So here’s a new thing spammers are doing, or at least, I haven’t noticed them doing it to me until now: lifting comments from other sites to give them an air of legitimacy, and then the links in the profile are spam. Cute. I have about ten comments in my queue right now that came from a post somewhere on the internet about roofing and gutter maintenance.
I am now not on tour, with anybody. The guy I used to work for cancelled all his dates for this year a week before Christmas. So that’s a bummer. After Christmas, I filled in as a button-pusher for a band the name of which I shall not mention here, and it was terrible. The band members like to think of themselves as production-savvy, and they’re not, at least when it comes to lighting. Their brother grew up working for their sister – herself a fairly well-known Christian artist – and his style is, shall we say…idiosyncratic. It looks like the work of someone who saw some flash-n-trash lighting somewhere and thought it was the Way To Do It. At one point in his programming, the lights simply blinked. On and off. Not even in time to the music! AAAAUUGHHsdakfajs fl;aksjfa. The brothers in the band, however, are now used to this style, and think it’s the “correct” way to do things. Certainly, some artists prefer more things happening to fewer things happening, and in between I feel there’s a sweet spot of good taste, but there was none of that here. Incredibly fast ballyhoos on slow songs, huge pulsing rainbow chases, and strobes on EVERYTHING.
It was such a shame, too, because there was a very nice rig in place for two of the four days that I was there. Martin MAC Vipers, VL3500 washes, Atomics, truss warmers, Sharpys. Generic, but had great potential. That was horribly, horribly wasted. And the artists themselves were pieces of work. At the last show, everyone went to dinner, and talk turned to having babies (many band members were recently married) which is all well and fine, until the direction swung suddenly to having babies to “combat the Muslim threat”. And it was not merely a terrible joke in incredibly poor taste, they were serious. They then said some horribly offensive things about brown people in general, and went on to enjoy their meal. After praying.
These are the people the industry throws me together with. Lovely.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks