It's now been a year since Mark Fisher and Patrick Woodroffe first came together to collaborate on the visual designs for the three entirely separate Rolling Stones productions that are now touring North America in up to 33 trucks. With a nine month run up to the debut Licks show, Production Director Jake Berry cautiously assumed that, after the false start of Bridges To Babylon, where the key prop - the amazing feat of engineering that was The Bridge itself - was delivered late, this time they would be well ahead of the game. Nothing in Stonesworld is that simple.
"Here we are in Boston, behind, but catching up at a rate of knots which is a credit to everybody," said Berry in September at the start of the tour, citing the appointment of Project Manager Richard Hartman as a crucial step towards co-ordinating the loose ends of the technical production.
As Berry observes, creating new, tourworthy ideas can still be a hit or miss affair. Those who live in fear of failure would be well advised to work elsewhere. "You don't get R&D like you do in a car plant where you have four years to design a car. On the road, your R&D is done as you go, and your prototype had better work. So when someone like Tony Bowern and his team from Brilliant say, 'Oh, I can do that', you're putting them on the chopping block."
With their universal clout, the Stones are in a league of their own when it comes to the approval (or disapproval) of design ideas, even after costly materials have been specifically manufactured. It's often frustrating to be on the receiving end of the band's disapproval, but it's a true measure of their uncompromising perfectionism, and Berry and Fisher have become hardended to the knocks.
Said Berry: "It's very rare that somebody walks in and says, 'Oh, that's the best thing I've ever seen'. So you have to change it around and these things don't happen in two or three days. And every member of the Rolling Stones has such an incredible schedule; it's hard to get everybody in the same place to make decisions."
On this tour, significant changes have included the B stage format, the video content, the Jeff Koons backdrop, and the stage decking. "For some reason the band didn't like the stage colour so we changed it. It could have been a lot worse... they could have hated the video tracking system then we'd have really been in deep shit!"
Even in the most testing moments, Fisher appears to have retained his sense of humour. "Out of an infinite number of possibilities we slowly eliminated most of the ones the band didn't like, but not quite all, so that when it got here they were able to change everything that we had built! Specifically we've changed the floor, the backdrop, the video content, some of the lighting, the B stage format. However, we haven't changed very much on the sound and we haven't changed the handrail!
They came one week and liked the stage but hated the video; they returned two weeks later and hated the stage but liked the video, so we were making some progress. There was some disappointment when they found that the pattern that they had removed from the stage for the stadium show was then missing in the arena."
With three productions often sharing elements of kit, it was important to devise a scheme whereby equipment could be easily identified by the load-in crew. Berry explained: "It was vital to mark flight cases and cabinets well. We have three colour codes - white being a theatre, green being a stadium [i.e. green fields] and orange being an arena. If it's white, red and green, it goes to all venues."
As an example of the way the tour has been run, in the Boston area, the Stones played the Fleet Center (arena), Gillette Field (stadium) and the Orpheum Theatre. "We have to program the arena and stadium shows with the same lighting system, and the band has to rehearse two different shows," said Berry. "Two days for a band on stage in full production for a show this size is absolutely nothing - others would be doing three weeks - but that's all we're giving ourselves.
At the same time we loaded the arena production into the Fleet Center, Site Co-ordinator Toby 'Blister' Fleming was loading the steel into Gillette Field. We had to be three days ahead so that everything was in place there when we loaded out of the Fleet Center. It's standard leapfrogging in some ways, but this approach does require an awful lot more work."
Fortunately, Berry has a very understanding crew at his disposal. "I'm really very fortunate. I can call on a really great bunch of guys and girls. I'd like to think that they like to work for me and I know certainly from my side I want them to be with me - there's no whining, no fuss."
Berry is particularly appreciative of his long-term relationship with Belgian steel scaffolding masters StageCo. Michael Tait of staging company Tait Towers best summed up their importance when he said: "They are just an enormous company and there's no one else on the planet that could have put this thing together, except StageCo. It's just staggering. The Belgians come in and they are just spectacular."
THE BIG LOOK
Following on from the opulence of Babylon, Mark Fisher's stadium set for Licks illustrates a quite different narrative. "It's really about the end of the mechanical age, the age of machines," he said. "Babylon was just an idea of wealth and here we've tried to set all that to one side and just create a mood of optimism and pleasure - everything that goes with rock'n'roll bands on tour having a great time. We taking over the stadium completely and devoting the evening to pleasure and fun.
It's entirely emotional. A celebration of 40 years of great music but looking forward and working with all of the equipment available today to make a really strong statement. You're going to come away from it thinking the band was great and the scenery was interesting, but I don't think it's got the 'Cor Fuck!' factor that Babylon had."
It does, however, boast the 190ft x 84ft Jeff Koons backdrop (the latest of two) which is a jawdropping sight on its own when it is revealed. "When you put up something that big, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to work out that you've got one hell of a sail," commented Berry, who hired Brilliant Stages to negotiate the effects of nature.
The Koons artwork was supplied to Brilliant, the overall stadium show set fabrication contractor, who then commissioned Architen Landrell to produce the final result, using a special German fabric that was developed for digital printing. Lance Rowell of Architen Landrell explained that although the fabric guaranteed an excellent image, the original backdrop was not ideal structurally.
Rowell said: "We had to reinforce it and that's where the problems began. The fabric actually shrunk a bit where it was heavily welded, and that gave us visible wrinkling that was four times worse under a spotlight. However, we instigated a system whereby we got rid of 90% of it. With the new image we've been able to get rid of it in design rather than pulling it out under tension."
Brilliant Stages, with assistance from Tomcat UK, has been responsible for the drops themselves, the tracks that they travel in, the motors and control that drive them and how they travel. "We use an expensive yachting type track," said Brilliant's Tony Bowern. "To deploy them vertically they get pulled up by winches and then to get them back into their carts they're pulled down basically by a pinch roller system that drags them against the winch and then back into their carts.
We made two prototypes - one to test the machine and another which we used with StageCo's towers in our yard, leaving it up for about a week in different weather conditions, just to make sure it'll work."
The eight lighting pods which travel between the video screens are driven on a tooth-belt system with the motor drive at the base of the tower - another Brilliant creation.
"The actual pods themselves can be positioned to within a millimetre of where we want them and they can also travel up to two metres a second, which is pretty fast," said Bowern. A similar system was used on another Fisher-designed tour for the Japanese artist Yumi Matsutoya, although the speed of operation on the Stones show is much faster and the pods are heavier.
Keen to highlight the sterling efforts of his Brilliant design colleagues, Piers Sheppard, Andy Edwards and Warren Steadman, Bowern also acknowledged the assistance of other companies involved in the mammoth stage craft, citing Sheet Fabs for their help with the rolling of the tracking itself for the video. Litestructures also helped with the rear spines on the video screens. Tomcat USA shared responsibility for the stadium header fascias with Tait Towers. Tait also supplied the 'fingers' or, as Michael Tait has it, "trapezoid-shaped tapering".
For the arenas, Tomcat supplied the grid, the lighting pods for the video screen, and the screen hang itself, while Tait provided all the staging.
THREE-WAY EFFORT
The tracking control on Licks is essential to the whole effect of the show, and it's dependent on a three-way effort by Seth Goldstein, who announces the cues, Gordon 'Gordo' Hyndford, who hits the buttons, and Bart Durbin, who ensures safety - all of whom are in constant radio contact. The trio have worked together for around 10 years on some of the greatest tours of that period.
In total, there are 16 crew involved in the tracking process. "We actually have spotters and emergency stop buttons all through the stage and everybody is keeping an eye on what's going on," explained Hyndford. "There's a person watching at every lighting pod making sure the cables don't get hung up as they go up and down, and they all have an emergency stop as well."
One of the biggest challenges, said Hyndford, is ensuring that water stays away from the electronics. The stadium shows, he says, are incredibly intricate. "There's a lot of instances where you can't just hop from cue to cue - a path that you have to follow and that involves a lot of people lifting and moving light pods and curtains out of the way, allowing space for the video to come through.
We're also concerned about wind. A lot of the elements out there are variable. We make it as consistent as possible but you start throwing in the darkness, the wind, the fog, the pyro, and that's when things start changing."
Bart Durbin added: "You don't want to be in a hurricane and try to get it down in the wind. It's a bit like being on a big ship at sea with gales coming on - we've got a tenth of an acre of fabric when everything's up."
TRACKING VIDEO
"People have tracked video before, but not 40 tonnes of it... at 30 feet in the air," said Jake Berry.
The Stones always do it big, and it comes as no surprise that the Licks stadium show features what is considered to be the biggest tracking video screen in rock'n'roll touring history Ñ a 33ft x 65ft, (16 x 9 format) Panasonic Astravision system supplied by BCC Video, which fits in a frame and moves on a trolley system. Four processors lined up on top of each other, providing four images that can be made into one.
However, the screen can separate into eight columns. Therefore, the images can be separated into each column - a task performed through the Pinnacle Excel DVE which can can take 12 inputs and give eight separate outputs, positioning the image to fit into any screen as it tracks into different configurations. The motor drives and control for the tracking were designed by Andy Cave and Dave Weatherhead of Entertainment Innovations, as commissioned by Brilliant Stages.
"Astravision has been around for a few years, but the method of image manipulation is quite new," explained Video Crew Chief & Engineer Zainool Hamid. "You'd probably not want to move a larger screen because you are stacking processors and it's very hard to pull more than four of them. The challenge is to match the separate screen modules and make them appear as one - that requires very precise matching of brightness, colour, light levels and camera curves. That's the only way you can get the image to be as big as it is."
The images that hit the screens are processed through a full 601 serial digital system which by its nature does not suffer from the noise and frequency response problems of analogue. All of the signals from the main programming, cameras, tape machines, hard drives and digital effects pass through fibre optic cable to the screen, guaranteeing a very clean signal.
BCC's control room governs 10 Ikegami cameras - three at FOH, four on stage (one on boom and three handheld), one on Charlie Watts, plus a general wide shot and a 'guitar cam' which was tried out on Babylon, and is now much improved. The control suite also runs a Pinnacle 9000 switcher, two Sony digital tape machines and six Doremi hard drive storage systems.
On the arena show, the screen area measures 48ft x 42ft (approximately 4 x 3 or TV aspect ratio format). The screen is static, removing the need for frames, and the whole system requires shorter cable runs so everything is more compact.
CUT & CONTENT
Reclaiming her Stones Video Director seat is Christine Strand whose job, following her absence from Babylon, is to concentrate wholly on the screen cut. Willie Williams, meanwhile, was brought in as Video Designer, to provide a different artistic viewpoint and commission video pieces accordingly.
Patrick Woodroffe commented: "Willie had worked with Christine before; he naturally understood lighting, and it's turned out to be an excellent collaboration. The way these things work best is when you integrate all the different disciplines, and Willie's a bit of master when it comes to that.
Willie commissioned some pieces and made some himself, shooting more stuff in Toronto. The lighting and video are very integrated not least of all because we have lighting fixtures right in the middle of the video screen (pods), so it all has to tie in closely. Christine will work with the colour of the lighting so that it all compliments each other."
It wasn't until the tour was given its title - Licks - that a more solid creative direction emerged, said Woodroffe. "The thing that didn't work immediately with the stuff that Willie had done was that it was a bit disparate, but that had to be the case as we had no idea what the show was about. After we had the title Licks, he made more material.
We shot a girl in Toronto who had these amazing red lips and she becomes this disembodied presence on the screen to connect with the Forty Licks album title. As soon as we did that, Willie was able to stitch back all the stuff he'd done before but in a different context. We brought in Lance Bangs, a relative of the famous Creem editor Lester Bangs, and he's made a few pieces, using Super 8 to achieve a 'street style'."
Strand says that her own vision for the screen cut evolved after noting Williams' imported imagery. "They were looking outside of many of the after effects graphics styles that you see so often on shows these days, and it needed something a little more special, more edgy and tailored to fit the Stones' image," she explained.
"My inspiration always comes from the music itself and the set lists on this tour are fantastic. The interaction between the Stones band members is always very animated and audience-friendly, so it's never difficult for the cameras to capture something exciting.
Deciding how to cut between cameras and not miss anything is obviously an instinctive thing - I try to imagine what I'd like to be seeing as a member of the audience, and then go with that. But when you have raw material like this it's hard to go wrong! At the same time you don't want everyone to be looking at the screen all the time; they should also be watching the band on stage! The more abstract images are designed for those moments, so they appear as background flavouring."
Invited on to the tour by Fisher in May, after the screen design was in place, Williams commented on how enjoyable it has been to have a specific role rather than take responsibility for the whole video department. "To be focused on just the visuals has been very liberating, but the Stones have so much history and so many associations that it's actually far from a blank canvas. It's also daunting to be faced with such a big canvas. It was only when Mick and Charlie arrived and saw the hugeness of the screen that they realised the power of it, and how it needed to be used very carefully.
It's important to give the band a sense of ownership, rather than put them in front of something that they have no control over. So they've had a lot of input in the process of deciding what's right and wrong for the show. The Stones have so much history and so many associations that it's actually far from a blank canvas. Mick made it clear after seeing a montage of historical footage that this shouldn't be a nostalgia fest. It's gratifying to note that pretty much everything that's been commissioned is being used in some way."
The proposals made by Williams were based on figurative subjects rather than abstract. "I"ve become very fed up with the way fast-moving abstract graphics have increasingly dominated concert video in the same way that automated lighting saturated rock shows in the mid-'80s. It's time to think differently."
Williams worked once again with Mark Logue of Punk Films during the commissioning and post-production stages. Video-wise, the arena and stadium shows look different to each other in many ways. There are some universal video elements, but the set lists are different and therefore sequences exist which are unique to each show. By the first show, visual material and the different permutations for their appearance had been programmed for 45 songs, but things are never cast in stone, especially early on.
Particularly satisfying for Williams is the piece used in the stadiums for 'Street Fighting Man' and for 'Undercover Of The Night' in the arenas - a heavily posterised sequence of car crashes overlaid by I-Mag of the band. Another scene sees footage of a freeway at night where a billboard to the right acts as the canvas for I-Mag.
However, everyone's favourite sequence appears to be the Anime cartoon, and Williams is proud to have contributed to the Stones' 21st century canon by daring to pierce their famous tongue logo! "I had the idea early on to introduce a suitably proportioned dominatrix wresting with the tongue logo," he said. "She pierces the tounge with a stud and then rides it.
It was very time-consuming because it required actually filming an actress riding a bucking bronco, and it was then painted over as a cartoon. The punchline is that she gets swallowed by the mouth and it spits out her boots!"
The appearance of spluttering gerbs on the screen during one sequence gives the impression of real pyrotechnics happening behind the band, whereas it's actually pre-recorded footage. Surely the safest way of achieving such an effect! "Yeah, it's video pyro!" laughed Strand.
"All of us were very wary of large I-Mag indoors and promised that we'd leave it until the very last number. We tried to think of achieving a balance and include I-Mag in between prepared material. Another way to use I-Mag in an interesting way is to put colour treatments over the camera images, like red or blue. The red is particularly effective and dangerous-looking."
PYRO
Finally, a brief word about the pyrotechnics which bring the Stones show to an explosive climax. Hats off to the pyro crew - Pete Cappadocia, Jason Jones and Dick Richmond - and suppliers Stage & Effects Engineering and J.E.M. FX for their sterling work on what has to be one of the most impressive pyro shows ever seen in rock'n'roll touring, topped off by confetti cannon mayhem.
Most impressed with the concept of confetti is Robbie McGrath who offered a unique viewpoint from the FOH mix riser: "We found out on the last tour that the confetti was conductive and the thought of it getting into the Midas desks scared the life out of me. I was then told that we had $60,000 worth of the stuff, so I should get over it! I spent so much time picking bits of crap out from the desks that I began to feel like a gynaecologist!"
Photography & interviews by Diana Scrimgeour.
Jeff Koons backdrop photo by Mark Fisher.
Additional reporting by Mark Cunningham.
Extra special thanks to Jake Berry.
ROLLING STONES LICKS WORLD TOUR -
Selected Key Personnel & Production Suppliers:
Management: Rupert Loewenstein Ltd.
Tour Promoters: Clear Channel Entertainment/Grand Entertainment
Tour Producer: RZO Piecemeal Inc.
Tour Director: Michael Cohl
Logistics Directors: Alan Dunn
Band Road Manager: Arnold Dunn
Clear Channel Tour Manager: Craig Evans
Accountants: Mike Sexton/Mark Aurelio
Wardrobe: Isobel Work
Security Director: Jim Callaghan
Tour Security Co-ordinator: Scott Nichols
Media Co-ordinator: Tony King
Media Representative: Cheryl Ceretti
Production Director: Jake Berry
Production Co-ordination: Fader Higher
Production Co-ordinators: Helen Campbell/Wendy Overs
Project Manager: Richard Hartman
Stage Manager: Anthony Giordano
Assistant Stage Manager: Seth Goldstein
Site Co-ordinator: Toby Fleming
Backline Technicians: Pierre De Beauport (crew chief), David Rouze, Peter Wiltz, Johnny Starbuck, Mike Cormier, Russell U. Schlagbaum
Set/Stage Design: Mark Fisher Studio
Set Construction: Tait Towers/Tomcat USA/Brilliant Stages
Staging: Stageco
Engineering: McLaren Engineering
Steel Crew: Bellekes Van Espen, Raf Goethuys, Patrick Martens, Filip Vandenbruwane, Mark Van Gorp, Andre Verbeeck, Patrik Vonckx, John Carr, Robert 'Snake' Castelletti, Elmer Vallejos, Randy Ellson
Lighting: Vari-Lite/LSD Fourth Phase/Syncrolite
Lighting Designer: Patrick Woodroffe
Lighting Programmer: Dave Hill
Assistant Lighting Designer: Adam Bassett
Lighting Director: Jim Straw
Lighting Crew Chief: Ethan Weber
Vari-Lite Crew: Kenny Ackerman, Nick Barton, Wayne Boehning, Barry Branford, Greg Gore, Craig Hancock
Syncrolite Crew: Stanley Kimberlin, Olaf Poettcher
LSD Crew: Adam Finer, Russell 'Bits' Lyons, Aaron Stephenson
Sound: DB Sound
FOH Sound Engineer: Robbie McGrath
Monitor Engineer: Chris Wade-Evans
Sound Crew Chief: Niall Slevin
FOH Assistant Engineer: Jim Homan
Monitor Assistant Engineer: Kevin Glendinning
FOH System Tech: Tony Luna
Sound Crew: Dustin Johnson, Roy Parrott, Ken Check
Rigging: Stage Right Production
Head Rigger: Bart Durbin
Riggers: Joe Favor, Shawn Moeller
Head Carpenter: Alan Doyle
Assistant Head Carpenter: Flory Turner
Carpenters: Gordon Hyndford, Steve Chambers, Michele Morin, Heather Rogan, Dewey Shepard, Mike Washer
Video: BCC Video
Video Design: Punk Films
Video Designer: Willie Williams
Video Director: Christine Strand
Video Engineer/Crew Chief: Zaindool Hamid
Video Ad: Charlie Harris
LED Engineers: Greg Frederick, Marty Kell
Camera Operators: Justin Bomberg, Joe Weir, Gabriel Lopez, Simon Cadiz
Pyro: Stage & Effects Engineering/J.E.M. FX
Pyro Crew: Pete Cappadocia (chief), Dick Richmond, Jason Jones
Power: CAT Entertainment Services
Power Crew: Anthony Hurlocker, Daniel Rodriguez, Jereme Gardner
Barricade: Production Design
Trucking: Upstaging
Lead Truck Driver: Steve 'Tex' Sallee
Buses: Senators Coaches
Freight/Shipping: Sound Moves
Furnishing: Inner Sanctum
Catering: Catering Solutions
Catering Co-ordinator: Peter McGoran
Head Chef: Lawrence Mitchell
Radios: AAA Communications
Travel Agency: Travel Tech
Public Relations: Rogers & Cowan/LD Publicity