Cleveland, OH
On the Cleveland date of the We Own The Night Tour there was a crazy rain storm that caused the show to get cancelled. The venue was Nautica Pavilion. Here is a video the band put on youtube.
Anyway! The rain started coming in during the middle of the set. Although there were rain screens on the sides and back of the stage it didn’t stop the rain from coming in sideways drenching stage right. The video walls and lighting trusses started to sway along with the PA. At that point, we realized it was way to dangerous to continue the show, especially since it was only two days after the Indiana accident. We dropped the lighting trusses and video walls and began to power down the stage. Of course, I have no pictures because I was in a frenzy tearing down equipment. The only thing we lost to the water damage was the guitar players pedal board. This is where I came in.
I took the whole pedal board apart. Had to test each individual pedals on my Orange Micro PiX Amp. That thing is great! Some peoplewonder why a tech would need one, but trust me any tech needs a mini test amp. After I had removed all the pedals from the board and tested them, it was time to clean all the contact points. This particular pedalboard has a loop master box on it, which was the last source of the problem. Each individual pedal worked but the first loop box on the loop master was shorted out. After cleaning all the contacts, I put the board back together and everything worked fine!
A couple shows later, we got blasted with rain again. I wasn’t going to let the rain destroy the pedalboard I worked so hard to repair. So I got some saran wrap and wrapped the entire board in about three layers of the stuff. This way I could still plug in my cables and the guitar player was able to see his pedals as he played in the mist. I also wrapped up his channel changer like a little cookie. This is a separate pedal from his custom pedal board.
