Re: Help me understand 'Riders'
Regarding communication:
Last summer I was re-hired by a neighborhood PAC to provide for their "2nd Annual" fest. I had done it the year before when they were on a shoe-string budget, bringing 2 tops and 2 subs for the 12 x 16 portable stage they'd hired. The second year they had qualified for some municipal funding as part of a city-wide celebration, so they got giddy and started booking all sorts of stuff that needed much more than the rig I had provided. I informed them that the gear they wanted me to bring would in no way suffice for the acts they were booking, but was told "they'll just have to live with it".
As per usual, I asked to be put in touch with someone in the band who could give me, at minimum, an input list and some cursory monitor requirements. When I got a call from the manager of the hip-hop group they had booked and they found out that the stage was 12 x 16, they bailed as they were a 10 piece group with "friends who like to come up and dance with us on the front of the stage". Of course, the upshot of this is that the 20-something who was booking things got PO'd at me, so I just asked them to find someone else to assist in their tom-foolery. Communication got me out of that debacle.....
post-script
The day of the event I got a call from the volunteer head of the fest asking why the 6KW welding generator the eventual provider brought was so much louder than the (Honda) 3KW generator I used the year before. They had to relocate it from beside the stage to about 150' away, splicing together a bunch of 50' AC cables to get there........all across a veritable wet-land once the overflow from the wading pool started running toward the low spot.
