Initially she completely blew him off, before coming back to apologize, and telling him sound guys were always trying to get the shirt from her.
“I said, I don’t want your shirt, I want a job.” After explaining that she was dating one of the company’s owners, the waitress gave Yakabuski her number to follow up. And follow up he did, repeatedly; “I called three or four times a month about passing on my resume. I just kept bugging her.”
Finally Yakabuski got a call from dB to work Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s 1986 Summerfest. The chance meeting, and the path it set him on involved a bit of luck, he says, but that luck came on the heels of a fair bit of perseverance.
Already, he explains, he’d sent feelers out to every Canadian-based audio concern, with no response.
That initial gig with dB soon led to more festival work and a tour with John Waite. Still, for the next four years he continued to return to Canada to fill in his schedule between US gigs. After getting his big break as monitor tech for Aerosmith in 1990, however, he never left.
“I got on a good roll,” he says, a roll that led first to shows with Poison, through TASCTASCO, and soon after to the gig Yakabuski is most often associated with, Van Halen. “I did one tour on monitors. The next tour, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, I did Front of House.”
Since then, he has worked for some of the biggest names in music across a wide variety of genres; Jon Secada, Ted Nugent and Extreme between Van Halen tours in 1994 alone; as well as the likes of Gin Blossoms, Paul Anka, Whitesnake, Julio Iglesias, Matchbox Twenty, and many others.
A long time association with Nettwerk Management’s Dan Fraser – who he’d met during his days touring the BC club scene – led to one of his later, equally high profile gigs. For years the two had discussed Yakabuski coming on to work a Nettwerk act.
“It was just a matter of finding the right artist,” he says. The opportunity finally came along in 2003, with the right artist turning out to be Avril Lavigne.