It wasn’t the largest attendance ever. The 15,000-plus who turned out to see Metallica was the second-biggest concert crowd in the arena’s history.
Nor did the show have the highest beer sales. It wasn’t the longest show by a featured artist. And there's no way to measure whether it was, musically, the heaviest.
4 comments:
When I first read the headline, I had no clue what to think. What do they mean by heaviest? As I read the article, it read exactly as my mind was thinking. When I learned what they meant by heaviest, I was amazed. The idea that this show has so much weight rigged for a rocket concert is truly spectacular. However, it does make me wonder if they ever run into issues while on tour. Do they ever get to an arena just to learn that the structure about the stage cannot support the weight they need it to? And if yes, what can you do. All you can do is not rig everything and have a stripped down version of the show which would not be ideal. All this aside, if these issues don’t occur, I’m sure this makes for a spectacular show and an extremely fun show to rig. I think it would be really awesome to learn even more about how something like this is installed multiple times a week.
As someone who dabbles in metal themselves, I was curious when I saw L.Kent Wolgamott’s article labled “Metallica show was heaviest ever - literally - for Pinnacle Bank Arena. Even though when it comes to metal, I’m more into doom metal or anything inspired by early Black Sabbath, and if I do listen to trasher I’m more inclined to listen to Pantera. L.kent discussed how the Metallica concert was, even though it wasn’t the largest attendance the band has seen, it was the heaviest. Not the heaviest in the way you might think. As Kent points out, “there’s no way to measure whether it was, musically, the heaviest”. What was heavy about the concert was the production, it even set a record for eight that has been hung from the Pinnacle Bank Area’s grid. He goes into describing the lighting system which was hung with other production gear, in a circle in the middle, because the stage was in the center of the area. The system, as kent describes “is made up of cubes with built in lights and video screens that move up and down throughout the show. The dropping of the cubes creates the dynamic weight that pulls down on the rigging. I enjoyed reading about the Metallica concert and the heavy production system. I love hearing about new ways lighting and moving trusts/rigging is coming together to set new standards in live music preformance.
So I found this article very interesting, but I have to admit that the discrepancy in the time for the rigging load-in between two venues sounds a little scary. "Earlier last week, the Metallica pre-rig took 9 hours, 50 minutes at Minneapolis’ Target Center. In Lincoln, Wednesday's work was finished in less than five hours, reportedly to the astonishment of the Metallica crew." Having a pre-rig go from nearly ten hours to less than 5 is insane. I understand that as load-ins progress from venue to venue, the tour crew gets faster, but this doesn't seem like this was the case here. It sounds like the building was better equipped to hang such a monster rig, with the Arena Manager reporting that "“The structural design [of the building] was developed for doing concerts,” Lorenz said. “That was a desire we had during the design phase, about having the structural capacity to hang the biggest shows and to have the building really fitted for concerts. The architects, engineers and builders gave us that." That and they credited the Local IATSE crews for the insane shave of time. While all of that sounds reasonable for a 2/3 hour shave, a 5 hour shave still seems a bit too good to be true in my mind--especially since this tour has been on the road for more than a year.
I really enjoy Metallica's music, which is why I clicked on this article but I forgot that they can be kind of crazy. This is no different. I think that what they did is amazing and looks super cool and using the old monitors to play with media is an amazing idea that most people would not think about. Media is definately an up and coming aspect of shows and it's been part of music longer than theater but the applications and ideas are similar and I think that Metallica's use is something that cound inspire a lot of designers. These new ideas are something that will help push the industry forwards and as more shows start to use media design there will hopefully be more interesting designs like the Metallica show. Also it is just amazing that nothing fell or was broken considering the weight of all the monitors.
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