You Gotta Look Sharp!
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.
The security at the venue was as strong as I’ve ever seen anywhere. Even when doing gigs for each of the sitting US presidents since Reagan. There was an additional checkpoint prior to entering where they inspected the undercarriage of the bus with mirrors on sticks just like in the prison movies and checked the driver’s paperwork. They were visibly armed. We proceeded to the second checkpoint where they made us disembark and checked our papers against a list and let us in to the next checkpoint which was the backstage entrance. We went through the magnitometer, hand frisked and wanded and had all of our hand baggage searched. We eventually made it in and headed for the stage. I was stopped at the stage entrance. I asked one of our other interpreters what the deal was.
“Where is your pass?” he asked. I showed him my jazz singer laminate. No dice.
“You need one of these” he said pointing at his pass, “why you not have”.
“Well, I didn’t know I needed one” I responded.
“You need pass” was the reply.
“And from whom do I get the pass” I thought was a natural response, trying not to use my outdoor voice. Using a loud, forceful tone directed at one of locals may have some unintended consequences from those other locals that didn’t have his grasp of English.
“You get from me” he said.
“OK, may I have my pass” I asked.
“They are at hotel, you should have asked.”
“Ask? Where do I get one now?”
“From me”
“OK, may I have one?” I was starting to get a bit bent.
“I don’t have them here”
At this point I expected the next line to go something like…
What’s on second? I don’t know. Third base!
“I’m taking your pass, you should have been paying attention when you handed them out and made sure the entire party had them” I said as I started to unclip his lam. He wasn’t digging it. “Well, you could do monitors for jazz singer tonight” I explained as he was hesitant to give up his pass.
“OK, just until you get your pass” was the response. I nodded though there was no way in hell he was getting this pass back.
We gathered just backstage, stage left. The night prior it had been dead case storage but it was now video village. And a damn big one at that. We asked talent producer dude and translator if they had a schedule. They did and gave us copies. It was in Russian. When asked if we could get one in English we were told they were still translating it. Huh? We were about 3 hours into the even and nearly 90 mins behind schedule. I decided to go out to my work area to see what had been screwed up.
I made my way around the riser sets. It looked like they didn’t work on rolling stages that often because the risers were loaded backwards, meaning the last band’s risers were closest onstage, and not loaded in reverse order. To make matters worse, they had 30 meter mic cables bundled as the looms to those risers with no way to disconnect them. Which means they were blocking my access to mon beach and my stairs. Well, the stairs that should have been there. They never made it so not only would I have to run the riser obsticle course (in a suit and nifty shoes) but I would have to climb about a meter and a half down into the pit on the rosettas of the scaff hoping my shoes had the traction and I didn’t break my ankle or rip my kilobuck suit. At this point, it was the only way into stage left mon beach. I made it down into the pit. It was still as I left it after doing a detailed once over twice. The house was much, much louder than when we had left last night. At least they fixed the buzz.
The room was finished and looked very nice. Excellent presentation and you wouldn’t have known it only a few hours prior. After we left in the early morning hours, the sound crew fixed the buzz, which took most of the night then started rehearsing/checking the local and regional talent which took them until almost showtime. Ouch. It was nice, IMAG on every wall though the resolution was a bit wonky. There were now camera positions where we had spike our sidefills, no biggie. The prior band was still set, unpatched and ready to roll back and the downstage drape was closed. After a few minutes admiring the room transformation I decided to climb out of the hole. There was a video mon close and good TV ettiqutte state to look at your script or book and be heads up on the mon so you don’t walk into a shot. Well, I wasn’t going to learn to read Russian in the next 30 secs so my script might as well been toilet paper. I started to leg up and crawl around the riser when there was a huge flood of both dry ice fog and an army of chemical foggers trained at the stage. I crawled back into the hole as the orchestra started into a fanfare and the drape opened for a reveal. The host and hostess appeared from stage right. The music portion of the show didn’t sound to bad, but the AV portion could have used some help as there was noticable feedback and reduced tonality, but from where dude had to mix, I doubt he heard it.
There was an announcement and the stage went dark then into a video roll. I was a clip of the groom’s family growing up with commentary from what appeared to be his relatives with pictures spliced in (a la Ken Burns) and what appeared to be either Super 8 home movies or early video. The final scene was a very old Russian woman, showing pics of the young groom from what appeared to be some sort of assisted living facility. I’m betting that was grandma. End of clip, cut to older couple in audience, the woman with tears streaming down her cheeks. The man speaks, the woman speaks, both to standing Os. Must be the groom’s parents. Next, a video roll of the same type of thing, this time the bride. From early clips of her playing pop singer as a young girl in here room, to entertaining the family at what appeared to be a holiday gathering to here now real life career as a big time pop star. Cut to mom and dad, mom crying, both give speaches. Except for the lighting guy with no sense of color or time, it was pretty good. Moving. The stage went dark and I decided to make my move. I knew there was a Red Bull, some cashews and a liter or two of water backstage with my name on it, or at least available for me to pillage.
As I popped up out of the hole, again with the fog. Tons more this time. So much that I couldn’t see anything on stage. Then an announcement over the low rumble of a tympani roll, which is the international sign for something big is going to happen. Then the strobes. The stage is full of fog, the strobes are going full bore. Then BANG! Full lights, light pyro and a reveal upstage where the bride and groom walk out on stage. I didn’t realize it, but to this point they hadn’t been in the audience. This was the grand entrance. Good thing I wasn’t standing in the middle of it. They made it down off the front of the stage, down a red carpet through the middle of the room to a charriot like table/podium where the groom gave a speech. The drape closed and out of shot, I made it out of the hole and headed upstairs to the dressing rooms. They’d made up a bit of time, but were still an hour or so behind.
There was hospitality and I was directed to what they called “The Green Room”. In other parts of the world, the green room is a place where people can hang. They have couches, drinks, snacks usually in a nice spread. This green room looked more like a storage facility. The dressing rooms weren’t stocked, except for the two principals downstairs. The bands needed to go to the “Green Room” and get what they wanted for the dressing room. There was a bunch of stuff from every rider that was there. We ask for six Red Bulls and a couple of cans of nuts. There were several cases of Red Bull and pounds of nuts. Cartons of towels. Cases of water, beer and snacks. The beer was Czech Budvar, the original Budweiser and nothing like the Clydesdale piss they pass off under the Bud name in the states. The spread was very pillage worthy.
The expensive cover band had heard the show was behind so they decided to try to go to the restaurant the previous day had served as catering. About 10 minutess later they got the 5 minute call. DOH! They rounded them up, all 14 and they took the stage. That means we were about to get the stage. As they took the stage on the wing above stage left, we got the stage. The riser rollout was sort of comical but eventually we got everything rolled out and started to do a line check. The talkback from FOH was a casualty of the buzz police and rather than risk hooking it back up (we weren’t sure they could, anyway) we used our radio spare as the talkback. It was so loud onstage that even with the TB maxed it was hard to hear. We eventually finished, the band did the set with the groom requesting an encore and presenting jazz singer with a nice watch. They then rolled into a a Russian track act downstage of the drape while other band set up. Jose and I stayed to help with the change the booked back to the hotel, way past last call. We weren’t done yet, we still had to get to the airport and get everyone on flights home.
We lucked out that expensive cover band wasn’t on our flight back home. They were staying for the “after party” which was the next night at a local club. Jazz singer was staying also. It was us and other band, crews now and musos in an hour. We met in the lobby and loaded bags into the gear truck. We boarded our vans and headed to the airport. The cold Sunday morning, gray and overcast lent a surreal feel over some of the more downtrodden areas as we approached the airport. We arrived at the airport prior to the gear and luggage. You have to pass through magnetometers and baggage xrayed before entering the terminal. We split into teams, one inside to get things going, one outside to direct the luggage in. The truck arrived about 20 mins after we did. There was some scizim outside. The airport porters weren’t going to let the promoter’s crew unload and carry our luggage into the terminal.
The translator worked it out (greased the airport guys) and we started shuttling the 50 plus pieces combined into the terminal. From there we split into separate units. Other band came in with no carnet, we had one. At one time customs looked like they were going to take us apart. That’s the term used when they inspect all the gear and ask to see specific pieces from the carnet. We told other band to do their own thing so they didn’t get hung up by us. After several shuttle trips, they breesed the gear through but had a hard time at security with the concept of group check in. Due to TSA requirements, every piece of luggage, hand or checked needs to be unpacked and inspected along with the usual shoes, computers, etc. Each one of us had to watch as they unpacked everything from each of our bags prior to check in. Eventually I did make it into the depature lounge, tired, a bit hungry and ready to go home. Not that I didn’t enjoy the trip, I did. I was just ready to head back. In a few weeks we would be making another journey. This time to Morocco and Tunisia.
April 12th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Great story! I like the human-level travails of clambering around in expensive duds.