Five Stadiums in Five Nights
I’m a lazy woodworker. I say that out loud in the shop and people usually laugh, because they think I’m being modest. I’m not. I mean it as a description of how I work and, most days, as a compliment.
In 1992 I was out with Genesis on a stadium tour, running lights and calling follow spots. Stadium tours have a shape to them. A day to load in, a show day, a day to load out and travel. That’s the normal rhythm and there are good reasons for it. On this run we decided the normal rhythm wasn’t necessary and booked five stadiums in five cities in five days.
We opened at Texas Stadium with a week to set up and a couple of shows to settle in, which felt civilized. Then came the push to Houston. We ran overnight, and I got off the bus at my eight o’clock call and walked straight into the building and went to work. Doors were at seven that night, show at eight. The last hour of load-in happened with the house filling up underneath us. At 8:05 I was hanging the last light while the show started.
It was a good show. Everybody loved it. It ended at 10:30 and we immediately began taking down everything we had spent the day putting up, and about two hours later it was all in the truck and we were headed for Miami.
We made it by five minutes. That’s the part of the story that sounds impressive, and it’s the part I trust least. Because what that day actually proved was that we could not do it four more times. Not because the crew wasn’t willing. The crew was willing. Willing doesn’t scale. Something had to change or the tour was going to grind us into paste somewhere around night three.
The problem was the back wall. We were carrying hundreds of Vari-Lites, and something like half of them hung on a scaffolding wall behind the band. Every one of those fixtures was going up by hand, one at a time, a person on the scaffold taking a light and hanging it and clamping it and moving on. Hours of it. There’s a nice piece of history buried in that, because Vari-Lite existed at all because Genesis paid for it. Showco demonstrated a prototype to the band in 1980, on the side of a barn in the English countryside, and Genesis put up the money to build fifty of them. Those went out on the Abacab tour in a bullring in Barcelona in 1981. Eleven years later we were hanging hundreds of their descendants one at a time, like it was still 1975.
We had a carpentry and metal crew traveling with us, so between cities we built ladder brackets. Separate from the scaffolding, racks we could lay down flat on the deck. Six fixtures to a rack. Load them on the ground where the work is easy, fly the whole rack up, clamp it to the scaffolding, done. Do that a dozen times instead of hanging two hundred lights by hand.
The clock collapsed. But the thing I actually remember about those brackets isn’t the time. It’s that they made the job teachable. We picked up local day crews in every city, people who had never seen the rig and would never see it again, and I could show somebody how to load a rack in about three minutes and then leave them to it. Hand-hanging a fixture on a scaffold is a skill. Loading a rack is a task. The bracket took something that lived in a few experienced people’s hands and turned it into something a stranger could do correctly on his first morning.
That’s the whole idea, and it’s why I call myself lazy. I am not interested in doing something the hard way if there is an easier way that gets the same result. I’m out for the payoff, which is a finished thing and somebody happy with it. The struggle is not the product. Nobody who sits down at a table has any idea whether it was hard.
In the shop this shows up constantly. We teach a Shaker end table class, and tapering four legs consistently is exactly the kind of job that goes sideways when six students each do it their own way. So we built a tapering jig. The angle is already in it. The hold-downs are already in it. Every leg that comes off it matches every other leg, and I’m not spending the back half of the class correcting four different people’s four different mistakes. An afternoon spent building that jig has paid for itself a hundred times over.
The subtler version has no jig in it at all. In the tool tote class the trick is knowing when to crosscut. If you mill your stock to thickness and go straight to cutting parts to length, you now have six pieces that each have to be ripped to width, which is six trips through the table saw and six chances to end up with six slightly different widths. Flip it around. Mill to thickness, rip one board, or in our case two, at a single saw setting, then take everything to the chop saw for the crosscuts. Fewer operations, and the widths are identical because they came off the same setup. That’s not a tool. That’s just doing things in the right order, and it’s the same move as the ladder bracket.
I’ll admit the failure mode. Sometimes I spend an hour building a fixture for a cut I was only ever going to make twice, and the honest accounting says I should have just cut the thing. I don’t always get the call right. Laziness has to be aimed at something or it’s just procrastination with better branding.
But the principle holds. Effort you spend grinding disappears the moment you stop. Effort you spend on process keeps paying, and it can be handed to somebody else.
