Joe Campbell, with Prodigy souvenir

Prodigy – We had doubled the size of the sidefills for the Prodigy, although that would have meant destroying the sightline for their monitor guy, Joe Campbell. Joe thought it over, in the morning, and asked us to leave the extra subs, which he could see over, but strike the extra tops. I took one for the team and was the one to cross the stage to ask the stagehands, that I had just asked to put the extra tops up, to take them down again, but leave the subs on a rolling cart. They gave me a raft of shit for a minute, but then were pretty good-natured about it, in the end.

Joe showed me one of the most hellishly smashed grilles to an RF 58 I have ever seen (see picture.) He has got a tough job, I know, because when I was working in San Francisco, I did monitors for the Prodigy before they carried someone. I knew from that experience that their keyboardist/composer Liam Howlett is a genius, but the two gys who sprint around the front of the stage, screaming and hollering, are a bit much. One of them came up to me in the middle of their show years ago, while my sidefills at the time were balls-to-the-wall carrying sequences and keyboards and what little vocal I could squeeze in. He asked me with a straight face “Can you get some more of the low end in my vocal in the sidefills?”

I nodded and shouted “Okay!” with a straight face, and when his back was turned, burst out laughing, took my shirt off and poured an entire bottle of Evian over my head. (Since there was next to no low end in his voice to start with.)

Joe has it down to a science, and I congratulated him on being relaxed and smiling after the set. The keyboardist’s world rode onto the stage on a riser that had essentially a whole sidefill rig stacked on it sideways, behind where he would stand. When Steve asked me earlier in the day to take some signal lines over there to test it with him, I asked “Where’s the amps for it?”

I had not seen the stagehands secure a rack of amps to the back of the riser with heavy-duty cable ties. You want to talk about your elegant solutions, this was the next best thing to having powered cabinets. I talked through a mic and dictated a few quick EQ adjustjments, and line checking was over.

Oasis – When I saw Bruce Johnston, their FOH, walk onto the stage in the morning, I instantly recognized the single rack space unit he had under his arm. “A Wendel!” I cried, and he laughed. “You can always tell the old guys, who actually know what these are,” he chuckled.

For those of you who have never heard of them, the Wendel dates back to when Steely Dan were making their big records, before MIDI sampling arrived.

Liam and Lads

The Wendel holds swappable cartridges that have drum sounds on them, burnt onto EPROM chips. Analog triggering is actually faster and more accurate than digital triggering. The Wendel is run off an insert cable on the chosen drum channel. I know they had kick and snare cartridges, I am not sure whether they made “toms” too.

I remember meeting Bruce in the early ‘90’s. He is from Australia, and was mixing the Divinyls when they were touching themselves. I was working in a theatre that had a basic system which was supplemented when the concert sold over a certain percentage. Unfortunately for the Divinyls, their show sold poorly. So, the promoter would not hire in the extra speakers, the ones that made the show much more do-able for rockin’ bands.

Bruce came in and played a CD. He lowered the volume and stared at the system. “I’m gonna hate this,” he commented. I flinched, and prepared to dig in for ten hours of scowls and sneers. Bruce spent about thirty seconds tapping his fingers, and biting back the rage he knew would be unfair to dump on me. Then he shook it off and proceeded to do a show.

Bruce got more out of that basic PA than any other engineer who ever came to that hall. I watched everything he did and never got the chance to thank him for all that I learned that day, about identifying the most important frequency that defines an instrument, and allotting as much system power as possible to that, while keeping a balance between the kick, the vocal and the rest of the band. Sonic wisdom.

Gareth Williams

Monitor man Gareth Williams is another highly experienced pro. They are using the Shure Beta 57a for vocals for Oasis. I am sick of hearing myself yap on the LAB about what great vocal mics these are. Oasis creates a loud-ass stage, and the 57a is an ideal vessel for extremely high gain-before-feedback. Gareth, Bruce, and their comrades run a tight ship, there were no issues during their set that required our help. After that, we set ourselves to the task of tearing apart the rig, casing it up, and sending it to where Jon was calling the truck pack.

I was irritated and insulted when someone working onstage commented that I seemed to be “too old to be doing this shit.” But the next morning when I woke up, my feet seemed to be seconding that emotion. Luckily, there was a hut in the courtyard of the hotel that has a pool fed by mineral hot springs. After floating around in that for a while, life seemed a lot more possible.

I will probably be at Coachella 2003, if there is one. Will I be working for a performer, like I was in 1999? Will I be reporting for PSW, like I was in 2001, or working for a sound company, like this year? I think if I was smart, I would have worked on being a deejay – they don’t have to be on their feet for as long as we do.

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