Dave Rat - Roadies in the Midst

I wake up on the bus and it is 10 am and still moving. This is highly unusual and I must admit it has been a few days or maybe a week since I have opened my itinerary and now is as good a time as any. Five hundred and nine miles, and we got rolling somewhere just before 3 am last night, 'bout right I guess. With rigging calls typically in around 8 am and a 10:45 am arrival time according to bus driver roadie Brian, that puts us about 3 hours later today at getting 12 trucks of gear in, up and running.

Turns out it the production humans have it planned out and expected the crunch. I asked if the sound roadies need my help but they have a mind set to power through and make it happen. It becomes clear the my assistance would just dilute the accomplishment, so I set up office and work on my ratty stuff as usual and await the amp racks to to be un layered out of the sound truck.

Status report: All amps function so the search for local spares on hold can be released. The damage report:

• 1 input panel partially ripped off the rack rails
• 8 bent front panels on Lab Gruppen amps
• 4 bent rack ears on Crown amps
• All the front rack rail is bent or stripped
• and the top shells on both racks have somewhat mashed in corners.

The good news is that though not pretty, it is patchable to finish the trip without shipping in costly replacement gear. The bad news is that at some point there is a pile of work to be done and a few thousand dollars in fix it bits to bring them back to the previous state of beauty. As with many things, humans included, it was not the actual fall that caused all the damage. It was the very abrupt landing when contacting the planet earth at a high rate of speed messed things up. I will try and shoot some pics of them at some point.

**** Highlight of the Day ****

I got a pile of Avril Lavigne swag to bring home to my shorties. Thank you Craig and Shawn!

**** End Highlight of the Day ****

Tonight the load out splits up the gear again. Next show is Virgin Festival in Baltimore for one truck and the global crew, all the rest of the hardware and humans have a 1400 miles bus ride to Toronto for multiple days off. Global crew has a 7:45 am plane international plane flight with a long layover and connection, that means like a 5 am lobby call, Super yuck!

The joyous

Dave Rat

YFATMOAIWPI!