On Tour with Guitars and Saxes
By Chris Kathman

San Diego, July 4th

View from the Stage

If you want to get technical,this was a Craig Chaquico show, but for me, it started the cycle. This was the morning I left my home, in other words, and didn’t see it again for 12 days. After which I had travelled, oh, maybe 8,000 miles or so.

8:30 AM – Rental company delivers a 15 passenger van (with the back seat taken out) to my home. I load in two big merch cases for Guitars and Saxes, with CD’s for Craig and three other artists, that I picked up from John Tripeny’s house. “Trip” has spent most of the last two years flying VDOSC for Audiotek (ATK) on the Ricky martin world tours. On Guitars and Saxes, he will tour manage and mix house, while I cover monitors.

I add another box of Craig Chaquico CD’s to sell today, that the record company sent over. An electronics rack for Craig (70 lbs.), with his Shure wireless receiver, a DBX 160 and a Quadraverb. My little rolling suitcase with my tools, long pants, and a fleece vest and hat. My big suitcase with two weeks of clothes, books, medicine, and vitamins. An armful of Craig shirts to sell in Carlsbad, California, at the Four Seasons hotel, which has hired Craig and band to play poolside, before a huge Fourth of July fireworks display. The original merch seller could not make it and was calling me up until half past midnight last night, when she finally found a sub. (On Craig’s gig, I was playing the part of Tour Manager as well as FOH mixer.)

Christian Walsh

Proceed to the hotel near LAX, where Craig has been staying since we flew back from Pennsylvania a few days previously (add 6,000 miles). We went to the QVC network in the rural outskirts of Philly, and tried to show that Joan Rivers how to sell stuff on TV. I mixed the (1 AM East Coast time) broadcast to millions of people, combining Craig’s live guitar to a minidisc mix he made of album tracks. Jason Lyle, audio engineer for QVC, was a total pleasure to work with. It is actually fascinating to sit in the green room and watch the computers tally the credit card orders from imsomniacs across America.

(I played Craig’s guitar to get a monitor mix blend with the track, and cut the wedges in, to make a focussed hot spot that I thought he would enjoy standing in. He walked in and started playing when I was working on the broadcast mix up in the booth, and immediately asked if someone could splay the wedges out to get rid of that darned hot spot. :- )

Back at LAX, I check into the airport hotel and roll the G&S swag cases and my big suitcase up to my room. Plug in the computer and get some last minute PSW work done. Band members fly in from San Francisco.

Get them checked in. Get their personal gear in the van. Good rental backline from Auntie Em awaits us, and a Sound Image system. No worries there.

12:30 PM – Drive the guys to Carlsbad, just north of San Diego. Arrive there before 2:30. Find promoter, get loaders, roll gear to stage. Meet backline and sound guys. Band wants beer. None in dressing room, politely make request. Set up Craig’s campfire effect – fan, fluttering silk, foil, and Christmas tree lights.

Rick Stanley

This will get triggered on one song. As it turns out, at that point in the set, the band is silhouetted against a dark blue sky, with a full moon rising behind them, and the effect is amazing. Rick Stanley shows me around the new Allen&Heath ML5000. The first thing I say is that it looks like a Soundcraft Series 5. It sounds fine, but then I never hated the older A&H designs the way it seems that a lot of people do. This is a definite step forward for them, I would bet that they will sell quite a few of this clean design. The mutes and VCA assigning is excellent, and does not require an extended tutorial.

Today, there are also new powered Sound Image composite cabinets, from their A.C.E. affiliate, which are pretty cool. You run an XLR signal cable into the double 15” sub, and then an NL-4 speaker line from there up into the top.

The sub cabinet has three built in channels of QSC Powerlite amps, which drive the sub and the bi-amped tops. The tops have a 12” JBL 2106 that takes 750 watts, and a 2450 on a 90 degree waveguide. These little suckers not only put out a lot of level, but a do so in a surprisingly smooth and musical way. Unfortunately, I do not get to use the pair a side physically coupled (which would have been great and taken them toward 105 potential dB) because for sightline purposes, I asked monitor mixer Christian Walsh to separate them.

Sound Image Sub

With calm and experienced people like Rick and Christian on the scene, continuity and system integrity is not something I need to worry about. I am far more concerned by the putative 85 dB limit. But as we go into the show, the promoter stops by and congratulates me on my restraint and lets me open it up a little, he just wanted to see that I was not an automatic axe murderer.

After the fireworks, Craig and sax player Kevin Paladini climb on chairs in the audience during the final song, and have a wireless duel, it is pretty funny. I eat one of the best cheeseburgers of my entire life in the band room, after counting merch money, and it magically gives me the energy to drive back to L.A.

Arrive at hotel, 1:30 AM. Ask for a 4:45 wake up call. Send Craig’s manager, Leslie Gerard, an e-mail asking her to stop by the hotel the next day and pick up some CD’s that were left over, and won’t fit into the G&S cases. Leave on the 5:30 AM shuttle with Craig, for our flight to meet the Guitars and Saxes touring party in Ohio. Those bastards flew in the night before and have been kicking back there, while we went and worked in Carlsbad.

ML5000

(A week later, I am stunned to find out that the van company still hasn’t picked up the van from the hotel, they are actually showing up at my home asking for it. Luckily, the band’s travel agent reads them the riot act and emphatically says the misunderstanding is all their doing.)

DO NOT BE A TOUR MANAGER. If you need more money than you can make mixing or being a systems tech, do whatever else you have to do, but don’t let The Man talk you into tour managing.

It is not as bad as you might imagine it would be - it is far, far worse.