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The First Stage
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The First Stage Unknown "The First Time" Is The Topic For The Seventeenth Virtual Symposium The First Stage The first time I saw the topic listed as an option for the Symposium the very first thing that popped into my head was the beautiful song by Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. That took me back a long way, back to the early seventies, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve told this story before and I’m going to tell it again. This is what old people do, re-tell the same stories and jokes over and over again. It’s comforting to us if not to you. In the early seventies, in late winter, I left frigid Toronto for Phoenix, Arizona and the desert. One of my best friends- Ray- had moved there and was living in a semi-communal apartment with a colony of freaks from southwest Michigan and a scattering of hippies from all over the country. The apartment wasn’t anything artsy or quaint- it was one of those nondescript and bland complexes that spring up overnight and immediately begin to decay, dropping pieces off like autumn leaves to lie in the dust, fading nearly instantly in the hot sun. It didn’t have a lot to recommend it the day it was built and went downhill almost before it was finished. There were thirteen of us crammed into that antiseptic two bedroom box, eleven guys and two young women. Ray and the brother of an acquaintance of ours named Bobby were working for an outfit called Special Events Coordinators. The company rented sound, lighting and audio visual equipment- remember audio visual equipment? Projectors and screens, amplifiers and speakers, even slide projectors. They had stage lights and staging and huge Altec speakers that stood five or six feet tall and were stackable. Nothing was digital but solid state components were beginning to make an appearance. The most powerful amps still had tubes. I took a part time job as a casual stage hand with SPEC. Phoenix was a sort of second tier convention destination and was trying to promote itself to top tier, and they had built a shiny new Civic Plaza with a trade show arena and a concert hall to that end. An annual event was the Phoenix Gift and Jewelry Show, and one of the first jobs I had was building exhibitor booths out of portable drapery and running cable for electricity to the booths. The company had a finger in all sorts of shows and presentations so I also humped speakers and amps for various concerts, like Procul Harem, Lee Michaels, Rod Stewart and Grand Funk Railroad. We’d build scaffold towers in the desert and mount Trouper and Super Trouper spotlights on the towers, and then run cable for headsets to the top so the lighting coordinator could cue the spotlight operators. Spotting the show with a Trouper was one of my first jobs too. The Trouper was a carbon arc spotlight and it looked like a cannon on a pedestal. It had a darkened glass window on the side so the operator could watch the arcing, burning carbons and advance them with a crank mounted on the barrel to keep the arc burning clear and bright. At the breech end of the cannon was a reflector that beamed the light out the muzzle end through a lens. You could attach a device to the barrel with colored gel sheets on levers and filter the light red, green and blue, or whatever colors were called for. All of this stuff counts as a first for me. I was a farm and a factory grunt before I saw Phoenix. I learned as I went along, and it was all new and exciting. One of the things that kept it exciting and worth doing was that the local girls saw us stage hands at the concerts and remembered us. We had rubbed elbows with the stars and that rubbed off on more than our elbows. My own specialty became one of the less romantic jobs, supervising the trade show setup. I was made the “floor man” after a few months and supervised the crews in laying out and setting up the exhibitor booths. We were a small outfit though and everyone pitched in at everything so I still did duty at concerts and delivered AV gear when I had to. The boss bid on building a stage for the Elton John concert in Albuquerque. We had folding stage sections, called risers. They were exactly like a folding table, but a lot heavier and sturdier. The stage for the concert had to be exactly the specified height and no combination of stacking sections would get our staging to that height, so the plan was to build a stage somewhat less than half the height called for, lay four by sixes on top of that in rows, and then build another layer of staging with the feet resting on those four by sixes to achieve the correct height. It was a complicated, a labor intensive and a dumb plan. We were and we looked sidelong at each other when he showed us the plan. He should have known better. We DID know better, but none of us refused…we were young and in love with our jobs, so we went along with it. We stripped out my trade show semi trailer of all the molded plastic chairs and carpet squares and overloaded it with staging. We wouldn’t haul the four by sixes. Part of the genius of the plan was that we’d buy the lumber in Albuquerque and sell it for salvage when we were finished with it. The boss had dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. He thought it was a masterful plan. Our sound tech Paul, the boss’s Mike and I got the nod to ramrod this job, even though none of us had ever built a stage this size before. Our company had never built an entire stage this size. And I’m pretty sure nobody had ever a built a stage with a plan this bad. The concert was to be held at an arena on the edge of town, and we hired local stage hands as labor. They were a rare breed in Albuquerque so we added a few temps to help haul the materials. We had a deadline and only a small window of time to build this thing. We had a bitch of a time finding enough four by sixes to use as our boosters. It took Mike all day driving around town to buy enough perfectly straight lumber- it HAD to be straight- and by the end of the day we barely had enough, it wasn’t nearly straight enough, and we were way behind with him spending the whole day timber shopping. We had worked all nighters before and this was gonna be another one. We did get the thing set up in time but it was close, and we were nervous. The feet on the riser legs were an inch around, with plastic shoes on them, and they rested on the six inch surface of the timbers to bring us up to the right height. They could slide three inches in either direction before falling off the timber. It looks good on paper, maybe, but in assembling this thing we learned that it was hard to get everything straight and square, especially with our somewhat crooked lumber, so some feet were very close to the edge, maybe an inch. If anything moved…we were in for a disaster.  Roberta Flack opened the show, and she was wonderful. Paul, Mike and I watched the show from the back of the arena and we were feeling good. Each of us took a turn at inspecting our staging underneath and it was holding still even with all the traffic of setup and performing. Then Elton John came out. That -of-a-bitch performed his heart out, God damn him. His crew cranked up their amplifiers and he bounced around at the keyboard and jumped on stage like a wild thing. The speaker towers stood on right and left wings that we had built and the stacks were twenty feet from the stage to the top. You could see them vibrating with all the noise. The whole damned arena vibrated. We breathed a collective “Oh, fuck.” and rushed underneath to take a look.  The four by sixes were walking around on top the stage base and the top layer of risers was dancing on top of the lumber. It made me nearly sick to my stomach. I ran to the semi and grabbed three hammers and a box of spikes. We began trying to arrest all that random jump and shimmy by nailing things down tighter, toe nailing the four by sixes right into our staging, which would ruin it, but we didn’t give a shit. We had to keep those wings sturdy or the speaker towers would topple over, maybe right into the crowd. We weren’t musicians but we tried to hammer in time with the bass. That didn’t work- how Elton’s sound manager heard us I don’t know, but he crawled under the stage and chewed our asses for all our racket. Paul and I explained what was going on, and he said he didn’t give a shit- we had to stop. Mike carefully explained to him that he was a stupid motherfucker and he threw us out- banished us from the arena and said he’d get Security to toss our sorry asses if we didn’t go. We went. We went out to our semi and sat in the cab, waiting to hear screaming and pandemonium from inside the arena. We talked about what we were going to do and wondered if anyone would die in there. I had read that the mountain lakes of Bolivia and Peru were teeming with fat green frogs. Have you ever bought frog legs in a restaurant? They aren’t common and are therefore pricey. We could run away to Peru and trap frogs for a living, beyond the reach of American justice. Buy some llamas for transport and hire a couple of sloe eyed senoritas to cook. It was one of the longest nights of my short life. Perhaps soon to be permanently short. Our stage held up. The concert finally ended. We hadn’t slept in seventy two hours and now we had to tear down that fucking monstrosity. We left the four by sixes next to a dumpster. To hell with selling the goddam things. Then we drove to a Motel Six and slept before the drive back to Phoenix. When we got home the boss asked how it went, and in perfect three part harmony we told him “Fuck you!” That was the first and last full sized concert stage I ever built. To read other posts for the Symposium, follow this link: Participants List For The Seventeenth Virtual Symposium The First Time Become a member now and get a free tote bag. |
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Thank you, honey. I'm not living that many new stories but I have a large supply of old ones. One of the things about being young, is that somebody will get a stupid idea and you think "Yeah! That's sounds cool! I'll do that!" Or even if it sounds a bit dicey, you figure, ah, fuck it. What could go wrong? Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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We WERE scared. Nothing went right and we thought we'd dodged a bullet when Roberta lulled us with her sweet voice. Then Elton John blew our cool for us and all we could think of was how the fuck do we get ourselves out of this? Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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Great story Kzoo. Soon as I read "It was a complicated, a labor intensive and a dumb plan." I had an idea of what might be coming. You guys could have become infamous that night. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
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Great story Kzoo. Soon as I read "It was a complicated, a labor intensive and a dumb plan." I had an idea of what might be coming. You guys could have become infamous that night. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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One of those "have faith and pray you get lucky" plans  Vive La Difference
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wild and crazy as hell
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One of those "have faith and pray you get lucky" plans Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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wild and crazy as hell Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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You did a great job at this story.. Another insight into the world of KZ. hugsssssssssss V love the way your thinking here.. Become a blog watcher sweet_vm
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I found myself growing anxious and almost believed that stage wouldn't hold. Whew! Love your stories, KZ!   Visit my blog It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World of NaughtyInSO, leave a comment, become a watcher. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ LIVE AND LET LIVE Be happy! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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You did a great job at this story.. Another insight into the world of KZ. hugsssssssssss V love the way your thinking here.. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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I found myself growing anxious and almost believed that stage wouldn't hold. Whew! Love your stories, KZ! Thank you sweetheart. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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That Song Makes Me Think Of X-Men Days Of Future Past,  Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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I loved this full accounting of it and winced along with your story this time as the first time you told it to me. Oh my! You make me happy to call you friend, Kk The observant make the best lovers, I may not do right, but I do write, I have bliss, joy, and happiness in my life, Kitkat Come check out my blog KItkat1415 check out this post by me Adventures In Body Grooming #39 April Topic Link: What Lies Beneath If April Showers Oh Bloody Hell What Kind Of Weather Turns Me On Bloggers Symposium 40
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I loved this full accounting of it and winced along with your story this time as the first time you told it to me. Oh my! You make me happy to call you friend, Kk Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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What a wonderful tale!!! I don't remember you telling this before!! Just think what you could be selling pieces of that lumber for today! Vintage Elton John Stage Lumber!!! You would be rich! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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that is an awesome story!!!  Glad the stage didn't come crashing down ... killing Elton John would not have been good for your life lol
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Great story. Amazing how much luck plays in our life. Sometimes I am amazed that I made it this far. if they gave Nobel for stupidity, i would have won it a few times. "Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”― Immanuel Kant .
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that is an awesome story!!! Glad the stage didn't come crashing down ... killing Elton John would not have been good for your life lolBecome a member now and get a free tote bag.
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Great story. Amazing how much luck plays in our life. Sometimes I am amazed that I made it this far. if they gave Nobel for stupidity, i would have won it a few times. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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That was awesome.   We're only young once!  lol (Yeah, yeah, yeah. Young at heart. Blah blah blah.)  Stories like this were part of what drew me to Phoenix. Although I'm sure it was much different when I arrived three decades later. (I'm sure plenty was still the same too.) I even had a serious relationship with a woman from Albuquerque, but I never went there. I have many stories from then, but never got so close to celebrities.   Everyone is mentioning "The First Time I Saw Your Face" by Roberta Flack. .. I don't know who she is!  .. Goog1e just told me the title of the song and showed me the lyrics to a verse. It still didn't ring a bell. ... I hope that I recognize it when I listen to it, because now I'm gonna have to.
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That was awesome. We're only young once! lol (Yeah, yeah, yeah. Young at heart. Blah blah blah.) Stories like this were part of what drew me to Phoenix. Although I'm sure it was much different when I arrived three decades later. (I'm sure plenty was still the same too.) I even had a serious relationship with a woman from Albuquerque, but I never went there. I have many stories from then, but never got so close to celebrities. Everyone is mentioning "The First Time I Saw Your Face" by Roberta Flack. .. I don't know who she is! .. Goog1e just told me the title of the song and showed me the lyrics to a verse. It still didn't ring a bell. ... I hope that I recognize it when I listen to it, because now I'm gonna have to. Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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I just love the way you have to express yourself!!!!  WITHOUT PASSION LIFE IS NOTHING
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I just love the way you have to express yourself!!!! Become a member now and get a free tote bag.
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Great story! That was a close shave. At least you're not liiving on Bolivian and Peruvian frogs now! Though, provided no one got hurt, it would be fun seeing Elton John playing on a collapsed stage! 
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