Licensed To Ill, the first full length Beastie Boys album and the first Rap album to go #1, set the stage for a long, successful career as rap royalty. Fueled by "Fight For Your Right," "No Sleep Til Brooklyn," "Brass Monkey" and “Posse In Effect,” the release became the first hip-hop record to break five million sales in the 1980s.

Wiffleball bat in hand, TP US set out to unveil a little of the mystery behind the latest Beastie Boys touring production experience. The legendary East Coast trio has been going strong for a quarter-century; in addition to being amazing philanthropists, they’ve managed to throw down a wicked beat or two along the way; from NYC hardcore roots to hip-hop evangelists, the Beastie Boys have never ever failed to entertain. Upon release of their first self-produced effort, the inspiring To the 5 Boroughs, they played a number of unannounced shows in Europe before heading back to the US and a headlining tour.

PRODUCTION
The expansive yet well-greased production runs under the direction of PM Bill Rahmy, who is joined on tour by Tour Manager Jerome Crooks and Stage Manager Art Freund. Show designer is Doug ‘Spike’ Brant of aRtfaG, who truly pushed the creative envelope (again) with visual and technical ‘firsts’. Handling transportation duties for the tour is Upstaging; six trucks carry lighting, audio, scenic, catering, and motors/rigging. Bussing - or people transportation, as we like to call it - for the touring legs is by Florida Coach.

STAGING
Along with video treatment and travel, staging is a huge part of Spike’s master plan and a major element of the Beastie Boys production. Major staging vendor on To the 5 Boroughs is the ever-busy Accurate Staging (www.accuratestaging.com). SGPS / ShowRig (www.sgps.net) brought motion control, motors and more to the mix. Lead carpenter is ‘Big Daddy’, so you better behave!

According to Joe Gallagher of Accurate, the gig began with a video consideration. “Spike called and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got these Barco’s that we want to mobulate upstage and downstage, and maybe to the left and right’. I had a Mobulator in stock, but I looked at the weight, and I realized what I had wasn’t going to be beefy enough to push this video downstage, so we built a system from scratch with a 3-horsepower motor - it lived in the DJ riser, and pushed the DJ and the video screens downstage / upstage. I talked him out of going left to right; it would cost more money than he wanted to spend on the set, so he was fine was that.”

Accurate also built what is called the float - essentially a band riser with aluminum piping. “I found out Spike was using the Mobulator to push the float downstage as well, so he had them working double duty!”
Gallagher adds the DJ tables were built ‘solid as a rock for Mixmaster Mike. “He loves it.” Finally, the company manufactured the enclosure for the Versatubes. “We made it so they could travel safely in carts and not have to be re-assembled each day,” Joe adds.

Meanwhile, SGPS devised the tracking system for the Element Labs wall. SGPS/ShowRig’s Jason Sky says it’s a precision positioning Servo Motor Winch Tracking System. For control the company customized a motion picture camera positioning software named Kuper Control, widely used in the film business and introduced for use in touring by their organization.

“We integrated the software into the system so that it could interface and talk with the servo drives,” says Sky. “The software is easy to use and is a cost effective alternative to other products available. During the show we fly two 3200lb. Barco LED walls provided by Nocturne. They track horizontally and vertically with repeatable cues and positions.”
SGPS also supplied 51 CM Lodestar motors for show; points were divided among quarter-ton, half-ton, one-ton and two-ton motors.

Touring rigger for SGPS is Lenyn Barahona. “He’s amazing,” Jason enthuses. “Not only is he the lead rigger, but he's also the motion control technician and operator during the show. His day is slammed from 6AM load-in straight until 2AM loadout. And he's happy to do it.” Sky sent Nellii Gibbons to train Lenyn on the mechanics and setup of the system, since he wasn’t available to do pre-production. “I'm not a one really for touring,” Jason cracks. “I don't really care for it, and think it’s better to own your own company and send out others. But it’s the service we’re known for at ShowRig. I programmed the show and traveled with it for the first four dates, operating the first show and training Lenyn on our new control system. He'd worked with our equipment on KISS - but with different control.” In closing, Jason says PM Bill Rahmy is the man with the plan. “It was good working with him. Bill knows how to put a tight show together, and motivate others to do so as well.”

AUDIO
The Beastie Boys’ thumping concert sound and auxiliary crew are being provided by Eighth Day Sound (www.8thdaysound.com). The five man audio team consists of front-of-house engineer Tim Colvard, monitor engineer Steve Wallace, FOH Tech/Crew Chief Mark Brnich, monitor technician Joe Langholt and systems techs Steve Curtin and Dan Klocker.

Very little expense was spared both at FOH and monitor-land, with some of the galaxy’s most cutting-edge gear landing on the Beasties’ tour. Audio consoles at both engineer locations are DiGiCo D5 digital consoles. Front PA is a crisp yet meaty L’Acoustics / d&b rig, comprised of 52 V-Dosc, 12 dV-Dosc, and 16 SB218 (with all Lab Gruppen power amps) and 24 d&b audiotechnik B2 subs and six Q7’s for front fill, powered by d&b’s D12 amplifiers. Key house effects include a TC Electronic 2290, TC Electronic D2, Lexicon PCM91 and Eventide H3000, with an Avalon 737 inserted on the vocal channels.

The in-ear Sennheiser monitor system is augmented with two d&b M2’s and two C7 subs for Mixmaster Mike. Wireless mics are all Sennheiser SKM5000 models with Neumann KMS105 capsules. The Professional Wireless Systems Helical antennae system helps keep wireless chaos from ever becoming an issue. Ultimate Ears UE-10s round out the wireless ear package.

TP US spoke with the band’s long-term monitor man Steve Wallace about the intricacies of BB’s live sound. Wallace, who has primarily worked as a production manager for the last seven or eight years, started with the Beastie Boys back in 1992, obviously giving him a vantage point in monitor-related anticipation!

“The rate and amount of technology change is amazing,” he says. “I was PM for Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Korn, etc., and was able to see the evolution but didn’t get the ‘hands-on’. Last year both Korn engineers changed to Digico D5s, and I thought I’m going to jump on this when I have the chance - and luckily the Beasties offered that opportunity.” Previously a dyed-in-the-wool Midas XL3 and XL4 user, Steve ran FOH when given the opportunity, but says in his adult professional career he’s really stuck to monitor mixing. With 40 inputs at the stage, it’s not the sheer number of channels that is intimidating. According to Wallace, the Beastie Boys are more like ‘two bands in one’.

“The three Beastie Boys do their hip-hop set, and then they do six or seven songs with a full band - bass, drums, percussion, keyboards, guitar - and that widens out things quite a bit!”

But switching between entire setups is a piece of cake with the DiGiCo. “It’s the push of a button,” the engineer explains. “The band goes off to do a costume change, so we probably have 45 seconds - but with the snapshot, you hit ‘go’ and it immediately crossfades into the new scene.”

Wallace actually employs three D5 recalls - one for the hip-hop, one for the mellower jazzy set - and one for the edgy rock material that closes the show. “It gives me three nice starting points,” he says.

When they do appear, live drums are mic’d with beyerdynamic M88 and Shure SM91 on kick, Shure SM57s on top and bottom snare, a 451 on the hat, 98s on the tom and floor, and AT 414s on overhead left and right - by any definition a straight-ahead rock drum kit and mic selection combo.

Acoustic and electric bass rigs use both DI and M88 for reproduction. Steve says the electric bass amp is the venerable Alembic, already blessed wth plenty of character. “The Alembic is already 100% dirty - so there’s not much need to mix in a ‘dirty’ bass signal!”

Guitar rig is a Fender Twin mic’d with a Shure 57, and four lines from various keyboards - a stereo XD1, a Clavinet and a Rhodes - complete the line level package.

Steve says due to the band’s sets and setup, there’s no need to pump crowd noise through the ears. “We started out doing that when we went to ears around seven years ago, and found that we get plenty of ambient stuff from the open mics on stage - I’ve got a full percussion rig up there! And during the hip-hop portion of the show, one of the lead mics is eq’d in a manner very conducive to picking up crowd noise.”

The percussion rig is mic’d with SM98s on the congos, bongos and djembe, and a 451 on the ‘toys’.

Using the D5 freed a 20-space rack full of outboard dynamics gear. “Any and all compression and gating is onboard,” he confirms. For effects, Steve says he is still using three TC Electronic 2290s - “basically to create some space in the ears for the three guys”.

“They each get their own unit,” he says, “and I do a quick 60ms delay with no repeats - just to fatten it up. It’s a little more than what a harmonizer would do, and a lot less than what some of this crazy delay stuff will do - more in the realm of spatial enhancement.”
He also uses a TC M5000 for vocal and drum reverbs. “We try to keep it pretty simple and open. A lot the reverb stuff I do will depend on what the natural room is like, and what we’re hearing in the ears.”

In closing, Steve says the Beastie Boys are totally aware of their environment and what they should be hearing. “I guess I’ve created a sound in the monitors for them for so long ... if I can get pretty close I don’t have a hard time dialing in what they want to hear; they take a fair amount of attention but they’re all great guys to deal with. And as long as they’re getting what they need, there’s not a whole lot of interaction between us. Surprisingly, I’ve found the hip-hop material is more challenging to mix than the rock set, which baffles rock mixers - and baffled me at first. But we have a DJ that’s dropping stuff off vinyl - meaning there’s no replay machine or samplers - so you never know what’s coming at you. But we’re lucky; Mixmaster Mike is an absolutely incredible DJ.”

VIDEO
Since the dividing lines between lighting and video are so effectively blurred on this show, it sometimes becomes easier to discuss the video in lighting terms, and vice-versa, which many crew personnel tend to do. But perhaps we should first head praise to vendors Nocturne (www.nocturneproductions.com) who brought out the big Barco bang and Breck Haggerty’s Diagonal Research (www.diagonalresearch.com), who delivered the all-important Nev8 system through Delicate Productions to Ed and Ted’s Excellent Lighting.

Nocturne’s toolbox included a 9' x 18' LED DJ booth, two Barco D7 LED screens (9' x 12') two Sony D50 digital video cameras, a 55:1 Fujinon lens, an 18:1 lens, three MX 70 video switchers, a 32 x 32 router, two 2-channel hard drives, three remote pan/tilt cameras, two cigar cameras, and Stuart White’s matrix camera.

The DJ booth includes the three LED video walls positioned around the riser; the outside sections function as wings that move from wraparound to widescreen orientations. As mentioned, the main Barco display tracks quite extensively, and the Element Labs Versatubes (on their concert touring debut) form a third layer of video interest.

A vintage 1970s oscilloscope is picked up via lipstick cam and projected, but that’s just scratching the surface. Think video games, NYC spy cam, vintage television, footage only hours old, and much more. This show is founded on the premise of fresh.
According to Spike, the band is very much into the idea of everything being live. “Every day the band shoots more video which needs to be played back that night.”

With a large number of live IMAG cameras being a cornerstone of the initial design, Brant dismissed the idea of using a computer-based media server. The NEV8 system allowed him to use conventional broadcast quality video equipment, like switchers, routers and playback drives, while still keeping control at the lighting console. “Complete NEV8 systems are similar to DMX media servers in function, but not in form,” says Breck Haggerty. “We start with complete video systems, made up of broadcast equipment you might find in a traditional IMAG system or a TV station, then we install the NEV8s to make a real-time DMX connection to each the components. This gives video directors new ways to control their gear, and allows lighting designers more opportunities to use high-quality imagery and cameras as a part of a DMX programmed show.”

TPUS asked Breck what separated the Nev8 from his earlier versions of the product.
“Up through the Nev7 system,” he explains, “they were all prototypes. Macintosh computers were involved, and some customized pieces of video gear we’ve gotten into - it was very proprietary, one-off sort of thing. The Nev8 is built from the ground up as an embedded controller; we’ve departed from the customized video equipment, and are just dealing with off the shelf video gear.”

And the advantages of Nev8? Well, it boots up in 30 seconds, it’s a real-time operating system, any tasks that are time-sensitive are optimized to run faster and stronger. And it will hold up longer on the road.

Nev is not a media server of itself, but can be used to control a mixer and two hard drives, in effect a two-layer media server. “You can set it up to do anything,” he points out. “If there’s already an existing video system and you only want to do routing - you can do that, or DMX control for remote cameras, etc.”

All the video and lighting are within the same GrandMA DMX universes. Lighting director Mike ‘Chicken’ Lamb is handling the main cue stacks, meanwhile Benton Bainbridge is doing improvised, real-time video manipulation on a second console, and the final granny is backstage, where Stuart White is handling live camera cuts between at least eight cameras.

“Because it all started to get so complicated, we found the best way to deal with it was with a multi-user environment, where multiple programmers can program at the same time - on different consoles and on the same cue stack,” says Haggerty. “This is going to be a big advantage for the bigger shows where there’s so much programming to do.”

Breck calls Stuart White a “wonderful mad genius type person” perhaps because he’s tech’ing Haggerty’s Nev system and keeping backstage under control. He also mentions that Joe Cabrera from ACT Lighting was a huge help during the programming sessions, and got them out of more than one vat of hot water.

LIGHTING
While the show blends lighting and video to new levels of ambiguity, and one could daresay lighting takes a more supportive than leading role in this production, there’s nothing ordinary about the tasteful mix of movers, conventionals and LED technology by Spike, or the incredibly facile tour lighting production by Ed and Ted’s Excellent Lighting (www.edandteds.com). Through liberal use of Tomcat’s SwingWing truss, large amounts of the rig ride in the truss, setting new land speed records for ease of setup. Use of the Element Labs LED products meld seamlessly with the blanket of illumination of Martin MAC 2000s and a variety of unique conventional lighting instruments and arrangements. Wybron’s color scrollers abound, and even more amazing, lighting director Mike ‘Chicken’ Lamb has the whole world in his hands.

Chicken spoke with TP US about the unique networked approach to visual control on this tour. “We use three GrandMAs out here running video and lights, and I’m basically the show director at this point ,” he says. He also calls the six house spots. “Whatever you need, I’m there,” he laughs.

The team programmed at Ed & Ted’s for about a week, but as there weren’t production rehearsals, Chicken says it took the first few shows to get the tour sweet. “Spike, myself, Benton and Stuart spent a week with the video - trying to get the clips in and logged, as we had time to get some kind of clip into each of the 50 song picklist - but from there we went straight out and did a show.”

“The band is all about having crazy video,” he continues, “and Mike D is really into visuals, but we’ve worked it out as we’ve gone along, and lighting isn’t as huge a deal here. We keep the lighting relatively simple, solid colors and not much blinky ballyhoo type of crap. The band told us what vibe they wanted for each song, and we tried to create it for them.”

The lighting director says the Beastie Boys’ color palette is mainly primary rock n’ roll colors. “It’s big blocks of color, so you’re not taking away from the video,” he adds.

In closing, Chicken says, “I don’t know if we could have done this without the Nev - it really is all about running video off a lighting console - and without Breck’s input in the beginning, it couldn’t be the same show.

To garnish additional production gems, TP US spoke with BOTH Ed and Ted’s lighting crew chiefs. To make a long story short, Kevin Cauley, who prepped and until recently ran the tour, endured a non work-related accident on a tour break. He enlisted Kenny Ackerman to fill in, and consequently, each shared some thoughts on the tour’s technology. Rounding out the Ed and Ted’s crew are technicians Steve Schwind and John Nichols.

Cauley says that the Versatubes were a standout element. “It does single colors very well, but it’s kind of got a low-res video wall look, and it’s that duality - you can use it as video or one big scenic piece - that makes it very neat.”

The 40 sections of batten are about three meters piece, each with 3 tubes, for an element approximately nine feet high. “We hang the Versatubes off the upstage truss - where you’d have your backdrop - and they fly in and out during the show,” he explains.

“They’re spaced with about a foot in-between each - and that helps get the low resolution look. It’s very versatile as a backdrop - you could put these inside or around any scenic piece.”

The frame by constructed by Accurate Staging to hold four sections of tubing. “We hang them off a piece of ladder beam - and our dimmer guy’s on the button of the controller. It’s funny watching the stagehands when they figure out these aren’t regular old fluorescent tubes!”

For console hierarchy, Kevin points out that rather than have a master vs. slave scenario, they were able to partition the lighting rig. “Certain parts of it reside on each console, but as a whole, it exists within the same universe, and each console has control over a particular world,” he says. “Chicken has lighting and the ability to trigger video cues, Benton’s video control GrandMA has power over the diagonal research Nev8 system with slight control over playback; it was easier to put it on Chicken’s system because of strange technical reasons. And out back, Stuart is using the GrandMA Lite as a switcher. The cool thing is if anyone of those consoles go down, the one with the next priority can pick up and start running the whole show. That’s a clear advantage of networking.”

Dimmerland contains two ETC 48-ways and two ProPower racks, and the Artistic License Artnet systems - which take the Ethernet signal coming from the consoles and converts it to DMX - are routed through Fleenor active opto’s. “One of those Artnet boxes will handle four universes of DMX, but we’re only using four at this point.”
Nine-Lites and Eight-Lites feature Wybron color changers, as do the ETC Source Four PARs. According to Kevin, the nine-lighters are set up over the midstage and upstage trusses; the fagpods are on the side; this incarnation of the custom aRtfaG luminaire features CXI changers, six DWE 650s and two Nook Lights.

“Each time we go out, we put a new little bit in them,” says Cauley, “and often we’ll use a Martin 3K Atomic Strobe in the center ... you’ve got to keep people guessing!”

A few Source Fours down center give a kicker from the front, while 32 Source Four PARs with color changers hang over the midstage truss. Five MAC 2K Wash fixtures share space on the midstage.

All in all, nine MAC2000 Profiles and 16 MAC 2000 Washes are used. “It’s a very light load as far as automated is concerned,” says Kevin, “but you get such a better looking show out of a mix of instruments.”

“The system works as a whole,” concludes Kevin, “and when it’s all going at one time it really fills out the space.”

Lighting crew chief #2 Kenny Ackerman is an independent who has chiefed for VLPS, PRG and others before working with E&T on this show. Ackerman says it’s a good pack, with between one and two trucks for lighting, and an achieveable rig, with 15 points - not counting cable picks or other flown elements.

Like Cauley before him, he appreciates the facility afforded by the Tomcat truss. “We have two side SwingWing trusses that contain MAC 2000s and molefeys with color changers, and a downstage truss - also SwingWing - that has the PARs with color changers - and MAC 2ks as well, and that all goes up so fast,” he says. The next structure up is a 20” box truss with 2K’s and nine-lighters. Upstage of that, a 12 x 18” truss facilitates a 40’ ladder beam and the 40’ LED tube wall.

Kenny points out there isn’t a downstage truss on this tour - and no front lighting, except for spotlights, providing a side lighting / rear lighting vibe. An Austrian curtain travels up and down, and the LED Versatube also animates, as does the ‘float’ - the backline gear riser for the band. “The dj booth has Christmas lights hanging all over it with Chinese paper hats - for an outdoor patio feel.”

In closing, Kenny says he gives the credit to Kevin Cauley for putting it all together. “I just had to take over and do my part. I got the easy part of it; we have a good team.”