Life is a Highway!

Big day again today and another sold out show!  It was destined to be a huge crowd on the grounds tonight with 5 mega shows playing.  Boyz II Men, Street Corner Symphony, Here Come the Mummies, WAR were on the four free stages.  Rascal Flatts, Little Big Town, Eli Young Band and Eden's Edge all on the grandstand.  The Flatts tour was extremely organized which makes my job just a bit easier.  I was still running all day but there were a lot of things I wasn't have to mess with that I normally would.  It was neat to see how all of the acts know exactly when to do what.  Some were better at it than others but it all worked pretty seamlessly. 

I absolutely love working with Little Big Town and Eli Young Band.  Just knowing those were two on the lineup and working with their superb tour managers again made me feel at ease.  I've never worked with Eden's Edge but they were very nice as well.  Flatts are always a hoot.  With the entire tour being obviously a lot of moving parts and people it was amazing to see how they could fit all of their equipment on the stage.  Unfortunately, the size of the stage hinders us from being able to put up entire, arena like setups.  Video walls are paired down, sets are shrunk and every inch of real estate is used.  They compacted it as much as they could but they were still hanging off the edges so to speak.  But with that brings easy parts on us.  Like the fact that they loaded out in two hours, where as last night in Louisville it was almost 4.

The fun part was watching their meet and greets run so smoothly.  They literally had them back to back and they ran through one band, brought out the next and then started the next one and so on.  And we had 12 buses parked in our compound today.  It was a RV lovers dream; 12 Prevost for everyone's gazing pleasure.

As we got closer to show time it definitely got busier.  I was trying to get all of the comp tickets sorted out and changes kept needing to be made.  The runners that would normally take them to the ticket office were busy so I was having to run back and forth.  But then the tour management started getting worried that JoDon was going to be late getting back from golf because of the traffic.  Then JoDon ended up playing golf a half hour longer than expected.  Fortunately, they were able to get him on the grounds quickly and he only delayed the meet and greet like oh...15mins. 

Little Big Town

Eli Young Band and Eden's Edge signing autographs for fans

A part of the Dream Team- Mark Cockriel of OnCue Systems

Everyone sounded AMAZING on stage.  I even got to catch at least one song of each band (except for Eden's Edge) and was really impressed with the stage setup and sound.  Apparently Boyz II Men had a huge crowd as well (about 7,000) and the other stages had nice crowds as well.  This fair has probably been the smoothest fairs since I've been here in four years.  Everyone really worked well together, the bookings flowed well and were good choices and of course the weather was just perfect.  Hopefully the overall outcome of the fair will be the same as our experience in the grandstand. 

So tomorrow I'll be wrapping everything up, packing up my office and stuff and ready to fly out bright and early on Tuesday for Syracuse.  Start at the Great New York State Fair on Thursday!