The Rider Rant

Chris Chapman

Chris Chapman

Active Member
We've all been there before. A Road Show is coming in. The fun of doing the Advance work on a tour. The fun bonus fun of getting an advance light plot and making it work. And then being able to execute everything so the Tour is happy, and your audience enjoys the show.

I had a little bit of a rough one yesterday. The LD wasn't on the tour, and he was usually the Board Op. The lighting design was based on a larger cast, and featured specials specifically for that cast. The Tour cast was fluctuating in size as well, so not a lot of help on that. "Here's a two minute video of the opening number. Make it look like that." So we struggle to get a compromise on the design with this epic quote from the Designer: "The show is good enough that you can run it under worklights and your audience will love it. Make it look nice."

So the LD signs off basically on me doing whatever I want with his show. He sends me a cue list for general ideas on looks and I'm on my own. OK. That's actually pretty cool, but I'm worried because I'm still running the show blind. We hang a modified version of his plot, and prep the stage with platforming as specified in the rider and focus off of that. I get in a quick pass on looks before they load in.

Tour shows up for load in. "Oh, this setup is terrific" they say. Except "We need to move it all downstage six feet." Half of the light plot goes right into the trash. We do an emergency refocus DURING dinner break.

All in all it turned out OK, but as being the local guy, I'm pretty sick of Tour Riders that aren't based on reality and PM's coming in and trashing a days work. I totally understand why Tour have riders and the need for it. But can't we get some level of compromise and getting riders written that actually reflect the show on tour? Not the first time this has happened. I had one show that had a VERY specific audio package that we ended up renting a good chunk of, and then they walked in the door and announced they weren't going to use ANY of that gear.

End rant. Big Sigh. Need to repaint my show deck for now for next weeks rental gig. Joy.
 
We (I) play a bit of hardball when I run into this type of situation - which is frequently. It's either YOUR design, adapted by the company to the house (a requirement of the contract) OR it's MY adaptation and at that point what the company wants is secondary to when I know I can give them in the time allotted. Pretty much EVERY company that is less proficient or professional at the decision process will be passive/aggressive in the process. I've learned to deal with it.

Our house has a very deep pit area and for a lot events that desire to be close to the audience, playing the pit is important but sometimes a problem if they have lighting or scenic requirements needing the rigging or overhead electrics. Thus a decision needs to be made immediately (or in advance) as to where the show is living onstage. As well, I'm focusing first thing in order to get the deck clear ASAP for load in and audio setup. If the company is not here prior to my starting a focus, they are getting the focus we set and we make it clear that we probably do not have time to change it. Our PM, GM and Managing Director as well will play hardball with a company so they understand that if they need something changed due to a companies inadequacies and it requires working through a meal break, then it comes out of the companies check.

We also spend a lot of time in prior conversation and e-mail exchanges attempting to establish in advance, where a company is playing onstage and how much time is required, or allocated, to make sure there are fewer surprises when they roll in the door. But there are always surprises and it's the nature of the business.
 
It is rather simple in our space, use the rep plot or go somewhere else. We don't have time to re-hang and refocus for every show. If the 40 specials we have in the air don't work for you, then you have bigger issues. Secondarly, like @SteveB our general rule is we either light the show how we see fit or you spoon feed it to us exactly as you want it and we'll hit go when told. Getting in a gray area never works well. I suggest you avoid that at all costs. We are not apart of your creative team. We can be creative, but my guys are not paid to be your designer to fulfill your exact vision. If you want that, you need to pay them a separate design fee.

As far as the focus before they get there thing goes, we never do that. Even with the music stuff we wait to focus specials until the show is mostly in. It means bounce focusing everything, but at least you only have to focus once.
 
porkchop said:
I mean if they're the ones paying for the time/rental shouldn't they be able to decide they're going to change it?
Click to expand...

In my example, I was unspecific in describing a scenario where we (the theater or in-house promoter) is paying the artist.

In a rental, they can do whatever they want if time allows, within limits and according to the contract, including completely stripping the electrics and soft good hang. They are paying for the restore, so it's up to the person paying the bills.

I will not however, design their show for them with the "help" from the LD they chose not to hire, or with the "help of the PM or whomever. I will provide a free design, but I have been known to tell an artistic director (whom opted to cancel his LD the day before the event) that it's my design and I like the look so too bad. I have also set the Ion into lockout while an LD was sitting at the desk programming subs and we were needing to take a dinner break. This was a show where the promoter paid for a 10AM load-in time with the artist and tech staff choosing to arrive at 3PM (we twiddled thumbs for 5 hrs.), then proceed to attempt to load in and setup scenery all the while needing to select, patch, color and focus roughly 150 units, plus program, all before a 6PM dinner call for a 7PM show. At 6:05 my PM pulled the plug on the programming.
 
"We need to re-hang the plot."

OK. We'll need $XX for the extra labor. Will that be cash or cash?
 
porkchop said:
I mean if they're the ones paying for the time/rental shouldn't they be able to decide they're going to change it?
Click to expand...

No. There are time/gear/space/budget/crew considerations. Just because the road guy didn't give all the info to the house guy, doesn't mean you get to show up and make people work over their breaks, etc....

I had a well known R&B act from Motown-Philly show up at my venue once. The stage was 40 wide and 25 deep. The pipes were dead hung at 20 feet off the deck. This was a showroom. They had 2 trailers, 52 foot each. It took all day during the load in to get the road manager to undertstand that his entire theater/arena set up was not, under any circumstance, going on our stage. We were telling him, standing in the truck, that he was going to have to make changes that we'd already made him aware of. We told him this during the advance process, multiple times. We produced the emails and his responses. It's not our fault you can't pay attention, or choose to ignore us. It played out like the second 20 minutes of "Behind the Music" where the wheels come off a band. Come to think of it...it was!

I don't know what happened to New Jack Swing, but I'm still around.

I also don't know what my point was here anymore...
 
We focused off of the Rider plot which had dimensions for the exact layout of platforming based off of plaster line. Our pit is not a danceable surface. With our main rag closed, and the set moved 6' further downstage, there was also a considerable issue with cable runs. I had informed the PM 2 days before they arrived that we were setting up based on rider and lighting plot, and he OK'd it. That is why I was peeved when he blew in and told me that everything had to move.

My point in the OP is that local houses CONTINUE to get riders that just aren't close to reality. I want to make every show in my venue go smooth. Talent should have zero worries when they walk into my space, and they can focus on their show. the best way I can help them do that is with a correct Advance on the show. It's been my bad luck to get a bunch of B & C level tours that do not have their act together.
 
Its completely hit and miss as to the quality and skill of the technical folks traveling with a show. With "Vegas" and variety acts (folks that were one-hit wonders 30 years ago and are still touring) a lot of artists want to maximize the amount of money from the artists fees going into their pockets and will not travel with anybody except a "stage manager" who at best is going to mix audio and while setting audio levels, plus doing a full run thru with the artist, will set lighting levels on a plot they didn't design or specify, etc... and so forth.

One thing we struggle with is trying to get the technical rep. from an artist to visualize how the space is laid out and what it looks like. We have photo's on a website as well as ground plans and light plots, section, etc... plus the technical package, but we still struggle with getting them to read all the information that's available. We had Jason Mraz a month ago and their crew of 8 or so did zip to look at the advance information we sent them and essentially made it up when they walked in the door. It was a poor adaptation of what they specified in their rider and I suspected they crew didn't give a s _ _ t. The show was boring as a result. Had I been the promoter I would have bitched, but it was a Live Nation rental and I don't think their tech/advance guy knew what he wasn't getting.

And so it goes.
 
I think the topic of riders is best covered by They Might Giants' John Flansburgh:
Ira Glass
The way I always heard the story was that Van Halen had something in the contract that they used when they toured that said that everywhere that they went, in every city, in every dressing room on their tour, there had to be a bowl of M&Ms, and that the brown M&Ms had to be removed. It's kind of a well-known story, I think. And the way that I understood it is that it showed what divas rock stars could be, that any whim that they had would have to be met, no matter how petty. You hate brown M&Ms? Poof! They will cease to exist in your world.

And then a couple of years ago, we had this band, They Might Be Giants, on our radio show. And by the way, you're listening to This American Life from WBEZ Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. Anyway, we had this band on the show. And I got to know them a little bit. And I had never talked to a touring rock musician about that story. And I remember John Flansburgh saying to me, no, no, no, no, no. I had the meaning of the story totally wrong.

John Flansburgh
I think there was only one "no," Ira.

Ira Glass
This is John. I asked him to come and talk about this with me again today, here on the radio. He told me that the music industry name for what we were discussing was the contract rider.

John Flansburgh
The thing that the average rock fan doesn't realize is that, in the itinerant life of somebody in a rock band, they're relying on a promoter-- probably a different promoter every day-- to give them everything. And a contract rider is basically the entire show from beginning to end. I mean, you're talking about personnel. You're talking about the PA. So a lot of it's very prosaic stuff. People really focus on the dressing room stuff, but actually most of it is just making sure that there's literally enough electricity in the venue so that the show doesn't end after 10 minutes.

Ira Glass
And this, Flansburgh says, was what was so ingenious about the brown M&Ms. Van Halen had this huge setup with lots of gear, and if the local promoter didn't carefully read the contract rider, stuff could collapse. It could be dangerous. So the brown M&Ms were like the canary in the coal mine. The contract rider said the brown M&Ms were not supposed to be there. If they were there, look out.

John Flansburgh
You know, it was a very clever way to make sure that all the specifics of his contract rider were going to be met, including technical requirements, safety requirements, all the things that David Lee Roth is probably more worried about than his actual M&M needs.

Ira Glass
Yeah. Actually, in his autobiography, he writes this. I found this on snopes.com. He explains the M&Ms this way. David Lee Roth writes, "Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into third level markets."

John Flansburgh
Tertiary markets is the word we use in the business.

Ira Glass
Tertiary markets. "We'd pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks full of gear in places where the standard was three trucks max. And there were many, many technical errors, whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages, because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in article number 126, in the middle of nowhere was, quote, 'There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area upon pain of forfeiture of the show with full compensation,' end quote."

So, he writes, "When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl, well, line check the entire production, guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed, you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to destroy the whole show. Sometimes literally life threatening."

John Flansburgh
Wow.

Ira Glass
Now, when I emailed you to see if you wanted to come on the radio and talk about this, you said, "Oh, that's really a coincidence." Because you just spent your whole day yesterday working on your contract rider?

John Flansburgh
Basically, a couple days ago, I was looking at the contract rider, which was 25 pages long. And I realized it was this crazy, Frankenstein document that-- there was some really odd, vestigial stuff. I mean I actually found-- we have all these personnel requirements for loaders, and electricians, and fly riggers, and all these people. There's 30 people that the promoter is going to hire on our behalf, and they have very specific job descriptions. But in only half of them did we require that they be sober.

Ira Glass
Wait, your contract for some of them says specifically they have to be sober?

John Flansburgh
It was such a hodgepodge that we had, in some cases-- What had happened is that we had had a bunch of loaders that had come in from another show the night before that had ended at 5:00 in the morning. And they came to our show at 7:00 in the morning to, literally, do another show. And they all got drunk in the couple of hours in between.

So in our contract rider, we said the loaders have to be sober. But unfortunately, the way a contract reads, it looks like you're kind of implying that everybody else can be drunk. And no one had ever thought to cross it out.

Ira Glass
Is there an M&Ms clause in your contract?

John Flansburgh
There are some-- It's such a personal thing. It's like asking somebody what's in their medicine chest. There are no M&Ms on our-- We have, like, hummus and tabouli. You would think it was Sarah McLachlan the way our contract rider reads.

Ira Glass
I mean more, is there an M&Ms clause, is there a thing in your contract that you put in there to be sure that people read the contract?

John Flansburgh
I think the first line of our contract is the promoter needs to call our tour manager when he gets this rider. That's basically just getting good communication going, rather than bullying and threshold tests, is the way we do it.

Ira Glass
And so if you don't get the call, you know, all right--

John Flansburgh
Yeah, yeah. And believe it or not, oftentimes they don't call. They've got other things to do.
Click to expand...
 
SteveB said:
Its completely hit and miss as to the quality and skill of the technical folks traveling with a show. With "Vegas" and variety acts (folks that were one-hit wonders 30 years ago and are still touring) a lot of artists want to maximize the amount of money from the artists fees going into their pockets and will not travel with anybody except a "stage manager" who at best is going to mix audio and while setting audio levels, plus doing a full run thru with the artist, will set lighting levels on a plot they didn't design or specify, etc... and so forth.

One thing we struggle with is trying to get the technical rep. from an artist to visualize how the space is laid out and what it looks like. We have photo's on a website as well as ground plans and light plots, section, etc... plus the technical package, but we still struggle with getting them to read all the information that's available. We had Jason Mraz a month ago and their crew of 8 or so did zip to look at the advance information we sent them and essentially made it up when they walked in the door. It was a poor adaptation of what they specified in their rider and I suspected they crew didn't give a s _ _ t. The show was boring as a result. Had I been the promoter I would have bitched, but it was a Live Nation rental and I don't think their tech/advance guy knew what he wasn't getting.

And so it goes.
Click to expand...

I so wish that the type of venues (hotels, banquet halls) had an accurate floor plan available. But most, even if they have a floor plan, draw it up to meet the client needs, not the vendors. The ceiling is 15' high, except around the perimeter, where there's a soffit, which is only 13'. Or if the ceiling is 12' "or so" but it's really 10' 11". Yeah, that 13" doesn't matter. Or how all the wall outlets in the 10,000 s.f. ballroom are on the same circuit.
 
As a maintenance tech for a convention hall I try to know all the quirks of our building. And if I don't know it, I try to find it. Makes life easier for all.
 
len said:
I so wish that the type of venues (hotels, banquet halls) had an accurate floor plan available. But most, even if they have a floor plan, draw it up to meet the client needs, not the vendors. The ceiling is 15' high, except around the perimeter, where there's a soffit, which is only 13'. Or if the ceiling is 12' "or so" but it's really 10' 11". Yeah, that 13" doesn't matter. Or how all the wall outlets in the 10,000 s.f. ballroom are on the same circuit.
Click to expand...

And while all the wall outlets are on the same circuit in the biggest ballroom, we have a 400a disconnect over in the laundry room which is 500 feet across the lobby, oh and that will be a $500 fee if you want to use it.
 
tjrobb said:
As a maintenance tech for a convention hall I try to know all the quirks of our building. And if I don't know it, I try to find it. Makes life easier for all.
Click to expand...

It's rare to actually get to talk to someone that actually knows those details in a ballroom though. Instead we get the event coordinator, or sometimes a "building engineer" that just tells us there is "plenty" of power.
 
The tour does not send out riders, management does, and management is stupid. Always talk directly with someone who will actually be there.

And the M&M thing, yeah the point is to make sure you read the details, but you should tell them where to stick their M&M's. There are lots of things on a rider that you can simply say no to, depending on your situation. You have to show them you have a backbone, or you will get walked on.
 
Also keep in mind a rider is only valid if attached to a contract. We routinely red ink riders to fit into house gear and labor. My favorite thing is when advancing you get sent the "new" rider... Which can usually be totally ignored. Now accurate stage plots is a totally different thing...

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
 
Pie4Weebl said:
I think the topic of riders is best covered by They Might Giants' John Flansburgh:
Click to expand...

Dave actually tells a version of this on his video podcast "The Roth Show" in season 1 I believe. But you should watch every episode. The VanHalen history alone is worth it.
 
Because you all want another reason to love me, here's Iggy's 2012 rider that I just found out about for the first time moments ago. Yes, I'd previously seen the 2006 edition. I don't sleep, except at red lights and my kids recitals. It's not my fault.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/iggy-and-stooges-0
 
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