Lighting engineers are the kings of rock and roll.

As well as not having to suffer the indignity of pretending to "rock out" every night for delusional idiots, we get better money, our careers last longer than three years, and we get just as much pussy as the musicians.

Because we're out on the floor with the crowd, the girls flock to us. When we explain how much artistic involvement we have with the band, we inevitably get laid. Look at the picture above. That shit happens every night.

We also have to climb up dangerous theater roofs, constantly risk electric shock, and often work 17-hour days to make sure the "rock" is brought to the "people." What I'm basically saying is that if the band is God, we are the priests, and you should all be on your knees to us.

Over the last year, one of my main gigs was doing lights for The Darkness. They're great guys and I had a blast on the tour, but what their fans don't realize is that they wouldn't have had half the success if it weren't for my amazing lighting skills.

Most rock bands don't consider their lighting too much—and most are copycat losers with no imagination. A lot of them use nothing beyond the boring "sixbar" (i.e., a one-deep strip of six lights). Yawn.

Because The Darkness are a rock revival act, I searched through old lighting warehouses to find the kind of lights that Zeppelin and Rainbow used to use.

After a ton of searching, I got ahold of these "dice" lights, which are basically three lights across by two deep with different scrolling. We had a whole back wall of them, and it made the band look amazing. I took the liberty of putting different color scrollers on every light. Every song would have a completely new scroller.

Obviously, there's a bit of a hair-loss problem going on with The Darkness, so I also had to ensure that nobody's attention was drawn to that (the guy who lights Danzig's shows should take note of this, BTW).

As The Darkness got bigger, a lot of shit happened with management and egos that I can't really go into. We parted company. Oh well. The time somebody threw an apple at me and threatened to sack me if I didn't give him any cocaine made me realize that maybe I shouldn't have put so much effort into making them famous in the first place.

JOHN TIFTON