A Barking Dog

I was going to comment over at Josh Evan’s blog, SPL140-WWJD regarding a comment he made on his current trip to Mexico. The blog doesn’t allow comments or trackbacks, though. Josh is one of the good young minds entering the biz today, not as a mixer per se, but as a support guy at SIA Soft/Loud/EAW/Mackie/whatevermusogearthoseguysfromfloridawithcontrolofthepursestringshavethembuy. And of course, Crazy Uncle Kenny ™. Josh is a really sharp kid that’s passionate about the biz but every now and then he says something that makes me go “HUH???!!!!”. But then again, I’m old…

Day one of two in mexico. Kenton arrived last night. We have a great setup. They will be filming the presentations, 730s sound pretty good (its hard to screw them up) sb1000 sound out, pretty good the a front loaded clam shell. Id rather have a bh760 or array of la400. That’s a big problem in our industry. Not enough use of horn loaded subs. And people don’t know how to demo them against a front loaded sub.

Not enough use of horn loaded subs? Dude, you gotta be shittin’ me. SB1000s are the best sub EAW has ever made. LA400? Surely you jest? (can I call you Shirley?). The BH760, IMNSHO is a one trick pony and not that good at it. For killer subs, not just from EAW but from anybody, it’s all about the SB1000. If you haven’t heard them kill everything else, find me or my buddy Big Al at the place next to the BBQ joint and we’ll show you how the adults use them.
I don’t know what gigs you are going to, but in The Bigs, horn loaded subs are the defacto standard. Keep blogging Josh, it’s a fun read.

Let’s see what we did today at the big time corporate marketing gig…

We locked the D1 up just before final rehearsal. That’s OK, it only happened during the Chairman and CEO rehearsal of entire meeting. Remove laptop, reboot surface, reboot engine, all is well. Head dude was ruffled, but we blamed Windows and he seemed to be OK. Seems he’s familiar with Windows causing problems. After a load in/ tech day, a rehearsal/ tech day and tech/rehearsals for a third day today, we get problems at about the time the rest of the shows on The Strip fire up. We had 15 hours or so using these 22 frequencies and now during the rehearsals with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th in command, the radio rig doesn’t want to cooperate. Sonofabitch…

Rewind to yesterday, or even load in day a couple days ago. At load in, the in house hotel rigger gave me grief for feeding out my own hoists and trying to connect my bumpers and run my hoists. Like I’ve done for the times I’ve hung PA in the almost 27 years I’ve been doing this. Or for more perspective, he was 5 when I hung my first PA. And I’m a lot fucking quicker than he is. House AV rule, we can’t run our own hoists or attach our shit to our own grids. The local hands are from a local (well, national) labor company and are quite good> The sparky and riggers are from the hotel AV company who to me seem two steps removed from high school AV washouts. Kinda set the tone for the week. Our guys are all Varsity. Video, lighting, A1, production, content creation. In fact, I’m the newbie here and they have taken a shine to me. Yesterday, we start to run parts of the show, a Fortune 50 CEO guesting for this Fortune 100 company giving a presentation about marketing. About 3 mins into the first roll (we have a 16 box M2D rig in a 30 meter square ballroom, yeah, we thump, because we are paid to) some AV lackey comes over and says we are disturbing the management meeting of the resort chain which has rented our clients the space. The venue aren’t newbies. It’s the 2nd largest resort owner in the state. Our production manager’s response is priceless. “Sounds like you need a better airwall buffering system” he tells house AV guy. Except for that room our client is renting that entire wing of the convention center (during one of the most in demand times in Vegas) and several hundred rooms. Plus catering.

All that for this. Earlier today, we shit the bed with the radio rack. This morning, I noticed they were reconfiguring the room next door and went over to find the house AV guy and coordinate frequencies. The deal was, they had a hotel list and we couldn’t use those, but they wouldn’t coordinate outside freqs other than the inhouse freqs. That’s not really a frequency coordinator, is it? AV boy in the next room that gave me attitude came over with a list to our room. Yeah, he was blown away. We’ve got the platnum shit. All I wanted to know was if we could get 22 clear freqs for our show. late in the afternoon, someone (or something) parked on 688 MHz and a few of our channels shit the bed. It was a big fucking deal. We had to go offline for me to find some clean air. I suppose that’s why they call it work.

The gig went without a hitch. We worked through dinner and got it up and running.

All in a day’s work…

Exploring the depths of the Moscow Metro and gettin’ all touristy had tuckered me out. We had plans for dinner at the restuarant across the street from the hotel at 6 pm that evening. Other band had a 7 pm call, we had a 9 pm call. With a budget of 1500 rubles for dinner, we would be able to eat well prior to the gig. This was instead of our normal catered fare. The rules had come down for the wedding. No going into the audience, keep a low profile until you hit the stage. Hence feeding us prior to getting to the gig. It would be good to get a slice of Russian life before we gigged. We met in the lobby where a couple of the musos talked Jose and other end of snake dude out of eating there. Said it looked crowded and smokey. I wasn’t up for more room service or restaurant fare so backliner and I headed for the restaurant. Guess it wasn’t too smokey because the guys that talked the other guys out of free grub made it over just after we did. So much for listening to suggestions. We dined on some small steak cuts, some local entrees that we didn’t recognized except for the potatoes and Pepsi. We had to order from the pics on the menu and as we tipped and were leaving, we were flagged down saying we had left money on the table. Outside of the swanky westerns style hotels, it was a non tipping culture. Kind of like Alabama.

Just prior to our 9 pm call I headed down to the lobby. To my surprise the band was waiting as well. They had decided to leave a half hour early so they could get settled in at the gig. Unlike the rehearsal day, we had hospitality. We were some snappy looking motherfuckers. Except for backliner of mishandled luggage fame who had been washing the same pair of skivies and socks for a few days now. He looked fine, but it was hardly the sort of dress that talent producer guy. And speaking talent producer guy, he looked absolutely knackered. Well dressed, but knackered. Everyone except the crew seemed to be sporting event passes and I wrote it off as a pose-a-thon. Backliner and Tatiana, one of our delightful translators, were chatting when the subject of passports and ID came up. We mentioned we normally didn’t carry passports and many times in the states didn’t even carry ID. She looked stunned. “You must always have your passport” she responded curtly. The backliner said he didn’t carry his the whole time we were here except to get into the gig. She looked shocked and explained to him that he was likely to be stopped at anytime and asked for his papers. She was stunned that we would trek about town with no papers. I can’t help but wonder how long it will be until we are compelled to produce papers when stopped in the US with no probable cause. We boarded the mini bus and headed for the venue.

(more…)

I was able to sleep a bit longer than the night before. I joined the others down in the dining room at the appointed time and tried to draft a tour of Red Square and the Kremlin. This was the rest of the party’s second or third time and I couldn’t convince anybody to go with me. Backliner did however want to hit out and get some Russky vodka to take back to the states with him. We decided to do that and got some recommendations on a nearby market where we could not only get vodka but other provisions so for the final days or our jaunt we didn’t have to pay mini bar prices for our water and snacks. Normally we would pillage those from the dressing room after the gig, or if it was really good just stash it in the room before the band gets there. Most of the time they don’t use it anyway.

Trudging a few blocks through the 25 degree late winter/ early spring chill we happened what could be considered the CompUSA/Apple store of Moscow. They had at least six locations in town. It looked like a computer store anywhere else in the world. There was even a small Mac dept that while didn’t have the latest Macs and iPods, still had a pretty good selection. It’s been about 10 years since the Russian economy tanked but over the last few years there has been some pretty good growth and in many places it shows. Though not every place. There are still some that aren’t enjoying the quality of life others have. It’s pretty apparent after you get out of the swanky area of Moscow and head toward the airport. Sure, there’s an IKEA and plenty of relatively new Russian shopping malls with multiplex movie houses. I couldn’t really get a definitive answer on how much the locals were making, primarily because I didn’t want to be so rude as to ask. I was afraid that my per diem for the day would be more than they made the entire week. I did ask talent buyer dude and he indicated it was only a few hundred to five or six hundred a month. I couldn’t believe that so I did some checking and indeed those numbers were supported by other studies and reports but it still doesn’t make any sense, numbers wise. That might be what they are reporting, but they have to be making more than that. Another interesting stat I got (which I checked on) more billionaries live in Moscow than any other single city in the world. Well, yeah. We’re working for one. It was explained to us that as foreigners, in that part of town we were basically being charged tourist prices. No shit. We left the computer store and hit the market. It took us about 15 mins to pick what we were going to bring back and stocked up on some other things as well. We then trudged back to the hotel. I was going to go to Red Square and Kremlin but backliner didn’t so I bid him farewell, put my stuff in my room and headed out on the town.

When I’m on tour I take public transport quite a bit. In other parts of the world and even in a few in the US, public transport doesn’t have the stigma attached to it that it does in suburban America. I could have walked, or taken a cab but I like to get out among the people. Check things out. It’s bad enough much of the time we only see airports, tour buses, hotels and venues so I like to get out and see what things are like where ever I might be that day. I headed to the Metro station a couple blocks away and headed down underground. I went to the map and looked where I needed to go. Everything on the map was in Cyrillic and English. That was handy. I went off to get a ticket. There were no automated machines, only a row women sitting at ticket windows that looked like they’d had the gigs for years. I get to the ticket window, no English signage. I look around. While the maps had English, none of the signage anywhere in the station did. I moved up to an open window anyway. “Hello, All day, please” I said, hoping they would speak English. I used to say “do you speak English?” but since most people we are dealing with did, I’ve stopped. I occasionally got some eye rolls or a “of course” and once in the Canaries some wound up ex-pat Brit bartender that replied “better than you do, laddie.” I figured before I got a “I speak four languages, asshole. How many do you speak?” I should just say hello, and take if from there. For the record, I did take a year of French, but I couldn’t concentrate because of Madame Catani’s skirts back in seventh grade. I can stumble through enough German and Spanish to get by and when I’m in Britain I also speak that langage.

“Da?” the woman asks. “Yes, one day.” I reply. She looks quizically at me. Another woman, apparently a supervisor speaks broken English, explains to the agent what I want, clips me for 15 roubles (about half a buck), prints the ticket and I’m on my way. I enter the gate and head down the escalator to the platforms. This is no normal escalator. It’s as steep as the ones in the Tube in London and at least two or three time faster. It’s quite the ride and I’d reckon it’s almost as old as me, or certainly older than my last couple of dates. The real people of Moscow are down here. The front line workers. The people we don’t see, spending a Saturday afternoon shopping, being with family or otherwise running errands. At the end of the world’s fastest escalator (Guiness book you know…) I reach the platform and realize one thing. I have not a clue which train to board. It was dimly lit, dirty, loud and crowded and smelled like buring rubber, dirt and putrid sweat. I was in a transfer station which meant I had four lines (8 different trains) to chose from. Where I was going was on the blue line and I was on the blue line platform. That was easy. Now, which direction to take. Normally easy, but here not. I do have the Metro map from the hotel with the English translations. It’s cool to discretely look at a map, and in some places be pretty touristy but down in the subway you want to watch what you do. Don’t want to appear lost or otherwise become a target. There are no larger maps or info kiosks. The light is so dim and the print so small I can’t read my map. That and my eyes aren’t as good as they were years ago. Even being touristy I can’t read it. There is a dim lamp right about the bench that if I stand on the bench and put the map next to the light, I can read it. So much for low key. It’s obvious I’m a westerner, perhaps German, English or American. I’m getting a few strange looks but in a minute or so figure out which train to board and not only that, memorized the next two stop names prior to mine so that as I was heading that way, if I didn’t recognize the names I could get off and head back. The train stopped, I boarded and off we went. This train car was old and hammered. It had seen better days. There were a few different cars that passed as I was figuring out where to go. Some looked new and modern. This wasn’t one of them. We stopped. I exited the train car.

I was pretty far underground now, hundred perhaps closer to two hundred feet. As I exited the platform the only exit I saw was leading down. That didn’t seem right but it was the only exit so I followed it. As I went down through the twisting maze of a tunnel, I noticed a large, thick door, like a bank vault. It hadn’t been moved in years. This was a Cold War fallout shelter. And they were having a “pardon our dust” sale in the station. Construction everywhere in the station and adjoining tunnels. And dangerous as hell too. Hardly any warning signs, you could walk right into a hole or jackhammer. It was Saturday and they were working. Eventually I found one of the world’s fastest escalators and started be hurled toward the surface. If you went up this fast diving you’d get the bends. I found my way out of the station, the main station enterance and floor a disater from the construction and made it out to street level. I got a quick bearing and headed for Red Sqaure.

I’m not going to describe it too much other than there were a lot of people enjoying the day, plenty to see. I shot 20 or 30 mins of tape. The usual stuff. Several wedding parties and couples there getting photographed. Must be some sort of tradition. I hung out and explored the square and surrounding area for a couple of hours. The sense of history was astounding. The GUM Department Store, formerly the state run store now basically a mall. Lenin’s Masoleum and St. Basil’s Catherdral. Spasskaya Tower. The May Day parades of military might, once right here. “We will crush you”, next door. Now, tourists taking pictures, enjoying a Coke and Lay’s chips and newlyweds starting their new lives together with the square flanked buy what was once . A lot changes in 30 or 40 years. After a couple of hours I decided to head back. I made it to the Metro station and set to board a train back. When I swiped my card, a buzzer went off and the normally open gates of the turnstyle slammed shut. I didn’t have an all day. I went to the window, slid 15 roubles through the slot and without a word she produced a ticket and sent me on my way. She did a double take as I took the ticket and said “thank you very much.” I decided to ride the train one stop past where I got on and walk back to the hotel. Past the block long Tag Heuer billboard with Brad Pitt, Uma Therman and a few others I didn’t know, but I think one was Anna Kournikova. As the train pulled into the station, I was pleasantly surprised. It was a brand new, modern station. Complete with fast but not dangerous escalators, good lighting and ventalation and no smell.