A few months ago, I was hired to do a gig for a company I had not worked for before, but heard a few horror stories about, mostly pay related. We were carrying most of the gear, but subbed out local crew, most of the lighting, racks and stacks and some backline. First, there was a problem with the promoter paying the balance when due, and the local crew (who had a five-hour call) sat around for three hours (after unloading the local gear for the first hour). Finally, the payments were made and we started unloading our truck.
After the truck was unloaded and pushed into the venue (from across the city street), the five hours were up and the crew walked, leaving everything to be moved to the stage and set up! Apparently the local company that hired the crew “tried” to buy them for longer, but they all had other gigs to work at!
Besides me, there was one other person from my company and two local guys from the rental company to set up a mid-sized high-profile show in a large club (including four electrics with many movers, flying two Meyer arrays, pulling snakes, setting up consoles, risers, backline, etc.)
To make matters worse, the monitor console I was given was an Innovason SY80, with only an FOH rack with input and output cards and no stage rack — enough to do most shows with ease. However, on this show, the monitor engineer had his program set up to use a stage rack and FOH rack, and apparently there is no easy way to reconfigure the console to use the line ins and outs on the rack. That alone was enough for them to consider canceling the show, but he started working on rebuilding his mixes, and I started wiring his special patch that was wildly different from the FOH patch.
Add in the band never putting 220v transformers on the rider to the mess and me having to rewire some twist locks to make 220v (very unconventional and slightly dangerous, but I’ve seen it work before so it would have to make due again). Now all we needed was to find Edison to Euro converters and some more people who speak Greek to translate between the band crew and us!
We were setting up the stage as the room was filling with audience at 8 p.m. We sound-checked one instrument at a time about an hour and a half after the show was supposed to start (10 p.m.). There was one instrument (of 12 or something) that FOH did not see, and he held the show for 30 minutes, while I ran back and forth, and passed an argument between him and his monitor guy. Shortly after the show started, we lost power at FOH twice because I was not given a twistlock power cable to wire to FOH, and was told to plug FOH into a wall outlet, and had three Edison interconnects in the middle of a mob of patrons.
Finally, we got better tape and security people to watch the connections. The show started around 11 p.m. if I remember right, and went until 2 a.m. two hours later than it was supposed to end. The crew is there to unload, but except for helping us push our heaviest items to the truck, they did not help us AT ALL, and my partner, truck driver and I packed up the entire system. They dropped me off at the hotel at 9 a.m. I got two hours of sleep, woke up 45 minutes late and hauled ass to the airport to catch a 11:45 a.m. flight back home! It then took me almost a month to get paid.
P.S. I am still trying to remember why I love this job!
