I had the good fortune of landing a job with SHOWCO in 1992. The shop was off Regal Row in Dallas. I showed up for work on my first day & a staff member (I don’t recall his name) took me around, introduced me to various department heads & then ushered me to my area. Cable. Cable for miles. My new job was to catch all types of cable as it came in the door from being on tour & test it & then put it back where it belonged. I showed up the next morning & the guy I’d met was gone out on the road. I was obviously “trained” and “qualified” in managements mind so I went back to work sorting & testing cable. A few days later a gentleman named John Blasutta came up to me & asked, “Do you have a passport?”, “yes sir!” I replied. “We’re going to Mexico…” he said.

I think we left about 2 weeks later so I got just enough time in the shop to get really excited. Billy Joel’s rig came back from the road while I was there. Chicago too maybe. A few tours were getting prepped while I was there to go back out. Lots of speaker testing in the area next to cable.

I did a very small tour of Mexico with SHOWCO & The Beach Boys in the Summer of 1994. I learned later that The Beach Boys was a sort of test site for new SHOWCO guys & I must of done OK since I was sent on to my next adventure.

OZZY – No More Tours Tour 1992

This gig would ultimately prove to be the end of my SHOWCO career. There must of been an unspoken rule that new (green) SHOWCO employees had to be broken down in spirit because I endured the equivalent of hazing by the monitor guy GUNK & then his assistant TATERS. I didn’t get hired because I knew everything there was to know about audio & touring. I got hired because I was a warm body, was inside the system and was eager and willing.

I was given the nickname “EB” by GUNK soon after my arrival at the rehearsal complex, a reference to the “Green Acres” character & it caught on. Soon the whole crew was calling me that…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lester

At the time I was making $600 a week & doing 4 or 5 shows on average per week & show days were as long as 18 hours each. You do the math. Come to find out later that SHOWCO charged $1500 a week for my services.

I’ll save the gory details but the tour was due a short pause & Sharon (Ozzy’s wife) became ill so he canceled the next leg of the tour. I went back home & worked a bit more at SHOWCO in the shop but soon that was over. I don’t even recall what happened. I was just glad to be away from GUNK & TATERs. While there were a lot of bad things about that tour, I still learned a lot of important things. How to work without sleep, how to skip meals, how to get yelled over the PA in front of a packed arena, etc… Good stuff that prepared me for my next job:)

What a long & winded way of introducing visitors to the SHOWCO PRISM system.

At the time I toured with SHOWCO, the Prism rig was considered to be the Cadillac of speakers ans was shrouded in secrecy. Only once did I have one of the grills off. To take it off you needed a special oval shaped bit to match the oval shaped heads on the grill screws. I was told, “Go in that room, lock the door and remove the screws with this drill. Once the grill is loose, call me. I called and I left the room and the other SHOWCO tech went in and locked the door.

I’m going to see if I can find some information about the Prism rig now that it’s long since been discontinued and replaced by newer options never to return to the prime time slot it was once awarded.

More soon…