Exactly one day before the Winter Olympic opening ceremonies started I was on stage with Little Feat in Park City, Utah. The temperature was in the mid teens. The concert was to take place that evening outdoors. There was a problem with the heaters. Apparently, they needed an additional generator to run all the lights, stage gear, and heaters. My hope was the lights would produce enough heat to keep us warm. At sound check, an hour earlier, the B-3 had blown up. 

   On most outdoor shows the power fluctuates causing all kinds of problems, especially with midi instruments. So when the B-3 (which is not a midi instrument) went down, I knew I might have to make some serious adjustments. I had already tried to make the life of our crew easier by using less gear. For most concerts I bring a rack of synths routed through a midi through box into a master keyboard (a Korg Trinity) on top of a SG Pro X (also by Korg). To my right is a B-3. I bring it in close enough so I can play piano or synth with the left hand and B-3 with the right when the mood strikes. My choreography for playing two handed keyboards is somewhat loose. There are times when I feel like having a B-3 sound interspersed between licks on the synth or piano. Park City was a situation where I had reduced my setup to one synth (a trusty Korg T-3), synth piano, a rented B-3, which was now lost in the shuffle. The crew on hand, in addition to the guys we travel with, were apologetic about it all. I told them it would be fine. After the number of years I’ve been on tour my attitude is if something doesn’t work, then move on to the next instrument. The audience doesn’t know what you’re going to play, and besides, I look at it as a challenge. Losing the B-3 was not to be the biggest challenge that night.

   Little Feat had just been in New Orleans to play a couple of shows for the Super Bowl--one of them with a B-3, the other without. We had played a private party for one of the NFL franchises and the next morning a Tail Gator Party with the Bare Naked Ladies and No Doubt at the Convention Center. My keyboard tech, Mark Gilbert, was in the process of leaving the band to go back to school to study music, came to help out in New Orleans but was not going to be in Park City. When Mark joined the crew four years ago, I had told him to keep things on stage as consistent as possible; it wasn’t a great gig for being inventive. For years, I had keyboard techs who would offer their services, which ultimately included redesigning my keyboard rig. I don’t doubt that most of them wanted to make things better, but I also suspect that some of the changes were generated out of boredom. I made a decision to put a stop to that.

   I put my trust in the desires of the techs to make things right. Unfortunately, everyone that walked through the door wanted to reinvent the wheel. To be honest, I let them do it, in part because I didn’t know what I wanted. Keyboards techs are a peculiar breed. Most of them are not keyboard oriented, but have extensive knowledge of guitars. Scott Pinkerton and Bob Rice were two techs I had the pleasure of working with, both of which were of the guitar camp but transferred their know how readily to keyboards. Scotty, who had worked with Larry Carlton, came in just as Let It Roll was coming out in 1988. Bob Rice came in somewhere in the mid 90’s, his resume included Frank Zappa. Both were, and are, great musicians in their own right. I had a couple of techs that followed in their footsteps with disastrous results on a couple of levels. One gig I was reduced to turning on my main keyboard off and on because of midi lock up (all the notes would stick on) throughout the show. Not good. It was a nightmare. I had bought a great deal of equipment which turned out to be a complete waste of money. The next tech that came in played keyboards (was a very proficient player, in fact) and had ideas on how to expand my setup. All of which was fine, but within the context of Little Feat it was over the top. When he left some months later I made a conscious decision to have a rig built that would allow whomever came in as a tech to act as a custodian and not an inventor. Maintaining the equipment would be the name of the game. I chose the two best guys I knew, Scott Pinkerton and Bob Rice.

    I realized that part of the solution to getting things straight was for me to be a better partner. I had a few discussions with the Scott and Bob to give them my perspective. They also gave me theirs. We were all looking for a keyboard rig that would be relatively easy to setup, which meant the cabling had to be wired in an efficient way, with everything clearly marked. Their method of working with each other was unique. They had a clothes line hooked up between them with a placard in which the words, “The Boss” were printed on it . Whenever one of them would run out of ideas or just couldn’t figure out where they were going they would shove the placard towards the other guy, making them the “boss”. I loved it. Weeks later they presented me with a road rig anyone would have been proud of. This was the rig Mark Gilbert, my new tech, was presented with.

  Mark was faced with learning the art of consistent setup. I told him early on that if I got on stage and a keyboard didn’t work, it could be one of a hundred reasons why: the volume not turned on (after using headphones), a pedal plugged into the wrong slot, a cable that needs repair, a fader down on the mixing console, the wrong sound programmed...any number of things. I also told him that if something was wrong it was usually something very simple. But when you’re in front of an audience it’s tough to sort it out quickly. He learned, the hard way a couple of times, the value of getting a check list together, and the importance of using his ears to discern when things were right or not. I could go up there and tell him out of six synths that one of them was not working on almost any given sound. Running a keyboard rig is not easy, but he turned out to be one of the best I have ever worked with. I knew I would miss him at the gig in Park City.

    I gave a cursory look at my simplified keyboard setup at the sound check in Park City. After all, I wouldn’t be using the B-3, so I just had the piano and the one synth. When we were announced to the crowd and started the first song everything was going fine until I put my foot on the place where the sustain pedal was supposed to be. It wasn’t there. I looked to the side and saw there were a couple of unplugged pedals. I kept playing, with the intent to plug in the pedal after the first song, which is what I did. The problem was the pedal I plugged into the back of the keyboard didn’t work. I causally went to the Global Page and looked for the polarity switch (+ or -) and toggled between the two. The sustain kicked in, but about thirty seconds later it stuck on. I switched the polarity again, it worked for awhile and then went off again. I took the pedal out of the synth and made a change with the one in the piano. All was well for about the next two songs when the new pedal stopped working. The entire time, other than when I went in front of the keyboard to plug in the pedal in to the back of the synths, I don’t think anyone knew what kind of trouble I was in. I finally disconnected the pedals altogether and just played the best I could without them.

    To make up for the lack of sustain, I used my left hand and played rolling octaves. The challenge was to keep it fresh, make it work within the context of the song, and to reinvent my style on the spot. When it came to my solo in the middle of Dixie Chicken, where it’s just me, drums, and percussion, I went into a percussive frenzy. My normal solo utilizes a string overlay against a legato approach on the piano. I abandoned that approach. It was different, but I thought it worked pretty well. The rest of the evening was spent in similar pursuit of redefinition of my parts.

   Later, at the hotel, our sound engineer came up and apologized for the mishap with the pedals. I told him I had had the opportunity to check it out at sound check and had failed to do so. And at any rate, even if I had the power on stage was fluctuating so badly that the problem would have still been there. My attitude was that it was live music and that things happen. There would be a lot of shows to play this year, and that I had learned a lot from this concert. The fans had a great time, I was presented with a challenge and met it head on. It always comes down to performance without excuses.

                                                        Bill Payne

                                                        somewhere in the wilds of Upper Michigan

                                                        February, 2002