A Steamboat turns about
Posted: 23 January 2005 at 15:13:00
It’s Sunday afternoon and we are en route back to our respective hometowns in Utah after Saturday night’s performance in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Our experience at Club Levelz in Steamboat Springs was very interesting.
Up until Saturday, Thom was half-joking that if we arrived in Steamboat Springs and nobody knew who we were or that we were playing there, he wouldn’t be completely surprised. He had been unable to get anyone from the club, the newspaper, or the local radio stations to return his calls. Our technical contact had not corresponded with Tim either. We had no idea what we were going into or whether or not the venue (or anyone else) had promoted the show at all. In retrospect, the venue also had no idea who they were going to be dealing with.
We had accommodations at a Super 8 motel. We only had the address and not the name, so I did a search online when we were in Vail and determined it was the Super 8. The Super 8 was “okay.” It was a mighty step down from the Holiday Inn in Vail. For one thing, there was no high-speed Internet access.
On Saturday at 6 p.m. we went up to Club Levelz to do our load-in and met Chad — the manager of the club along with Erik — our sound and lighting engineer for the evening.
Levelz is on the third floor of a building in a trendy resort area populated by bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and ski and snowboard stores. Chad told us it would be easiest if we loaded our gear into the club through the back door. The weather was considerably colder than it was in Vail and the ground and walkways were icy and slick. To make matters worse, none of the lights along the stairs or walkways on the rear side of the building worked so we had to load all our gear into the building in the dark while working to keep our footing on the patches of ice.
The inside of the club was as cold (or colder?) than outside. I don’t know if there was no heat and they were just planning on the crowd and the band to warm the room up or if they just took forever to heat the room.
The room was a good sized room, but was, in a word, filthy. I felt like I couldn’t touch anything in the room that wasn’t covered in a sticky film. The wood dance floor was worn, dirty, and looked as if it hadn’t been maintained in years.
The stage at Levelz is a good sized stage. The only bad thing about it is a pillar that goes up to the point of the roof at the front of the stage about two thirds the way across. There were two other pillars in the audience area that also went up to the point of the roof.
The lighting at Levelz was very exciting. They have multiple colored PAR cans on a truss beam across the back of the stage and in front of the stage. In addition, there are five intelligent scanners mounted on the rear truss with the PAR cans. The lighting console was several magnitudes better than what I had used at the Sandbar in Vail and certainly better than most we’ve used anywhere.
The screen situation was a difficult one. We rented a six by eight fastfold screen from a local hotel but because of the rear lighting truss being only about 8-10 feet above the stage floor and the drum riser going in the middle of the stage, we couldn’t hang the projection screen directly above and behind the band. We considered both sides of the stage and ended up putting the screen on an angle on stage right with the projector on the front-of-house stage-right speaker stack.
I was very frustrated as we tried to figure out how we were going to handle the screen and projector situation. This was compounded by the cold room, everyone else’s moods (bad, bad, bad), the less than stellar aesthetics of the venue, my low blood-sugar and growing hunger, and the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the venue staff. Plus, the ticket price for the show was five dollars (The Sandbar charged ten) and we weren’t getting paid a “good” guarantee for the show, presumably because it was our first time in Steamboat Springs and at Levelz. That gave me (and everyone else, I guess) less incentive to try to excel at my job. I think everyone in the band was feeling similarly.
Then the pizza came. The venue supplied us with food from the pizza restaurant downstairs. The pizza was okay (any pizza is “okay” it seems, but was a far cry from any food we had eaten in Vail.
After getting the screen situation solved and eating some food, I realized I didn’t have the microphone that I used to trigger the music visualizations on the screen. I asked around to see if anyone had an inexpensive consumer microphone and everyone looked at me as if I was asking them if they had an apple pie in their pocket I could eat.
After soundcheck, Thom and I drove down to the Wal*Mart in town — the only place open, I was assured, that might have a microphone. I found a cheap Labtec computer microphone there for eight or nine dollars and we grabbed some Oreos and headed back up to the club.
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At ten o’ clock, Chad started asking us if we were ready to start. Thom, Juli, Matt, and I were there and ready to go. We were the non-drinking members of the entourage and the drinkers were not back from heading back to the hotel. Fortunately, they arrived within five to ten minutes and I started up the intro music track. There was about 40 or 50 people there when we started Shine On You Crazy Diamond to go into our first set — the complete Wish You Were Here album.
The crowd responded and boy did they respond. They were dancing, hooting, screaming, and clapping. Some of them were coming up to the stage and giving band members high-fives repeatedly throughout the show. Some were obviously hardcore Pink Floyd fans. Most were in their 20s and 30s but there were some first-generation Pink Floyd fans in the audience singing along with the songs too.
After a couple of songs, one of the guys handling security near me got my attention and asked me, “How long have these guys been playing together?” I told him it had been about four years. He expressed his amazement and said they were playing so well, he thought they’d been doing this for a lot longer.
Erik, our light and sound engineer, assured me he knew a good deal of Pink Floyd songs, so I let him run lights. I was reluctant to do this because of how well I was able to handle the lights in Vail but I was so exasperated with the situation leading up to the show I didn’t really care anymore.
Erik turned out to be more than just “familiar” with the music of Pink Floyd — he was as big a fan as any of us. His lighting was better than anything I could have done juggling audio effects and projected visuals concurrently with lights. Erik’s lights were, by far, the best light show we’ve ever had. The only thing missing was fog (we ran out of fog juice in Vail).
After finishing the WYWH album, the band took a short break and I played a Daffy Duck cartoon on the screen and then our website promo. The band came back onstage and started the second set with Run Like Hell. There were close to 200 people in the audience by that point.
The music for the night was nearly spotless. Thom said he about wept during Us And Them because the vocal harmonies on the chorus were so sweet.
When the show was over (after an additional encore of Fearless slapped on at the last minute, the audience and venue employees mingled with the band congratulating them on a great performance. Chad, the club manager, promised us we’d be invited back soon and that he’d double the ticket price. He told us he’d take care of getting us a screen to use the next time. He had two more pizzas ordered up for the band after the show and told us to stop at the restaurant on the first floor in the morning for breakfast on his tab.
Chad commented that he rarely sticks around to watch a show, but he stuck around in the back of the room and watched the entire show.
The second batch of pizza was very good compared to the pizza we had earlier.
Erik came down from the sound and lighting booth and told just about everybody in the band that he had a great time and that everyone did a spectacular job. That’s when he told us what a big fan he was and admitted he was skeptical of the band when we arrived.
Erik said he was able to just set the sound on the mixing board and leave it while he ran lights. He said this attested to the band’s ability maintain their own consistent sound and levels on-stage.
All the venue employees helped haul the gear down the flights of stairs to the truck. It seemed like each of them couldn’t say enough good things about the band and wanted shake everyone’s hand.
This morning, we went to breakfast at the restaurant downstairs from Levelz. When we walked in, Bridget, the waitress, asked us, “Are you... Sons Of Nothing?” and then showed us to our table.
This was a kind of landmark for me. I mean, it’s not uncommon for the band to be called “the band“ or “the Pink Floyd band” but Bridget referred to us by name... and she didn’t have to look at a cheat sheet, cue card or anything.
We all had a delicious breakfast and we tipped Bridget twenty dollars, gave her a t-shirt and some stickers and got out of town.
Right now, it’s looking very likely we’ll be heading back to Colorado sometime in April.