#1644796 - 03/05/05 08:35 AM
SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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okay everyone, this is catharsis for me...i've put together a little story about organizing and managing the promotion of our show tonight at the Jefferson Center, a lengthy piece that is may or may not be interesting, but something I wanted to put together just to document the process....It's fairly long, so I'll post in installments....here's part one...sorry for the self-indulgence!
*******
Well, tonight’s the culmination of about 8 months worth of planning for our Supergig here in little ‘ol Roanoke, Virginia. And after spending the past two weeks in and out of Nuclear Imaging Centers and on treadmills getting stress tests, and then finally spending 2 hours in an Urgent Care center last night to get a shot of Prednisone for my voice, it’s all about to come together – For better or worse, we’ll see how it goes.
Mainly due to my boundless manic insanity, our tribute band decided last summer after playing our last “home town” gig in Roanoke to rent out the biggest, fanciest music hall in all of Southwest Virginia…A $9 million renovated high school from the 1920’s that has been rejuvenated with plenty of marble and velvet and normally plays host to groups such as Nickel Creek, Dr John, and Wynton Marsalis. It’s only a 1200 seat theatre, and obviously shows by those folks are always sold out, while the local chorale society and various charitable organizations get breaks on renting the place. Virtually no “rock” band and certainly no local act has ever performed there. But there really is no music scene in our area any more. The last club with an actual STAGE closed down last fall, and now the music scene in Roanoke is filled with bars that move aside a few tables and bring in bands and host open mic nights where they pass around a coffee can and play for tips. So with no hometown venue to host our show, and emboldened by playing for audiences of 500-800 in major metro areas like DC and Charlotte, we decided to bite the bullet and round up some $$$ and rent out the Jefferson Center.
The idea was simple enough. We normally get paid about a grand to do our show here in town, and end up paying about $300 for sound and light production, clearing about $100 per person. Definitely the least lucrative show we do, but it’s a no sweat gig with zero travel and a friendly home town audience. The idea was to pay the $1400 to rent out the hall, which already had the advertised “state of the art” sound system and lighting rig, and bump up the ticket price a little, and hey – we’d make back our money, probably clear what we’d normally clear, and have a great performance at a top-notch venue. Great idea in concept, absurdly naďve in reality.
You see, that “state of the art” sound system truly is state of the art for a 3 piece bluegrass group or children’s choir. For a rock and roll band with actual amplifiers and two (!) bass drums, it’s impossibly inadequate. And we forgot – Who’s going to take tickets, direct traffic, run the board, usher people to their seats and generally stand about in the balcony chewing gum and running the follow spots? Well, the Jefferson Center has an answer for that, at about $18/hour per warm body…Oh, and a minimum $25 burn fee for those follow spots as well…So the $1400 quickly becomes an estimated $2500 or more – depending on how long we play, how organized we are, and how many people attend. By the time all of these figures were presented to me, the idea had already seemed so ridiculous and insane, we knew we had to do it anyway.
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#1644797 - 03/05/05 10:34 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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Lee Flier
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Loc: Atlanta,GA,UNITED STATES
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Hi Jeremy,
I think this is a great idea, but I'd appreciate it if you'd keep it all in one thread. That is, post part II in this thread right underneath part 1. Otherwise 1) this forum will get cluttered with a whole bunch of threads on the same topic, and 2) People who haven't read the whole thing won't be able to follow along in subsequent posts without hunting around for all the past threads.
You should be able to just cut'n'paste part II as a reply to this thread and then I'll delete it.
Thanks! Looking forward to the rest of it!
Lee
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#1644798 - 03/05/05 01:07 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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dohhhhh6
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Sounds awesome! Just read #2! Keep it up man!
_________________________
In Skynyrd We Trust
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#1644799 - 03/05/05 01:56 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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NOTE: Here's part 2...As I mentioned, this is more a personal account of putting a show like this together and if it's of any interest I can post the remainder later (after the show!)...If not, take it for what it is and thanks for letting me vent...
************
We knew the key to success was above all else – Get people in the door. Roanoke is notoriously stubborn about getting off its ass and going out anywhere after dark. And we had the saturation factor to deal with as well – Why would people pay $15 to see a show that they could see virtually for free when we perform at the local AA baseball games or the requisite summer “after 5” shows on the market square? The answer was just to not play anywhere close to home for the better part of 8 months. And the only way to get people in the door was advertising. Which cost big bucks….Money that we didn’t have? No worry, however…We’d get sponsors! That’s it – With the right corporate sponsorships, we knew we’d get the entire Roanoke Valley to come out and support us.
The first on the short list was Clear Channel. They’d sponsored several outdoor shows for us in the past, and because we’ve spent $$ advertising with them before, we knew the scale of what we would need was way out of our budget. We’d have to basically sign over the performance to Clear Channel, who happened to own an 80’s friendly station in town that played Journey in pretty heavy rotation. It was the perfect fit…After a 3 minute phone conversation, the station’s program director was gung ho – “Let’s do it!” he said, then hung up the phone. It’d be another 6 months before he would return my calls again, and by then the format for that station would had evolved to be much heavier on Ashlee Simpson and Bowling For Soup than Journey and Hall and Oates.
Second, we knew we had to have some presence on television. I contacted the local monopoly cable company and asked about their cable advertising rates. The helpful sales rep put together a programming schedule based on our target demographics (females aged 35-45), and said we could get 300 spots on Food Network and HGTV for a little over a grand. Fantastic! (Cost for gig now approaching $3500). However, the cost didn’t include the actual commercial production. No problem – I’d edited enough in Vegas Video to know the ins and outs of producing a spot…I’d be able to handle that. The main task was finding the corporate sponsors to help out with paying for the spots.
The last frontier of media saturation would be print. Roanoke basically has one newspaper, and a monthly “entertainment” rag consisting more of ads than actual copy. With advertising rates close to $500 for one spot in either paper, it was out of the question to finance print ads. We’d have to get some press the old fashion way. So I contacted the editor of the entertainment section of our daily paper and pitched the idea. “Hey, we’re a local band that you’ve never covered because we play in town about 3x a year, and we’re spending $4000 to rent out the Jefferson Center just to have a place to play because the local music scene is so decrepit – How’s that for a story?” The editor said she’d think about it. Good enough for me.
With our media plan in place, we’d have to find sponsors – Luckily the guitarist in the band is also a mortgage broker, and knew lots of local agents, attorneys, and insurance agents. I knew the kennel where we kept our Basset Hound also had some new competition in town, so maybe they’d be keen on springing for some advertising. All in all, over the course of the past several months, we were able to raise enough to finance our TV ads and pay for incidental expenses here and there. We presented the idea to potential sponsors as a means to get their name out to our demographic, and we’d provide them with tickets and access to the show along with a little reception afterwards. Knowing most of the people who sponsored us was a big help, as approaching businesses cold for this sort of thing would have been fruitless.
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#1644800 - 03/05/05 01:57 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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thanks, lee...done and done!
i'll post the rest later this week after the show, etc...written my 1000 words for the day at least...
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#1644801 - 03/07/05 05:31 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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Picker
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Registered: 06/13/04
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Loc: A few miles fro the corner of ...
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Looking forward to hearing the end of the story. God bless you and your efforts, man.
_________________________
ROCK GUITARIST ABDUCTED BY ALIENS AND RETURNED TO EARTH!
Anal probe wouldn't fit past his head!
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#1644803 - 03/07/05 01:03 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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GTRBass
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Registered: 12/03/03
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Loc: Los Angeles, Ca
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Thanks for this. I for one would like to hear more.
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#1644804 - 03/07/05 01:50 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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strat0124
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Registered: 04/03/01
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Yo X, now that theres no hockey in Roanoke, whats taken the slack? I've only played your town once at the Awful Arthurs of all places, great crowd and cool waitstaff. I live in Amherst now........culture shock from moving from Norfolk (Ghent).
_________________________
Down like a dollar comin up against a yen, doin pretty good for the shape I'm in
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#1644805 - 03/07/05 05:40 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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hey all, my brain is fried from trying to mix the super-overdriven board mix of saturday's show with the super screechy FOH mix of our camera man's mic in order to get something to put to our video...
there's definitely more to come, glad to know it's of interest...
hey geenard, since hockey's left town i think the roanoke basketball team has taken up a little of the slack (the nba development league). i haven't been to a game but we are performing after a game at the end of the month, so it'll be interesting to see what the response is...
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#1644806 - 03/12/05 10:11 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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So the good news was we raised enough money through sponsorships to pay for the cable tv ads…Luckily I was able to produce the commercial on vegas video using clips from old footage and some nifty software called “Magic Bullet Movie Looks” that comes bundled with Vegas….Not to get geeky here, but it’s a cool plug-in that’s basically a color-corrector with presets like “War Epic” or “Neo” to match different movie looks and styles. Looked pretty good (aside from the consumer level video we had to use), but we needed a voiceover! Sign #23 that maybe something wasn’t kosher with the Clear Channel folks. Program Director dude, who had been so eager to help and lend his on-air talent to our voiceover commercial was still not returning calls. In fact, now we’re about 3 weeks before show time. I’ve got nothing on the radio, and no viable TV commercial. I’ve spent $75 in full-color posters that have been summarily torn down and replaced over the past several weeks at every Kroger and Sheetz gas station within a 60 mile radius. I’ve also got $1750 in sponsorship money from all these good people expecting to see their names on the television in the coming weeks. So the best I can do at this point is slip into my best uberdeejay mode and attempt the voiceover myself (with a little help from Waves pitch shifting software). It sounds like a monster truck jam. Good enough for basic cable, I guess.
At this point I still haven’t heard from Clear Channel. I burn an audio track from the 30 second spot and grab 10 CDs and swing by the station. I introduce myself to the station manager and inform him our deal – They are to give away 10 pairs of tickets for the next 2 weeks, along with our CD…here’s our commercial spot. I haven’t heard from program director “Steve,” but your drivetime dude is also supposed to emcee the show. Let me know if you have any questions! Finally that afternoon Steve calls me back. No explanation as to why he’s ducked me for 3 weeks, but says we’re cool and everything’s a go!
In the real world, I work a 50 hour+ week as a sales rep for a freight company. I have a territory and an expense account, and I’m expected to entertain customers, manage them, and replace them when they get fed up with us (or find a cheaper carrier). It’s a business where people will use carriers based on a .05 difference in rates, and when stuff goes missing, turns up damaged, or gets reweighed and upcharged (yes, we love our customers), my cell phone is usually ringing. So as all of this is going on, I’ve got my 2 largest customers fed up with my company. I’ve got people calling me throughout the day looking for lost or damaged freight. I begin to feel a constant tightening in my chest as I drive throughout southwest virginia alternating between customer’s phone calls and bandmember’s phone calls, and I wonder how much either one of these endeavors is suffering because of the other. After about a week, the tightening doesn’t go away, and finally on Sunday, two weeks before the show, I have an explosive pain in my head that radiates down my torso and extremeties. It won’t go away and it hurts like a bitch.
That Sunday at practice, we decide to have both our keyboard players onstage at the show. Our first keyboard player, who is absolutely one of the best pianists, keyboard players, and musicians I’ve ever worked with, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis about a year and half ago. During one of the first and only flareups he had, we had to find a sub player that knew all of Journey’s material and could sing backup and be flexible enough to work with us based on player #1’s schedule. After searching high and low and dealing with a lot of the idiosyncrasies that come with keyboard players (sorry guys), we finally found a guy right under our noses – He was a driver for my company…He loved Journey, and knew a lot of the material. He wasn’t a keyboard player per se, but one of those “jack of all trade” musicians who could play a little of everything. Over the course of the next year, he got very good at playing the Journey material, and invested a lot of money in new equipment as well. Unfortunately, every time he went 3 or 4 months without playing, we would have to spend 2-3 weeks practicing with him to get him back up to speed. Finally we just decided it was fair to both players to just alternate between the two guys. That way he was constantly in practice, and we were not shortchanging anyone by putting them on standby for months on end.
So the decision was made on Sunday, 13 days before the show, to have both players onstage. Alternating between melody lines and leads. Good news = amazing vocal coverage. Bad news = 7 players on stage with 2 keyboard players doubling up most of the material usually doesn’t make for the best stage volume…Oh, and how about a seven way split of the take? We decided since player #1 contributed 2 shows worth of money to finance the performance and player #2 contributed 1 show worth of money, we’d do a 6 way split with both players splitting their take 60/40. Fair enough. Then my head exploded and I spent most of the next week in MRI machines, on treadmills, getting injected with dye and generally feeling like enough was enough.
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#1644807 - 03/12/05 11:52 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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Part IV - Think I'll post the other 2 segments later this week...again, sorry for all the exposition - Just getting this out there, and if it's of any interest or help, then thanks for reading!
********************
So I’m sitting on a tiny little table for 30 minutes with radioactive dye running through my veins and a huge machine straight out of The Matrix is slowly taking little pictures of my heart. My cell phone, sitting on a file cabinet in the room, is ringing off the hook. When I finally get out of there and check my messages, there’s one from the girl who runs production and sound for the hall we’re playing at. I get in touch with her on the way back to the office. It appears the sound system in the hall is terribly inadequate for our purposes. She’d gotten my stage plot and input list, and it doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to do anything in there without bringing in at least 2 stacks and a huge subwoofer. She says what she can do is just put vocals through the house PA and let us mix using our stage volume from front of house. This is unacceptable. While we’re used to seeing acts like Bruce Hornsby and the Tower Of Power performing at this venue, it never occurred to us that they may contract out their backline and production…Duh…So the solution is to bring in racks and stacks from their production company at another $300. Hell, what’s another $300. We’d bring a few of our monitors for side fills and the drummer, and make it a little easier on us.
I’m getting phone calls every day from the band members now asking if I’m feeling okay. The tests they’ve run don’t say anything except that I must be under too much stress. And my liver enzymes are out of whack and I can’t have a beer anymore or eat anything with too much sugar or fat. This makes my wife happy. And it will make it easier to lose my layer of winter blubber I build up between Thanksgiving and Easter. One of the band members wants to rent a reception room at a local convention center for sponsors and friends after the show. Could I get a better deal since I know the venue? No problem. Another person calls me saying the venue’s website isn’t selling kid’s tickets like we had discussed. No problem. I call my insurance company, who was supposed to write us an event policy ($1 million policy - gee, thanks Great White), and says they have no idea what I’m talking about. The manager at the Jefferson Center is calling saying he needs my rider immediately. Get in touch with another insurance company and get the policy written for $300…No problem.
A couple of positive things are happening though…My head is feeling a little better since I started caring less about things. My wife also decided to give me an early birthday present – A Nuemann KMS 105 handheld mic…She found an amazing deal on a new one out of Michigan, and it will be here in time for the show! Excellent. I’ll be moving up from my Shure Beta 57A. Also, the newspaper dude finally called me back and it looks like we’ll be getting some press for the show. We talk for about an hour, mostly about the sorry state of the music industry in our little corner of the world, and though I’m in a Journey tribute band and he is in a navel-gazing emo band, we find common ground our disappointment with the local status quo and he’s going to do everything he can to help us promote the show. For all the flack Journey ever got as a corporate machine, it’s ironic that 20 years later, as a tribute band we are seen as a fringe act on the sidelines of a music industry that has consolidated and become more corporate and homogenous than anyone could have predicted…To think that Journey was raked over the coals in 1982 for daring to allow Budweiser to sponsor their tour…Well, okay…The commercials were cheesy and laughable but so was everything back then.
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#1644808 - 03/12/05 12:19 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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Geekgurl
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Wow, Jeremey. I'm glad you are feeling better ... it's a lot to pull together, and I hope it comes together for you. I applaud your "stick-to-it-iveness" ... Update us whenever you have time and feel it's prudent.
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#1644809 - 03/25/05 06:31 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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well, throwing caution to the wind, i guess i should follow through and finish this misguided thread. i thought it may have had some interest for folks, but upon reflection it maybe seems like just too much dirty laundry. but never let it be said i didn't finish anything. so throwing prudence to the wind, here's the rest of my story. anyone know a good editor?
*****************
The Thursday before the show, the Roanoke Times features our story on the cover of their weekly entertainment pullout section. An Illustrator-type rendition of Steve Perry with mullet and leopard skin shirt is on the cover with the title “Don’t Stop Believin’ – Journey Tribute Band Wants ‘Open Arms’ At The Jefferson Center.” Sweet – The media trifecta is complete. Now our ads are all over cable advertising, we’ve got the cover of the weekly entertainment rag, and their talking us up all over the radio…Or…We thought they were…Come to think of it, we hadn’t heard a single thing from the radio except a few runs of the spot I provided them. Two days before the show and I’m not sure they’ve given out a single ticket yet. They certainly hadn’t been talking it up on the drivetime programs. I can’t tell you how much Ashlee Simpson, Kelly Clarkson, and Rob Thomas I’d had to wait through to see if they were talking up the show. Keep in mind, this was a two way agreement…Certainly we had little to offer Clear Channel, but by the same token, we had put their station name and logo all over TV and our posters. Business is business, and why agree to something without following through? After calling and leaving another message with the program director, I heard the dee jay 20 minutes later say that the 8th caller would get tickets to the “Frontiers show this weekend – A Journey cover band…If you like Journey, you should go see this show!”
After all was said and done, the station gave away 8 tickets. The emcee that was supposed to show up did not make the show. This was the same dude I heard the day before the show saying we were “hilarious” and “actually thought we were Journey,” then played a bit of us performing “Don’t Stop Believin’” and poked a little more fun at us. Again, I can understand being a dee jay and goofing on us because Journey isn’t hip since they changed formats, but…a deal is a deal, right? Believe it or not, this past Monday (right after our show) the station changed formats again from “Magic FM” to “THE BULL COUNTRY!!!” So I can’t say I blame anyone at the station for how things turned out.
So it’s the Friday before the show. We’ve got the paper coverage. We’ve got the radio coverage. We’ve got television coverage and we’ve even got insurance coverage. Everything seems to be in place. I delegated the reception room to a couple other band members, and we are ready for the show. The only problem was I had no voice.
In 3 years of doing this show, I’ve never had throat problems. The first 2 years we did the show I was still a smoker. Aside from some endurance issues and the fact that my voice sounded like crap at the end of the night, even that never really stopped me from being able to perform. But having not smoked for a little over a year and with a new KMS 105 microphone, I found myself with no voice three days before the show. I couldn’t overdose on Ibuprofen due to my liver problems. I had to talk all day long in my day job. All I could do was go on voice rest when I got home at night and drink loads of Throat Soother tea (Slippery Elm Bark is the trick). With about 30 hours before the show and still no voice, I had to take the nuclear option. 6 PM Friday. Urgent Care Center. Begging the doc in the box for a shot of Prednisone. For you non-singers out there, you should know that the steroid Prednisone is the last ditch savior of the throat and voice. Get it early enough and it will clear you right up. But you are pumping your body with loads of steroids, which will plump you up and make you feel like shit. No real choice. After waiting for 2 hours, we finally leave the pharmacy around 9 PM and get home to bed.
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#1644810 - 03/25/05 06:32 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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x factor music
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Well, after all of the buildup, the day of the show is actually pretty uneventful. The wife’s parents and aunts and uncles are in town, and so we escort them around to the local attractions. Still not talking very much. Still choking down tea and Prednisone. Spend 30 minutes in the shower going through scales and warm ups. Pack everything up and at 5 o’clock take the wife and show up for load in. From the amount of stuff we’ve got (a seven piece band at this point), you’d think we were Metallica. The venue staff is probably a little amused, but we get everything loaded in and we’ve got two hours to set up and soundcheck before doors open at 7. We had everyone in the band bring along a roadie to help with load out so we can get out of the venue early enough. We’ve got a two hour show to do, with no break, and can’t afford to spend 30 minutes afterwards bullshitting with folks while our equipment sits onstage. As a result of our crew, there’s probably 30 people running around on stage loading and getting things set. What normally takes 40 minutes or so streches into an hour and now some of the guys in the band are having problems with power. Incessant humming from the guitar amp. A constant whine from one of the keyboard rigs. Well, it can’t be bad power, right – I mean this is a $9 million hall with about $300,000 worth of PA between the stage and the booth!
Anyway, we finally get set. Groups of our crew are troubleshooting the offending rigs. We can’t use our extra monitors because the FOH girl didn’t have speaker cables. “You brought the monitors, where’s your cables,” she says. So we’ve got about 20 minutes before the doors open. We’ve got 4 monitor mixes, consisting of 4 EAW LA-12s across the front of the stage, and the sound person is standing in front of each mic going “Hey one, two, hey one…Could you take out a little of the 8k?” We haven’t even checked the drums yet, we’ve got 20 minutes to go, and she’s dialing frequencies out of the background vocal monitors. Finally we get cranked up…Time for one song, and the minute I stand more than 5 feet away from my monitors I lose everything. The sound onstage is horrible, and all I can think is that I’ve got 2 hours to perform and 8 hours ago I had no voice. There’s a live mic on a stand just sitting in the middle of the drum riser, pointing at the ceiling. Wasn’t on my input list. It’s just there. People start opening doors and coming into the hall. Too late. We got to get offstage. One of the guitar players is talking about switching out amps…I notice the mic on the rhythm guitar isn’t even pointing at the amp…Was it even in the mix? No matter - No more soundcheck. I jump in the shower and start doing scales again.
Finally at 8 PM, there’s no deejay, no emcee. The guy we were paying a couple hundred bucks to video the show with his Canon XLII doesn’t have the right cables to get a board mix, so he’ll have to use the camera mic. My wife freaks out worrying that halfway through the second song my voice will be gone. But it’s showtime, so what can you do - We just send the band out onto the stage to an old intro CD we had. I come out on stage during the opening number and that’s that.
All in all, we had a great show. We played for 2 and a half hours straight. Once my voice got warmed up after about 3 songs, it found its zone and stayed there. Besides being horribly out of shape and almost passing out a couple of times, things health-wise were fine. Everyone played great, and although we had many comments about the FOH sound being fairly bad, we had just as many saying it sounded fine. I am extremely thankful for that Neumann – I didn’t push half as much as I probably would have, and it was just amazing the nuance and expression it is able to pull out of a performance. Now we’ve got some fantastic video, and a little bit more credibility locally from all our efforts.
Did we make any money? Well, we didn’t end up writing anybody checks at the end of the night. We sold just under 350 tickets, and with all the entourage in place, the hall looked surprisingly full. Aside from the Clear Channel debacle, all of our sponsors seem happy to have been a part of it. I wish I could say there was some great revelation through this experience. There really wasn’t, aside from the experience and knowledge gained from promoting and producing a show like this completely from scratch. Would we do it again? Probably – But I think one of the things we learned was that it is easy to get caught up in the idea of playing a certain venue or for a certain crowd…That the bottom line is really our show, and when it comes down to it, the performance is really what people are going to remember, not the marble atrium or velvet seat cushions. I truly believe that given the same amount of promotion and efforts for the show, we could have been just as successful renting out a ballroom and bringing in our own production for thousands less.
But it was a great learning experience, and I’m glad it’s over. Now if only I could have a beer.
*************
The end....
Video clips of our performance can be seen at
http://www.journeytributeband.com
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#1644811 - 03/26/05 01:46 AM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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Geekgurl
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Glad you made it out alive, Jeremy. The sound check sounded horrifically familiar me, bringing back memories of one out-of-town gig I did a couple of years ago (Just imagine a belligerent conguero -- NOT from my band -- yelling at the FOH guy "We all have to make sacrifices!" because there's not enough mics to go around and God knows how many he had absconded for his rig at that point) .. everything from the motel rooms to the soundcheck was screwed. But ya get thru it, dontcha?
You're certainly right that people are going to remember the performance first and foremost, but as I read this I'm wondering if it generated any leads, for future gigs for you guys ... at least lots more names on your mailing list?
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#1644812 - 03/26/05 05:11 PM
Re: SuperGig From Hell Part I
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Rim
MP Hall of Fame Member
Registered: 02/21/02
Posts: 2451
Loc: Alexandria,VA,US
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Thanks for sharing and I'm glad it turned out well.
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