NEIL YOUNG: CHROME DREAMS II

The 62 year old, who exchanged thoughtfully amused asides with the audience through his acoustic set, emerged after the interval for a blazing electric set with his superb band — Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, Rick Rosas, Anthony Crawford and wife Pegi Young — that saw the clock dashing for midnight and an audience hanging on to every second. Moreover, this was no mere Greatest Hits outing but showcased a clutch of newcomers too.

This unique show was designed explicitly for theatres by two lighting design luminaries rather better known for illustrious theatre careers, Peggy Eisenhauer (also Chrome Dream II’s production designer) and Mike Baldassari.

Production lighting and rigging, featuring a bevy of vintage stage and movie lights, was handled by Holland’s Flashlight Rental, whose brief included helping the designers source the original fixtures from across Europe, protecting their creaking bones from life on the road, a long, complex rig at each venue, and manually handling the detailed re-gelling and re-focusing of the venerable floor lights between sets.

Eighth Day Sound continued its US audio provider role in Europe, with veterans Tim Mulligan and Dave Lohr at FOH on a Digidesign Venue and d&b PA, and Andy Ebert mixing monitors.

A VINTAGE VANTAGE POINT
To condense two long careers somewhat brutally, Eisenhauer and Baldassari — who have taken alternating stints at the helm of the tour’s Avolites Diamond 4 lighting board — had earlier collaborated on a Tony-nominated Broadway production of Cabaret for Sam Mendes and, in 1992, Neil Young’s Harvest Moon tour. Eisenhauer’s credits also embrace much-lauded work for the stage and screen with Jules Fisher.

Ms. Eisenhauer had been the first to be called and inspired by Young’s aspirations for the ambience of this new tour, and both say they were enthused by the idea of a stripped-down, hand-crafted, theatrically-industrial look featuring vintage lighting pieces culled from movie back lots and warehouses across the US and Europe.

Specifically, Young wanted no sign of modernity in the looks — no moving lights, no hint of electronica. The design (“Antiques Roadshow, we call it,” joked Baldassari) is backdropped by each theatre’s bare back wall which was lit as found, complete with whatever theatrical bric-a-brac was to hand in each location. Add a couple of fire escapes and a washing line and you could be on a set for West Side Story.

The casually dishevelled design informs the proceedings with an intimate warmth and humour that matches Young’s self-deprecating references to ageing and the very notion of rocking out in your seventh decade. The look stays the four-hour distance without palling and shimmers with moody insights.

Baldassari’s assertions that “two shows are never alike” and “we don’t run this show from programmed cues because we couldn’t” are of a piece with the overarching aim to reach back into an era and a look now rarely seen on a modern rock stage, a slowly metamorphosing, gel-changing timeline that here sees the punchiest colours appear toward the end, the show bookended in white. With not a single automated instrument, the floor lights are reconfigured between sets by precisely repositioning the stands and hand-swapping gels.

Adding intrigue to the proceedings is tour manager and artist-in-residence Eric Johnson, who can be spotted amid the upstage paraphernalia feverishly working up large acrylic canvases on his easel, which are propped up at stage left as the electric set progresses to illustrate each song’s title — these are now being auctioned in aid of the Bridge School at www.neilyoung.com

The theatrical ’92 Harvest Moon tour was a design reference point for Chrome Dreams II, and the intervening years have dimmed neither Eisenhauer’s nor Young’s enthusiasm for what she calls “the dramaturgy of his environment”, adding, “he loves giving people a theatrical experience which underexposes the rock star, revealing only an incidental character. And he loved the idea that we would see the inner workings of the set changes, choreographed into the show; you see gels being put in and pulled out, guitars being pulled off and put on. For him, it’s all part of what he wants to reveal.”

Providing a suitably theatrical environment proved a logistical challenge for both the designers and booking agency ITB, explained stage production manager Tim Foster: “Our main criteria were a large permanent stage and enough seating capacity to cover the costs of a five-truck tour with some of the best production people in the business — and they weren’t as easy to find here as in the States where a lot more old theatres exist. The Apollos, the Playhouse in Edinburgh... there are not too many of those old cinema houses left, particularly on the continent.”

Foster added that Europe’s working time restrictions for drivers made the resultant itinerary even tougher to stitch together.

Finding the vintage lighting kit for Europe also took time. The Flashlight team, with project manager Tijs Winter, began a trawl of European warehouses, the primary target being Mole-Richardson 5kW and 10kW movie lights — partly an homage to Young’s own film career. With Eisenhauer’s initial Stateside discoveries in the bowels of New York theatres for reference, dusty kit was found, photographed, and voted in or out.

Baldassari, who had worked with Winter on several productions for Stage Entertainment, said: “For the European tour, Flashlight were a really big help. They have the right attitude and the right equipment and as important as anything else, the right price. I’ve known Tijs for a long time so I called him up and we went through what we wanted, fixture by fixture. It took us a while to locate the really big lights like the 10kW Mole-Richardsons, which had been easier to find in the States.

“Flashlight found a couple at Het Licht in Holland and the owner, who was a big Neil fan, showed me around his shop and when we’d found our four Mole-Richardsons, covered in years of dust and with no lamps but the right size and vintage, he put his shop on it and by five o’clock the next day they’d delivered our reconstituted 10kWs to the theatre. “Peggy found two more in England at Jim Laws Lighting and sent a truck to go get them. And Tijs e-mailed me photos of stuff Flashlight had in storage, like Pattern 23s, Strand 123 Fresnels, CCT Fresnels and DeSisti 5kWs. They fit well with Neil’s vintage equipment and incredible sounds.”

Winter, the Flashlight team and show carpenter Jim Linville then tackled the task of packaging the lights for the tour to match the fully roadworthy Tomcat Slimline truss, PAR cans and ETC Source 4s in the overhead grid. The thick rubber stage floor covering favoured by Young to ease his perambulations with heavy guitars also help cushion the lights during their nightly manhandling.

Among the most striking uses of the big Mole-Richardsons comes during one of the electric set’s standouts, the epic ‘No Hidden Path’, in which one giant light, gelled in yellow up at stage left, blazes cross-stage like a baleful sun, set against a vivid red wash from another up behind the drum kit.

“One of the atypical things about this design,” pointed out Eisenhauer, “is we’re not intending symmetry, or the power of symmetry to represent the music; we’re taking a glancing, asymmetrical compositional approach. Often, two big lights working together and a few highlighted details are enough composition to make the picture. Another is that we didn’t use the lighting system as a rhythmic instrument as is common for concert production. So Mike and I decided that if we were going to take this approach, live composition-making would come out of what he did from moment to moment; and when I run the show it’s a different show.”

Completing the set and coming into its own toward the end is a scattering of large letters upstage, which look eerily familiar and turn out to be remnants of the New York Nederlander Theatre’s old rooftop marquee signage. In the days before neon and LED, they once spelled out each show’s title; nowadays, when not on tour, they adorn a wall in the home of their rescuer, Jules Fisher.

Colours, said Baldassari, also fit the era and the mood: “For the overheads we pick specifically very classic rock’n’roll colours: R83, R22 dark blue, dark orange, dark red, that kind of stuff. And then the floor colours change from set to set. For Pegi [Young]’s opening set we use lighter and more pastel colours, and then for Neil’s acoustic set everything is changed; the colour becomes a little more saturated and uses slightly darker colours. For his electric set, we go to full, saturated rock’n’roll colours, changed by hand at precisely the right moment during songs.”

And finally, there’s the début of ‘Baldassari Blue’ on the tour — an R381: “it’s the pool of light that he walks around in during the acoustic set. It’s just something I worked on with Rosco and it looks great.”

Sound of gold
The work of FOH engineer Tim Mulligan and engineer/sound recordist Dave Lohr — along with a top backline crew that includes Young’s veteran guitar tech Larry Cragg — helped garner the tour glowing ‘great sound’ comments on NY fans’ websites.

“We mix some of the vintage side with the new digital consoles into the package, trying to get the best of both,” said Lohr. “Some of the older gear seems to help with Neil’s acoustic portion of the show and give that analogue ambience, and to facilitate a large number of inputs in a small theatre tour we’ve used the Digidesign Venue console, and that’s worked out well.”

Both standard and third party plug-ins are employed, particularly the Waves C4 multi-band compressor.

The PA comprises d&b J-Series, generally configured as three subs per side with 10 J8s and two J12s flown a side. Lohr opined: “It works very well for us in the theatres; it’s lightweight and easy to rig, and you can hang enough boxes from a single point to get the SPL you need.”

The instrument and input tally reflects Young’s desire to surround himself with an ambience that’s a three-way cross, sonically and visually, between a studio, a theatre and a living room. Lohr: “He wanted to recreate on-stage what he used on the records — the right amp sounds, the right instruments. And he prefers an enveloping mix from the band and to really hear the sound of the room.”

Instruments are mostly miked, with a few pick-ups blended in where required, and again Young’s desire to experience the room is key to choice of microphone. A few wedges and fills cater for the band, while vintage Neumann KMS140 mics deliver the vocal along with modified KM84s, RKM88 panel mics and “the best guitar mic ever made, in our opinion, the Sennheiser 409”.

On a show where Young’s famed ‘old black’ Les Paul guitar and his vintage acoustics are as revered as the lyrics to songs penned up to 40 years ago, sound matters and suffice to say, it is pristine when it needs to be, massive wherever appropriate, warm and sparklingly revealing.

Other companies worthy of mention include the rigging service company Rigging Box, Redburn Transfer (trucking) and Coach Services (buses).

The crew also includes road manager Cary Kemp Band, backstage production manager Erin O'Neil, Flashlight account manager Fransien van Lavieren, backline techs Kevin Brown, Mouse DeLaluz and Rocky Roberts, rigger Jon Curcio, audio techs C.W. Alkire and Marty Tarle, lighting techs Bjorn Vanderbroeck and Tom Van Leeuwen, catering and dressing room co-ordinator Kara Gilfoil, and truck drivers Rob Atkin, Pete Cramp, Davy Forbes, Mark Phillips and Pete Barrington.

The harvest of Chrome Dreams II will return, albeit in a somewhat trimmed format, to Europe this summer for select festivals — among them Vince Power’s Hop Farm show in July. One for the diary?

TPi
Words and pictures by Mike Lethby