Before the Fire : Ancient History

Before the Fire-

The above is a pre-fire picture of the stage after a major cleaning and upgrades. It was a relatively small stage for the size of the venue. There was a lot of wasted space that the old air handling systems used. Everything was old, ancient. The building was completed in approximately 1905. It has been many things over the years, and that story is already pretty well told. But needless to say, when I was hired as the Production Manager before the fire, the building was in bad shape. The new owners worked hard and spent a lot of money correcting the problems and refurbishing the place. They had already spent upwards of six figures to fix the worst issues, and things were getting much better. But still, it was an old building with old equipment. Nonetheless, it was a popular venue and a main stop for national acts passing through the southeast.

It was a labor of love to keep all the old gear working. The building had been used as a movie theater for many years before becoming a music venue and had extensive remodeling to accommodate the sloped floor and theater seating it required. That work had been performed starting in the '30s as the bottom floor became the Elite Theater, and not much else changed besides the paint job on the exterior and the marquee. A group of locals refurbed the building in the late ‘70s for a brief period as a concert venue but closed it soon afterward. In the early 90's it was purchased by a different group and reaffirmed as a concert venue.

The old 35mm projector, screen, and various apparatus to show films were still in place during the late ‘80s when I moved to Athens. I was experienced as a film projectionist and a Dolby Sound system technician in commercial film houses. They would hire me to come in and "build" the films and run the projectors when they occasionally showed films, and the regular projectionist, Brian Crane (RIP), wasn't available. So my efforts as a technician working at the Theatre go way back!

Pre-fire technology-

For the technically minded amongst you, the original performance stage was a proscenium thrust. The downstage edge was 9' forward of the proscenium line with a fire exit at floor level, on each side of the stage. The stage was approximately 5' tall, 20' deep, and 22' wide. There was no overhead fly grid or batten system for hanging additional lighting or audio equipment, or anything except for the old movie screen. We had a front and rear truss that were dead-hung on specially installed points of the roof, but they were severely load-limited. I want to touch on some aspects of the old equipment for a moment because it's a tale worth retelling.

The Screen-

The screen was old and very heavy. A very old lace & grommet perforated skin that was super dusty and stained. The stains really showed when a bright scene came up in a film! HA! It was hanging directly over the performance area of the stage. Jesus wept, and Mary, Joseph, and all the saints moaned like wounded animals every time that giant old screen had to be raised or lowered into place. The frame and structure were supported by a homemade, super janky block and fall set with 3/8" steel cable connected to a hand-cranked boat winch. It was so insane to look at it and contemplate operating it that you had to ignore your misgivings and pretend it didn't exist, or you would lose your mind with paralyzing fear. It regularly had to be raised and lowered for films and showing football games, as we had both film and modern video projectors. The process of raising and lowering that thing involved great trepidation, praying, and foul mutterings and scared the living shit out of me every time I moved it. It was the veritable sword of Damocles hanging directly over the band's head every night. Movies and football games drew huge crowds, and those kinds of events were just as crucial to the task of selling beer and paying the rent as much as the music scene was. It was a necessary evil, and we feared it greatly.

The Audio system-

It's difficult to see in the picture above, but the monitor mix console for stage performances and the audio engineer operating it sat in plain view of the audience during concerts. This is not the case in 99.9% of venues as it's considered somewhat of a distraction, and generally, bands don’t like anyone on stage distracting you from watching them! There was nowhere to hide the large console and racks of equipment besides keeping it as dark as possible, so it sat out in plain sight on the stage-right area—the opposite side of where every band ever in the entire world prefers it to be placed.

Whoever might be operating the monitor mixer during shows would often be accused of "playing keyboards in the band.” As long as the sound engineer didn't fall off the stage in a drug-addled stupor, they might get away with taking credit as a keyboardist (you can't make this shit up!).

There was a small stairway on the right in the picture above, and it was used to get up onto the stage. You had to walk across the back of the performance stage to reach another set of stairs to get to the "main" dressing room! The SOP was commonly to see the headline act, trying to sneak across the back of the stage during the opening act’s performance. They had no other way to get to their dressing room!

The PA was a small, seriously abused Meyer Sound M2D line array and P650 subs. When the room was sold out for a performance, the temperature in the building would reach at least 110 degrees, and the PA required multiple cheap box fans hung in various positions blowing on amplifiers to keep the PA cool enough so it wouldn't shut off automatically. The whole arrangement of fans and cabling created a massive dust bunny that makes me sneeze just thinking about it. The FOH mixing console, used for sound control in the audience area, had been partially broken for at least four years. It was an old analog console, and everyone was reluctant to replace it with a modern digital mixer. A thoughtful audio engineer could still make it work, and any given band might sound excellent. If the sound engineers were given enough time for soundchecks, and he or she had an abundance of patience and skill. Sadly, the supply of skilled and thoughtful audio engineers was just as limited then as it is today.

The Curse lazy sound techs-

As a long-time tour sound engineer, I’ve worked in hundreds of concert venues and clubs in my career, and I always looked for a couple of things right away to judge the character of the place when I first arrived. The picture below would be the first indicator of serious maintenance issues in any setting when visiting a venue for the first time. This is always a dreaded moment for a tour professional. One look at the floor of the Front of House mix position, and a small but significant part of my soul would shrivel like a raisin. Yes, that's a picture of the GATH soundbooth below.

When I saw those club systems like that, I just knew it was going to be a day filled with low expectations. That does not make for happy musicians or crew. Most of the time, the audience could care less. Usually, it's a bunch of 19-year-old college students drinking $3 cups of beer and getting wasted. But the band and crew take this stuff seriously!

So I had a personal stake in making sure the GATH would never get the lazy label. Scenes like the photo below were not going to happen on my watch. Musicians from all over the world knew the GATH was better than the average club, but there were issues to deal with, and that's why I was hired.

Stage Lighting-

The lighting system was kludged together from three different half-broken professional lighting dimmers and a 24 channel Lightronics lighting controller that was ancient. It had a half dozen faders broken off and looked like it had been dropped repeatedly. I wish I could find a picture of that device so you could marvel that it could be functional at all.

The GATH owned a handful of lighting fixtures of different types, sizes and wattage mixed together in an unexplained random manner. These lighting fixtures hailed from a distant era when brightness and efficiency were still elusive concepts for manufacturers. I’m sure they were probably given to Kyle Pilgrim for free. But if you were a thoughtful lighting tech, you could make it all work. If it wasn't raining, and you held your mouth in just the right painfully sad expression of defeat for the entire evening.

The Power-

The power distribution room broom closet where the breaker panels were, was best not examined too closely. One look would put the gibbering fear into any sane production professional. The A/V panel had been grafted onto the original ancient electrical service in a properly Frankensteinian manner. There were great loops of wire and cable hanging and laying everywhere as though you were in some post-apocalyptic movie set. If you could just manage to figure out which wire did what and get all the brooms and mops out of the way, then you could MacGyver a solution to what was clearly a dangerous situation.

There is an essential part of electrical safety that deals with a concept universally known as the Ground Plane. It's the primary safety feature of modern electrical systems. When I first started working at the Theatre between touring dates, I immediately diagnosed this as a problem and undertook what steps I could to alleviate the situation. I literally ran a ground wire from the service panel to a ground rod outside. Despite that, there was a continuous and highly rancorous debate amongst the local sound techs, often threatening physical violence, as to the truth of whether the Georgia Theatre did or did not have a grounded plane. Despite my fix, which was sabotaged several times, the truth will never be known. Now the story takes on the status of a legend to be fondly reminisced by old and graying sound guys. I can honestly say that the building is thoroughly grounded now. HA!