Dave Rat - Roadies in the Midst

Continuing...

Back to Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market and what would a fish market be without ice? Most likely stinky and empty so they have this big old conveyer belt machine where giant ice blocks are sent up to drop down and be pulverized. Bring your own bucket.

Though sparse, other necessities were evident and I am not sure what all that stuff is but I do know an edamame when I see one

What I did not know is what they make those little green guacamole balls out of that are sitting on sushi plates. Shhhh, for those who don't know Sushi that well, here is some advice: You will find a small green guacamole ball on your sushi plate. The really cool thing to do is just pop that whole delicious morsel right in your mouth really fast, first thing, mmmm, yummy! But hurry because that stuff is in high demand and someone else may get yours if you aren't quick.

So turns out that even though that green stuff looks like guacamole, and tastes of so yummy by the spoonful, it is actually called wasabi and looks like this

before being turned to paste. The old school way is to rub it on shark's skin but now a days they have metal grinders. What I also did not know is that nearly all the wasabi outside of Japan is fake because the real deal is too expensive.

Though the market does not smell, it is a bit messy and at the end of the day when it's time to run the numbers and do some calculations, I can see where the abacus would hold up a bit better in this environment that battery powered calculator.

Off to lunch and 9 am as all this fish walking made us hungry. Roadie James, Chef Assist Julius and Raymond our friend and tour guide of the market you can see and Scott, and Wayno you cant. Raymond is the one who hooked us up and has friends and relatives at a few shops in the market which is why the next round of sushi was some of the best Toro tuna I have ever had, so good I forgot take a picture.

And a short Youtube version for those that like visual motion.

**** End Fish Market Adventure ****

OK, now back to being jet lagged.

Dave Rat

First order of business today is a bit of back repair and the promoter has arranged so graciously an acupuncture/acupressure specialist to swing by my room and fix me up. While I am waiting, I head over to the mini bar drawer and find a coffee which both impresses and depresses me. Japan's creativity and creations are amazing and some of the things they come up with boggle the mind. So there is a coffee cup and a mini filter and little filter holder and cream and sugar and a stir stick and a top all in a neat little package.

Dump in hot water and poof, a perfect cup of drip coffee. While this is interesting and somewhat useful, it also highlights the reality that a many Japanese products are beyond belief wasteful in their packaging to the point where the amount of trash created often outweighs the consumable product itself, do you remember the plastic bottles full of ice when I was here before? Which in my opinion cancels out the cool factor. True beauty in design occurs when a harmonious balance between function, aesthetics and efficiency is reached while minimizing any negative impact that resides in the surrounding world from both manufacture and post consumption.

The massage /acupressure does a great job of lining me back up and reducing the ouch factor and it is time to head to the gig and a good sized gig it is. The moment I walk in through the revolving doors the instant air pressure surge hits me. "Ah, an air filled dome." It is one of those venues where they have a soft flexible roof and giant blower fans some where that pumps in enough air to keep the roof up, sort of like a giant version of those air filled things kids jump around in at the fair. All doors the are revolving and the trucks enter through multi-stage air locks to unload and it gives me a headache if I go in and out of the pressurized room too many times.

The air supported ceilings are surprisingly strong and as you can see in the picture below, you can hang lights and stuff from the flexible roof. Our touring production is too heavy for it though so we have everything supported by the stage we had brought in for us. Occasionally while touring I have come across and air filled arena where we have hung the sound system from the floating roof and it is really strange to see the chain motors running and the gear not lifting till the roof sufficiently sags to to hold the load. And then when audience leaves at the end of the show, the PA drops down a bit due to the air pressure dropping/escaping.

The double hung mains and 15 deep side hangs with 3dV-Dosc under all clusters plus 6 dV-Dosc in top of the side hangs and for center cluster totaling a whopping 90 V-dosc and 36 dV-Dosc not including delay clusters and that is one bad ass PA!

Down below is a modified sub cannon setup with 4 side stacks using a 2 foot spacing and an 8 sub center cluster.

Here is a graphic of the sub layout that roadie Lee put together, Lee rocks!!

Having this much clean sound power is really fun. Hello Homare, Tukiji and Raymond and thank you for the awesome fish market adventure and coming over to my office for a rock show adventure! Sashimi and Soju for all!

Speaking of rock show, hey look, there it is!

Now that was fun!

Dave Rat

Forth time to Japan in less than a year. Jet lag hits me hard this time. Usually I deny it's incapacitating grip but instead I just give in and rest my back and indulge in being horizontal. I could care less what the time is when I sleep or rise. Exhaustion from my marathon run at home during the tour break sets in. Nap after nap, computing at all hours and the 24 hour local quick market has fishy rice balls and water that sustain my hunger. A full night and day and night and day before a midnight load-in forces some reality into my mix. At some point while living this bleary timeless state the phone rings and it could be 6am or pm and it makes no difference.

"Lobby call in 3 minutes, the van is already here, we are headed to the fish market, hurry up" Lampi Scott's voice, I am pretty sure, is coming from the phone. Well, it's all news to me and I was out the door before I even bothered to ponder where or why I was going. The fish market we did, shopping with Wayno the Chef, in the seafood equivalent of New York's Wall Street. Passing through the gates, we are informed that we have entered a no-man's land where city laws no longer apply. The police don't enter except to haul out the occasional body from a miss step off off a high place or other questionable demise. The fish mongers rule this land and whatever you do, don't get run over by a cart.

Turns out there are two types of carts, old and new and one type gives you a bigger owie than the other when failing to move from it's path, though it is tough to figure out which is which. The old one was born in centuries past while the new one is nothing like anything I have ever seen. A rotating turret with a motor inside and a steering wheel and thinner round wheel brake on top. The powered front wheel can turn so sharp that it can nearly go backwards and turns inside less than its own length.

Isle after isle of any and every species of ocean life, now food, endlessly fills this massive warehouse and most surprising is what is not seen, the smell of fish and that fact that it is practically non existent. Amazingly, barely hint of scent of the fish as far as the eye can see, all perfectly iced or dry iced

and messes scrubbed clean into the constant flow of fresh water steams disappearing into rough gutters and away.

The king of fish here is the tuna. Massive multi hundred pound swimmers flash frozen on the boats to what I am told is the optimum 60 degrees below zero storing temperature. Earlier than the 6:30 am it is now, the booth buyer was earlier out bidding up to 10's of thousands of dollars for prime specimens. Check out the modern giant band saw slicing whole tuna

Followed by the old school method of hacking out the bones with a hand sharpened axe like knife

to be thawed, sliced, packaged and delivered to fill the daily orders from the endless multitude of restaurant's demand.

**** Ponderings ****

As we wander the endless labyrinth created by one species to consume a myriad of others, the potential to be aghast highlights the human hypocrisy of needing and enjoying to eat. Yet so many turn a blind eye to the foundations by which our polished food is acquired. Whether it be plants or animals, each person decides to draw their personal line of edible acceptability but it makes little difference as everything is interconnected. It is just a matter of which illusion we choose to present ourselves as reality. Is it better to eat the critter or hack down it's habitat to create a field to grow vagatarian crops leaving the critter with an extinguishing fate, and what do they feed those plants we eat anyway? Not unlike the self and society censored parallels where humans publicly gloss over their underlying desires and act in patterns of sexual interaction while pretending to ignore the necessity and natural humanly allure, not unlike an amazing meal on a hungry stomach. Then I ponder the true and unavoidable cause of global warming to be caused by both sex and food. As clearly as we humans are creators of the unraveling predicament, we as a species have the power to halt man made global warming merely by convincing all humans to simultaneously refrain from sex or food and the problem would soon be enough as we extiguish ourselve. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that we as individuals and a race are incapable of treading upon this planet so softly as not to impact it. A quandary indeed unsolvable, given the acceptable choices. Then it becomes clear that trying our best as a species to attempt to slow down the eventual and unavoidable reality is really the only sensible option. How hard, how much and at what rate becomes a personal choice with global ramifications for each to decide and rally for or attempt to dictate. In the mean time, I am quite hungry and there is a fresh Sushi meal in my near future I predict.

**** End Ponderings ****

To Be Continued...

Dave Rat

 

Japan Airlines flight number whatever bound for Tokyo. My back hurts, my body is crooked and I went to a chiropractor on the way to the airport. Must have pulled a muscle and it knotted up like a twisted rubber band does when let loose in someone's hair. Have ya ever done that or had that happen where someone would twist up a rubber band and let it go in the small hair behind your neck? Ouch! I seem to have acquired a bit of a hitch in my get-a-long which is just what I need right now.

So I immediately pass out on the plane and wake up hour after takeoff to discover I am sitting next to a mid meal Japanese businessman who is a few drinks into the wind. Handing me the menu, "oh, which one do you order? Japanese meal o American meal?" he asks while perfectly combining al R's and L's in into a hybrid that makes me smile. "Well," still trying to hack through the haze, "Um, which on is that?" as I point at his food. While the presence of small rubbery flower shapes, chopsticks and bowls of brightly colored mystery globes clearly gave it away, he nearly shouts "Japanese meal!" Well, then that is what I will have then. Engulfed in excitement he yells down the isle for the flight attendant, orderes my meal and then proceeds to partake in what appeared to be some sort of joke telling session with her that suspiciously felt like it was at my expense.

"To drink?, um water, please," still trying to form words awaking from one of those slumbers that leave your arms feeling like lead. "Water? why water, no wine? why no wine?" he stares, loud and curious as can be. Ummmmm, well, how about a wine please. "Ahhhh yes, Cab Syllah, velly good!" And so it went, with him asking me each time I ate something if I liked it. I could only come up with two answers able to break the language barrier without insult; "yes, good" if I liked it and "hmmm, so-so" when it was beyond the realms of edibility. He loved "good" but really loved "so-so" and so once again he calls the flight attendant over followed by more laughing, a bunch of sounds I don't understand mixed in with the occasional "so-so" followed by more laughing. Wine and more wine and more laughing and I soon figured out that whenever he did not understand something he would invariably look forward as if think intently and nod his head and say yes, yes, ah yes. Then I realized that he barely had understood anything I had said the whole time except "yes" and "so-so."

His English was very limited and very hard to understand and yet still light years more advanced than my Japanese which is primarily relegated to names of Americanized sushi items, "hello" and "thank you." But that did not stop us from chatting away and in the middle of a jumbled question I hear what sounds familiar but not English. So I ask if he speaks Spanish, in Spanish and that is when the fun really began. Turns out he is a car parts distributor for Latin America and he can rock the Spanish. Though I may not have the syntax all down, I fair pretty well as well. So there we go, a common language all good as we both get yelled at several times to hush down. Too much fun and say hello to my plane ride friend Tsuchiya!

Landing at the airport, turns out that all that wine has left me a bit less chipper than the average bear but not so bleary to miss this after Leif pointed at it. Check it out, up there under the C-Clamped webbing is a birds nest with little birdy chicks in it. The webbing and triangular roped off area is to prevent poo bombs from taking out unsuspecting travelers. Cool stuff, I like the awkward mesh of different speiceis looking out for each other.

Next stop, hotel and the 'day of landing production meeting' where a bunch of delirious western roadies attempt to discuss things we pretend are important through interpreters with a sharp team of Japanese perfectionists that tend to be damn good at what they do.

Dave Rat

Day 370 - May 28th - Fast Forward to Almost Now

I have been moving from city to city for over a year now and also now I moving the place I return to between travels out and abound, oh boy! Well there are many joys involved with displacing one's self. The opportunity to place all your things in boxes. The chance to pay someone way too much money to break all your stuff while moving it and the exuberant mystery of the scavenger hunt of searching out items afterwards hidden in boxes afterwards. At least time was short and workload high mixed in with catching up and preparing to leave. My overload mode was complete and it is rare that I ask for help but without it submersion was imminent. I am beyond lucky that magical people will drop all, for my rescue. Here is a pic of where I decided to move:

After some thought, perhaps a bit of alteration is in order and the blank wall removed?

Ooops daisy, looks like all the wall fell off, oh well, not a big fan of wall paper anyway.

Say "Bye bye low ceiling." Say "hello big mess."

Why would a human voluntarily indulge in the misery of relocation, perhaps you ponder? Well, hopping to the other side of an infinite redundant traffic jam that divides my humanly self from my shorties and the world of Rat was an inspiration. Compounded by the fact that this small path leads to to the sea

PS. that is the shadow on monitor Daniel next to my head and he lives just two stop lights away now. Plus, this curious contraption feels attractive for reasons unknown

Though whether it's worth it is constantly under scrutiny so I must cling to my momentum of the original decision despite the obstacles that so cheerfully leap into my path or more realistically put; the obstacles I chose to create.

**** The Surrounding World ****

Oh, on a separate subject, here is something I found interesting on several levels. There is this guy Harry McCracken who is the editor for PC World Magazine who is quite possibly the most respected editor of computer stuff out there and he resigned early May. Turns out that he had new boss and in in less than a month he wrote an article that was censored. His new boss felt that an article he wrote was not so friendly to advertisers and was told to rewrite it, so he quit. I love that! Integrity vs. money in its purest form. Since then he has been rehired and his boss re-assigned. I love that too, integrity wins over greed. I love those things on a global level. Finally it turns out that the article he wrote was titled "10 Things We Hate About Apple"and I love that but on a more personal and opinionated lever. the reason the article was quashed was that Apple phoned PC World and requested that it not be printed. I don't love that. I believe that cheating by leveraging power to promote your products is a below the belt move. I am fine with success but only when earned rather than manipulated.

**** End The Surrounding World ****

Right now I am writing from notes and residing in Japan. Come join me, I wish you were here! Come soon and very soon I will fast forward blog to now in real time. Tomorrow in real time is a show at Tokyo Dome and in blog time? Well, we will find out soon enough.

Dave Rat

 

Paris

**** Ponderings ****

Day Breathing, eating and sleeping are choices deeply intertwined with the survival of an individual

**** End Ponderings ****

**** A Toast to Us Friends ****

A pause for a moment with a smile and I want to thank all of my bloggery friends from the depths of my heart for bringing me that that smile to my day, everyday. Who would have ever knew that a wandering soundie could be embraced so warmly by so many amazing and unique friends that span the globe. The whole thing is as absurd as it it is heartwarming. Even the thought that a person can have job purpose of controlling sound is an oddity unto itself and it exceeds any dreams I could have imagined my future to be. To be able to share this sensation of motion and feel \ so many interesting and amazing people are joining in, is beyond words I can express. I looked at the web site statistics today and they say that over 5000 unique visitors are viewing the blog daily, mind bending, mysterious multitudes. Yet I have come to know through comments and emails perhaps 100 and I read every one. I apologize for being slow to respond and at times I feel I have I have bitten off more than I can chew. I do plan on catching up on answering question perhaps not for a bit though as just trying to catch up on posts alone is a challenge in itself. So here is to all of you and to us and to never knowing what will happen next and to the curious and to opening each new day like birthday present.

**** End Toast to Us Friends ****

Last night I ovenighted with the band and 9:30 am sees me at the venue a full 36 hours before the show, this is not a normal day.

**** Issue of the Day ****

Everything. Things are amiss. We have been cycling through various stage setups and nothing is stable. Something is not right. The sound on stage is all over the place. Daniel is in spirally hell and no matter what he does he is helpless to get it under stable control. My job is to find and fix the issue. There are several potential culprits I found:

1) The PA is behind the band. Typically this is a bad thing but not the end of the world. IT makes my job tough as everything I do is heard by them and can screw them up so I have to mix with care, but we have done it before and not had an issue.

2) The video screens in front of the PA are new. Though they let most of the sound through and do effect the sound, I can compensate for it. More relevant is that there is "splash from the video rags that reflects onto stage kind of like shooting a hose through a screen door.

3) There is a curved roof over the band. Curved surfaces act as sound reflectors and like a curve mirror, reflect the sound to a center point. That point is AK's mic.

4) that stage is resonant. If you jump on the stage it makes a boomy sound, though the issue is mainly described as a high frequency wash that makes it hard to hear each other, it is possible that low end is overloading the in ear units.

So here I sit with Manny the Aussie rigger doing all we can to address the issues and what we did is 5 things. First we had 4 feet removed from the front of the stage which pushed the band back relative to the PA. Next we moved the video screens out from in from of the PA. Third we draped theatrical black cloth on the inside of the curved roof to reduce reflections. Then locating more stage tops, we double layered the stage to increase the sturdiness of the stage. Finally we crossed our fingers because there was nothing else to done, if this does not work, I am at a loss. It must. And tomorrow we hope for a day that is:

**** hopefully End Issue of the Day ****

And off to find an adventurous night out as a group of bloggery friends who have self proclaimed themselves "The Ratketeers" are in town. Cheers and beers and many bottles of wine deep, a most memorable adventure indeed.

Dave Rat

Though at times life is stressful, so many things are sweet.

And of all the things we commonly eat, how strange is it that we avoid consuming anything that has anything to do with insects except honey. Our only insect created food.

 

**** Special Alert ****

Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone but I got a bit laid back in my bloggery, like 4 weeks behind, yikes and easily the longest lag yet and during this lag something special has happened. Guess what? We missed the Blog's Birthday! Happy birthday RITM blog! May 24th marks the first day of the second year of us Roadies being in the Midst, or at least the official observation of them in a bloggery form. One whole year since the actual tour started and though the actual tour process, as far as my involvement on an active level, started back in late January 2006, but we don't really count that because those extra months were PB (Pre Blog). So today is the Day 366 since us Pepper's roadies first left home on our world wide food sampling trip that also involved setting up gear for a rock show. Let us raise our glasses and sing in merry rejoice.

**** End Special Alert ****

Oh, and we may as well settle in on a proper calendar dating system. "PB" will mean "Pre Blog" as in Day 89PB was 89 days before the RITM blog began. That way I can now refer to dates via bloggery time. Where as dates occurring after the blog began will be referred to as "PB" which means "Post Blog" so to clarify Day 89PB will mean 89 days after the Blog began and we were in Arizona. Actually it does not matter much anyway because once time has passed it becomes a slippery medium that has less and less relevance with each passing day and all that really matters is the memories.

And while we are catching up on past memories, I guess now is as good a time as any to tidy up the unfinished Coachella adventure so here are few odds and ends. I don't recall mentioning it in past blog posts but here is something for the sound techery humans.

**** Sound Nerd Speak ****

One of the issues, in my opinion, that us sound nerdery humans often encounter is the insecure action of ego based self importance that inspires us to loose track of the big picture. One area that often occurs is at mix position. Here we are at a festival ready to rock with 80,000 of our new found best friends whom have all come to join in listening and loving the tunes and low and behold they also like to see the band. Here we are as soundies (and lampies) all ready to rock like no tomorrow so we set up a monolith of techno scaffolding blockage dead center in prime seating so us privileged few who are paid to rock can do our gig. And with our momentum of self importance we barrel through and build our big bummer to stand on while totally disregarding the fact that the reason we are here is so that many of those humans who can't now see, want to view the show. After seeing event after event where there is a big "V" of emptiness behind the sound area because the audience can't see from that area, I decided to make an effort to bring about some change.

Here is an aerial picture from Coachella 2004's main stage with a "normal" festival mix position.

You may notice a slight devoid of humans behind the mix area above. Below is a picture of a low profile riser open back mix area that I came up with and have been fighting to implement for for many years but GoldenVoice and Coachella festival readily embraced it the following year in 2005.

Above you can see the "see through" mix position that I do all in my power to implement whenever possible. The amazing thing is how much resistance I encounter from promoters, production and other band engineers at festivals that really have a hard time straying from the norm. Even if though the "norm" sucks for the crowd and puts the sound engineer on a platform that is too high to hear what the audience hears.

Below, I put together a very high tech labeling of the sound system in the Mojave tent:

A pic from main stage at night

Mojave mix position

The 60 foot dome

\

Other wanderings

And I will see ya soon!

The returning to blog life,

Dave Rat

Last night I was off to the gig at 11:59 pm took a look around and confirmed that all was under control and immediately headed back to the hotel 20 minutes later.

That was way back on June the 4th. Now that it is deep into the 7 AM hour of June 5th, lets go see what breakfast looks like downstairs.

Ewwww! yuck, look at all that horrible food, bummer! Oh well, don't want it to go to waste so I will have to eat it, I guess, before I start wandering around Tokyo for a bit to take another look. There are so many unusual things everywhere, it is really hard to know which ones to take pics of.

Not so cool of a place to call home but as far as living in a box goes, this is the nicest one I have ever seen.

For some mysterious reason I felt drawn to the crepe shop so I indulged in a carmel cream and ice cream crepe. Yumm!

Speaking of food, there is a restaurant a half block away where you put $ in a machine, press a button for you choice, a little ticket pops out and then you walk inside, hand them the ticket and they make that food for you.

At first it didn't make sense but after thinking about it, eliminating having the chefs take orders and handle the money does streamline things a bit. All good, fast and like $5 for a bowl of noodles.

And off to do the rock show.

Dave Rat