Jeff Culmer

So Christmas was good, Patti and I got some nice gifts, she got me a Golf bag organizer, and a video game, some other pretty cool stuff but I don’t want to brag, I got her some pretty cool stuff, I think?  My aunt sent us a gift box that had a couple family history items, the first we see when we opened the box is an ashtray from forever ago that has my Mom’s family trucking company logo on it.  I think this is pretty cool, there was and I’m sure still is a lot of these kindof things floating around, they use to employ a lot of people all over the States.  I’m not really sure exactly how old it is, but I enjoy the fact that I have this piece of family history.

The other was from my Dad’s side, My grandpa was on the city council for 22 years in the little town of Woolstock, IA. (If you click on the link you’ll see how big the town really is, the other cool part is, the building that my grandpa built for his electrical company is still there, it’s at the bottom mid/right just on the north side of the railroad tracks of the photo) It was the town my dad grew up in, it’s where we spent the first couple years of my life, the town only has like 200 people total, for the longest time it only had 1 stop sign, it’s claim to fame was because this guy was born there.  You just don’t hear of that any more, people don’t get involved in their community, or stay in the same community for more than a couple years, when we were buying our house everybody kept saying plan for 3 to 5 years then you’ll be on to another location in a different house.

I’ve never really understood that, is it because we’ve changed, the “iPod” generation, do we get bored that easily, or is the work environment turn over that much?  My wife’s grandma still lives in the house her and her husband bought in the 50’s, I mean that’s just unheard of.  I’m not saying that you have to live in the same house forever, my family never lived in the same spot for more than a couple years, and for half of my childhood I lived in a camper, we never spent more than a couple days in the same spot.  “Plan on moving in 3 years!  Seasons in life change that quick”  is what somebody said, and you know what that could be true, but does it have to be?

I’m a little late starting a New Years resolutions, I’ve never been one for having a resolution for the new year, I’ve always just tried and work on things and not wait for a reason like the 1st of the year, if your going to do something, you should start and not need an excuse to start something, but one of the things that I’ve noticed is that I haven’t been calling people back, I get a lot work calls, and calls from friends,  I can’t answer every call, nobody can, there are times when I just need some time to myself or I’m spending time with my wife, the flip side to all that is, I don’t return the call that I ignored, that’s the part that’s not right.   So there it is my resolution for at least the first 2 months of the year (isn’t that about the average of how long people stick with their resolutions?), I don’t promise to answer my phone but to at least return your call in some form or another.

So I’m finally getting around to looking at some of the pictures from the tour, we had a show in Vegas, and for me it was the 4th time I’ve been there this year, and only the 2nd time I was able to hit the strip, it just happen to be on the day after the grand opening of the new something something casino with the really high stuff, and cool stuff blah blah, they did have this fountain thing, that is… good for picture taking I guess.

Nick, Eric and I in Vegas baby, just being rambunctious!!

The Dog at my in-laws, basically I have more to tell just don’t have the energy right now.

Today we went to a Dutch Market, at first I was only going to hang out with the wife and father inlaw, it didn’t sound like it was going to be a ton of fun, you know buying groceries from a market full of people, that and I’ve been so tired and didnt really want to get out of bed. I’m not big into shopping for several reasons, for one I like buying stuff, I admit it, I’ll spend to much money, you would think it would be the other way around the wife will spend all the money, I mean it still is but I would rather let my wife spend money than myself, because I buy stupid things. Anyway this market place was pretty cool, I bought some pretty cool foods that I can’t wait to eat, and some food I already ate, like pretzel dogs, it’s a pretzel wrapped around a hot dog, it was pretty stinkin’ amazing, I had 3, (don’t judge me!!! it was that good) and then there’s the home grown bread and butter pickles, I had a sample there was no second guessing I had to buy some of that, there were a few more things, all of them well worth the money.

It was a lot of fun just walking around this place. Course any time I can spend with my amazing wife is fun and amazing.

This tour has been one of those tours where it’s been fun with a lot of stories to share and ……… at the same time I haven’t really shared any stories or that many pictures, for one reason or another, there’s a ton of excuses, the biggest reason would be I just haven’t had the energy, usually I’m done loading in by noonish do a few things here and there after lunch and then I would have the afternoon to upload stuff and share some stories, but for some reason on this tour (some due to late load ins) we’ve been getting things done a little later than noon, and then by the time we eat and tweak a few things it’s really late in the afternoon, and I just don’t feel like grabbing my computer to post anything, I’ve tried to post from my phone a couple times using some app, but haven’t really done that very well.

Now that I’ve said all that, I would like to contradict myself a little, I’ve been finding some new blogs to read of buddies on the road that I didn’t know they even had a blog, just happen to run across them, one of the things they all seem to have in common, is they mention what I just got done writing about, excuses as to why I haven’t been posting things, the best part is do people really read this blog or their blogs enough to be apologetic or to have excuses as to why they haven’t posted?  Or better why do we feel that we have to have an excuse as to why we haven’t posted something, the point of blogging at least for some is to share what’s going on in their life or on their mind, some use it as written commercial for themselves or for things/people they think are cool, I’ve been thinking about this for about a half hour now, hence the contradiction of the two paragraphs, I should have deleted the top part and started over, but I wanted to see it, I wanted it to be just like all the other posts I’ve posted when I haven’t been on the blog for a bit, just to remind myself that I don’t need a flipping excuse, nobody cares, and if you stop reading my pointless life stories of being on the road or being at home then well it’s all good, I still enjoy having an online journal of  what’s going in my life, I like to go back every now and then and read the different moods I was in on what day, or see the pictures of the things I’ve been apart of.  So hopefully I’ll read this in the future and remember that I don’t need excuses.

We’re doing one show in B.C. Canada.

I wish that was all I have to share with you today, Its been a busy day, we got here and the stage was in the wrong spot, which contributed to slow rigging, because of a lot of reasons that I don’t want to bore you with, the stagehands as well as the riggers were all over the age of 60, and if you think I’m joking I’m not, we looked, there wasn’t one stagehand that was close to my age, not that that’s a bad thing, things just went a little slower, bless their hearts.

And then there’s laundry day, the venue had 2 washers and 2 dryers, free laundry is rare, so it was a free for all, people just beating other people up trying to get their clothes clean, I was able to sneak in and share a wash and dry with Sam.

And that’s pretty much it for things that didn’t piss me off today, oh I did get a new beany (not sure if that’s how you spell it, not that it matters I can’t spell jack) that was nice my head is warm now.

The last couple of days have been good and tiresome, we’ve had a lot of things that are not normally on the tour out with us this week, for one one of the opener bands that’s normally on the tour wasn’t able to do the dates this week so we had a different opener, it didn’t effect me, but it did effect some of the other crew, they had to listen to the music being played. (haha am I joking?) Second part of the week that was a little different, we had a speaker for a show which did effect me and pretty much the entire crew the one day, it wasn’t bad, he had a lot of staff with him that videoed us working all day, well I say all day, we didn’t start load in till 11am do too a long drive for a 6 o’clock show that day, so more like watched us run literally to get the show up in time which we did, because we’re all awesome! Somebody had to say it. There was a lot of changes to the show that they (the speaker) felt was needed, I really don’t want to go into that, when I talk about that stuff it always comes out pissy, and that’s not the case, I just don’t understand people.

Anyway there was that, and then there’s the reason for the picture above which has to do with Nick, we were in this building yesterday, and during load in the riggers computer with all their cheat programs showing them how to rig a bridal in the air went down, now I’m not a rigger, I don’t pretend to know that much about it, other than knowing which direction the shackle needs to be and knowing when a local rigger is full of it, and I don’t feel safe having him/her down rig the equipment I’m responsible for, so this guy comes to nick and says, “we’re going to need to use several long tape measurements, to measure the bridals because our computer died, what we’ll we’ll do is send up tapes to the up riggers and they’ll measure up there down to here.” So Nick says in all his nerdy ingeniousness “Why? you never heard of A x A squared + B x B Squared = the square root of C x C Triangle” blah blah blah yea I stopped listening to be truthful just like you stopped reading and have now scrolled down to look at more pictures with shorter stories but the point is if your do something for a living do your homework and learn different methods to your job for those moments that you need to have a back up plan like everyday for us. IF you can’t tell I’m proud of what I do and the guys I tour with.

So Nick was the down rigger for the day actually figuring out all the points and putting together the steel.

Ok enough long stories, time for short stories and again most of them have to do with Sam, Sam was waiting for load in to start in IA and down the hall towards the loading docks, is the door for catering and the PO (production office) so Sam being bored not seeing me, not that it would matter but it makes it funnier that he didn’t know I was there, switches the tapes to the doors so people will go into the wrong door. That’s just awesome.

Merch guys, and not like always these merch guys really work hard, and do whatever they can to make the client happy, getting up with the rest of the crew and loading in at 8am, if you don’t know, most merch guys don’t do anything really, and get up around noon, and do a little here and there, but not these guys.

Sam looking at the audio feeder that the electrician ran, and didn’t put in a cable ramp, on a day that we had Teen Challenge hands so… inexperience and brute force is the name of the game with those guys, things like running cases over cables is something that happens… And we try to catch them before they do it and educate them, but if you scroll down you’ll know why it’s dangerous to run cases over cables.

Yea that’s right, a big ol’ cut in it, which if that cable would have had power in it and the dude that pushed the case over the cable that cut it with the sharp medal from the wheel, would be hurtin/dead. Yea I said it.

And now something that I’ve been waiting to see for a long time, a FOH Audio guy (Lampa) finally giving in and acknowledging that it’s too loud!

Santa Cam has to be one of the funniest moments of the night, One of the bands rents some little lipstick camera’s from us for their show, the cams don’t move so whereever we put them that’s where they stay for their show, well one of the cameras is on this plastic Santa on the stage, what makes it funny is that it could be in the middle of a serious song, it’s all heartfelt and aometimes mushy christmasy and there’s Santa up on the screen, I mean that crap is just funny.

So when walking in this morning we had a pretty good idea of that it was going to be a rough day, we had had meetings about today and the lack of… Well it’s not really made to put a show in, so the pic above is what we first saw walking in.

The Guys Discussing what they need to cut but still have a show.

The Lift wasnt exactly clise to the stage, and it wasn’t centered, the best part was I can’t drive off of the plywood, and that’s all the plywood they had, it was fun scooting the lift over inches at a time.

Nick’s working on video things while I supervise, haha seriously I do work. Sometimes.

Audio hanging from some scaffolding, I just thought I would put this pic in here as well, or those who do audio and want to see what they did today, usually I could care less about the audio guys but, today I’ll share a pic since they had some trials as well.

FOH what can I say, at least the com runs were short.

The walls up and working, it always feels good when we can take what could have been a really long and bad day and turn it into a good a day, we all got together found out what the day was going to be like and started advancing what we would we need to make the day happen, like what needed to be cut or sized down, what we needed to hang things like renting this lull lift for me that video could even be hung today, overall I would have to say it wasn’t a bad day.

This is video world. It’s ran by 5 year olds.

You have to appreciate being ready to load the truck, not to brag or anything, the only reason I’m sharing this pic is because it’s the only 1 of 2 pictures I took on the last 2 shows. We had a few minutes to kill waiting for the audio/backline truck to finish.

Sorry for the aweful pictures and even worse descriptions/back stories to the pictures. The end

As I posted last time if I had some time I would post some pictures of the tour, I’ve been a little under the weather, so the stories might be a little misconstrued do to the med’s!  But this way they’ll be more interesting.  Ok they won’t be interesting at all it’s just going to be descriptions and more boring.

Just so your not confused, the description of the photo is underneath the picture.

The Room we rehearsed in, I’m still a little confused what it really is meant for, all I know is it was a really big place that had a lot of steal and really old tools, that I would love to buy,  the place was pretty cool, you had to drive through some different area’s of town to get there, but worth it once your there, way better than sound check (haha)

Bush (not sure if he’s related) looming up our video snake, yea that’s right you read right, a video snake, we put the robo controller and all the camera stuff at FOH because the lighting console controls everything, even the oven that cooks the meals for catering I think.

New York City is a post all by it self, and I’ll be getting to that at some point this week, but I thought I would share this picture because it’s just awesome.

Our Truck for the tour?

Did you count how many hands we have for load out?  I like this method, I’ve been on tours where each department has a sticker that’s a color, or a colored shirt that says the tour name, that all helps, but honestly I’ve really enjoyed this one, he hands out the gaffe tape and makes them put it on the front of their shirt, it really is a good idea because it’s cheap for one, and we can keep track of who is where, you wouldn’t think that would be a problem but it can be.

Our loading dock for the New York City show, it was 8th Ave if you really care, and nobody slowed down even a little as we unloaded in the street.

Bush (again) focusing the drum lipstick cam.  From the looks of it, you would think that the only two guys out of the 15-20 crew guys that actually work is Sam and Bush.  And that might be the truth I’m not really sure.