I’ve just returned from the second and last leg of the Summer 2012 tour of Lou Reed and his band. The tour was called “From VU to Lulu” because they played all sorts of material from the Velvet Underground days to the latest Lou Reed & Metallica record “Lulu”. As always I have mixed the FOH sound and enjoyed doing so and working along one of the best crews I ever worked with (thank you Stewart, Matt, Joey, Gary, Jesse, John, Jacob, Bungie, Peter, Rod, Des, Liam, Stuart!!!).
The whole tour was a blast and we made sure to make the best of every minute, whether it’d be a concert on a hot sunny day, a load in or load out in the middle of pouring rain (we had a lot of those) or a day off in some beautiful European city where I’d venture out on some exploratory tour!
There are a million videos of these concerts on YouTube but I want to post one that is special to me. “Junior Dad” is one of my favorite songs of the set and one of my favorite songs from “Lulu” (if not from Lou’s entire discography!). On this particular day in Dresden, Germany, this song got particularly intense because without our knowledge somewhere across town fireworks started in the sky in the middle of the intro to the song and continued for the entire duration of the song. Lou, the band, the techs and probably the crowd were all confused at first but Lou quickly showed the genius he is and started ad libbing and incorporating these fireworks in his lyrics effectively changing the lyrics to match the environment and showing true artistry and creativity to thousands present.
My own approach was to actually make the whole concert way louder (by at least 10dB!!!) because initially the fireworks were so close and loud that they were ruining the intimacy of the intro to the song. By making everything louder at the mixing desk the concert was still louder than the fireworks and when the drums kick in the whole concert is really loud and grandiose, which is just fine considering it’s the last song of the set too!
The audio of this YouTube clip is not great and at times distorted too because it’s from some unauthorized camera in the crowd recording with the on board mic, but in spite of all of that, it’s one of those cases where the beauty and uniqueness of this moment is more important than the actual quality of the audio or the video.
Enjoy!
Hopefully see you in November/December in the far east…