A Barking Dog

**NOTE**

Can’t believe it’s been three months since I retired ABD…  If you want to see what I’m up to these days I’ve put up a blog chronicaling my racing at the National Guard Supernationals XII Presented by SKUSA next week in Vegas. It’s at http://lokikart.com/purplein1/

This post has been a long time coming and I probably should have done it a year ago. Much like Barton was interrupted while staring at the keys of his Underwood at the Hotel Earle by Charlie Meadows, I’ve been doing much the same but in suburban digs in Las Vegas. Next month I’ll celebrate my 3rd year year in the city of sin and circus shows. I suppose much in the same way that an inmate celebrates that final walk to the electric chair. It’s not quite as grim as Ben and Sera make it out to be, though in my original apartment behind that hotel that rocks hard it certainly could have been. It’s a cold, soul less place that extracts a toll on many that call it home. To me it’s nothing more than a company town, a place for old roadies to go and become part of the corporate machine where mediocrity and low profile are rewarded over risk, skill and expertise.

I’ve had a great time doing A Barking Dog for the last five years or so, however infrequent it’s been over the last year. This post for me marks the end of an era, the last post of A Barking Dog. The stories were true to life, at least how I remembered it to be afterward or how I saw it those times when the posts were in real time. Some of the people weren’t exactly pleased in the way I protrayed them. Bummer, I called it like I saw it. Which is one of the reasons I decided to stop posting. I’d like to keep this gig until either I retire and move to some Del Webb gated community (I’m almost old enough..) or until Ambi and I figure out how to get those couple of acres of land either in Nor Cal or the PNW and start our organic produce farm, with of course, a race shop.

My current corporate overlords, while not as hard core and tight assed as the first place I worked on The Strip still wouldn’t appreciate some of my observations. On a pretty frequent basis I have a “you gotta be fucking kidding me” moment, at which point I turn to one of my colleagues and say “you gotta be fucking kidding me”. It’s an interesting mix on The Strip of audio types. Not a lot of rock guys and not a lot of guys that have done big time stage mons. I think there might be a dozen of us with most of those at the big time music gigs or rooms in town. The production show crews while they have bands and monitors, don’t have a lot of real monitor guys. There are a couple of guys that can do it pretty well but there are also many guys that think they are a lot better than they are. The bands for the most part know the difference. They need rock mons in a theatrical production show environment and a lot of the kids on the mon desk weren’t born when some of us started doing mons or playing in bands. They need real monitor guys on real monitor consoles and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. It’s no wonder why some of the younger, higher caliber guys spend a year or two on The Strip then hit back out on the road. I don’t blame them but for an old roadie like me that wants to wind down and spend the back nine of the career working with cool, high tech stuff from the creative angle (these days I’m doing a fair amount of mixing both FOH and mons) back on the road isn’t really a good option.

For a quarter century I based my life on getting the next gig and getting a bigger gig. I had some success and a couple of failures along the way. I had a good run. Just like A Barking Dog. It had a good run, though belabored over the last year or so. At one point there were about 15,000 people a month reading. Now it’s time to turn out the lights and go into archive mode.

Like Shakey says, it’s better to burn out, rust never sleeps.

Thanks for a great run, gang. We’ll see you around…

KDAVE-FM

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens

No static at all…

Instant asshole, just add alcohol…

Over the years I’ve watched many an old, or even middle aged man ride off from many, many successful years touring. Dicko, Perk, Mason and Morrison to name a few. These days I reckon I’m in that group. With few exceptions touring life has no place for old men. Either the road eats them up or of their own volition indicates they leave the road. If nothing else for the sake of their own sanity. Some though, present company included, stay past their expiration dates then wonder why what used to be so fulfilling has turned into a wasteland devoid of any enjoyment. Gotta love what you do but when you don’t it’s no different than being some cubicle rat in an office, counting the minutes until your release from the prison of conformity and Dilbert like ineptitude. At least Dilbert is funny.

At the front end of the career it’s a competitive environment. And that doesn’t change as the years rage on. There are always more people than available gigs though there never seem to be enough GOOD people for those gigs. As one gets on in years, like the seasons, things change. What was important at 25 is no longer important at 35 and things like family start to take priority over things like gigs. What do you think is more important? Making sure your TPS reports are properly filled out, or making sure your kids are healthy and happy? Lumdberg might be pissed, but those reports are a distant second, if not further down the list.

When you’re a young turk in this biz you don’t think about what you’re going to do next year. Let alone when you are 40, 50 or 60. I know I didn’t start thinking about it until Crazy Uncle Kenny’s dot com entered a death spiral and I saw my six figure livelyhood disappering faster than Britney’s panties. Forty years old, no college degree, years of experience in the Varsity of touring audio. Outside of touring, that and six bucks would get me a double tall, low fat, half soy, part vanilla, part hazelnut latte. For all intents and purposes in that case you don’t have a pot in which to piss, as they say. It really hit home when shortly after the dot com was sold for pennies on the dollar and the operators at the time determined they didn’t really need my services. No prob, I thought. While the first dot com bubble burst, it was still a boomtown in comparison to the rest of the world.

I was attending a technology job fair up in Seattle, fresh on the dole of the State of WA just ending a nearly three year run at the dot com, the heart of which I started as a labor of love not quite a decade earlier. Google was advertising a contract position for someone to maintain storage space in either the Chicago or Atlanta data center. Basically, you read a log and swap dead hard drives from clusters. Even though I’d been able to build dot com, build and run the data center infrastructure I wasn’t qualified for the job as a contractor swapping drives. I was Red Hat certified, Sun certified and a former MS certified tech with commercial experience on the Internet since the Internet became commercial. No matter. I didn’t have a college degree, even though most of the kids applying were in grade school and had no idea what a server was at the time I was starting to build the property. While I had the knowledge and experience to do the task, according to the search kings, I didn’t have the most important part. A piece of paper that said that I was able to tolerate four years of school regardless of any real world experience.

That left a mark. And at the same time was a huge wake up call. Had I stayed at Cal Poly Pomona about a quarter century earlier I might have had the paper to get that gig, but I surely wouldn’t have gotten the gigs I did, when I did had I stayed in school. As they say, when you find a fork in the road, take it. And I took this one and that was where I was at the time. The next day I confirmed an offer for a tour that would take me through most of that year. One door closes, one door opens. At that point, the dynamics and structure of touring had changed. Controlled more by the bottomline than quality in and of itself the pricing structure for most continued to decline. What was once a US$2500/wk gig plus PD, business class travel and own room in a good hotel was a US$1200/wk gig, light PD, coach travel and sharing a room with some twenty something concerned with getting the most out of the party atmosphere. Or about where I was nearly two decades earlier.

I suppose that’s standard economics. Supply and demand. It’s OK when you’re 20, or 30. Less tolerable when you’re 40. How about 50? I’ll be there in a few years. At 60? The problem for many of us is we didn’t start thinking of exit strategies until well into our careers. You can milk a good twenty years from the road, but can you do thirty? Or fourty? And at what cost? In the mid 90s there was a very popular band that we had a vendor contract with. They were from Austraila and were tearing up the airwaves at that point. The mon guy from OZ was a family man. He’d been on the road for sometime. At one point during the tour he called home. His six year old son answered. “Hi, it’s daddy” the mon guy stated. To which the kid replied “Who’s daddy?” Within the next couple of days, the mon guy headed home, to my knowledge never to tour again.

My point is to have an exit strategy so at the point you turn 50 you’re running the show instead of changing RF mic batteries and shouting “climber 2 check, fourteen, one-four, check” into a french Canadian’s face just prior to the show. Even the best laid plans shit the bed. Make sure you have a handle on where you wnat to go and how you want to get there. What you are doing at 30 isn’t going to be what you want to be doing at 60.

World Champ

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens

World champ smokes US karters in national race.

World Champ

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens

World champ smokes US karters in national race.

More Winter Testing

Originally uploaded by Dave Stevens

First competition race in more than 3 years.

As the Summer 2k7 ABD winds to a close, (actually this started about two months ago) this being the final post of the Summer 2k7 season (which at this point is now Fall), much has happened in this last several months. We went from having a technically deficient show in terms of sound systems and design to one of the most elaborate designs and implementations not only on this block but in the in the biz as a whole. Even after a year, I’m still amazed, but no longer perplexed by the scale of what we do. No longer am I overwelmed with a gigantic performance space that encompasses several thousand square feet over six stories and more than a million gallons of water.

But it’s not come at some expense. The compressed time frame of our recent “enhancement”, (sound is awesome, but a reported 6 mil worth of lights looked like shit to me) unmanagable colleagues and demands from upper management make the technical nirvanna secondardy to the petty politics, greed, arrogance, incompetence and ignorance that seem to permeate my existence on the gig at this point. Just like with touring, it became not fun to come in everyday inspite of having one the best gigs in the biz using some the most advanced tools available. The horseshit factor outweighed any enjoyment that might be derived from such a job. It’s not like I didn’t like those with which I work, as I do. It’s just that I have a different veiw of Varisty than some of them did. Or at least in my mind, I think that I do. I do enjoy the genre of the modern circus style Las Vegas production show in the terms of scale, scope and artistic endevor. You’d never find me doing some of the things the performers do. Ever. Well, except perhaps imbibing on a favorite spirit at the Artisan or Peppermill.

It’s a bittersweet time, full of angst and indecision. As Ed says, “but I know that I know I don’t want to stay”. So I left. About six weeks ago I put in my notice, much to the “disgust” of English John, our leader. I don’t know that disgust was the word he was looking for. I’ve only voluntarily left one gig before, work of Sid for the “riders that go for great distance”, or the “riders that are very tall”, as Jordy would say. I did mention that after nearly a couple of decades, I did run into Jordy in Spain again? I mentioned that in the Euro 2k6 season when we were doing the castle tour. Still have some great castle gig video. I should post that one of these days. I should also not cuss, bathe regularly, brush my teeth and not be such a crusty old fuck. But that’s not likely to happen either.

Much like an infant in a shit laden diaper, it was time for a change. Not that I didn’t like the show or the people I was working with, I did. But the challenges were few and a couple of the personalities I had to deal with made the gig less than fun. I told the powers that be that I left the gig to pursue greater opportunities. That’s partially right. But I also didn’t have any shirts with a rainbow picture of the sun with French writing. Well, Quebecious anyway. I figured that if I was going to spend the back nine of my career doing this kind of show (with an outstanding benefits and good compensasion package) I might as well be doing it with the people that are considered to be the top of the class. Even if they are based in Canada, err, I mean Quebec.

So if this is such a good move, why is it bittersweet? Other than the fact that Fuel record is on Dave’s iTunes now? I had (and still have it) it pretty good. I was instrumental in redesigning and programming a big ass monitor rig on one of the most complex shows on the planet. I was working with (mostly) some pretty cool people. But after a year and a half I was going nowhere. I need to be the lead dog on the sled team. I can’t stand looking up the other dogs butts on the sled, particularly when I think I can be faster than them. On tour it was easy. Cut the mustard, be good at your gig or your ass gets shipped out. In LV Strip world, don’t work like that. If you’re kind of good enough to do the gig, don’t piss anyone off too badly and don’t invite any lawsuits, they’ll keep your ass around no matter how much you know or don’t know about doing mission critical pro audio. To me, that ain’t right. Know your shit, do it well or get the fuck out. It’s really that easy.

As wistful as I am for the touring days, it would take a call for a long term gig where Rog and Dave brought the inflatable pig and styrofoam bricks for the wall to get me out of retirement. And somehow I don’t think I would be on the short list for the call.

So what did I do? I started over. Again. Shit. Part of this is having to work my way back up from my former life of being the big swinging dick on the desk to being the guy on deck that makes sure that all the IFBs, ear mons and mics are working. About a hundred packs at this point. No, really. That’s an assload of batteries. And not counting wireless com. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward. Of course, the trick is to know when the time is right and see the payoff at the end of the tunnel. Otherwise you’re just going backwards. And that’s the bittersweet part. Knowing that you can do the heavy lifting but being relagated to what one might consider crap work. That, my friend, is what separates the men from the boys, the Varisty from the Jr Varisty.