Dave Rat - Roadies in the Midst

Safe and sound we are. Our first show in Dallas went on without a hitch and it looks like everything is running smooth after our longest break yet. Gnarls Barkley is our new support act and some cool familiar faces on the tour. Normally I would have some photos to show you but guess what. You will never believe this but it appears that somehow my camera has made a break for it and escaped. Ya know, I spaced on attaching it to the my new laminate and it appears I have not fully re-acclimated to tour mode yet as battling the scattering of personal items escaping is still pretty much a full time job. Give me a few days and a few more donations to the world of elsewhere and I will get my deal dialed in. In the mean time, well, I guess I need to go camera shopping. Arrrgh! I had some good pics on there too and the best one was three little girls maybe 6 to 8 years old that I gave pink flamingo glasses to and a case to stand on. So cute! Oh well, at least I don't have to be worried about being overly attached to material things. Plus, that little camera served me well and I did have a fun and wonderful night so a silly camera is just a small price to pay for adventures I love to remember, in the big picture of it all.

In the mean time, since I am picture less, I guess I will share another blast from the past. This the following is a calendar that a guy named Joe Cole made. Joe friend of Henry Rollins that Rat Sound hired to tour as a sound tech on the final Black Flag tour. Joe ended up being murdered in a robbery at the house that Joe and Henry shared in Venice. Joe went to down town LA and took pictures of homeless people, printed the calendar and then gave them out in exchange for donations which he then donated a portion of to a homeless shelter in LA. Whether you feel it shocking, altruistic or creative, I thought it unique and interesting enough to share and share a memory of someone no longer hanging out.

The dedicated to not losing the next camera,

Dave Rat

Never ever forget that you never ever truly know what will happen next. "Highly probable' is as good as you can get with future predictions. I must admit that I was over prepared thermally for yesterdays southern California weather in Oklahoma. Who would have knew? After reading about thousands of stranded freezing cows, I figured I was gonna freeze too heading out to middle America. Funny thing was that there was all this silly talk of a cold front coming in. Who would have knew? Definitely not I, said the sound guy. Anyway, last night at the hotel bar I was hanging with rigger Fletch and he is drinking wine and has a porcelain plate with a picture of a deer on it with him, of course. Don't we all carry them. Actually we don't so asked and was quite pleased to be let in on a bit of roadie antics. Turns out that the tour riggers have this deer plate that is bestowed upon whomever amongst them screws up, comes in late or forgets something. Fletch earned it by being late for working out in the hotel gym, or maybe he forgot. Either way, I love the roadie games.

So what was warm and wonderful weather last night has taken a bit of turn.

They call the stuff "freezing rain." It is not snow, it is not hail and it may have been rain but it aint no more. Little round ice balls.

And wow! Are they slippery! Fun to watch my friends get caught off guard. It is like walking on mini ball bearings. And what could be a more perfect compliment to the freezing rain than the implementation of our tiki theme! Thank you Ratketeers, this is all good! Here we can see roadie Scott proudly showing off his decorating accomplishments.

Of course, I head straight for the grass skirt

It is customary for the major vendors on a tour put together some sort of swag for the roadies and band. At Rat Sound we try and do something as unique as we can, so my big project for the day is to give out the big delivery of our newest Rat Swag, shoes! I wonder when the last time a sound company made shoes was?

The roadies seemed quite pleased all in all and quite a bit more pleased that the roadies seemed to be when they heard that we are now in holding pattern. We are all good, show is all set, it's cold outside but warm in here and all is good except for one little problem. The good news is we can play the gig, the bad news is that the audience will be unable to attend the show due to transportation issues. It turns out that the little ice balls and sheets of slippery ice underneath are fine for cars that are moving but not so fine for cars that are attempting to accelerate or stop.

Pack it up roadies,

The show is cancelled, we are gonna try to drive to Dallas. Hmmmm, no one can drive, too slippery here so we are gonna drive elsewhere. Hmmmm, something is fishy.

The putting my life in the hands of the bus driver on icy night roads,

Dave Rat

So here we go again. Some days you just got to get up in the morning go to work. Pretty normal stuff for a human being to do, it's just that my "work" is in Oklahoma and my work day just happens to be three weeks long this time. Airports don't suck, they don't deserve that much credit, they are merely annoying. I know the routine, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure it out.

Show up and

• hope they have your ticket right,
• hope your bags are not overweight,
• hope the line is not so long that you miss your flight,
• hope you do not end up behind someone that causes a stink or tries to bring "bad' things through security,
• hope the security line is not so long that you miss your flight,
• hope the hike to the gate is not so far that you miss your flight,
• hope your plane is running on time or at least close,
• hope they have not sold your seat to someone else,
• hope they do not take away your carry-on-bag because the overhead compartments are too full,
• hope you do not sit on the runway forever,
• hope the food, if any, is remotely edible,
• hope that you are not seated next to someone that endlessly farts, snores or has to go to he bathroom 10 times when you have an isle seat,
• hope that no one does anything stupid like die or yell at a flight attendant that causes the plane to be diverted and land at the wrong airport,
• hope the plane stays in the air while trying to fly,
• hope you don't leave anything on the plane,
• hope that your bags show up on the belt and finally,
• hope that everything you put in your bags is still in there.

So really, all and all it is pretty straight forward stuff and since most everything is beyond my control, there is no real reason to stress over it. So I just wander on through with the smile of mild annoyance.

So, here I am

rocking like a hurricane, or at the very least, riding in a cab towards the hotel in Oklahoma. An explorer, and adventurer, a gypsy navigating the uncharted territory of thrill and the stars align to deliver me to

the sheltering safety behind a door that a small plastic key card allows entry with its encrypted password stored on a magnetic stripe. But no journey can be accomplished without nourishment so off into the mysterious city I head

and amongst the plethora of opportunities

and two's and two's of blocks walked before I settle on a local cuisine called ribs, okra and slaw. And though my mind and eyes offer reluctance, my belly wins out in the short term

Only for belly to grumble later about the grease and though I feel shade less than exuberant, I bask in telling belly "I told you so!" Oh, for a fresh cucumber, tomato and feta salad with olive oil. Well, at least my problems are not outside of anything a few cold beers can't fix. So I am off to meet the clustering roadies at the hotel bar. I will see ya 'all tomorrow, when we .............

Oh, that's right, how about a rock show?

The feeling displaced,

Dave Rat

The time to board the plane approaches and as I always seem to experience in the not too distant memory, I am filled with this anxious feeling of remiss or more accurately pre-miss and it dawns on me to ponder the things I will miss. With that in my mind, today I add to my computer a new folder called 2007 where I will store month by upcoming month each batch of photos I accumulate in my travels and wanders that inspire the snapshots of time I grab paste into the physical memory banks.

**** The Things I will Miss ****

I First is the little people I love. My daughters, my niece and the little ones in my heart that I rarely see. And though far away and disconnected, I always I hold them in my heart. Some things hurt too much to think about more than in flashes so I let them slide out of my mind and find distraction.

Next would be sensation and familiarity of my bed. The place I go at the end point of each day when I have had enough and where I climb in to recharge to be for feeling of warm fresh start.

And when I wake I like to play a album as I start my new day, I will miss the scratchy sound of the needle upon the spinning black disc and how I never know exactly how long before the music will start.

I will miss the way the the dreary and hazy sleep fades away each day as I head to the ocean blue room of clean. The rubber ducks that sit on the shower head and the way my day comes into focus as I ponder my plans under falling water.

I will miss drinking that first morning coffee without having to get dressed and the way the espresso maching always scars me when it gets hot and starts spitting steam out the relief valve when it is ready.

I will miss searching the fridge for bits of food when I went too many days between shopping and being able to eat simple clean cool mangos, making shrimp tacos and salsa and my two favorite knives, the one that rusts if I don't wipe it off and the one that makes the cool shhwriiing sound like a mini "Kill Bill" sword.

I will miss my favorite pan made of cast iron that I cook nearly everything with and how I need to take care of it to keep the perfect layer of cooked in oil and how it never touches soap.

I will miss the enjoyment I feel to create new things or fix things that are broken with my pile of tools

I will miss the freedom that my motorcycle and car gives me to be able to travel on a whim to destinations without hindrance. I will miss not getting anything good in the mail and then after day after day passes to the point where I stop checking, actually getting something good. I will miss the two ladies next door that take a walk every morning and always smile and loaning tools to my neighbor across the street. I will miss going to the Rat Shop and especially everyone there that each day come to share a bit of their life together for a common goal and the challenges and successes that each day brings. I will miss the people I care about that that I hang out with at home.

So to all that I press the pause button and step away. But it never pauses, it just keeps rolling along without me. Bye bye home and soon all this will fade, I know it will, it always does, it is just so hard to see there from here.

The not sad and getting ready to leave,

Dave Rat

 

The roadie herd is an ever evolving entity. With each tour comes new faces while once daily faces drift off on to different tours and adventures in life. Time travel ont the road is a strange progression. There are people that I see year after year and others that I re-meet after decade and pick up where we left of as if we both just gone home for the weekend. As I approach my seventeenth year touring with this band and twenty first year working with them, I have seen nearly everyone leave no one is left from when I started except for Ak and Flea. Some people leave due to the realities of no longer being alive, some have gotten confused and forgotten or failed to play their part in orchestration. Still more have allowed distraction to take them away or political rifts, power plays, incompatibilities, oversights and poor timing have towed many roadie in other directions. Above all, the same looming fact hovers over all 'roadies by trade' as it does any herd in the wilds of the tundra. "To be a part of the herd you must hunt and fend for yourself or you will be left behind to be eaten by the vultures." Translated into the realities of roadie terms this means that there is diminishing place for elder roadies and when you are too old to lift and load and move fast from city to city, a younger fierce roadie will replace you.

Unlike other jobs, roadies worldwide can typically be fired without cause, they have no medical insurance, no pension plan, no sick leave, no set hours, no overtime or anything close to a set of "acceptable treatment guidelines." Roadies for the most part are throwback from the 'days of old' or third world labor in many ways. But not all tours and not all bands operate the same and Peppers are beautiful and compassionate organization that is one of of the better to best tours one could hope to work on but still, like all tours, this tour will eventually end and spill a pile of jobless roadies out into the open roadie market. That inevitable outcome will happen to all, including myself. How prepared each roadie is to deal with that reality is up to the roadies themselves.

There are several types of roadies I have encountered in my travels. The Curious Adventurers, the Big Eyed Climbers and the Life-ers are three common ones. The Curious Adventurers are the ones that have some other skill or life alignment whom have chosen to tour for experience and growth, they may have a solid gig at home and the opportunity to take it on the road appeared or they have some sort of career training to fall back on when the tour luster fades. The Big Eyed Climbers are the dedicated roadies that follow lines of opportunity with a voracity that radiates the sensation that wherever they are, they will somehow succeed and the same tools that got them here will get them somewhere else wham the time comes. The Life-ers are the ones with perhaps nowhere else to go aside from the road or lack any other skill that they are aware of that will allow them to survive any other way. In some cases they are stowing away a nest egg for their future but all too often I see them wrapped and blinded by the cash flow and tour motion as they head toward the same inevitable outcome as an old hooker with no other skills.

My long time friend Nick the Fly has decided to take some time off of the road to rock out on his own projects. What you may not know about Nick the Fly is that he used to own a sound company, he is highly skilled at building cabinetry including the many of the Rat designs and he is extremely adept with computer skills among other things. Nick, rock out on you adventures I look forward to hanging out with him off the road when this trip ends! I will miss him but know that it is every roadie's responsibility to pursue their dreams. Rock on Nick!

Pirate Lee Vaught who is the Rat Sound crew chief on the Peppers tour will now be full time FOH tech! And here we go to do some more rock shows!

Count down to fly away date - 3 days 23 hours and 45 minutes till take-off

The getting ready to pack my bags,

Dave Rat

Oh, and for you sound humans, I wrote a short blurb article on touring in the December 2006 issue of Sound International Magazine.

So I am doing my best to keep to clean the house in between making messes. Seems I spend my home life doing one, the other or in a horizontal position. Projects unfinished expose themselves as I peel a few layers of between-tour-sediment away from the various clustering spots and low and behold, I find some old journals. Though most of the contents consist of cringingly unreadable babble and actually unreadable hieroglyphics, a quick scan through did reveal a few pages of interest.

The was written while on Black Flag tour. "Cel" was the bass player for the band that was riding with me and we were on our way to do a show at a club called Maxwell's in Hoboken. As you can most likely tell, the truck ran into a serious 'hitch in it's get-a-long' right about the time it's wheels were no longer on the pavement. Some idiot had cut our brake lines in San Francisco after him being tossed out of the club and our brakes never worked quite right since then. Well, also it did not help that we were doing about 60 in the fast lane that was actually not a fast lane but in reality a left handed freeway off ramp, downhill into a "T" intersection in a fully and completely overloaded truck. Anyway, I am pretty sure that I could had ground the gears down and pumped the brakes up enough to force that manual steering piece of crap truck around the right hand turn when a stressing and screeching and "POW," the actual box mount to the truck snapped and over we gover. Splash goes the window and I must say that to this day I still recall that it was the strangest sensation to have your head just 6 inches await from a window view consisting of sliding asphalt.

**** Sound Nerd Speak ****

For the next blast into the hand written past, I present some high resolution images of a PA design that never got built.

This was to the next incarnation of the system we carried on that tour

but due to the decision to pay rent and eat food rather than finance yet another PA from the ground up plus our in ability to locate satisfactory 8 inch drivers we ended up reconfiguring the "Brown System"

into the "Thin Fills."

For you sound nerds out there, I thought you may get a kick out of a line array based design that was based on dual 15", dual 8", dual compression driver components that is 48 inches wide and 18 inches high designed in 1986.

Anyway, the cool line array wave guides were still a decade away from being developed by L'Acoustics which was the true turning point in line array feasibility. I know most of the Rat site regulars are familiar with all this but for all our new friends, if you are curious about the development of the Rat PA systems, you may way want to check out the Evolution http://ratsound.com/evolution/evol1.html pages. I have not updated them in a while so it just stops about five years ago but you may find it kind of interesting.

**** End Sound Nerd Speak ****

Pondering. Air brakes are good, especially on big heavy trucks! For you non trucky mechanichy types out there, did you know that air brakes work the opposite way of the brakes in a car or small truck? In a car, you press the brakes and the brake fluid pushes these little pads to rub on either a disc or cylinder attached to your wheel. Brakes are normally 'off' and press to put them 'on.' Air brakes are normally 'on' and have big strong springs that push the pads against the cylinder and then when you start the motor, it builds up air pressure in the brake line hoses that forces the brakes to be 'off.' When you step on the brakes, it releases pressure and the brakes then go 'on.' This way if you have a leak in the system, the brakes get stuck 'on' rather than 'off.'

Ok, enough! Till we meet again in a day or two, good travels to all!

Dave Rat

Continue reading "Day 227 - Jan 5 - Home"

Ok, I know I have been blog slacking, Oh the pleasures of being home! But I promise you'll are not forgotten so

Here I come with some filler to hopefully keep you satisfied.

First, if you are reading the blog on MySpace and you want to navigate around a bit, try going to it on the Rat Sound Site where there is categories and it is way easier to get a round and also there is a navigator page http://www.ratsound.com/blognav.htm

If you are reading on MySpace or the Rat Site and you have a myspace account and want to be auto notified of new posts, try this link - myspace auto-notify.

And all that web flurry mumbo jumbo aside, I have been getting many emails curious as to when I will resume and all good! It makes me really truly happy that I have so many friends that enjoy the adventures and I promise to have many a surprise still to come! On a side note, this may be worth a gander as I did a bit professional reviewing Dave Rat style a while back at a few trade shows (read " Dave Rat is giving us some filler because he is stalling")

NAMM Awards

NSCA Awards

The quite honored,

Dave Rat

Hello brand new year,

Hey, check out Wooster Collective and scroll down the December 31st page to the "Best Christmas Wreath Ever." The "Erock" guy that made it is a well known Seattle roadie that I toured with on a Danzig tour in 1990 and then again with Pearl Jam and now he is in the Neil Young camp.

Good morning new year and I am all done pretending to be excited about last year sliding into the past. I liked last year and feel no elation in it going away. In fact, it's ending is a bit more annoying than anything else. So now I get to spend the next 3 weeks writing the wrong year and sectioning off all the little bits of paper called receipts that I have collected from around the world so I can try and figure out how much I owe in taxes. Say bye bye to what I knew and hello to new adventure. Usually that statement would bring me some sort of thrill or at least anticipation but as I ponder why it feels so inert, I realize it is having choice and freedom that makes me happy. I choose to go get coffee, I choose to orchestrate my life so I can tour as a sound engineer and I choose try and be healthy for the most part except when I choose not to to. I have no choice about whether the new year comes. It is just a chunk chunk chunk of the time machine plugging along because allegedly, two thousand years ago this Julius Caesar guy comes up with a calendar and so we have a big party to celebrate a new number at the end of the year at right about now.

So since this year start marker has been hammered into my life by the world around me, it creates a situation of before and after yet possesses no capability to alter it.

So here we are crossing into a new year that is helpless to turn the tide of the quagmire that greed promoted as fear created, they hung Sadam. They got him good and even though there were no weapons of mass destruction at least the powerful US/UK was able to attack and kill off a group of allegedly threatening people, that were guilty of attacking and killing off a group of allegedly threatening people. I am not against the death penalty, I am against hypocrisy. The liar presentation that there was some altruistic humanitarian angle or some actual imminent threat that was used to sway the naive into supporting what has no option but to fail. Violence does not make peace, no matter how you wrap it. But I do not believe in world peace, I do not hope for it nor will it ever exist. It can not exist anymore than humans will ever be successful at persuading wolves, bobcats and sharks into being vegetarians. It just aint gonna happen, and that is ok and that is beautiful. It is the balance of life, the eaters and eaten and without that life would stop. I am not against the death penalty, I am against hypocrisy. I am against deception, and though deception is part of life like a chameleon in hiding or a snake that mimics a branch to hunt, it is the challenge of unmasking the deceivers that perpetuates life for those with open eyes.

And heaviness aside look what I found!!! I came back from tour and my office was drenched in Tiki!

How much does that warm my heart! Gifts and thought and each day for over seven months now I dedicate some time to sharing my world. A group of friends that playfully call themselves the Ratketeers came up with logo

that in all of of playful absurdity, Rat made into shirts

and devised a surprise and with the help of Daniella and Julie at the Rat Shop converted my office while I was away! And more importantly, check out the new front of house theme for the US tour coming up! Thank you Ratketeers! Hmmmm, something tells me that as a sound company and a bunch of roadies, we may be breaking some new ground in the realms of the unusual. Definitely not boring at least.

I spent my New Years as I so often do attending a rock show for a change. Imagine that! This years choice was Paramount Studios

Where Rat was doing sound for several stages and DJ's including this Rat Trap 5 rig

and a V-Dosc Rig on the stage with The Killers

where I hung out with Harley who was mixing their sound

And also with Greg to the left who was FOH tech for Rat and I met up with Shaun and Karissa

For a nice transition into the new year. OK, here we go, now that we are done with the old, lets see what we can do with the new!

The ready to move ahead,

Dave Rat