Load In Montage Mountain.... sounds mysterious like Escape from Montage Mountain ... like some Nancy Drew Mystery ... rather like a nitemare on Montage Sreet for this 8am load in.
After remembering the beer ::yay:: cooler, ice, and 2 fold out chairs, I forgot my coffee. This is 7:30 am folks! Working at Montage Mountain is kind of like going camping since you're usually there 18 plus hours. So feel bad for me OK? THis day was about to get worse. About 8:15, while unloading the first of this 10 truck show, stage manager comes over and says "you six, go see Rick in electrics". WAIT A MINUTE...electrics I thought, that's lighting! I'm That Sound Dude!
Right away the word feeder was mentioned. Now don't get me wrong I love cable, I pamper cable but, like most stage hands, the word feeder gives us that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs like finding a human bone at the cabin your camping in.
Ok I thought, I'll do the feeder and then they'll send me back to the trucks and I'll get on the sound crew. Not!!! Rick the lighting road guy who was surprisingly easy to work with, had a bit of a problem remembering names. Since Freeze and Raphael were prolly different enough to be easily remembered, we turned out to be his all day cable guys. Socopex hell boys and girls, soco-hell.
Show Call Deck Hand. The stage was set and the crowd filtered in. With the threat of rain, ppl with lawn seats began breaking out the rain coats as Cheap Trick prepared to mount the stage. For some great pics and a link to Ricks guitars see my Heart - what's in Nancy's box blog from last year. Here is a new addition to the collection...
...namely "Truthiness" which I believe is from The Colbert Report. Cheap Trick recorded the theme track from that show.
Another big wowee was Ricky Rockets drumkit here...
Ricky, who has his own custom drum company, has one of the nicest modern kits I've seen. For more information about Rocket Custom drums, click
HERE
Load out Requested - back to Rick in lighting, prolly bc my name is ez to remember, to pull up all that heavy soco we laid out during load in. I'm telling them my name is Bob from now on. Finally after about a 2 1/2 hour load out and 18 hours on the mountain, the last truck closed it's doors. It was a night off for the road crew and miller time for the local crew. Another cold and foggy June evening awaited us but we didn't care, we had cold beer and a comfy fold out chair. Ahhhhh....
Note Worthy Slingers back!!!! It's going to be a crazy summer!