There are thousands of amusing stories of life on the road waiting to be told just one more time. Please send your favourites in for inclusion on this page.
The first one comes from Paul Curry in Australia...
It's spring nineteen seventy, about seven in the morning, Vince
and I have just arrived at Kurnell in our company Kombi vans, so too has the police
patrol boat Nemesis, there are a few fishing boats out and the nor'easter will be gentle,
it's a glorious day on Botany Bay. We dubbed the gig, after three days of rehearsals
with the Australian Broadcasting Commission's radio and tv crews, "The Queen's
BBQ".
The crew, security, police and artistic direction, took to having a few
beers and a BBQ at the end of each days rehearsal. Two hundred years
have passed and Sydney is celebrating the Bi-Centenary of Captain
Cook's discovery of Australia.
For the previous week, we had erected lots of horns on twenty
foot
poles along three miles of foreshore for the general public. The real
"quality" in the sound system was the multitude of brown boxes on sticks
in the official bleacher seating enclosure and dais. These line array
columns were called "Billy Grahams" having been especially designed by
Dr. Ernie Benson, as the major speaker component for a large arena PA on
the Billy Graham Crusades, way back in the late fifties. Tens of
thousands of people had found their Savour by listening to word of God
on these speakers. In the company catalogue, the boxes were described
as an AWA557, comprising four 6" X 9" car radio speakers arranged in a
column with ports, relatively flat from 175hz to 10khz. and could
handle about 10 watts before the internal 100v line transformer
saturated. The whole system was driven by a stack of 120 watt TOA "Blue
Line" amps, with battery power backup. The TOA amp was ubiquitous in
the PA Hiring Dept, we loved them and one knew when they were seriously
clipping without listening to the speakers, the output transformers
would rattle and the little red light on the front panel would go dim.
You could squeeze a few extra watts by running the amps on car batteries
which suplimented the lack of microfareds in the ac power supply.
The protocol of the time would not allow us to use our mics on
the
chromium cocky perch for HRH Betty Windsor, oh no, only the ABC were
allowed to do that so we had to take a split. We weren't even allowed
to take a transformer isolated split of the actual mics because it
hadn't been invented yet, only a composite split of voice and tape
replay from the ABC. The only mics were were running were the on site
announcer and the band mic, which were not going to broadcast. Gone are
the days when one could do a whole band mix on one mic. I would place
the mic just in front of the conductor and say "what ever you can hear,
the mic will hear also" and they would believe me. The ABC had sound
splits running everywhere, to all the commercial radio and tv
broadcasters including international press. Even the New Zealand
Broadcasting Commission were there as they owed their recent heritage to
Captain Cook. The ABC had spent many hours with the two mics on the
cocky perch, running independently to two RCA 6 channel mixers, exactly
lined up to produce 0.775v into 600 ohms at the outputs, one hundred
percent redundancy was ensured. ABC tv provided the fold back to the
performers on the beach with their own monitor system.
Nemesis is cruising off shore about 200 yards to ensure
that the
hundreds of small craft are kept away from the dais, the crowd
had swelled and the official guests are all checked in by uniformed
police and double checked by the Premier's department employees working
as front of house. We get a GO and the military band play the National
Anthem then Ch7's evening news presenter, Roger Climpson is speaking
beautifully on our local announcement mic, explaining and introducing
the line up of many healthy children about to perform the usual boring
tableau in the sand before our Queen and nation.
The live performance starts. Comming weakly out of our speakers
is one hundred percent of thin crappie distortion. Vince turnes the
main wick up a bit more and it is still crap, but louder, well that
proves that volume control still works. The Duke leans forward and
looks enquiringly at the speaker under his chair and puts his fingers
in his ears. The royal children are squirming and I'm going a whiter
shade of pale. Whilst this is happening, two guys in a little dinghy,
powered by an out board motor, running very close to the shore, pull
up in front of the dais to a rock about twenty yards out. One of the
men clambers on to the rock with a flag and tries to erect it whilst
shouting out some prepared protest speech. I can't recall the flag
but it wasn't the Aboriginal one as it hadn't been invented yet
either. The Special Branch, with panic on their faces, are asking me
is it sabotage by the uni students or something? I can barely think
as we check over the gear, saying "It has to be the split from the
ABC, it's not us". I keep repeating this mantra as I recheck the
gear while the rest of the electronic media, except the remarkably
calm ABC tv crew, are screaming about the lousy sound. We soon
figure it out, ABC tv have good sound !
A fat sergeant of police starts wading out to the little boat while
non uniformed police run to the waters edge to confront the protesters.
The guy in the boat is panicking and is frantically trying to restart
the outboard motor, his mate is balancing on the rock with the flag,
Vince, who gets the big money, rushes over to the van and grabs a 12"
portable valve tv and one of those single earpieces that look like a
hearing aid. He hands the earpiece to me and I tear off the earpiece
then bare the wires with my teeth and push the wires into the
binding post terminals of our mixer as he stabs the mini jack into the
headphone socket on the tv. If your are old enough, you can probably
remember, valve tv's take an eternity to warm up, especially in the
days before Kambrook power boards and I'm trying to find an empty power
socket and not pull anything important out in the poultice of cables.
The guy in the boat has success with the outboard motor but his throttle
is wide open, the boat suddenly spurts forward and he falls down in the
boat stunned. The crowd are yelling out "don't leave your mate behind"
and the fat sergeant is getting deeper and closer. The little boat is
spinning around in circles and our tv is starting to warm up, there is
Premier Askin on the screen saying very clearly on the tv, without
distortion, "Your Royal Highness", tap tap, pause "Your Royal
Highness",
pause, tap ! tap ! "YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS !". He grips the heavy cast
iron round base mic stand with both hands and thumps the whole assembly
up and down on the dais. By this time we have the tv sound on to the
PA, the Premier, being very astute, senses that his tapping and thumping
have fixed the problem and commences to reintroduce Her Majesty.
Nemesis wants to get in on the act and powers in toward the
official dais at full speed, realizing just in time, to avoid ploughing
up the little children on the beach in front of the dais, the ten ton
vessel, makes a sudden decision to go hard right. This creates a
tremendous spray all over the dais, splashing the Royal Family's boots.
I can't recall the children getting wet as they were all wearing green
plastic garbage bags with cut-outs for limbs and head. Plastic was
really in then, especially as Cristo, a French artist had wrapped up
part of the Botany Bay foreshore in Gladwrap as his contribution to the
Bi-Centenary art happenings. Nemesis then over shoots the little boat
and the fat sergeant by now, up to his armpits in the bay, receives
Nemesis's huge bow wave right over his head while the gaggle of
plainclothes police rush up the beach away from the wave. Miraculously,
the little boat is not swamped, the guy comes to, steadies the boat,
and picks his mate off the rock, they zoom away, hugging close to shore
which is too shallow for Nemesis to follow to cut them off. The ABC
radio senior engineer, reaches over to one of the RCA mixers and turns
down the master knob and the electronic media stop screaming, Vince
monitors the ABC split and it is clean, then the penny drops, one of the
output leads from the mixers which were being summed into another mixer
would be out of phase. We were all given the summed mix except ABC tv.
Why this glitch never surfaced during rehearsals we will never
know, a cone of silence descended over ABC radio. I could hear the
police radio chatter saying that the protesters had beached their boat
on the shore about a mile away and had melted away into the crowd, I
think they got away with it, probably saved by the sound from the
evangelistic loudspeakers. When the re-enactment was over, I happened
to overhear the BBC correspondent talking, summing up the day live to
England, "Well listeners, that ends a perfect day here at Botany Bay,
marred only by an inefficient public address system". The evening
newspapers had headlines, "Public address system fails at Botany Bay"
"Queen embarrassed by sound system" later that night, watching a replay
on commercial tv, I broke into hysterical laughter, seeing the
chromium cocky perch going up and down with white clenched knuckles in
front of the vein popping face of the Premier on the evening news. The
Next day, Vince, myself, the PA Hiring manager, The chairman of
Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd, along with the ABC, were hauled
before the Premiers Dept for an official enquiry, but of course nothing
was said publicly of the outcome, it was old news.
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