NEWSLETTER

I am Sonic Youth’s sound guy. That means I do a bunch of engineering at their studio during recordings and I go on tour with them, working the soundboard and making sure everything is perfect.

The day-in, day-out good times of being a sound engineer touring with a rock band are pretty much what you might imagine: free granola backstage and a solid night’s sleep on the bus. But when shit goes wrong, it can be a major drag. On tour, I’m plagued with anxiety nightmares. I miss the only van ride from the hotel, or I can’t find the mixing board, or the whole band and crew has to learn how to fly a rental car to get us to the next gig.

Here are a few of my most fucked moments at the soundboard:

1. No Vox in Italia
The basic task of a sound person is to make the band seem effortlessly all-powerful.  One of the major ways to fuck this up is by having someone’s mic not work. 

We were doing a festival in a soccer stadium in Arezzo, Italy.  It was one of my first festival gigs ever. The promoter had brought in an insane mixing board built for mixing theatre productions. Half the controls were upside down and totally counterintuitive.

Over 12 hours elapsed between soundcheck and the gig. Nobody was supposed to touch my settings for the vocal mics. Some shit went wrong on stage as we were changing over for the band to go on, so I took some shortcuts checking the lines from stage. We were behind schedule.

The festival was free, so not only were there 30,000 kids on the field in front of the stage, but every third kid had brought his grandmother and propped her up in the bleachers. The band took the stage and warmed up for 30 seconds. All the instrument mics worked. I scrambled to put together a mix. Every kid and bewildered grandmother had their eyes glued to the stage and the source of the droning guitar feedback.

The band started a song. Thurston stepped up to the mic and we heard nothing. My settings had been changed. I completely fucking wigged. I flipped every goddamn upside-down crazy control on his vocal channel on the console to no avail. I had the intercom strapped to my head, jamming on the call button trying to get Luc the monitor guy’s attention. Maybe the problem was on stage and he could fix it. Nothing.

The local guy from the sound company was totally oblivious. He was sitting in a lounge chair and couldn’t see the stage, and for some reason didn’t notice a grown man having a complete fucking meltdown ten feet from his face. I stumbled toward him with headphone and intercom cords holding me back and tried to tell him that everything was totally fucked.

Thurston’s monitor must have worked because he couldn’t tell what was going on, and just kept doing it. The sound company dude got on the intercom and chatted with his coworker on stage about the problem.  Finally, I twisted the right knob. I inched it up and the crowd heard the last few lines of the song and I looked like the biggest bonehead in the world.

2. Streets of L.A.
The band got booked to play a street fair in L.A. I think it was five bucks suggested donation to get in, and Mudhoney was on the bill too. The actual area people could fit in was limited by the width of the street.  Demand for space overtook supply.

Security was being provided by local volunteers: civic minded do-gooders and the burliest dudes from the neighborhood. The stage was small. The sound system was more like something for a state fair than a rock festival, and the stagehands were understaffed for the sheer number of bands playing.  In addition to SY and Mudhoney, there was a full slate of locals.

Sonic was on last so by the time we got the stage, there was so much band gear on the deck and on the ground that it was almost impossible to move. Deliberate sabotage could not have made a worse mess of the mic cables.  I spent maybe ten minutes on stage trying to help sort out the insanity, but then realized just getting to the soundboard was going to be a feat itself.

It literally took me 20 minutes to go the couple hundred feet to the board, people were jammed so tight. That’s when I started to get spooked about the inherent danger of the situation. Twenty thousand people stuffed that close, hot and dehydrated and tired, now with a seemingly endless wait for the band to come on. An inexperienced, overwhelmed security force and the chaos onstage fueling the crowd’s annoyance.

This is what Sonic Youth looks like when you're doing sound for them from all the way across the venue.

The soundboard was up on a makeshift platform. There was no barricade or security surrounding the platform, so people were packed tight around it and climbing up the sides to escape the heat of the crowd. As we checked that patching the cables on stage had gone well, news came to me in my headphones that the volunteer head of the volunteer security force was about to pull the plug on the show. Someone found her poking around the generator tent literally trying to cut the power.

More and more cops started showing up around the perimeter. We could see them outside the fence. Finally someone realized that putting the band on the stage was a safer plan than plunging an angry crowd into darkness. The chief security volunteer made an announcement to the effect that everything was fucked-up and could people please not kill each other.

And then of course the band came on and calmly took over the situation.  Everything was fine, and we pushed that state fair P.A. straight into the red and rocked those mothers. The band cut a few songs from the set list, but when they tried to come back on for an encore the coppers kept them sealed up in the tour bus. The cops figured the crowd was sated and that was enough.

3. Sick and Gearless in Australia
Last summer we flew to Australia after being in L.A. for a few days. The night before we left I stayed up all night drinking beer in the hot tub on the roof of the hotel. On the plane I realized I was getting sick. Sixteen hours of hellacious, hallucinogenic plane rides later we were in Canberra.  The jetlag, the travel from summer to winter, and the illness would have been enough, but to arrive in a surreal newly built government zone with one tangle of strip malls for a downtown was too much.

I spent a day and a half knockdown drag-out sick, eating at the same Thai restaurant and watching Australian rules football on TV. Word spread that the gear was being held up in L.A. We travel with two dozen customized guitars, all strung differently, maybe 50 guitar pedals, and a very specific drum kit, none of which are easily replicated. While I was watching football, the band and the rest of the crew figured out what it would take to make it all happen without our stuff.

The next day was the show, which tool place in a university cafeteria. By morning it had been determined that the gear was still in the States. The call went out to raid the guitar store in Melbourne and drive the replicants down in a truck. It was night and it was cold and I had the fever chills when the truck arrived; a massive alien alternate-universe truck that kind of grossed me out.

Nic and Eric who handle the instruments went berserk restringing guitars as fast as we could open them. Kids were lining up in the cold. Hours of doing nothing waiting for the truck meant we were in the weeds real bad.  Near meltdown.

And then suddenly it all happened. The crowd came in, J Mascis did his thing, and the band took the stage. A hearty rocking ensued. It was weird seeing them play the wrong instruments, like a tribute band. But it turns out it’s actually the people in the band who make that sound, not those crazy little machines.

I’m still not sure how we managed to avoid a total trainwreck that night.  I guess other people worked hard while I kind of staggered around housed on multivitamins.

AARON MULLAN
Aaron’s own band, Tall Firs, play a gorgeous and subdued folk rock kind of music. They rule. Look at tallfirs.org

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