The Union Bar & Grill has seen its fair share of solid, now-famous performers, including The Black Keys and The White Stripes, but when a rowdy, drunken band comes through, it’s up to the sound technician to deal with the problem.
In the late ’90s, Cullen Beach was running the sound at The Union—setting up microphones and adjusting the levels of instruments to make the sound crisp—when a drunken Detroit band started breaking guitars and throwing the pieces at the crowd.
“I stopped the show; they were completely wasted. They left but not until I forced one of their amps into pieces down the stairs,” Beach said. “It’s more of a bar thing, you get people wasted and it’s one o’clock in the morning … they think it’s a free-for-all. It happens very infrequently.”
Beach now spends most of his time working and repairing sound equipment for Ohio University at Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium, but he has a long history as one of these “sound guys” put in charge of running the nightly entertainment Uptown.
He said that in Athens and many other smaller bars he’s worked before, the sound technician becomes the stage manager, working lights and corralling the artists on and off the stage on top of making the show sound good — a task that can change drastically depending on the space.
Troy Gregorino regularly runs sound at Donkey Coffee & Espresso, 17 W. Washington St., and said the small space of the coffee shop can make or break artists.
“It’s good to work with musicians who know how to play to the room,” Gregorino said. “I feel like my job is to help maximize the experience for both the performer and the audience.”
He said Donkey Coffee is more like a theater or concert venue than a bar performance because people come to listen to the music, not chat over the musicians. That can be a good or bad thing depending on the confidence level of the performer, he added.
However, at a place such as The Union, it can be harder for the sound technicians to work with the room because there is so little absorbent material, and the music just bounces off all the walls, said David Young, freelance sound technician for The Union.
Young is also keyboardist for The Burning River Ramblers and a host of other bands throughout the years, which is experience he said helps him see from the perspective of both the performer and the man behind the console.
“I come more from the other side of the stage so I can kind of speak both languages,” Young said. “The bands and I usually get along just fine.”
Even with those connections, Young said he had to learn the ropes of how to work the room and politely tell bands to turn it down when they are playing too loud.
Like many OU students in media arts and studies, Young started early while he was still in school and threw himself into the thick of the late night uptown music scene, a strategy Beach recommends for aspiring students.
“(Students) got used to being behind a soundboard night after night, having to deal with setting up mics and tearing them down,” Beach said. “I’ve had a lot of students over the years say they learned a lot more through sink or swim in that situation than they ever would have (otherwise).”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
@Wilbur_Hoffman
