Editor’s Note

There has been an old Jackson Browne song going through my head lately called “The Road and the Sky.” One of the verses goes like this:

Now can you see those storm clouds gathering up ahead?
They’re going to wash this planet clean like the Bible said
Now you can hold on steady and try to be ready but everybody’s gonna get wet
Don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet

Recent conversations that play into the current economic climate affecting our industry

First, a conversation with a soundco owner in the Midwest who said he was busy but broke. “Not a box or an amp in the shop — everything is rented. But cash flow is down significantly.” As we talked we figured out that clients are not paying as quickly as he would like and that “some checks are better than others.”

I got a couple of reminders in the past weeks about just how small a business this is and the importance of personal connections. But this time there was a twist. First, one is more music-oriented. As I have written about before, I am one of those stupid guys who refuse to give up playing music in addition to magazines and Web stuff and the occasional audio gig.

You may notice a small change on the cover of this issue of FOH. Where it used to say “The News Magazine for Live Sound” it now says “People. Production. Gear. Gigs.” I know it seems like a small thing, but it speaks volumes about the role of news in print media and the future of FOH magazine.

So, it’s a Friday late afternoon and I am trying like hell to get access to the Journey/Heart/Cheap Trick show in town. I figured we already had interviews with the crews for Boston and Styx in the can and we could do a real classic rock extravaganza. But, of course, me being me, I was trying to do this at about 4:30 p.m. on show day. A couple of friends in the biz with ties to a couple of the acts tried mightily (a big tip of the hat to Dave Shadoan and Greg DeTogne), but it was just too late to make it happen.

When the first draft of the piece in this issue of FOH on the events surrounding the recent visit by the Pope came across my desk, I freaked out just a little.

Not because the writer had included frickin’ lighting info, but more because there was a crew list attached that was about three-pages long and included everyone who had even thought about working the gigs.

A friend of mine has a T-shirt that reads, “People say I have ADD, but they just don’t understand. Oh, look! A chicken!” It has become a kind of shorthand in my very nonlinear-thinking family. Kind of a warning that someone is about to go off in a seemingly totally unrelated direction. Now it only seems unrelated. Truth is that if you sit down and really analyze the situation, it is something like this: Something the other person said reminded me of something else, which reminded me that I had forgotten to do something I was supposed to do, which made me think of this thing I need to tell the other person. We used to just sound nuts. Now one of us will say, “there’s a chicken.” And the rest of us know we are about to go nonlinear.

It’s really easy to tell when someone really cares about what they do. When I am out on gigs I see it all the time. The funny thing is that the bigger the gig, the more likely you are to find at least a few people who just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the gig. It is just a paycheck.

Don’t know why really, but the coverage in this issue of the recent Led Zeppelin show caused a bit of an “I remember when” kind of nostalgia among most everyone I talked to about it. Love ‘em (me) or hate ‘em (my wife), you could not ignore them. Yes, they were horrendous live at times, but just like the generation of rockers who came up in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and point to seeing Elvis or The Beatles as their “I wanna play guitar” moment, an awful lot of next-generation players point to Zep as their reason for doing what they do. 

A good friend of mine — not in this business — has recently started a new line of work that requires a high level of organization. This guy is smart and talented and — like me — less than organized.