Four Heads Are Better Than One

The story goes that the Trey Anastasio Band (TAB) and Goose were playing at the same festival in the summer of 2022. Anastasio, being a fan of Goose, sat in on a couple of numbers, and then backstage proposed the idea of doing a tour together. Multi-instrumentalist Peter Anspach and his bandmates from Goose agreed it would be a lot of fun. So, the kernel of a mutual admiration club was planted. Jesse Sandler, the Production Manager for both bands would be the facilitator of making it all work in a live setting. Thus, the sold-out co-headlining Trey Anastasio Band and Goose Fall 2022 tour headed out playing multiple arenas in the northeast.

Lighting Designers Marc Janowitz (TAB) and Andrew Goedde (Goose) plus their Lighting Directors / Programmers on the road, Patrick Hayes for TAB, and Tony Caporale for Goose, engaged in some great teamwork and creative synergy to provide fans with two equal but separate full-blown shows together in one night. Each jam band did a 90-minute set with a 30-minute set changeover in between. The show closed with a combined 15-minute encore, replete with exclusive collaborations presented by both bands. Gateway Studios & Production Services (GSPS), the vendor for the tour, provided the lighting, rigging, and camera package.

 Divergent Paths Lead to Collaboration

Goedde has been lighting Goose for five years now. He was just getting into lighting for the live event business when the band was still playing to 50 people in clubs. “I was just kind of punting the whole show,” he says. “As the band was honing and refining their sound, I saw the need for the lighting to be more articulated. I saw the benefits of rehearsing and doing more cue-to-cue programming to fit their song compositions and then back to their improv sections. I was struggling, honestly, to get the cue stacks organized and the files where I could do it every show.”

Fortune smiled on Goedde through social media and a mutual acquaintance, when Caporale, a fan of the band Goose, was looking for tickets to a sold out show in Pelham, TN when socially distanced shows were still going on. “When I heard he was looking for tickets,” Goedde tells PLSN, “I checked out his Facebook page, discovered he was a fellow LD, and hooked him up. Through that I also learned his specialty was working with cue stacks and timecode—exactly what I needed.”

Says Caporale, “ I went up to thank Andrew at the end of Goose’s set having clearly seen his talent, and told him if he ever needed anything, ‘I’d be happy to help out.’” Adds Goedde, “I told him I wanted to bring what he does to Goose’s visuals and create a hybrid show between our two crafts of execution.”

 Merging Designs

By the fall of 2022, this co-headline tour brought the opportunity for Goedde and Caporale to work together. At the start of this tour, both TAB and Goose had been on the road throughout 2022, so base lighting designs existed for both, which assisted their integration for this double headliner. “Jesse Sandler, our Production Manager,” says Goedde, “who also does TAB and Phish, merged our and TAB’s design in Vectorworks and said, ‘hey, we can make this work.’”

“This is Andrew’s baby. I’m super stoked to just to be here helping him,” comments Caporale. “Any input he allows me to give; it’s a good relationship. We both have chops in different categories. It is a great mixture of programming ideas and design stuff. Being allowed to share input and being so open with me and so welcoming has been such a delight. Andrew’s ideas of what he likes and what he wants the band to look like, I’m all ears. I do my best to reciprocate on the consoles to support his ideas.”

Timecode is not used for either band’s show. “We do a lot of BPM ( Beats Per Minute) cueing, states Caporale. “We auto trigger that through the [MA Lighting] grandMA command line so Andrew doesn’t have to continually tap a button say to follow the drum kick so he can concentrate on the other intricacies of the band. This really lets him flex out a lot more with the music.” For control, Caporale used an MA Lighting grandMA3 full-size console for Goose. “I’ve just kept building my punt pages from when I started with the band,” comments Goedde. “I start with a lot of color looks and also have everything that the rig can do at all times right at my fingertips. I have no idea what direction the band is going to take when they go into their improv. I have a color look for every song and build with the band from there.”

They did a week of prep in St. Louis at GSPS. “Goose usually gives me a song list that always changes right before the show. It keeps us on our toes,” says Goedde. “We both were at Gateway spending time in pre-viz. Then we were able to get into the arena three days before the show. On show days Pat [Hayes of TAB] would have command of FOH first, then we would get our time, so the system was set for doors and top of the show.”

 Lighting the Trey Anastasio Band

The Trey Anastasio Band (TAB) lighting design has had little variance over the past few years. “Trey prefers to play intimate venues around the 1,200 to 3,500 range. When that design is implemented for larger venues, it can be a real stretch,” explains Lighting Designer Janowitz, who has been working with Anastasio’s pet project since 2012. “Trey’s style of working is more describing how he wants to feel on stage, so it is not literally visual but more expressing the vibe of what he wants to stand out and what not. He prefers the performance space and the musicians to be featured and stand out. This was a thing that aesthetically works. We looked at the amount of time of the tour; a little over three weeks, and he wasn’t supporting any new work, so there was no sense reinventing the wheel. So, we scaled what we had to fit.” This became a “creative utility” that actually doubled the size of their touring rig.

Along with his heavy roster of touring and television clients, Janowitz, based out of his E26 Design studio, guest lectures at various universities and has given several Master Classes at Carnegie Mellon University, which is where he met his Lighting Director/ Programmer for TAB—Patrick Hayes. “The lighting department head of CMU facilitated a meeting, and shortly afterwards, when Marc was rehearsing a My Morning Jacket tour on the CMU mainstage, he brought me in to assist programming,” says Hayes. “In 2016 when I graduated, Marc took me on Flight of the Conchords, and I have been working with him ever since.”

Hayes did not get introduced to the TAB organization until 2020. “During Covid, Trey performed an eight week web series at the Beacon, which combined many iterations and collaborations from his long career,” says Janowitz. “In that time, Pat came with me as a second programmer, and he was exposed to everything Trey does sans Phish.” Janowitz’s show file consists of all 120 songs TAB performs on an ETC/High End Systems Hog 4. A page for each with access to additional palettes should the need arise. “ This is very much a hands-on band,” he smiles.

 Scaling up the Rig

“I generally ran all of Trey’s shows, but come 2021 and the industry coming back full tilt, I had TAB and My Morning Jacket going out at the same time, so Pat became the natural choice to cover me.” The existing TAB rig was scaled up to almost double in size to fill the arena sized venues, with three overhead trusses–front, mid, and back–on which were hung 27 Robe FORTES, 17 Spiiders, 26 Spikies and an array of 20 GLP JDC1 hybrid strobes.

Both bands shared the downstage overhead truss that include 10 FORTES and 6 Spiiders, plus two upstage / downstage oriented side trusses flown at the downstage corners, each rigged with five Robe Spiiders deployed for cross stage washes. Seventeen of TAB’s Spikies and 17 more Spiiders were rigged on 17 vertical ladders on their upstage truss, and their mid stage truss also had a ladder below the center point with a single Spikie. Goose’s two overhead trusses featured 16 FORTES and 16 Tarrantulas, eight each on the upstage and midstage trusses.

All the floor-based kit was designed and rigged on wheeled towers and dollies to facilitate its rapid positioning onstage for smooth changeovers and to ensure it was practical to tour. Goose’s floor package was slightly larger and included their 16 Robe Tetra2s attached at jaunty angles on eight floor stands. They also had eight FORTES behind the low riser line for blasting in high impact light and beam effects from behind.

 Kudos for the Crew

All four creatives have high praise for the GSPS organization and their crew, led by Crew Chief Chastity O’Bradovich, noting that without them none of it would have been possible. “Yeah,” says Caporale, “our whole crew was exceptional, especially the crew chief. Chas is a badass Crew Chief who was super valuable to the production. The whole Gateway crew was great, but she definitely pulled it all together.”

Goedde agrees, “The camera crew from Gateway are on another level regarding the quality of their work and their webcast. Everything was recorded and viewed live in HDR; a big difference from our usual 1080. They were nice enough to give us a feed at FOH, so we were better able to pay attention to our lighting. They spent about an hour everyday color matching everything on their cameras. A lot of time on a webcast feed you’ll see two different cameras and the color will be different. That can throw you.”

Adds Hayes, “Jesse Sandler, who also PM’s Phish, deserves a huge attaboy too. Though he is primarily TAB’s PM, he treated the Goose guys equally, so this was a genuine co-headline tour. He merged the two plots in Vectorworks and made it all work so no one had to sacrifice any design aspects or got slighted in performance space and time onstage. Certainly, kudos go to the well-designed rolling risers from Gateway, but it was Jesse who made it all happen night after night in the real world. “

Each team took advantage of previz software before rehearsals and kept their previz setup at FOH during rehearsal. Each was allotted one overnight programming session, and during the day, “We followed the unwritten rules of co-headline,” said Janowitz. “Anytime your band is onstage it’s your rig. It was a totally accommodating situation.”

 Key Equipment Choices

No one on the lighting team mentioned any real challenges on the tour, barring the transition to Robe FORTES, which actually was a welcome one and kept problems to a minimum. Goose changed over from Martin MAC Vipers and Tab swapped from Robe BMFL’s.

It was Goedde’s first-time using FORTES, and he was impressed at the sheer power, “I had to keep the intensity down as they really punch through,” he commented, adding that he was also “very happy to make a swap to FORTES, a topic decided during early discussions about lighting the joint tour. They were just so much faster than what we had been using.”

Caporale appreciated how the FORTES looked, especially when playing the 360˚ shows. He particularly likes the new split-color gobos and the accurate, sharp framing shutters, summing up, “All of the FORTE characteristics have been a big hit with us. Goose usually has an upstage black that we paint with gobos. When we played to a 360˚ audience, the FORTE’s played totally cool on the audience. It looked like they were melting.” He and Goedde enjoyed integrating them with the Tetra2s and Tarrantulas which they also used on the Goose tour earlier in the year. The two of them loved having the additional scope for flower effect looks running the combination of Tarrantulas and Tetra2s.

For TAB, this co-headline tour also meant a change from Robe BMFLs on the previous tour to FORTES, a move that Janowitz and Hayes had already been considering, and now came the perfect opportunity. Janowitz notes the FORTE is a “beast” of a fixture. “It was also great to finally get to work with a full LED rig,” he notes.

The process of updating their show file from BMFL to FORTE was relatively straightforward, with the gobos and zoom values needing to be tweaked as you would expect. The biggest challenge according to Hayes was mimicking the double animation wheel of the BMFL, but they found a neat trick to achieve the objective. “FORTE is such a great light,” adds Janowitz. “It is a bigger brighter fixture than the BMFL and has enough horsepower to put two gobos, a prism and a deep color in the beam and still have good light coming out the front. Pat came up with using the single animation wheel with a gobo spinning in the opposite direction, to create that effect we lost from the BMFL. Once we had completed the updates, we realized just how much the FORTES were able to do and bring to our show, like produce stunning effects and incredible intensities even when in the deepest colors and combining gobos.” Janowitz noted that team TAB is also a big fan of the flower effects in the Spikie and Spiider.

Although the shows were live streamed each night, no fixtures were dedicated specifically for key lighting for camera. “The Gateway camera crew were there to capture the show and that’s exactly what they did,” notes Caporale. The only concession to camera lighting was with the ETC Source Four PAR floor lights for TAB. “We add Lee 202 to them for camera balance and opal frost to soften the sidelight,” notes Janowitz.

All parties expressed that they would love to do this again, noting that it should be a longer run. “We all grew up with Trey’s music, which has inspired us in so many ways,” says Goedde. “Above all it’s been fun, as well as a priceless and memorable experience.”

Production Team

• Production Manager: Jesse Sandler
• Tour Manager, TAB: Richard Glasgow
• Tour Manager, Goose: Samantha King
• Lighting Designer, TAB: Marc Janowitz
• Lighting Designer & Director, Goose: Andrew Goedde
• Lighting Director, TAB: Patrick Hayes
• Lighting Programer, Goose: Tony Caporale
• Lighting Crew Chief: Chastity O’Bradovich
• Dimmer Tech: Benjamin Beardon
• Lighting Techs: Joshua Blair, Geoffrey Bourlet, Andrew Kenneth, Daniel McDonald
• Account Manager, Gateway Studios & Production Services: Trey Kerr
• Project Manager, Gateway Studios & Production Services: Conway McDonald-O’Lear
• Lead Rigger: Kieran Donnelly
• Vendor: Gateway Studios & Production Services

Gear

Lighting

• ETC/High End Systems Hog 4, TAB
• MA Lighting grandMA3 full-size, Goose
• 55        Robe FORTE
• 18        Robe Tarrantula
• 37        Robe Spiider
• 18        Robe Tetra 2
• 38        Robe Spikie +
• 20        GLP JDC1 Strobe
• 14        ETC Source Four PAR 750W
• 1          ETC Sensor Dimmer Pack
• 2          ADJ 20” Mirror Ball
• 2          ADJ 120V Mirror Ball Motor, DMX
• 4          Reel EFX DF50 DMX Hazer
• 3          MDG theONE Dual Hazer / Fogger

Video

• 1          GSPS Broadcast Trailer
• 1          GSPS Broadcast Trailer Stage Box
• 5          Panasonic AK-UC4000GSJ 4K Studio Camera
• 7          Panasonic AW-UE150KPJ 4K PTZ Camera
• 1          Canon CJ14ex4.3 BIASE 4K ENG Lens
• 2          GSPS Box Lens and Camera Package
• 2          Fujinon UA107x8.4BESM 4K Box Lens
• 2          Canon CJ24ex7.5 BIASE 4K ENG Lens
• 4          Blackmagic Design Micro Studio POV Camera 4K
• 2          Lumix G Fisheye MFT Lens
• 2          Olympus Digital 12 mm MFT Lens

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This article original appeared on PLSN