Dave Rat - Roadies in the Midst

Of all the yearly occurring festivals I have worked, Fuji Festival is easily my least favorite. There are numerous reasons ranging from it being very far away to the fact that it is far away and hard to get to as well. Invariably a Fuji festival trip consists of flying 12 hours or more depending on your starting point, driving 2 hours from Narita Airport to Tokyo to do some sort of promo, doing a 4 hour midnight run up the hill to the festival site to stay in a mini-bed ski lodge with no internet, hanging out all day in a remote location waiting to do a throw and go rock show followed by another 4 hour midnight run down the mountain to stay in an airport hotel before flying home. And get this, Fuji Festival is not even at mount Fuji! That awesome white topped famous mountain, well that is in the opposite direction, I am told. Though, it did not used to be that way and I remember the first one I worked was actually at Mount Fuji.

Anyway, that is tomorrow, today we setup at a TV studio for a one song live deal. It is pretty interesting, they have the stage on segmented rolling risers with a set change involving what seemed like 50 Japanese stage crew. It was kind of fun and I joined the techs as they surfed their segments moving pretty darn quick out the door and into the other room and back again. Here you can see roadie Tracy surfing his segment into the storage room

Now look closely at the picture above and you will notice that there are a bunch of people working but one in particular must be special because he has a rather large tool belt on. Maybe he is a carpenter that works with hammering nails and sharp things? How else could you explain the fact that he is wearing the Japanese safety shoe. It turns out, every single person I could find that had a tool belt also was wearing the highly protective footwear:

Dave Rat

P. S.

If you are ever looking for a bargain on a square watermelon, you can scoop this baby up in Tokyo for $100.00 US or so!

And is that $60.00 for 2.5 KG of oranges? May as well grab them while you are here.