The Wedding Rehearsal
One of the great things about touring overseas is that much of the time, well most of the time, breakfast is included with the room. Not some lame ass Days Inn continental or Holiday Inn barebones buffet, but a real honest to god roadie hot breakfast. Just like catering. I had a good sleep, though I was still on Vegas time. It was 8 am local time, 7 pm the previous night before Vegas time. I felt good, for now. Only slept about 6 of about the 12 hours on the plane. Then the hassle of customs, the other bands, the production meeting. We’d made plans to meet at 10 am but I knew I wasn’t going to make it that long. I headed down to breakfast without the others. Good thing it was included because the menu rate was US$42.00. Ouch. Them there is Tokyo prices. But it was good (the waffles and omlettes rocked) and the Red Menace was covering my tab. At least for breakfast and room, but not for the six dollar Dutch Bud I didn’t drink the night before. Our band dudes were down in the dining room. Cover band didn’t know that breakfast was included. I grabbed some grub, and went back up to hammer away on the expensive WiFi. A couple hours later, to be social I returned to the dining room and sat with our backliner, DJ Ghetto Einstien, Jose our tour manager and dude at other end of snake. DJ and other end dude were to go at 2 pm because they were doing double duty, aka double dipping by working for guitar player that sits. Jose and I would join them a 7 pm for our setup and check. The breakfast offically ended at 11 am but they started striking it at about quarter til and by 20 past 11 they wanted to throw our asses out. In fact, they did. We were drinking coffee, long since finished with breakfast and they suggested that we could sit in the lobby and they would bring us coffee. In other words, get the hell out of the dining room so we can do the lunch change over.
I was willing to hit out, but the other dudes had to be at work or didn’t want to venture out. Wussies… I decided I would troll Tverskaya, basically Rodeo Drive of where we were. Think Rodeo as in Beverly Hills, swimmin’ pools, movie stars. Not rodeo like Brokeback Mountain. Just after check in last night, I signed up for WiFi at a whopping US$39.00, not quite the record of 30 euros we paid for each of three days last summer in Austria, but enough so that I knew that with our work schedule, I wouldn’t need or want to spend anymore. But she gave me four extra hours. I went back up to my room and got dressed for the 26 degree F temp and hit out on the main drag. I went to a great Nokia store and poked around for a while, a department store, a couple of parks and a Mickey D’s (aka Thee Embassy) where I didn’t know what the hell to order. It was all in Cyrillic and even in Japan and Hong Kong it’s also in english. Not here. They did understand “Big Mac” and with the help of the young assistant manager, I was able to get a super sized Big Mac meal with a Coke. I’ve been in McDonalds all over the planet and haven’t had this much trouble. Even in Leipzig (former east, 1998) when the burger they served me made me sick as the dog they killed to make it. My overpriced, english speaking room service staff didn’t seem so bad. I’ve been in a lot of places where it was expensive, like Tokyo, but at least there was a picture menu, roman characters or an english speaking wait staff to take my order. I paid a bit less for my Moscow Big Mac Set than I did at O’Hare a week before coming back from our Chicago gig. And I don’t know that the staff at O Hare understood english any better than the Moscow staff did. But at least I had a familiar character set to point at. Just like Japan.
After a couple of hours, I made it back to the hotel. I’d wanted to do Red Square but was tired. Jet lag was catching up. It was 3 pm local time, 2 am Vegas time. I went to my room, flipped on the TV, tuned it to BBC World (which was interesting because they had about 15 channels of english langage TV, mostly US) and awoke just prior to my needing to be at the 7 pm lobby call from my RAZR alarm clock. I didn’t have dinner but they told us there would be some sort of catering, though dressing rooms would not be available and there would be no hospitality. Welcome to Moscow! We’d left instructions with our guys and other band that if the shit hit the fan, call and we’d boogie down and help. Didn’t hear from them or the promoter and we were jet lagged, so we didn’t worry about it. Jose and I met in the lobby and boarded the mini bus for the gig. When we arrived, they were almost two hours late. “Why didn’t you call us?” we asked our guys. The reply, “it was so screwed we didn’t think you could help and we knew you would be here by 7 pm anyway”. The transportation coordinators and schedulers weren’t going to delay the band departure sched, even though we knew they weren’t going to be ready for a couple of hours. We’d rather have the band cooling heals elsewhere than with us. And they’d rather not be at the gig if we weren’t ready. We were able to contact jazz singer to tell him we weren’t ready and he wasn’t gonna come until we were. Take that beotch.
The gig was a clusterfuck. The main floor was dangerous as all hell. Installing the lighted dance floor, huge holes worthy of breaking a leg, fixing the stairs to the mezzinine could result in broken ankles and dodging the personel lifts made it a Workman’s Comp Uber Claim. When we got there looking out at a disaster area someone in the party remarked “they must not have personal injury lawyers here.” Rehearsal was running about two hours behind and other band was just getting set. They quickly ushered us through the disaster zone that was the venue towards the inhouse restaurant that served as catering. We went through the lobby, which at this point was made up on one side with a half dozen pics of the groom from infant to current, set dressed in blue with the other side being the bride from infant to current, set dressed in pink. They’d done the lobby up nicely but we were headed toward to cafe. We boarded an elevator that was almost as old as I was to go a floor up to the cafe. Looking at the controls, I had to wonder if we were going to survive this elevator ride. We did make it to the cafe level. The grub wasn’t bad. Chicken wings, salmon, hamburgers, salad bar, frites, assorted veggies and breads. We also had cola or Fanta. I like Fanta. We were informed that they had made up almost 45 mins and they were almost ready for the crew. There is a god…
At 11 pm which was two hours after we were supposed to start the check and three hours after we were supposed to start setting, we got the stage. The room was coming along nicely. They had most of the decorations done. It was still dangerous as fuck though. The stairs from the mezzine level had been removed. The front of the stage had been modified for two Chapmans and two camera tracks. One wrong step and it’s Russkie hell in some hospital. The one thing though, that stood out was the buzz. It was hellacious. We noticed it when we came in at first but were quickly sheparded to the food. Measured in the middle of the room, about 20 meters it was 101 dBA spl. In other words, loud as shit. It’s the loudest buzz I’ve ever heard. And I’ve heard and been responsible for some loud ass buzzes over the last quarter century. For the other band checking, much of the time it’s louder than the program. They did get the DVDosc in the config we discussed, but it was one buzzing motherfucker. And they couldn’t fix it. The mons were buzzing too, though not that loud. With a bit of troubleshooting, we found the Spirit 8 to be a culprit and that dropped it to about 95 dBA spl @ 20 meters. Enough to do a check but not enough to do a gig. The band kept asking about the buzz. Prior to that, they couldn’t make the side fills happen. They were way down in level. Almost one legged. Additionally, there was an issue with my cue. The cue issue turned out to be a broken LED on the talkback switch that attenuated the cue 10dB. On an SM20 the TB dims the cue function. They didn’t know that, even though we had four onsite. Stage boy Pav came over, couldn’t understand what was happening and got an ass chewing. Except for Yuri, the crew didn’t realize the importance of being able to listen post eq on the mixes. Pav asked what he could do, my two fill mixes weren’t working and two of my eight wedge mixes weren’t working. Great, 40 percent of my shit doesn’t work. Within five mins or so, Yuri and Pav fixed it, though Pav was starting to give me attitude. Don’t make me school your former commie ass, ’cause you won’t like it. Actually Pav was lucky to be 10 when the empire collapsed, but I didn’t need the ‘tude. We are 34 inputs and 10 mixes. It ain’t that hard, comrade. On my side of the stage there was still no getaway, or stairs. Producer dude wanted us to wear suits. Got no problem wth that, I dig suits, cause I look good.. For the last two days I’d been crawling up the scaff on cases to get to the stage. That’s fine if I’m in Levis or Dickies in tee shirts but if I ‘m wearing a thousand dollar Hugo Boss suit, fuck y’all, give me some stairs. I love suits, I have a couple of Cardans, a couple of Bosses and an Armani, though the Armani is made for tweaky little Euro bastards and never quite fit, the the contour was excellent. I’m in a thousand dollar suit, hundred dollar shirt (no tie, please) and two hundred dollar shoes. No fuckin’ way I was going to scale the stage like some steel monkey. Boy would I be surprised the next night.
We schlepped through that check, with the musos asking what the hell that buzz was. We didn’t know and Russkie sound dudes didn’t know. At this point for a 9 pm check we were at almost 1 am. With the transport situation fubar, jazz singer had a town car dedicated to him and band and crew had to wait for mini bus availability. The venue was nearing completion but the production logistics were shitting the bed. We finally cleared the venue prior to 2 am, hoping to make a last call for Guiness at the hotel bar. Jose sent me with the band in hopes that I could hit the bar, order beers for me and my mates and have them arrive shortly thereafter. As luck has it, at twenty til two the bar was shut. but they were supposed to be open until 2 am. Well, yeah, but they weren’t. Whatever. I retired to 314, my humble abode for the week. About 10 mins later Jose called, they were able to get a bus right after me. “I guess we’re screwed for a Guiness” he said. “Yeah, we don’t have very good roadie karma” I replied. I retired without even cracking the mini bar. I was tired and even though we didn’t have a call until 9 pm the next night, I wanted to get some sight seeing. I thought the next night might be fraught with peril, though our Russian pals weren’t going to ask for help, might as well grab a kip and at least get up early enough to grab some of that good breakfast grub.