On the way to San Diego, I had about two and a half hours to kill in Del Mar. It was mid-80s and sunny, with an on-shore breeze that made everything very nice. I had lunch (a grilled panini sandwich) at a nice place with an outdoor patio, view of the beach, and enjoyed my situation immensely.
Then a stroll along the beach, watching the surfers and people enjoying themselves as in a nice summer vacation. Only this was mid-November. I couldn't believe the weather. So, the punch line is that I had no idea I would be spending any time at the beach, and I was in my gig clothes. Not exactly beach attire. Head to toe in black, long pants, black t-shirt, black shoes. I must have looked a teeny bit out of place. Nevertheless, to make the most of the situation, I did take off my shoes and socks and waded into the water at least up to my calves. Nerd alert!
It was warm. In mid-November. There must be a reason people choose to live in SoCal.
Then it was on to the venue in San Diego. The Anthology Restaurant is relatively new (opened summer of 2007). The place just screams "MONEY!" High-end dining, with high-end interior design, and a great sound and video system for shows. There's seven cameras positioned around the stage to capture the show, each with remote controlled pan/tilt and zoom, mixed live and distributed to a large screen over the stage and many video screens throughout the three-story venue's dining, bar, and lounge areas. Also, distributed audio in all the remote locations, and in the main viewing area (all three floors of it) a Nexo Geo line array with fills. Yamaha M7CL surfaces in both the FOH and monitor worlds, and EAW wedges. And I forgot my camera at the hotel. Look them up online to see how fancy the place looks.
All this money poured into the place, and yet, here's where they skimp: The sound crew is also the video and recording crew, and sometimes it's one guy doing it all. We were doing two shows that night, and we started with two guys, one on monitors and one at FOH helping me and mixing the video and recording the video/audio feeds. By the start of the second show, I guess the assumption was that things were dialed in with monitors so the FOH tech left. Just left. No explanation, nothing. So monitor dude (who was great, by the way) was supposed to run the second show from FOH. They have a laptop to remote control the monitor desk, but the interface wasn't working. It was explained to me (after FOH dude left) that for a lot of shows, one guy runs monitors, FOH, video and recording all at the same time. And we're talking full production seven camera video and audio recording, with the video show distributed in the venue (and that's a big part of the atmosphere of the place). Well, I wasn't planning on mixing the co-bill star's show, only my boss's show (we were opening this night). But again the co-bill star of the show had guest musicians sitting in with him on the second show, which meant extra inputs that had not been sound checked. We had planned for this, and the extra inputs were staged and ready to be a plug-n-play situation, but someone would need to be at the monitor desk and the FOH desk when they came on stage. I knew if I left, the remaining sound dude would suffer (and the show would certainly suffer). So I agreed to stay and take care of FOH for the late show's co-bill star set.
Turns out I really suck at mixing FOH and trying to run a seven camera video shoot at the same time. After things had settled in for the guest musicians, the monitor guy came to bail me out of the flaming nose-dive that was the video show. He was so practiced at it, he probably could have done a decent job of all of it himself, but that's a lot of stress for one dude.
All in all, a great place to have a show, but the vibe was maybe a bit cold (lots of polished metal and glass, and video everywhere, making things feel disjointed and connected only by technology). The food was great, which scores high in my world. Thanks for a good time.
