Study Hall

ProSoundWeb
An “old timey” image from “back in the day” to set the stage for this story.

Anatomy Of A Bad Gig: Recalling A Show 40 Years Ago Where Virtually Nothing Went Right

On the upside, there were several valuable lessons learned as the author and crew worked to live up to the mantra "the show must go on."

In autumn of 1982 I was working at a sound and lighting company when I was tapped to do front of house for what turned out to be an early “corporate” gig: Tony Bennett performing at a car dealer’s annual dinner at a hotel in downtown Toronto.

Even though I was a young “rock ‘n’ roll guy,” I was open to new experiences and looked forward to the gig. This was at a time when the icons of the 1950s and 60s were not that popular, before the huge resurgence that they experienced later in the 80s. (For example, a friend of mine would play Frank Sinatra for walk-out music – to clear the hall as quickly as possible!).

In what was an unusual move for the time, the lighting director and I actually managed to do a site inspection before the gig. About a week out, we went to the venue, the Hilton Harbour Castle, and met with a person whose title was “Head Houseman.” We told him why we were there and he proceeded to show us the Frontenac Ballroom, a modest-sized room with a proscenium stage.

We got into quite a bit of detail with the gentleman, including a discussion of where the PA stacks would go and whether they would leave sufficient clearance around the fire exits at the front of the room. Satisfied with all of this, we went back to the shop and designed and built the rig.

Sleight Of Hand

Now this was in the days before “event planners” and production companies, so our main contact for this gig was a woman from the advertising agency for the brand of cars that the dealers sold. I’m going to call her “Lola,” which was not her real name (which incidentally, I remember, both first and last) but it will become apparent why I chose that moniker later on. Lola was a corporate type with short blonde hair who was definitely an enthusiastic user of the pharmaceuticals of the day to s-t-a-y c-a-l-m and l-a-i-d b-a-c-k. I didn’t have much contact with her in the run-up to the show (our lighting director, a woman, handled most of that) but I certainly did on the day of.

Friday afternoon, we were loading the truck at the shop when the LD came back from a second site inspection with some alarming news: The room that we had inspected was not the room the gig was in. That room was the Grand Ballroom on the second floor of the venue. It was much larger, but was divided in three with air walls, and we were told that we would be in two-thirds of the room. I decided the PA we’d spec’d could still handle it and we carried on with the truck pack.

The gig was on Sunday. The reason I remember this detail almost 40 years later: We were short a graphic EQ for the mains and rather than cross-rent one, I “borrowed” the Ashly SC-66 dual parametric from a club where I worked on Saturday nights. At the time, Toronto was pretty much closed on Sunday, so I knew it wouldn’t be missed. What I didn’t know was how much harder it would be to tune the PA with that equalizer. (Lesson learned: Don’t experiment with new gear/technology on show day!)

One channel of an Ashly Audio SC-66 dual parametric EQ in its analog glory.

Sunday morning we loaded in with no problems, with a crew that must have been hotel staff. Once we were in, I asked the “Head Houseman” if he could supply a couple of box risers for the main loudspeakers. He agreed, which was great, but it took well over an hour for them to appear. This put me behind with stacking the PA, but I tried to make up for it by setting up FOH and doing whatever else I could do in the meantime. (Lesson learned number 2: If you need it, bring it!)

By the time the risers showed up and we got the PA in place, the 20-plus piece orchestra was filing in and beginning to set up on the stage. As soon as I had the house system wired and ready to test, the band was set up and Mr. Bennett and his musical director walked in and immediately began rehearsals. While they were doing that, rather than having an opportunity to try to get a mix together, I was still trying to ring-out the PA. This didn’t go down well with the folks on stage, at one point prompting an angry outburst (I was never sure from who, but I don’t think it was “The Man.” (Lesson learned number 3: Don’t tune the PA with the artist on stage.)

The rehearsal went on for a while, and for reasons I can no longer recall, I didn’t have any time to do much with the PA when the rehearsal was over. (It may have gone so late that the attendees filed in when they were done. In any case, I remember that the LD, her assistant and I left the room and were fed dinner in another room.)

When we returned, the event was under way with all the guests seated at large, round banquet tables. Now here’s a lesson that I hope the hotel learned from this one: In the center of each table was the usual centerpiece, and this was surrounded by a large ring of wine bottles, alternating red and white and all of them open! Now I may not be remembering this correctly, but at the time I was under the impression that there was a bottle of red and a bottle of white for each guest. This, combined with the usual bar service, did a very effective job of making sure the car dealers were all totally sloshed before the speeches were even over.

Wait, It Gets Better

The speeches were another area where the organizational gaps in this event became apparent. These were underway when I came back from dinner – but not through our sound system. “Lola” must have set that up with the hotel.

In any event, there was a lectern with a couple of mics set up downstage right. While I was taking stock of the situation and trying to map out some strategies to quickly get the mix together when the show started, Lola came to the FOH riser and asked me in her distracted, tranquilized voice if it would be OK to open the air wall to the third section of the room (which was just behind FOH) so the dealers could walk around and look at the cars that were on display while Tony Bennett was on stage.

Tony Bennett, still going strong today at age 95. (Credit: Dwight McCann, Wikipedia)

I replied that this was inadvisable because the PA had been designed for the smaller room downstairs, and that increasing the size of the current room by another third was really going to be pushing it. She nodded and walked away. Two minutes later, I hear the “whirr, clack, clack clack…” of the air wall opening. I didn’t have any time to do anything about that, however, because as all of that was going down, the speeches wrapped up and somebody, presumably the house AV folks, struck the podium… and the orchestra took their places on the darkened stage, the lights came up and…. BUZZZZZZZ!

Now my first thought was that it was really unusual for one of our systems to suddenly start buzzing like that. My second thought was that the show had started, and I should be trying to get my mix together and instead I had this buzz issue to deal with – and then I noticed that the buzz seemed to be coming from everywhere at pretty much equal level, and it slowly dawned on me that it wasn’t my system at all, it was coming from the ceiling loudspeakers that had been used for the speeches.

This was further complicated by another “Lola” fail – apparently she had asked us to provide clip lights for the music stands and had been told by our LD that we did not supply such items and here was the phone number for a company she could rent them from, which she hadn’t done. (Important lesson: In the future, just say “yes,” cross-rent them, and put them on the bill!)

In any event, as the LD was finding levels that allowed the musicians to see the music without making the whole show look like a mall parking lot at night, the dimmers were making the buzz a lot worse. It was around this point that I heard that the house AV folks had struck the podium and gone home!

Still unable to leave the FOH riser because I had no mix, I somehow managed to find someone – who could find someone, who found someone else – to go up to the AV booth and kill the open mic lines from the podium (which we found draped over one of the lighting multi-cables at the end of the night).

Somehow I managed to get through the rest of the show, never even remotely happy with what was coming out of the PA and not comforted by the fact that the audience was far too drunk to care.

All’s Well That Ends…?

Earlier in the day, while doing something at the stage, I’d noticed a low stage-like structure on the opposite side of the dance floor from the stage and thought to myself “I wonder what that’s for…?”

I’d forgotten about it with everything that subsequently happened, but then, as I was miserably starting to strike FOH, I heard a woman’s voice boom out “Her name was LOLA, she was a show girl!” – and there she was, “Lola” herself, fronting the dance band on the mystery stage with a rousing version of Barry Manilow’s “Copa Cabana”! This of course instantly brought her motive for “organizing” the whole gig into sharp focus.

As I continued to pack up, I decided that this whole debacle was bad enough that I owed Mr. Bennett an apology and vowed to find his room and go do just that. So, when the dance band took a break, I spotted Lola at the bar (where else?) and approached her. I said “Lola, I feel really badly about what happened here tonight and I’d like to apologize to Mr. Bennett, so if you can tell me what room he’s in…” And she looked at me blankly and replied in that unmistakable voice, “Who…are…you?”

I may have used some bad words then as I ripped the pass off my belt and read it to her, the gist of which was, “My name is Ike Zimbel, I’m with the sound company, and we we’ve been working together all (expletive deleted) day!”

Now that ought to be the end of the story, but when I got back to the FOH riser, a gentleman from the hotel who I hadn’t seen before was there and he proceeded to ask me questions like “What happened here tonight?” and “Did you do your homework before coming to our hotel?” and etc. This went back and forth for a bit and eventually he left me his card and said if we were ever in the hotel again for this type of job to be sure and contact him first.

A year or so later, one of our techs was going to be doing a show in that hotel so I handed him the card and said, “Dude, you’ve got to call this guy before you do that gig!” When I bumped into him a while later I asked him if he’d called, and he replied, “Yeah, I did, and the guy said he had nothing to do with shows!”

Study Hall Top Stories