Jeremy Roth and Brown Note Productions Light Socially Distanced Gigs at Landmark Venue

(Photos: Rett Rogers)

Production designer Jeremy Roth resides in the small covered-bridge capital of Oregon known as Cottage Grove, where he’s been fortunate to share this small, forested hamlet with a few industry friends over the years. One of them was musician and recording producer Richard Swift. Back around 2014, Swift had the then-relatively-unknown singer Nathaniel Rateliff in his studio making his first Night Sweats album. Through mutual friends, a kinship was born.

“A few years later, after that record had gotten a lot of acclaim and attention, Nathaniel called me to help out with production elements for a club-and-theater tour. This led to bigger productions as his popularity grew,” says Roth. Every year since then, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, all Colorado natives, have sold out multiple night runs at Red Rocks. Roth has been designing all of those shows as well as their tours. His 2017 design for the Red Rocks shows was, at the time, the largest lighting and video rig that Brown Note Productions had ever put in for a non-EDM show.

This time around, the singer was exploring another side of himself with a somber, folksier-style of music, similar to his work previous to the Night Sweats albums. “After touring relentlessly, Nathaniel needed a break, so he went to work on a solo album. This was a very personal album, much more inward as he dealt with loss and grief, which included the passing of our close friend and collaborator Richard Swift. We went from a party atmosphere with the Night Sweats to an intimate evening with his solo band.” Jeremy notes that the band now is made up of most of the Night Sweats, except they swapped out the horns for a string section and added an additional drummer. The songs are all new.

Hand Forged Lighting

This was to be a one-truck theater tour. The artist had conversed with Jeremy about how to create an intimate look on stage. They looked at old designs that included candles, but didn’t want to approach that clichéd look. Instead, Jeremy envisioned some old vaudevillian clamshell lights where tungsten bulbs sat in a reflector and glowed, but without that exact retro clamshell look. The fixtures were not meant so much to light the artist but to create a mood on stage both for the band and the audience.

Back to friends in Cottage Grove. One such friend of Roth’s is a blacksmith artisan by the name of Mark “Bear” Diriwachter. He went to Bear’s shop, Bear Iron, with some basic ideas about what he wanted to fabricate out of metal, including the shape and general ideas about how these fixtures had to be designed to easily mount onto a mic stand. After some discussions, Bear hand-forged a prototype. The two worked on the final bits and pieces, including a metallic looking PVC sheath that could wrap the mic stand shaft to hide the AC cable to the bulb. Each one was made of hand-hammered, forged steel and weighed 10 pounds. “While we never meant to use these lights by themselves, my lighting director and programmer, Bobby Mathias, and I found a couple of spots where they were the only light source on stage, and we got some good shadow play. The reflectors would also sparkle and glint as they caught colors from the overhead lighting rig.” Roth adds, “I’ve really enjoyed working with Bobby on these shows. He’s a great programmer and LD and has a great feel for the aesthetic we’re working to create.”

Textures

Brown Note Productions out of Denver once again was the chosen vendor for this artist. They provided a previz suite in Denver for Roth and Mathias to get in a few days of programming prior to loading into Denver’s 1STBANK Center for a few more days of band rehearsals and a “soft opening” for friends and family. Roth says “Sara, Ryan, James and the rest of the folks at Brown Note have always been incredibly supportive of this band and my work, to which I’m incredibly grateful.”

The tour carried a front truss that had Robe BMFL Blades mounted in it, a longtime staple of Roth’s shows, to be used as key lights on the band. “I often have a soft pebbled gobo texture in the beam to project dappled light on the band members that’s a little broken up,” he says. “It helps me to accentuate Nathaniel while still providing the band enough light to see and play their instruments.”

Roth has long been known as a designer who uses a lot of textures in his work, whether it be the custom imagery he projects on the backdrops or the break up patterns of light that augment the stage scenery. “Over the years, I have collected a decent assortment of custom gobos from Rosco and Apollo designed to fit into the Robe BMFL fixtures, so I continue to use them. I am a huge fan of Robe fixtures.”

The tour also carried a small assortment of Claypaky B-Eyes and Robe MegaPointes for backlight specials and effects. On tour, Mathias would utilize house fixtures to round out and fill in as needed. One fixture that Roth really enjoyed carrying was the top and bottom rows of LED cyc lights. Upstage behind the band, the tour called for a truss or house battens to fly a custom-printed backdrop upstage, a white sharkstooth scrim. The printed artwork came from Doug Spencer, an artist friend of Rateliff’s, and was printed by Rose Brand on a Leno-filled scrim material. The strips illuminated the artwork, while projection lit the white sharkstooth. “I specifically choose the Elation SEVEN Batten 72 for my cyc lights. With seven different colored diodes to mix from, they give me the richest and widest assortment of colors out of any strip light I’ve used.”

Roth’s design included a single 31K Panasonic laser projector hanging from the front truss as well. “I love this particular projector because it’s really dependable and we could hang it sideways to make use of their 90° snorkel zoom lens. Theater tours are always tricky with short throw distances, and so having a ultra wide zoom lens is pretty key to making it work every night.”

The stage set consists of four risers in a wrap-around half moon fashion, with Rateliff in the center. An additional upstage right riser seats the string section. “With the custom lights, we placed them in three concentric half circles. We placed a few in front of Nathaniel, then had a taller row between him just in front of the risers, with an additional four-foot-high row behind the risers. Bobby had a smattering of B-Eye K10’s on the floor as well. As far as the looks of the show, the lighting was subdued, as one would expect, with a folksy-type vibe, since lots of ballads are performed. The only movement you may see is slight, and that would appear from the projected imagery behind the band. The projections were curated by Roth and contained artwork and video content from Doug Spencer, Rett Rogers, Richard Swift and Roth himself.

Red Rocks

Colorado’s Covid-19 regulations during the late September run of shows at Red Rocks limited gatherings of just 175 people in one place, so that was the guideline set for the attendance at the huge outdoor venue. The people were scattered and masked, with most attendees seated between the stage and FOH area — a far cry from the 9,000+ fans usually on site. An “overflow” site was set up in the parking lot, where Brown Note set up a video wall made with ROE MH7 panels.

As for local production, Brown Note was tasked with bringing in everything from lights to audio to video for the Red Rocks performances. They brought in some additional lighting to make sure the cameras could catch the artists from different angles. Because the show was at Red Rocks, streamed and documented by camera, the production decided to forego the projection screen itself and use the rocks as a projection surface. Mathias notes, “For this show, the glaring concern was the very nature of our soft goods package, the almost guaranteed nightly winds, and the fact that they were undersized for the giant 60-foot-plus expanse of the stage. With that, we recognized that a lot of our content, especially Doug Spencer’s amazing work, felt like it would be right at home on the natural surface of the upstage rock face, and we made the call to utilize that instead of wrestling sailing soft goods every night.

“Like a lot of productions last spring, this show was blindsided by Covid after just getting off the ground. I was so excited and proud of everything Jeremy and I had created around this collection of songs,” Mathias adds. “The Red Rocks shows themselves were just so cathartic for all of us — 175 people a night in such a grandiose space was eerie, but it truly let the natural acoustics and presence of the rocks take center stage.”

Nate Rateliff at Red Rocks

Sept. 15-21, 2020
Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, CO

Crew

Production/Lighting Designer: Jeremy Roth
Lighting Director/Programmer: Bobby Mathias
Production Manager: David Gleeson
Lighting/Video Co: Brown Note Productions
Brown Note Crew: Ryan Knutson, Account Manager; Sara Bensman, Account Manager; James Watt, Lighting Crew Chief; Sean Ginsburg, Lighting Tech; Colt Hester, Video Tech
Video Crew: Rett Rogers, Director; Matt Wade, Editor; Jasper Gray & Will Gardner, Directors of Photography; Sarah Liles, Executive Producer; Christian Silberbauer, Line Producer; Rob Murphy, Production Manager; Samantha Sigler, Production Coordinator; Andy Busti, Trevor McKenna, Isaac Sokol, Matt Wade, Brendan Young, Camera Operators; Nelson Carayannis, Tyler Weisz, Cable Camera; Scott DaHarb, First AC; Nathan Berry, DIT; Mitch Stelling, Key Grip; Alex Boll, Sound Mixer; Cameron Burke, Hillary Thomas, Christine Sweredoski, PA; Kari Jo Faulhaber, Post Producer; Jonnie Sirotek, Colorist

Gear

Lighting:

• 2       grandMA2 Full consoles
• 20     Claypaky A.LEDA B-Eye Wash K10’s
• 5       Robe MegaPointes
• 14     Elation SEVEN Batten 72’s
• 6       Robe BMFL Spots
• 6       Robe BMFL Blades
• 6       Martin MAC Auras
• 6       Elation Proteus Maximus
• 6       Elation Proteus Rayzor 760
• 1       Lighting Opto Rack/Luminex (8 Universe)
• 2       Base Hazers
• 1       Pea Soup/Phantom Hazer Package
• 14     CM Chain Motors
• 1       Motion Labs 24-Way distro package
• 20     Tyler GT Plus Truss
• 1       ETC Sensor 48-Channel 2.4K Dimmer
• 1       LEX Lighting Power Distro 72 Way

Video:

• 1       Panasonic PT-RZ31K laser projector
• 1       Panasonic 0.693 -0.912:1 zero-offset short-throw lens
• 1       Blackmagic Design setup w/ Teranex Mini HDMI to Optical 12G converters (4), Teranex Mini smart panels (2), Teranex Mini rack shelves (2)
• 2       BNP Rackmount media server kit (3RU)

Overflow Lot Video:

• 312  ROE MC-7H White 7.5mm LED video panels
• 1       Video wall structure (for 50’ x 25’ video wall w/60mph wind rating)
• 10     CM 1-ton chain motors w/ 80’ Lift – P14 – IP66 motors
• 5       10’ x 20.5” Tyler Truss sections