We’re working tonight on what is billed as the Latin Rock & R&B Show. Three Latino rock bands on stage together. In the order they played, the bands are:

Thee Midniters

Cannibal and the Headhunters 

Malo

Tonight’s show is hosted by “Shotgun Tom” Kelly of Sirius XM Satalite Radio.

Cannibal and the Headhunters was here once, a year ago, our contact is Robert Zapata, the drummer for Cannibal (and also Thee Midniters). He is a nice guy who has tried to make things flow as simple as possible. It’s the 60th anniversary of his band Cannibal and the Headhunters. They were one of the first Mexican-American groups to have a national hit record, “Land of a Thousand Dances”. Reigning from Los Angeles’ East side Francisco Mario (Frankie Cannibal) Garcia founded the group in 1965, and they helped to usher in LA’s “East Side Sound”.

Thee Midniters were among the first Chicano rock bands to have a major hit in the United States. They were one of the best known acts to come out of East Los Angeles in the 1960s. They were among the first rock acts to openly sing about Chicano themes in songs such as “Chicano Power” and “The Ballad of César Chávez” in the late 1960s.

Malo a San Francisco-based ensemble, was at first led by Arcelio Garcia, and Jorge Santana, the brother of Latin-rock guitarist Carlos Santana. After the release of their first album, many of Malo’s original band members left the group. But the band continues on and still retains their great sound. The horns and excellent percussion really take the show up a notch.

This show turned out to have a lot more audio inputs and videos than we first expected. We were sent a stage plot for Cannibal but not the other two bands. Also, although we knew that Cannibal would have horns, they were not shown on the plot and nobody told us what instruments would show up. So that was a surprise.  We also found out about the horns and percussion (three bongos, a pair of timbales, some cowbells and a cymbal) for Malo at the last minute, also a couple of saxophones, a trumpet and a trombone. Once again this is not that unusual in this business, though we always hope that the performers let us know ahead of time.

 (They never sent a plot or an input list for Malo)

At least all the players and their people are very friendly, which makes going a little out of the way for them easier. And they were good bands.

We were told there would be a video for one band and a still image logo for another, but it turns out each band has a logo and Cannibal has seven videos. They brought a laptop with all the content in PowerPoint but it’s better for us to throw all the videos into PlaybackPro Plus X, our video playback software, mainly because this way a progress bar never accidentally shows up on the screen. 

Some of the other crew members (not on audio today) decided to throw in a helping hand but accidentally plugged in some inputs out of order so Ducky and I had to go through each line and mark both ends for the changeover. So that didn’t really help, it just made more work for the two of us.

The last minor annoyance was that Malo, the closing band, didn’t bring their videos until a few minutes before they hit the stage for the show! No still logo, just three videos  to loop and no instructions. That’s how we roll in the live entertainment business.

At least all of the bands sound great though, and of course the horns help out in that regard.

Word from the box office is that the show has sold pretty well too, but it’s hard to tell from under the balcony where the video station is – although when I did get out on stage the crowd looked pretty decent.

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A Flock of Seagulls started as an English new wave band formed in Liverpool in 1979 (now members live all over the world). The group hit the peak of their chart success in the early 1980s.

The group had a string of international hit singles including “I Ran (So Far Away)” (1982), “Space Age Love Song” (1982), “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” (1982), and “The More You Live, the More You Love” (1984).

The opening band is Men Without Hats, a new wave and synth pop band originally from Montreal, Quebec Canada. Their greatest popularity was in the 1980s with “The Safety Dance”, a worldwide top ten hit (No. 3 in the United States), and “Pop Goes the World”. They took the 1990’s off and returned around 2010.

The drummer, Adrian is mixing in ear monitors for the band from a small mixer at the drums. FOH (Front of House) is mixed by their audio engineer Nick from an iPad. They will have wedges on stage as back up mixes which will be mixed by Kerry (our house monitor engineer). All the inputs go to the Men Without Hats audio rack at drums and then split  out to our system.

Adrian, Men Without Hats drummer explained the name of the band “In Canada, because it’s freezing cold during the winter only tough men go without hats.” Men Without Hats are going out on a new tour soon and are just getting set up with this new input rack and monitor ears rig, due to somebody losing their old  one (amongst other gear) as they passed through an airport not too long ago!

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