Gig Report: Blowfly Live!

[marty lester]

so time for another potentially boring gig report...this time, it was for 2 shows featuring Blowfly, the 70 year old rap pioneer (among other things)...for a shoot for an upcoming documentary on the man himself.

night 1 was at Emo's here in Austin. as i was setting up my rig, another guy comes in w/ a similar road-case and proclaims that he's there to record the show for a documentary. so naturally, i'm curious...did the film-maker double book audio crews? it turns out the opening band was doing the exact same thing...shooting/recording their show for a documentary.

after the panic subsides, the other audio dude starts trying to figure out just how the hell we're going to manage this...since i've already got my splitter in-place and there's no way i'm going to pull my leads now. well, i turn into a "hero" because i told him that since i have a 3-way splitter, if he's got the cables he can take my 3rd split for his rig and i'll keep my split and FOH split in-tact. suffice it to say, he was happy. i just had to help him manage phantom powers for his (well, my) room mics, etc.

long story short, the show was very strange but it went pretty well. i was only
moderately jealous of his rig 'cause he had better mic pres than i did. oh well...

night 2 was at a place called "The Rock Bottom Tattoo Bar" in San Antonio. we got there to find quite an interesting venue...in a divey kind of way...with the sound board
in a separated back-room with a hole cut into the wall so the FOH guy could see/hear
what was going on and mix. we set up in the back room w/ him and took our split right from the snake that went into his FOH console. the only really weird thing
about this set-up is that there was the biggest BBQ tub that i've ever seen permanently installed in the back room right next to us. fortunately, it was inactive, so it wasn't super hot in the back room. ah, the glamor of location recording...

both nights were recorded to my HD24XR rig (and now my 2nd HD24 back-up unit) using my Presonus Digimax 96 mic pres. it is nice going analog out of the mic pres to unit 1, and lightpipe out of the mic pres to unit 2. i still want better mic pres though...just have to scratch my head about how to get analog audio to both units (hello patch-bay i guess).

now for the silly part of this email. we were getting punchy by the end of night 2, so we decided to write some goofy location recording haikus to keep ourselves awake and amused. the submissions are from my 2 assistants and me.

"thought disco had died
not in San Antonio
least it ain't too loud"

"dirty backroom sucks
i think i might burn alive
re-wire the building"

"in a shit-ball club
did that ****** spill a beer?
i should go sell shoes"

*** no offense intended to Emos or Rock Bottom...we were just goofing on the clubs. we had a great time at both places and everyone was really nice.

here's a few bonus pix...note in the first one the dueling rigs. mine is the black one on the left.

[Remoteness]

I love the dueling rigs picture.
Too bad you weren't also in the photo.
That would have been awesome...

The engineers; the gear; the place where it all happened!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Believe it or not, I had a similar situation happen to me on this crazy gospel gig, but the client actually hired two set-ups for the same session.

I guess he wanted to make sure that someone will show up to his gig.
The differences was we showed up with TBM around 12noon for a 4pm sound check and 7:30pm doors. The "back up" cats that showed up to do the same recording didn't arrive until we were half way through sound check; telling me that they were hired to do the recording and that he was the record producer of the date. I said, "where's your gear?" He replyed, "It's in the trunk of my car."

It was a pretty funny scene to say the least.

So, it ended up that these dudes were authorized (by my client) to take control of the master hard drives at the end of the night. I told them that they must back up the drives before they do anything with them because we were going to wipe the drives in about two weeks or so...

Months later I get a call from the client; he asked me if I had the masters after he already knew the masters were released to that dynamic duo. I said, as you already know your producer has the masters. My client replied that they messed up the tracks and were holding the media as ransom.

As you can imagine nothing ever came of that recording.

Man, you cannot make this stuff up -- crazy, right!?

Sorry bro, I didn't mean to hi-jack your thread.

[marty lester]

Originally Posted by Remoteness

I love the dueling rigs picture.
Too bad you weren't also in the photo.
That would have been awesome...

Man, you cannot make this stuff up -- crazy, right!?

Sorry bro, I didn't mean to hi-jack your thread.

actually, thanks for the hi-jack. i initially started writing this with the
intention of making it a "what a world we've chosen for ourselves..." kind
of thread, so your posting is exactly appropriate.

great story Steve.

m.