One starry night in Vegas, I had been asleep for a couple of hours when my cell phone rang. I looked at the number and it was Mike Burns from the MGM Grand Garden Arena. “Hey Mike, what’s up?”, I said as I shook myself awake. Mike explained that the band’s tech team arrived in the arena at 1 AM and listened to the PA system that had been provided for them. After a quick listen, it became clear that there was something terribly wrong with the speaker system. It was a quality, self-powered PA from a very popular manufacturer, but there was definitely something wrong with it. After an hour of troubleshooting, it was decided that the answer was to find another PA that was ready to rock and have it installed for the show that was scheduled for the next night. That is when I got the call…
AV Vegas had been providing live sound equipment and musical instrument rental for the MGM Grand Garden for several years, so it was natural for Mike to call who he knew and trusted. He explained that we had an hour and a half window in which to remove the bad system and install and tune our system and then turn it over to the band. “Mike”, I said, “No problem. Oh, by the way, who is the band?” His reply was Journey. Journey? Wow! I was so excited, I could barely get back to sleep.
It turned out that this was first show of their tour and their sound check / rehearsal was at noon the next day. We arrived the next morning, just as excited as we could be. Removing the old rig was slow going. The speaker cabinet rigging was difficult to deal with, but finally it was time to fly our rig, We flew our JBL Vertec 4889 boxes and checked their performance. All was good. Journey’s sound crew was cool under pressure until they saw the band walking in the back door of the arena. Just seconds after we finished the rig, the front of house engineer yelled, are we up and running? I yelled YES as he was walking quickly towards his console. He stopped and gave me the biggest high five I have ever had.
There are a few days in life that are truly, truly grand. The day you meet the love of your life, the day your kids are born. I may be accused of over dramatizing this event, but I will never forget the night I received the phone call and the day that AV Vegas got to provide a PA System for Journey. You see, it is not supposed to happen this way. The big sound companies always get to do the big bands. But on March 6th of 2008, years of preparation paid off. AV Vegas, a mid sized concert sound company got to be part of rock and roll history. I will always be grateful to be able to serve the great bands that I have grown up with. Journey is just one of them.
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