Hartman Over the Rainbow

December 2009 Issue 124

In 1971, Richard Hartman played a major role in establishing an exciting new London music venue. He told Jerry Gilbert the full story...

A single year in the past four decades did more to open the gateway to a new generation of sound and light production values than any other: 1971.

    It was the era immediately after Woodstock, after the Isle Of Wight and after WEM. When the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London opened its doors in November that year, the driving force was the production team at Fillmore East in New York — and the legacy that was unquestionably Bill Graham’s.

    The 2,700-capacity venue in Manhattan’s East Village had recently closed after three successful years and the technical team wanted to find a similar venue in London where they could raise the empirical bar, literally to the roof.

    Simultaneously, the Rank Organisation also saw the sense in providing bands with credible suburban London theatre venues of around 3,000 capacity, and rushed through its Sundown Theatre programme (covered in depth next month). Either way, tired West End theatre infrastructures and many Odeon cinemas past their sell-by dates would be banished forever.

    Although short-lived, London-based music fans in the 1970s have reason to be grateful to John Morris (Bill Graham’s right hand man who conceived the Rainbow idea) and John Conlan (the guiding force behind the Sundown).

    Both conceptions provided the first chance to hear real powerhouse sound systems previously unimaginable. Rock fans could also see America’s leading lightshow, Joe’s Lights — founded by Joshua White — who at various times were resident at both the Rainbow and the Sundown in Edmonton, but were also seen at festivals like Bickershaw in 1972.

    I was not only fortunate enough to have been a rock journalist on Sounds in 1971, but to discover that our locale was less than a mile from where the new Rainbow would set out its stall. But by the following year the dream was already over. The first iteration of the Rainbow management lasted only four months and later attempts by Chrysalis’ Chris Wright (and others) to rescue the venue ultimately foundered.

    However, largely inspired by Richard Hartman, the bespoke technology which they produced would shape the thinking of touring bands, and with its filmic infrastructure lay down a marker for the future MTV generation, though back in the day a venue designed around TV shoots was outrageously provocative.

    It’s Hartman, the Rainbow’s resident genius, who has earned our attention this month. Mark Cunningham caught up with the innovator on U2’s 360° tour in Spain — an interview which I was privileged to finesse back in London. Here is how he remembers that epochal period.

    Until the Rainbow team breezed into town, audiences had largely been conditioned on WEM sound systems and the classic West End leko and fresnel theatre lighting scenario dominated by Strand.

    This was about to change and in so doing, Richard Hartman became almost single-handedly responsible for laying down the gauntlet to Britain’s growing army of prog rock bands to develop their own shows — and many of today’s rental companies can trace their lineage back to the influence of the Rainbow. Here’s how the adventure began...

ORIGINS
At the beginning of the 1930s, the last of a quartet of Astoria Cinemas, built by Albert Stone for film exhibitor Arthur Segal, opened in Finsbury Park following those already constructed in Streatham, the Old Kent Road and Brixton.

    “The original theatre was a 1932 design and these Astorias were originally designed as pleasure palaces for the movie industry,” Hartman recalls. [The Finsbury Park Astoria later became favoured by promoters such as Arthur Howes for ’60s package tours featuring The Beatles; it was also where Jimi Hendrix first burnt his Strat on stage.]

    But why had such venues been necessary? In the socio-political agenda of the music industry, Woodstock and the Isle Of Wight had proven that large gatherings (over and above those mustered for the old Odeon ’60s package tours) were possible and if the box office could be harnessed they would be commercially viable.

    Hartman believes Pink Floyd’s ability to sell out Earls Court in 1973 provided the proof when the popular belief was that it was unthinkable that a band could sell out a venue with a capacity running into five figures.

    Outside the UK the story was already different. Historically, Europe had offered touring bands larger arenas — bullrings in Spain, the post-war German messehallen and sportpalasten (for the American service bases) and so on. It had been Fritz Rau of promoters Lippman & Rau who had succeeded in getting many of America’s largest acts to play in Germany for the first time.

EXILES ON SEVEN SISTERS ROAD
Changes in the music industry and exponential growth in the live concert world have been cited as being among the reasons for Bill Graham’s closure of the Fillmore.

    The production team of John Morris, Richard Hartman and Chris Langhart (Hartman’s technology tutor and guru at NYU) wasted no time in setting sail for the UK on their idealistic mission and establishing a management team with Michael Jaffe. If further cachet was needed, Langhart had also been Woodstock promoter Mike Lang’s technical director in 1969.

    Morris, who was married to an English girl, wanted to recreate the Fillmore experience. Finsbury Park was favoured to Brixton (today the O2 Academy) and after securing backing, did a deal with Rank for the building (which had later been trading latterly as the Odeon). The old tenure ended in September 1971 and within two months it had been converted from a movie house into a 3,040-capacity pop venue.

    Hartman remembers: “Both the Finsbury Park and Brixton Astorias had heavy grids which were never used because they were movie houses.” This would serve his plan well to build and install 400 3200°K PAR 64/1 (narrows).

    He also liked the fact that the Rainbow had been designed as a Spanish Andalucian village. “Little stars were built into the ceiling but because it was a movie house they had never really turned the roof lighting on before. So we re-did the plaster in the ceiling and made the stars twinkle. There were stacks of them.”

    The Rainbow opened on November 4 1971, with a classic performance by The Who. But the odds were stacked against it from day one. There was a huge operational flaw which doomed the Rainbow to economic disaster — since the business plan had been predicated on being able to stage TWO shows a night (at 8pm and 11pm) as the Fillmore had done.

    That was quickly scuppered by a local resident, who lived close to the load-in door, complaining about the noise. An 11.30pm curfew was imposed, while the local landlords objected to the granting of a liquor licence.

    “They simply lost the revenue streams; the economics weren’t there,” Hartman reflects ruefully. “Losing the liquor license finally nailed the coffin on the finances.”

    Furthermore, the building had been the subject of a preservation order in the ’70s and successive managements were never able to maintain it to the required standard.

    In addition to the environmental nuisance of load-ins/outs there was the continual hum of generator noise. “With all this state of the art equipment, we were so far over the electrical limit that we needed our own generating plant, which we tried in vain to keep quiet.”

LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY, LIFTGEAR & SOUND
Richard Hartman’s role was technical production co-ordinator, working under Chris Langhart and John Chester (another refugee from the Fillmore East).

    He recalls that as a trainee LD under Langhart at NYU, his classes had “no barriers, and he was at the cutting edge of everything”. He credits these two for leading the sound and lighting ideas in the first Rainbow, yet it is his name that has constantly been mentioned in dispatches over the following decades.

    “Every major group went through the Rainbow and the effect on the bands that was to open their eyes to a number of things which they then developed,” says Hartman.

    Although all kinds of apocryphal stories abound concerning Hartman’s backstage factory, churning out wonderful innovations, the reality is that most of the kit was made offsite, in unglamorous workshops in places like Balham.

    Fillmore East had been awash with bulky theatre lighting. “We looked at the horsepower and figured there was more to be gotten out of movie lights,” Hartman reflects. “The only lights you could get were Redheads, rented by one of the L.A. movie companies.”

    This is what gave him the idea for the pioneering square PAR 64 studio lanterns, with snoots. “We used really long tubes of metal and made 400 of them really cheap, hotwiring them in as a permanent installation. They allowed light levels sufficiently high to shoot videos.”

    He adds: “I got into all the disciplines of the mechanical world because until then it was all flats and scenery. The concept was we would develop lighting in such a way that the light beams became the scenery.”

    Prior to that, he says, no one knew what a PAR 64 was or what they weighed. “With that much horsepower in our PAR 64s it turned bands’ eyes around as to what they could achieve. You could almost chew the light through the air, it was so thick and colourful, but it turned on the managers and producers. They quickly realised that if they had enough sound and lights they could do anything.”

    The Rainbow became the nucleus for a lot of designers — later sucking in technicians from the Roundhouse (professionals still highly active today such as John Coppen and Jon Cadbury).

    Back in 1971 automation was still to come. “You didn’t have the kind of intelligent electronics, just transistors and Integrated Circuits,” says Hartman.

    But the Rainbow’s control system was certainly ahead of its time. “It was colour-balanced video on a joystick system, and you could change the colour but keep the level the same. What designers preferred, however, were preset boards where they could take a look and assign lamps to a channel — by mixing the channel numbers you could start stacking scenes on matrices.”

    Chris Langhart had designed the joystick control for the 400 lamps, split into quadrants, RGBW colour-balanced to keep the light levels the same for the TV media. “No one else had a handle on this,” comments Hartman. Strand never reacted to the market and never caught on fast enough to do anything (although Electrosonic did with its Rockboard).

    Hartman remembers that Electrosonic later provided a lot of dimmers for the Rainbow. “Everything was designed specifically so you could film bands for TV on stage, although bands were horrified [at the idea] as they felt they would lose audience.”

    Polar boards made way for master boards, with 20 or 30 masters that would control matrices and SCR dimmers. John Coppen remembers that during his time there (from 1974), the PAR 64 lamps, road-boxed 30-way dimmers and three-preset 60-way desks, with 60 x 20 matrix and chase sequences, were still unheard of.

    In fact, Hartman’s compact 30-way dimmers and desks, as well as alloy mains, were sub-contracted to Dick Parkinson and the newly-formed Rainbow Productions in the second iteration of the venue.

    Memories of the Rainbow’s sonic components are sketchy — but they were almost certainly powerful JBL-loaded bespoke cabinets, made by the Rainbow team, driven by HH amplification.

    “The Rainbow became a testing ground,” observes Hartman. “We made a lot of JBL cabinets. During the short time that the Rainbow was under the first guise it woke a lot of band managements up to what was going on.”

    Until then, he says, bands had been subservient to the few rental companies on the scene, including the slightly more eccentric (such as Tychobrahe’s use of the blue carpeted Cerwin Vega! system for the Rolling Stones in 1973).

THE AFTERMATH
By March 1972 the pioneering dream was in shreds. After laying dormant for a while the Rainbow crew formed themselves into a new operation (Lairhurst Ltd), with MD Dick Parkinson, Annie Pocock and Micky Martin, as the technical lighting people. The new team attempted to revive the venue’s fortunes although Hartman remembers that a lot of the equipment that had been there “was sold off to make ends meet”.

    At the same time, his new company TTR (Theatre Technical Research) started designing and making much of the equipment for the new Rainbow Productions.

    But in those first four short months in Finsbury Park, Hartman laid down enough credentials to last a lifetime. At the Rainbow, he continued to improve the inchoate technologies that had taken root when the venue first exploded into life, and demonstrated to military cable and connector companies of the secondary use for their products in this brave new world.

    “The only place you could look for cables and connectors was the military back then,” he says. “No one ever thought rock’n’roll music warranted the creation of product.”

    Eric Pierce’s Showlights provided a technical step up with the Electric Light Orchestra and started looking laterally at adapting military cores, he remembers.

    Hartman: “Eric built the Telestage trussing and that was one of the first uses of multicore, which again changed the whole economics of touring. Instead of plugging a single lamp you were plugging six lamps, and you were using up 1,500 lamps on a night; you could do mass termination of PAR cans and do large shows with quick turnarounds.”

    As a result, the manufacturers started getting demands for thousands of metres of cable. “French LAPPs and companies like Amphenol and Veam started to diversify from military and make connector lines and industry-specific products.”

    Long-throw CSI (Compact Source Iodide) spots were later developed by Hartman and bespoke truss and ground support (up to one-tonne towers), since he neither liked the Genie Super Towers nor the Vermette lifts.

    This work was continued later by TTR, which was based in Edwin Shirley’s yard and in fact built one of the company’s first roofs.

    Today, Richard Hartman remains one of the industry’s most enduring technicians (having worked with many of the industry’s best, including Michael Tait (of Tait Towers) during his time with Yes, Pink Floyd (with Graeme Fleming, who later went on to start Britannia Row Lighting) and Mark Fisher/Willie Williams on several U2 tours and more.

    Asked to consider the product milestones he has witnessed down the years, Hartman cites the PAR lamp, the LAPP multi-cable and mass termination of lamp bars, welded alloy truss and automation as the most significant landmarks.

    The Rainbow will be remembered as a venue that hosted some of the era’s most thrilling live events, including David Bowie’s ground-breaking Ziggy Stardust performances, Bob Marley’s Exodus and The Ramones’ UK breakthrough.

    After successive attempts to revive it, the Rainbow Theatre sadly closed for the last time on December 24 1981, re-emerging in 1995 as the Brazilian Pentecostal Church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

    And as for those legendary square PAR cans, they went on to make an appearance on the first Wings tour.
TPi