Lighting Dimensions - Action (As In Live)

A Decade Of Farm Aid

November 1995--Ten years ago, after Bob Geldof had organized the Live Aid extravaganzas to benefit the starving inhabitants of Ethiopia, a group of American musicians looked to easing the plight of the farmers in their own homeland. Yet unlike its model, Farm Aid has become an annual event. This year Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp returned to share their music and support, and they were joined onstage by Hootie and the Blowfish, Black Hawk, John Conlee, and the Super Suckers at Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, KY.

"There was also a very exciting, very colorful Native American dance group that opened the show--the Dennis Alley Wisdom Dancers--and they always do a really good job," says LD Jeff Ravitz. "And it was a little smaller than in the past, so instead of getting 40-plus acts on and off stage for 12 to 14 hours, we had seven bands on in seven hours. The crowd got a more substantial show, because every act was on stage like a mini-concert."

As the show is also televised, the content is also interspersed with interviews with various farmers and farm lobbyists, and this being the tenth anniversary show, footage included retrospective tapes and clips from previous Farm Aids. The staging showcased another innovation, because instead of the usual 60' rotating turntable, the acts were changed via rolling risers, which fit flush up against the 80'-wide by 60'-deep stage's front. Mike Brown of United Production Services provided the stage and the roof, and Ron Stern served as the production manager and event coordinator.

"Because it is such a huge stage with a fairly high roof, there is quite a bit of physical space to cover, and a lot of lights were dedicated strictly to trying to light the audience in a way that's not really bothersome to them and makes it look interesting on television," Ravitz explains. "It would be easy to just blast the whole audience with a few big lights--but we tried to do it a little bit more tastefully than that."

The tools the LD used to accomplish this included 26 Cyberlights operated by Carl King from Bandit Lites. "They really gave the show some crispness and some depth, and provided some excellent gobo pattern coverage on the stage," Ravitz says. "The basic gist of Farm Aid has always been that nobody really knows much about the bands that are coming in. Certainly, even if we did know what the configuration of people on stage was, it never really sticks to that once we get there on stage, and we don't know a thing about their show. So we ended up doing very generic cues. As a result, the Cyberlights were extremely helpful in picking up positions between any of the generic specials that we might have had to focus. The other element is wanting as many different textures as possible for television, and the Cyberlights provided that last texture that really made it look finished off."

The lighting crew members who helped Ravitz carry out his design plan were Willie Twork, Carl King, Mike Shook, Glen Bowman, and Brian Brown. As the event's main lighting contractor, Bandit Lites supplied all of the lighting equipment, which included: 26 High End Systems Cyberlights, 41 PAR-64 bars, 22 PAR-64 ACL bars, four 5-22° CCT fixtures, 10 ground cycs, four Lycian HTI short-throw followspots, 26 PanCommand Systems ColorFaders. Control boards included one High End Systems Status Cue, one Avolites QM 500, and one Leprecon LP 1524 desk.

"We loaded the lighting in Saturday morning, focused and programmed through the night, and then the next day was the show. So we only had the course of one day to set up, and one night to get any looks into the consoles that we wanted," Ravitz says. "So we put in a real menu of things that we could draw from--that's really the best that you can do. And by having good, intuitive operators on both the conventional console and the moving light console, you can actually make it look as if it was all planned. Everybody seems to think that we had accomplished that this time, so I was very pleased."

--Catherine McHugh

Copyright ETEC, 1995. All rights reserved.