PLSN | Motley Crue: The Final tour

Subscribe
MA Lighting dot2
Compact Control
Solutions
Subscribe
Laura Lawrence
Joins Full Compass
as Marketing
Manager
Like us!
Follow us!
Current Issue
Gear
ProLightingSpace
Archives
Sitemap
Advanced Syst
Group Hires Cla
Virtue To Lead
People Operatio
Feeds:
Join us!
News feed
Current Issue
ProLightingSpace
PLSN TV
Submissions
Clay Paky Sets Up
Technical Service
Centre in Russia for
the CIS
to our
Print Edition
News
Media Kit
Jobs
Bookshelf
Search PLSN
Event Production Dir.
September 2014 Issue
Production Profile
Motley Crue: The Final tour
Cleverly named The Final Tour, Mötley Crüe’s
final tour began July 2 in Grand Rapids, MI.
And final it is. In January, under a banner
proclaiming “All Bad Things Must Come to an
End,” the iconic band’s members held a press
conference in Hollywood, complete with a New
Orleans-style funeral marching band, at which
they publicly signed a legally binding “cessation of touring” agreement. It
prohibits them from going on the road together or individually under the
Mötley moniker after their current 18-month worldwide victory lap ends.
No biennial reunion tours, no country fair oldies circuit, no package
cruises.
Written by Tim Bradley
Thursday, 11 September 2014 12:09
Share
View Comments
Of course, fans will not be left Crüeless. There’s plenty more to go around, including
the nearly 100 million albums the group has sold, 22 Top 40 singles, five books
authored by group members, 2,500 branded products, a back catalogue of movie
and television appearances, a nationally syndicated radio show, night clubs and strip
clubs, tattoo shops, philanthropic causes, and not least, collaborations with other
musicians in several genres. A feature film based on their book The Dirt is due out in
2015 from Jeff Tremaine (who gave the world Jackass and Bad Grandpa), and there’s a documentary in the
works. A country music tribute album is about ready for release, featuring such artists as Florida Georgia Line,
Rascal Flatts, Cassadee Pope and LeAnn Rimes. The song “Kickstart My Heart” is featured on Dodge
commercials, and the group has discussed releasing new music online on a song-by-song basis.
Most Likely To Exceed
The final tour’s show has all the elements you’d expect from the band most likely to
exceed: thundering power chords from guitarist Mick Mars and bassist Nikki Sixx, the
tight-pants tenor of singer Vince Neil, exotic dancers dressed in the legal minimum, a
metric ton of attitude, neuron-blasting special effects, lyrics as subtle as a
steamroller, anthemic lighter-waving ballads, profanity by the pound, pyro, cryo,
explosions, confetti, costumes, flames pulsing out of the bass guitar neck like…like…
well, insert your own analogy here. Because it is the band’s last go-round, they were determined to push more
envelopes than the post office. They wanted big and crazy. They got it.
The visual madness originated in the comparatively sane brains of production designers Robert Long and
Sooner Routhier, operators of SRae Productions in Portsmouth, NH. “It’s been a whirlwind,” she says (they
dove into the Crüe’s swan song project just after finishing work on the KISS tour that featured a giant,
articulating spider marionette and already has assignments in the works for an electronic artist, a country tour,
an off-Broadway show and a musical tribute called The Australian Bee Gees that will also be shown on PBS TV
in the fall).
“We’ve worked with Mötley Crüe since 2009,” she points out. “Whenever there’s a new tour design to be done,
we start working with the band to learn what concept they want, what themes to use and so forth. This one took
about six months to get ready. Since it was to be their last tour, the general idea was about putting the band to
rest, with RIP motifs. We began coming up with ways to portray that on stage. We wanted to take them through
Popular Articles
Clay Paky B-EYE 20
Seen on Multiple
Bandit Tours
Crew for TV's Glee
Relied on ETC Gear
Six-Season Run
Maroon 5's "V" Tou
with Robe BMFL,
CycFX 8 Moving Lig
MA Lighting dot2
Compact Control
Solutions
the ages, through the different looks and scenic elements they’ve had throughout their career, and bring it all
together in one cohesive look. That led to sketches and image searches, followed by full-scale renderings,
designs and meetings with the band for input and approvals. Every song is structured, and we stuck to color
palettes that work with the song. We think music has color and shape, so we try to portray that with the lighting
look. For instance, if they’re doing Shout at the Devil, which is all about the devil and fire, you don’t want to be
using green. It’s very red and yellow and amber. On Dr. Feelgood, the album cover has a crazy green tile wall in
the background with some red and white, so we tried to put that in somehow, even though it looks disgusting.
It’s meant to be uncomfortable to look at.” She credits advances in console technology and software with
making possible lighting looks that are original and unique.
"Strictly Come
Dancing" Live U.K.
Tour Lit with Robe
BMFLs
A Scalable Design
The size of venues influences the design, too. “We knew they’d be playing arenas
and amphitheaters,” Routhier explained, “so we tried our best to keep the shows
within those confines. As it’s designed, this one is big, but we have trusses that can
move or shrink according to the space. For a larger venue, they go on the sides to
make the show wider; for a smaller space, they’re moved back toward center. We
have elements that can shrink and grow as needed, but we typically draw our shows
within a bounding box of the smallest space that we can.”
Next came meetings with the vendors, in which Long and Routhier planned the gear, scheduling, crew,
transport, etc. “Robert is like a renaissance man of tours,” said Routhier. “He’s done it all, from guitar tech to
stage manager to production managing. He is amazing at the tech side of things, of getting things in and out of
buildings, keeping things on budget, knowing how many trucks, all the little details that go into putting a tour
together and making it look good, as well as having an extremely creative mind. My strengths are more on the
graphic side, like drafting, Photoshop, Illustrator and design art.”
And since bad boys like to play with fire, there’s pyro involved in every Mötley Crüe tour. “We bring over FFP
from Germany,” Routhier explained. “They’re really good at experimenting with different effects, so when we
have a crazy idea and send it to them, they’ll go into their labs and experiment with it and come up with
something that has never been seen before. They do an amazing job with that.”
After all the materials were produced and ready to go, everything was shipped to a rehearsal space in Grand
Rapids about ten days ahead of the first show and set up so the band could rehearse with it.
Over the Top Drum Gag
The literal high point of the program is the “Crüecifly” drum solo stunt. Drummer
Tommy Lee, who in recent years has become as noted for his priapic prowess as for
his percussion proficiency, is carried up over the audience with his entire drum kit on
what is essentially a slow-moving rock-and-roller coaster to the back of the hall and
returned to the stage, playing and chatting up the crowd while rotating end over end.
“We’ve been building drum riser gags for Mötley Crüe for 30 years,” says Eric
Pearce, owner of overhead rigging specialist Show Group Production Services, Inc.,
headquartered in North Las Vegas. “This concept came from a combination of
discussions with Robert Long and Sooner Routhier. It is by far the most extreme
drum riser gag I’ve ever seen.” The actual fabrication, he recalls, “was done in a
great rush, because it took a while for management to approve the finances and to
get the thing really into a ‘go’ condition. Basically, the whole thing was designed and
built in less than six weeks.”
When a system weighing several thousand pounds is suspended above an audience, concerns ensue.
“Obviously, safety was the first consideration when we started the project, trying to figure out how to create
something that would be safe to have above people’s heads,” said Pearce. “Everything is double- or triplesecured. The drum kit is welded to plates on the rotating deck, with secondary attachments for the individual
parts. It’s radio-controlled and miked, with a UPS unit supplying power.” The track is lined with Elation LED tape
and Martin MAC 101s. Around the drum kit are LED rings called Bright Beats that Lee triggers from his drum
pads.
“The horizontal speed of the Crüecifly is limited,” Pearce explained. “It’s going
through changing radius curves, from tracking on the inside of a curve to tracking on
the outside of a curve. Every time it transitions, the program has to speed up and
slow down the opposing drive wheels to get through that transition point, then
accelerate and slow down and run them at different speeds as it hits the next
changing curve. Programming-wise, it’s very complex to go around these multiple
curves. Four drive units drive simultaneously. As their position changes as they move along the track, their
speed relative to each other has to change. That alone took about 20 hours of programming to figure out.”
And the stress on the drummer? “Tommy’s very acrobatic,” said Pearce, chuckling. “For the last one, he went
upside down on a 30-foot circle that was on stage, so he’s pretty much used to these stress rides. I don’t believe
he had more than a day or so of rehearsal before the first show. It’s much more difficult to ride on the unit than it
looks. It’s not only a head rush, it’s a stomach rush, it’s an everything rush.”
The full Crüecifly package, which takes local stagehands under SGPS supervision about four hours to erect, is
designed for major arenas. In venues where the roof is not strong enough or there is no roof, a modified
segment of the system takes the drummer only a short distance out from the stage.
Going Out with a Bang
Lighting director/programmer Matt Mills describes the Crüe show as “definitely kicked
up a notch from my previous work (Daughtry, Staind, Three Doors Down, Nelly
Furtado, Disturbed, Linkin Park, etc.). They’re really going out with a big bang. There
are definitely some pretty cool things being thrown around out here. The Tommy Lee
drum solo belongs on a episode of Modern Marvels.”
Fresh off a tour with Avenged Sevenfold, Mills began programming for the Crüe gig ahead of time at home in
Orlando with fellow lighting director Mike Cooper, who’d brought his family down for vacation. “I have a pretty
nice programming suite set up in my house. I have a grandMA2 Command Wing linked up to a computer [with
Marketplace
Media Kit and Information for Advertiser
Advertise in the Event Production Directo
(new window)
grandMA onPC software v3 for pre-viz work]. Mike and I would sit up late at night, load the show file up and
figure out what worked and what didn’t, so we could be a bit farther ahead before we went into preproduction.”
Cooper had done the band’s 2013 Intimate Evening in Hell residency at the Hard Rock Casino’s The Joint
venue in Las Vegas, so many elements from that transferred over to this show. The two kept any programming
that worked from the Vegas set, adjusting for the different configurations, and added any new elements. “Each
of the 19 songs and the drum solo and the guitar solo has its own cue stack, its own page on the console,” Mills
explained. “The whole show is time-coded. We had the foundation of the programming in, then we got the new
time-code tracks from their Pro Tools guy and were off and running. There are a few things I’ve adjusted since
we’ve been out, like some of the transitions between songs, which can go very quickly. Coming out the drum
solo, there’s a guitar solo. We give Mick his special spot, with the rest of the stage dark. We’ve got four ego
risers that are really just a big LED brick. He steps up on that and I uplight him all in red so he looks real evil. He
goes into an evil-sounding guitar solo that transitions into the song ‘Live Wire.’”
Virtual Rehearsals
The band was on hand for some rehearsing with the lights. When they weren’t, “we
did our own rehearsals. We fired up the iTunes and cranked through all the songs to
see how it was looking, making sure the transitions were good, making sure we didn’t
have a red and blue song followed by a red and blue song.”
Mills owns the two grandMA2 consoles he uses on the tour and operates them in full tracking mode, so they
back each other up. “I’ve been a grandMA guy ever since they came out. With every new software release, they
keep making it easier and more powerful, so it makes it a lot easier for me as a programmer to knock out some
very intricate looks very quickly. I’ve progressed with them and couldn’t imagine doing a show without them. If
someone asks if I speak a foreign language, I tell them ‘I speak MA command line.’” He estimates that the
show, counting LEDs, has 16,000 light fixtures. It takes four or five hours to set up and about two-and-a-half
hours to take down, depending on the venue and loading dock. “We’re in a really good groove now,” he says.
“Christie Lites really went above and beyond to make this thing right. They have such great customer service,
getting us things we needed at the last minute when things changed from what was on paper.”
Mills describes an effect that he’s especially proud of. “We have a lot of LED fixtures up in the rig, a bunch of
Ayrton MagicPanels and Martin MAC 101s. Inside of Catalyst, I’ve pixel-mapped every LED fixture we have, so
now I can play video on top of the entire rig and can get effects out of it that I’d never be able to get from a
lighting console.”
Concludes the lighting director, “This is so cool, because as a teenager, I went and saw Mötley Crüe several
times when they rolled through my town. It’s pretty wild to sit back and think that I’m actually taking them out for
their last tour.”
And that’s final.
For more info on the design team and band, go to www.sraeproductions.com and www.motley.com.
The Mötley Crew
Production Design: Sooner Routhier, Robert Long/SRae Productions
Lighting Programmer/Operator: Matt Mills
Lighting Programmer: Mike Cooper
Production Manager: Robert Long
Stage Manager: Patrick Murphy
Production Coordinator: Eric “Shakes” Gryzbowski
Riggers: Chris Sorenson (head), Ben Erdreich
Carpenters: Casey Long, Dale Bryant, Scott Ramos
Lighting Co: Christie Lites
Lighting Crüe: Martin Kelley (rep), Mike Flynn (crew chief), Sean Flynn (dimmers/distros), Andy O’Toole, Tyler
Pigeon, John Clark, Ian Saunders
Video Co: Chaos Visual Productions
Video Crüe: John Wiseman (rep), Robert McShane, Kenny Ackerman, Seth Sharpless, Chad McClymonds
Staging/Rigging/Automation: SGPS/ShowRig
Staging Crüe: Eric Pearce (owner), Chris Kunkle, Angel Aguirre, Mike Rock, Vince Gallegos, Jordan Matson
Pyro: FFP
Pyro Crüe: Nicolai Sabottka (rep), Nick Tompsett (shooter), Marcin Okupnik, Christoph Buschor
Gear
2
1
12
2
1
3
1
20
5
MA Lighting grandMA2 full size consoles
MA2 on PC with Command Wing (for Pyro)
MA Lighting NPUs (4) and NSPs (8)
grandMA2 Lite consoles
City Theatrical SHoW DMX system
Additional SHoW DMX systems (Drums)
Catalyst Pro media server
Opto-Isolators (8-way DMX)
60 channel HD distro racks
1
110
46
38
18
16
16
7
5
3
6
8
52
6
18
40
4
9
14
4
400’
4
4
2
4
39
24
6
ETC 96 channel dimmer
Martin MAC 101s
Ayrton MagicPanel 602s
Martin MAC Viper AirFX fixtures
Clay Paky Sharpys
Martin MAC 2000 Wash XBs
Martin MAC Auras
Martin MAC 2000 Performances (for Alice Cooper)
Martin MAC III Profiles
Altman Lighting Focusing Cyc lights
Jelly Jar Aircraft Beacons
Bars of 6 VNSPs (for Alice Cooper)
ETC Source Four PARs (for Crüe Pods)
4-Light linear DWE blinders
Showtec Sunstrips
Martin Atomic Strobes w/Atomic Colors
Apollo Design Technology Right Arms
Bright Beats LED Drum Heads
Chroma-Q Color Force 72s
ETC Source Fours (36°)
Elation Flex Pixel LED Tape
JEM ZR 44 foggers
Radiance hazers
DF50 hazers
JEM ZR44 Hi-Mass foggers
7'10" sections of Christie Lites F Type track truss
End Gates for Christie F-type truss
Christie Lites dance towers (for Crüe Pods)
0 Comments
 Recommend
Projection, Lights and Staging News
⤤ Share

Login
Sort by Best
Start the discussion…
Be the first to comment.
WHAT'S THIS?
ALSO ON PROJECTION, LIGHTS AND STAGING NEWS
PLSN | PLSN Names Nook Schoenfeld
Editor
PLSN | Club Rules 101
7 comments • 2 months ago
2 comments • 4 months ago
Dee — I have spent my career avoiding
these magazines, but this column was
brought to my attention, in a less than …
Jp — Great news... You were always my
best editor. 'Jp that looks like crap...
Lemme fix it for ya'
PLSN | Widespread Panic
PLSN | Alice Cooper
1 comment • a month ago
1 comment • 5 months ago
Curtis George — The stream from
Penny — Go Andy May!
NYEhttp://www.panicstream.com/vau...
✉
Subscribe
d
Add Disqus to your site

Privacy
back to top
Check out some past issues...
March 2015
March 2015 Digit
October 2014 Digital
November 2014 Digital
December 2014 Digital
January 2015 Digital
February 2015 Digital
Browse the online archive
Other Timeless Sites
PLSN Latest News | Current Issue | Gear Reviews | ProLightingSpace | Industry Jobs | Industry Directory | Bookshelf
Buyers Guides | PLSN-TV | Tips & Tricks | Product Videos | Search PLSN
Subscribe | Media Kit | Submissions | Archives | Sitemap | Contact
© 2005 - 2015 Timeless Communications - Terms of use
6000 S. Eastern Ave. Suite J-14, Las Vegas, NV 89119
P: 702.932.5585 - F: 702.932.5584
Site design and development by Eklyptic