[Dixielandjazz] Sound guys

[Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis]

We played a gig at an up scale nursing home the Sunday before Fat Tuesday. 
They usually put the band in an atrium kind of area.  There are three areas 
that radiate off of the atrium.  All have lower ceilings than the stage in 
the atrium.  The band's sitting eye level is just below the ceiling of the 
rooms which are very long and narrow.  The guests are placed in these long 
low ceiling rooms.

As you can imagine the sound is pretty bad especially since we are more or 
less an acoustic group.

This year the recreation director decided to hire a sound crew.

I would have welcomed the hard rock cafe guys.  These bozos looked like they 
had just been fired from a bluegrass festival.  They were complete with bib 
overalls and beards that went down to their chests.

Their equipment looked like it had been through one too many rock concerts 
and the cabinets were huge.  They brought in 7 of the biggest speaker 
cabinets I had ever seen and strung wires all over the place.

The microphones were placed on ordinary weighted mike stands with booms.  If 
you extend these booms very far that kind of stand becomes unstable.  They 
had all the mikes on those booms.  Well I tipped one over going up the steps 
to the stage and they had a fit about screwing up their equipment.  If the 
guy hadn't put it on a step that wasn't very stable and narrow with the boom 
extended it never would have happened.

The mikes cut in and out and while some people think of soprano saxes as 
mass weapons of destruction, with their help it became a reality.  While I 
was basking in my new found power the guy playing banjo and singing couldn't 
be heard.  He wouldn't touch the mike because they had yelled at me.  I got 
up to wiggle the cord and see if the thing was turned on and guess what.  My 
mike went over again.

It got pretty exciting around there for a few seconds while the blast from 
the mike explosion died down.

I'm looking forward to next year and the reunion concert with these clowns.
Larry
St. Louis
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Butch Thompson" <butte1 at mac.com>
To: "djml" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 2:18 PM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Sound guys


>
>
>> I remember Hary Epp used to say "When you see a sound tech wearing a T 
>> shirt
>> that says "Hard Rock Cafe", beware."  He was right
>
> Does anybody remember who put it this way:
>
> "My confidence in any sound man  is inversely proportional to the length 
> of
> his ponytail."
>
> Butch Thompson
>
>
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