What's your worst load-in? What do you do to ease the pain of it? I'll start. . .

Ours is an outdoor lakeside stage at Lake Anna Taphouse. It's a good stage, with good power, the servers and punters are universally awesome and ready to party (some boat in and dock behind the stage). All in all sounds like a great venue to play, right? 

It is, after you get done with hauling your equipment ~100 yards across a parking lot and down a boardwalk to load in, and before that same haul to load out. There's not a whole lot they can do about it either. If they controlled the lot next to them, they'd absolutely install a driveway to the stage, but. . . 

After our first gig there we told them you're a great venue, but that load in is sheer hell in 90 degree weather. If you want us back, we're gonna have to tack on an extra $50 per person ($200 total) just because of that rough load in.

Our first show this year got rained out, but we've got three more coming up. . . I gots me a big ol' folding cart ready too.

(05-11-2023, 11:22 AM)Moonrider57 Wrote: I gots me a big ol' folding cart ready too.

The folding cart has become a necessary accessory in ENG/EFP applications, due to the inevitable "mission creep" that we now have to factor in to every damn job.

For music-related endeavours, I have a small pallet trolley. Best $40 I ever spent...DC30's are heavy!

Cheers,
Tim

This place was one of the better places we played, location-wise: at the very mouth of the Connecticut River, bang up next to a marina. Some of the lights you can see in the background are a railroad bridge that takes trains from New Haven to Boston; some of the fainter ones are on Long Island, some 15-20 miles away. The crowd was always very into it when we played.

But getting ourselves to that point was always a fucking chore. Even with our kit on dollies, carts, and hand trucks, we had to negotiate a concrete common area between the restaurant and some of the other buildings in the complex, which the landlord resolutely refused to patch once it became obvious that the concrete they'd used was of a decidedly inferior variety you wouldn't want to use as a foundation for your house, or find out that your contractor had used. Thrills and spills galore! Total distance, probably about the same hundred yards, and again, it might as well have been an unpaved parking lot that played host to a bunch of yahoos doing hole shots (we do have a few of those in the 860). Humping six musicians' worth of kit in 95 degree heat and 70% humidity, as it usually was whenever we played there, was worth packing a couple of frosty bottles of PowerAde Zero just to keep hydrated. And we'd start an hour or two before sunset, so it would stay that hot at least until we were halfway through our last set (we'd finish by 10PM), by which time either a welcome breeze would finally waft north from Long Island Sound, or else it would be pissing rain and we'd have to negotiate that concrete patio-in-name-only in between sheets of water.

In fact the heat was what finally killed my Kronos some time later: it overheated on just such a day in direct sunlight, and took the sideboard that powered its internal hard drive (and the drive itself) down with it. Haven't been able to get it to produce sound since, although it still does power up.