Some gigs stay in your memory because the band was brilliant. Others stay there because you spent half the night wondering whether your equipment would survive.
Working with King Kurt definitely fell into the second category.
Before one of the first shows I did with them, the band gave me some plastic and told me to cover the equipment.
I remember thinking, why?
I found out soon enough.
By the end of the evening, the place was covered in offal, blood, dead flies, flour, eggs, and just about anything else the audience could throw. This was not the sort of gig where you packed away a clean mixing desk, rolled up a few cables, and headed home.
Everything was filthy.
The leads were covered in muck. The equipment needed serious cleaning. I knew I was going to spend far longer sorting everything out than I had spent setting it up.
Then I looked at one of the stage monitors.
Somehow, an egg had landed inside it.
The monitor had become so hot during the show that the egg had actually cooked.
I had been working in live sound for long enough to expect strange things, but I cannot remember anyone teaching me what to do when part of your PA system starts doubling as kitchen equipment.
That was life around live music.
You could spend hours carefully setting up microphones, speakers, monitors, cables, and a mixing desk, trying to make everything sound exactly right. Then the audience arrived, the band started playing, and suddenly you were dealing with something nobody could have included in the technical manual.
I worked three shows with King Kurt before deciding I had experienced quite enough.
Cleaning all that mess from the equipment after every gig was not my idea of a good time.
Still, years later, I can laugh about it.
That is one of the reasons I wanted to write My Life in the Mix. The music business was never only about the music. Some of my strongest memories came from the strange things that happened around the performances.
There were difficult venues, wild audiences, practical jokes, famous musicians, broken equipment, long drives, odd requests, and situations that seemed completely normal at the time but sound ridiculous when I tell them now.
An egg cooking inside a stage monitor was just one of them.
My Life in the Mix tells the stories from more than forty years behind the mixing desk, including the bands, tours, mishaps, friendships, famous faces, and backstage moments that audiences never saw.
If you want to know what life in live music was really like when the show ended and the cleaning began, this book has plenty more stories waiting.
