Tough Day At The Ofice

Nagoya, today, the second day. We launched from Tokyo on a bullet train and blew into town just in time to hit the gig.

It's a very tough room for all kinds of reasons not necessarily observable at a glance. The audio guys have a hell of a time of of it, not least because Mark -- our FOH engineer -- is situated right next to me up in the ceiling of the place, so he can't really hear what's bouncing around in a very lively room. At least he can bloody see, though, which is better than I can say. I look out from my desk through a very narrow notch between my spotlight operator -- unfelicitously placed right straight in my sightline to the stage -- and a perforated metal screen blocking my view of nearly everything stage-right of center. I get to see about twenty percent of the stage without craning around for a peep through various cracks in all the visual blockage. Whoever laid this out was not a lighting director.

They hung a goodly number of instruments in the place, but all the glass should be replaced. PAR 64's are mounted with narrow bulbs, throwing an average of about fourteen feet: this not enough throw for them to spread their beams and really go to work. They should be re-done with wides, or mediums at least. What all this means is that the focus is a game of very few inches. Practical implications arose during the show when Daniel stepped out from his keyboard for one of his (newly added) acoustic guitar bits. During the afternoon, I had asked him where he would stand for these parts, and placed a special-pool right there for him. Well, when that cue rolled up, I ran the fader faithfully, knowing that it wouldn't work: he wasn't anywhere near that mark. He wandered around for a while, near enough to Regina's special that I tried that and actually caught him for a while, but he spent most of the time half in and out of anything I could think of in which to catch him.

During dinner, I asked him, "Is this the first time you've ever worked under lights?" He half-groaned and laughed a bit, and then explained to me that he was chasing his sound around the stage: what he was hearing was hardly enough to know what he was doing, and everything bouncing back at him from the room only compounded the confusion, to the point that, at one point, he only discovered that he was a half-measure behind the rest of the band after the fact and couldn't hear it.

"Ah," I said, "I get it. Thank you for telling me that. I really could not understand who on earth would deliberately stand half-in and half-out of a leko pool, and that's what it looked like you were doing." Production notes went around, and we're working it all out.

But that's what it went like all day yesterday. Everybody was tired as hell, teeth on edge, and trying to be cool with each other throughout the fight. All day.

I don't really know what happened, but the second show just rolled into place: Peabo-san threw down an acoustic guitar solo in Sade's "King Of Sorrows" that would have been worth recording. It all got phat, just like that. Like I said: I don't know why. Sometimes, it's like that: just magic. Over it, we trailed home like battle survivors.

One more night here, tonight. Osaka, tomorrow, with a day off. Excellent. We'll roll into the Hilton, and there is a superb bakery in the train station in the basement. I like the Osaka Hilton, and it'll be good to relax.