Recollection of a friend:
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Love Valley
I was involved in “the Music” at one time when I signed on to work with a light show. A buddy had pieced together the projectors and gear to run a show in a short-lived nightclub in Carrboro but it had closed and somehow I ended up with the stuff. The Caolina Union had purchased a “rear-projection” screen to allow us to do our stuff behind the bands. We had 16-mm projectors, overhead projectors, and various items like “watch glasses” to energize concerts: big and small. Our first big date was Jubilee on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill. The back projection worked pretty well with the “floating blobs” and film clips and pulsing lights behind the Joe Cocker band. They almost wrecked our equipment during the set-up, playing around and bumping into us as we set up, but things went OK. When BB King was setting up for his set we asked him what kind of images he’d like to see behind him during the show. He was gentlemanly in his reply: “You all know what is best.” We cut the Vietnam War clips and went with shifting and blending colors.
Word came to us that there was a gig out in western NC that could use a light show and lighting in general. I convinced the Carolina Union to “lend” me the back screen for the show and somehow I got into the position where I would sub-contract the stage lighting. The Union got me in touch with a company that rented spotlights and I acted as the middle-man for what was called the “Love Valley Rock Festival” to rent gear to light the stage and do a light show. “It’s gonna be big” said the guy managing the set-up. The pay was “expenses”—and I learned the hard way that meant “nothing.”
The stage lighting was to be two “Super-Trouper” arc lights on scaffolding, maybe 25 feet higher than the stage so they could angle their beams down onto the musicians. The whole thing was kind of jury-rigged, but the scaffolding guys knew what they were doing and the lights were hauled up and attached firmly to the floors of the towers. All I had to do was recruit someone to run the lights while I handled the back-lit light show. Two un-stoned locals were willing to help and I trained them up on how to “fire-up” and more importantly, shut off the lights. The carbon rods were new, so no need to get into the details of “fire-and-re-light.”
The screen had been set up by the roustabouts who were hanging out everywhere. There was seemingly no one in charge and random people were handling expensive equipment. But hey, it’s 1970 and it’s ROCK AND ROLL. Our lighting gear had been put in a cabin not too far from the stage the night before but there was no way to lock it away and I spent most of my time checking back to see if it was safe. Luckily, the only thing stolen was a violin and its case. I’d fancied I’d learn to fiddle and a friend had gifted me a violin thinking she’d get paid back with music.
(The scaffolding is shown in shot by Ed Buzzell, a UPI stringer who took a huge number of pics of the festival. His web site has disappeared but selected shots are still viewable.
The back-screen had been installed and it looked small because of the size of the stage and the venue. The Allman Brothers required a huge amount of stage space to handle their two-drum-set and the multiple other hangers-on-stage. They were, in general, tolerant of the people trying to rig up the screen and didn’t say anything about the lighting, they just assumed it would go well.
Late afternoon saw roadies setting up drum kits and guitar stands and eventually, at 6-ish and still plenty of daylight, musicians more-or-less wandered out and picked up guitars and started tuning and playing. One of the drummers sat at his kit and soon enough was tapping out rhythms for the guitarists. That’s how the show started, little by little. I have no recollection of the names of the tunes, they just came out and just played, mostly a riff on Mountain Jam. Their official set-list was only 8 songs but they extended and merged them over and over again for four hours.
As the sun started to set I was prepping the guys who would run the big lights. The “Super Troupers” were carbon arc lights and were really big, they weighed over 200 pounds and stood six feet tall and were, essentially a controlled, very focused fire.
As the music as getting more attention and the daylight was fading, we sent up the volunteer “roadies” to ignite the spotlights. The Allman Brothers, or part of the band, were in a bit of a lull and as the lighting guys worked their way up the ladders in the scaffolding, some bright-light on the stage decided he would help thwart some sabotage. “Hey, don’t go up there man!” he shouted over the PA system to my guys. “Hey, stop them, man!” He then set about instigating the audience to curtail this trespass by telling them to chant: “GET DOWN-GET-DOWN”. The crowd half-heartedly took up the chant.
This encouragement was captured by some of the still upright-though-stoned semi-macho guys who then tried to mount the scaffolding and shake the metal frame and, in general, risk the lives or limbs of the now-frightened guys up at the top of the platforms, vaguely aware of what a falling spotlight might do to a random numbskull unlucky enough to be under one.
I scrambled up one of the towers and got to the top and was greeted by some jeering from the crowd and this emcee-of-sorts shouting at me: “Hey man, get down. What are you doin’ with those lights?” He then re-appealed to the crowd to follow him in a chant:
“Get Down! Get Down!”
“Hey, who are you?” he shouted at me using the mike.
“I own them!” was my shouted response when the weak chanting died away in a few moments, a reply that put the guy on stage into a sort of confused-while-stoned mind set. “Hey” he turned to someone on the stage who seemed to care about the success of the concert, “does he?”
A brief confab ensued and it was determined that I, indeed did control the lights.
By then a few slumping and sloping guys from the audience were either trying to follow me up the tower or were stationing themselves as guardians of the fortresses-of-light. The situation was getting out of hand and it was pretty clear we couldn’t run the lights with the threat of tower invasion looming.
So I doused the light on the tower I was on and told the guy on the other tower—via our walkie-talkies—to cut his. The concert was to proceed with only the “house lights”, some small, household-size spotlights that illuminated the stage for the benefit of the band.
We spent the night on the towers to keep people from climbing them and we were helped by a few guys from the concert management (an oxymoron if not outright untruth) to make sure the towers weren’t toppled or mounted by would be Stoned-Metal-Alpinists.
The back screen was never illuminated for the show, we were basically in protection mode but the ABB played on and the show was counted a success in that no one died, the crowd never lost its self-control, and the band got back to their motel and trailers in good order in the wee hours. I meanwhile was faced with getting the spotlights taken away—and the helpful theatrical supply guys did all that. The light show only lost one projector and the back screen made it back to Chapel Hill two weeks later via a Trailways bus.”
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