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When
we arrived at Riverside Hall early on a Saturday afternoon
to set up our equipment and prepare for the arrival of guests,
we noticed half a dozen Porta-Johns in the parking lot.
Since the reception facility is located next to the Mississippi
River and summer music concerts are commonplace in our Iowa
community, we figured they were simply the remnants of a
recent outdoor festival.
However,
when my guys and I went to change into our tuxedos inside
the hall’s restrooms, the doors were locked. The staff told
us that a water-pipe malfunction had shut down all indoor
plumbing for the weekend. Then, after we got dressed, we
returned to the ballroom just in time to witness the wedding
cake collapse onto the floor. Apparently the cake hadn’t
been well constructed, and as a result, the reception would
go on with neither indoor plumbing nor a cake.
Needless
to say, it was interesting to greet guests at the door in
our usual, formal way—white gloves, canes, top hats and
tux coats with tails—and telling them, “Welcome to Dave
and Melinda’s reception. We don’t have indoor plumbing and
we don’t have a wedding cake, but we’re going to have a
great time anyway!”
The ball was definitely in our court to create a successful
event.
Every
mobile DJ can recount a story where they’ve overcome a seemingly
impossible situation. At my gigs, I’ve had a groom punch
a bride in the face during an argument; I’ve seen crowds
too drunk to party before the first dance even started;
and I’ve accidentally called for a dead grandparent to come
out on the floor for a dedicated dance.
The
challenge, though, is to ultimately make the event successful.
Sure, sometimes there’s nothing much we can do. But, often,
creating success from a mess is simply a matter of showing
a little creativity.
Here
are some examples.
No
Electricity? Oy Vey!
Over the past 20 years, Geoff Carlisle of Jamm Entertainment
and his nine mobile systems have entertained for a variety
of functions in the Birmingham, Ala., area. Carlisle’s company
is especially popular in the corporate party and mitzvah
realms, in large part because of their attention to detail
and customer service. But Carlisle says he’ll never forget
the time he faced the most challenging of bar mitzvahs.
“We had been hired to provide sound, lighting and video
for this mitzvah a couple years ago at the Pinetree Country
Club,” recalls Carlisle. “They had a three-hour party planned
with about 150 kids. There were to be basically no adults,
and that ended up being in our favor.”
The
event was scheduled on a day with typical Alabama fall weather,
which Carlisle says gets pretty bad because Birmingham is
in a tornado alley. Carlisle and his DJ showed up on time
to set up their video projection screen, camera, sound system,
lighting system and fog machine. But just as they finally
had everything ready to go, the lights went out. “The first
thing you’re thinking is that these people have reserved
you, it’s a busy night, and you’re going to get paid no
matter what,” Carlisle remembers thinking. “In turn, that
motivated me to want to assure the client that we’re making
every attempt to make their party a success.”
Upstairs,
two other parties were also happening during this weather-related
outage. “Upstairs, in the biggest ballroom, there was a
800-guest sit-down dinner for Mercedes Benz,” says Carlisle.
“Somehow they eventually got a generator, but the lady who
was DJing up there looked dazed and confused. She basically
just stood around waiting for the hall to help her find
a generator.”
Rather
than waiting for the hall staff to find his solution, Davidson
immediately left his DJ to man the console while he went
out and got a generator himself. Meanwhile, the guests made
do with flashlights and candles.
Well,
that generator worked just fine at first, but unfortunately
it supplied enough power to juice only one of Carlisle’s
Mackie powered speakers. And if that wasn’t bad enough,
his fancy new dual CD player—complete with memorized cue
points—wouldn’t read any of his CDs because of all the electronic
static running through the sound system.
The
solution? Carlisle plugged a Discman portable CD player
into his mixer and played one song at a time, talking between
songs while his DJ changed discs. “We would plug the mic
in and talk really softly to make announcements,” he explains.
“That little CD player that cost about $60 probably saved
the night at that point.”
After
30 minutes of darkness, the power returned and they were
able to plug everything back in, but a short time later
the power went out again. “It was becoming very difficult
to run the whole show without a sound system,” Carlisle
recalls with a bit of frustration still in his voice.
When
it eventually came time to try one of the many activities
that Jamm Entertainment upsells with their mitzvah packages,
the DJs couldn’t scream loud enough into the mic to compensate
for the severe lack of power. To make things work, Carlisle
again had to get creative. “We simply turned the gain down
and plugged the microphone directly into the back of a Mackie
speaker, using it directly as a PA system,” he says. “With
one speaker and a mic, I was able to lead a game of Musical
Chairs, and by the end of that game, luckily, the power
came back on for the final 30 minutes.”
Not
only did Carlisle make it through the night, but this seemingly
impossible event even pumped up his business. “Ever since
then, when I go out and talk to clients, a lot of the kids
who were there thought it was the coolest party ever,” he
says, “probably because all the lights were off. It was
something different, so being able to work with that bad
experience in turn ended up creating one of the coolest
parties ever, and we’ve gotten two or three bookings as
a result.”
When
Venus Isn’t Talking To Mars
After setting up for a wedding reception a few years ago,
my staff and I were surprised to see that the first carloads
of arriving guests were actually the wedding party. Usually,
of course, by the time a wedding party arrives, the guests
are already there. So this seemed strange.
When I approached the groom to ask how everything was going,
he said, with a distressed look on his face, “Things were
going great up until now. My wife and I came over here in
separate vehicles and aren’t talking to each other right
now.”
Wow,
what a way to start a marriage!
At
this point, I didn’t want either the bride or the groom
to think I was taking sides, so I made sure I spent equal
time talking with each one to assure them that we’d do whatever
we could to turn this mess into a success. The bride was
especially troubled by the situation, and was crying when
I went over and greeted her with a hug.
After
instructing the bride to look me in the eye, I assured her
that things would get much better before the evening passed.
“There are a lot of unusual demands being placed on you
right now by your spouse and your family and your guests,”
I said, “but don’t worry because I promise that things will
get much better. In many ways there is more stress on a
couple, and especially on a bride, during the wedding day
than there will be ever again in their marriage. If there’s
anything we can do to make your day go better for you, please
ask.”
Within
an hour, we had the bride and groom at the bar doing shots
together, and throughout the dinner and dance we frequently
played a sample of a long kiss while we had their guests
cheer for them as they kissed.
I’m no marriage counselor—just ask my wife—but, whew, it
worked this time!
Consummation
Proclamation
When Atlanta-based DJ Jon Davidson performed for a wedding
four years ago at an antebellum mansion in the Atlanta suburbs,
he was being paid to play for a typical reception. The scene
was the Flint Hill Plantation in Roswell, Ga.
“Everyone
there was from out of town,” he recalls, “Their rehearsal
dinner had been held the night before at a hotel a few miles
away, and now everyone was being shuttled from the hotel
to the ceremony and reception.”
Problem
was, some key participants didn’t show up in time to the
reception, including about 25 guests from the bride’s side
of the family; Davidson, the photographer and the wedding
coordinator couldn’t figure out why they didn’t show up.
The guests were all tight-lipped and tension filled the
air.
“The families would not talk to each other, dance with each
other or give me any direction the whole time,” says Davidson.
“It was like I had walked in on some totally strange warp
in time and I felt very out of place. I even double-checked
my spec sheet to make sure I was in the right venue and
double-checked names to make sure I had the correct client.”
It actually wasn’t until after the reception that Davidson
discovered the reason for the subdued mood of his guests.
It turns out, right before the rehearsal dinner the night
before, the bride had walked in on the groom performing
a little “rehearsal” with the maid of honor. “Miraculously,
the bride agreed to go on with the event,” Davidson says
in amazement, “but most of her family had decided to fly
home before the reception. Needless to say, it made for
a rather subdued weekend.”
Although
the bride and groom had their first dance together that
night, Davidson says they didn’t interact again the rest
of the evening. “In fact, it’s a good thing we didn’t do
dollar dances,” he says, “because the bride’s family would
probably have been throwing coins at the groom!”
To
overcome such a strange twist in the event and turn things
into a party, Davidson tried everything in the book. “I
was entertaining the heck out of them and they weren’t responding,”
he says. “It was like a segregated situation, in which we
had one family on one side of the room and another family
on the other side, and no one wanted to get up and talk
or dance.”
It
was a case in which no solution could be found, so Davidson
was stuck in a losing battle for the souls of the guests.
“I got out there and taught the Electric Slide and did some
other standard things like The Twist and the Conga Line,
but it pretty well sucked. “I question to this day why the
couple went through with the reception at all, but it was
probably because everything was paid for so they figured
they might as well go ahead and have a party.”
And
now Davidson is left longing for a tactful way of following
up and finding out if that couple is still married today.
A
Bass-Less High School Dance
Everyone knows that if you book school dances, there’s the
potential for overloading your equipment and blowing a circuit.
Back when I did schools, our company would always run at
least a couple lights on the same breaker with the power
amplifier, so if we did lose the lightshow due to a blown
circuit, at least a couple lights kept going while we corrected
the problem.
“Oh
boy, I’ve had some doozies,” says mobile DJ Cary Cavanaugh
of Iowa-based Full Spectrum Entertainment. “Sometimes things
are just clicking along and something will happen, like
a breaker will trip, and you’re suddenly trying to figure
out which breaker or power strip tripped out, and what I
should do so this doesn’t happen again. It’s like hitting
a brick wall; the momentum’s gone.”
Of course, the trickiest part is when, instead of blowing
a circuit, you lose speakers, mixers or amps themselves.
For
an extreme mess that became a success, Cavanaugh says he
will never forget a high school homecoming dance he did
in Mason City, Iowa, back in 1989. “We were tri-amped, for
lows and mids and highs, and one of our amps went down.
I’m underneath the table, in the dark, scrambling and fumbling.
The music sounded atrocious for a while but I managed to
keep it going without shutting down.
“That
was back when heavy rock-n-roll was hot, before this thumpy
bass stuff. Motley Crue and stuff didn’t really need the
bass as much as today’s music, but without the bass it was
just really shrill.”
In
a rat’s nest of cables, Cavanaugh was left to figure out
how to resolve the problem without stopping everything and
losing the energy on the dancefloor. “It ended up, we had
blown out an output in the bass amp, and what I had to do
was repatch into another amp on the fly, running around
the crossover full-range into the bass. It sounded kind
of poppy, but it got us through the night, and that was
our most on-the-fly, frantic, oh-my-God-are-we-gonna-get-this-done
thing I’ve ever experienced.”
Fortunately
for Cavanaugh and his assistant, the students that night
really didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sure they heard it sounding
tinny for awhile, but we just kept going from song to song
and making announcements between tunes,” he says. “As the
night finished, actually, nobody said a word about screw-ups.
We were simply thanked at the end of the night and paid.”
Everybody’s
Kung Fu Fighting
About three years ago, Dubuque, Iowa-based Stanley Samuel
was DJing for a reception in Dodgeville, Wis. Imagine his
surprise when, halfway through the reception, the groom
punched the bride and of guests began a brawl out in the
parking lot.
For this extreme situation, Samuel chose to simply keep
playing the music, beginning with a couple of slow songs,
and things ended up calming down on their own. “I think
the guests were just too drunk this night,” he says. “It
was a redneck wedding, with everyone drunk before we even
got there.”
For
these types of extreme situations, Samuel suggests Van Morrison’s
“Have I Told You Lately” as the perfect song to calm a crowd
down.
“To
be honest, I don’t think there’s any way DJs can prevent
things like that from happening,” he says. “Controlling
a crowd is a job for family members. I’d get involved if
they were breaking up my stuff, but otherwise I’d stay away.”
In the end, Samuel says there’s nothing you can do to totally
prevent anything unusual from happening at a gig. “You just
have to be flexible and creative,” he says. “Have a few
tricks up your sleeves, and remember to pack extra cables,
a variety of adaptors and maybe even a Discman.”
“With
some preparation and a little bit of luck,” says Samuels,
“you’ll be prepared like a Boy Scout for any extreme situation.”
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