’s 10 volts higher than before, and I ask if they can knock it down some. That’s when I find out we are still on the first generator and they turned up the overall voltage thinking that would solve the problem.
It turns out the air filter on the spare generator got soaked in the rain. We insisted that we must use the spare generator or the show would be canceled. By the way, doors were opened by now, so canceling meant a probable riot. An air filter appears seemingly from nowhere and the spare generator fires up. We turn on all our gear and play some music through the PA. It works. We are only two hours behind schedule, which is a miracle. Load out is done by 5; on a plane home by 10.
