Blog Wrangling a round robin

Usually I'm not curious at all about the little logistical nightmares that promoters and stage crews go through to make a concert happen. (Beyond being massively grateful, of course.) Or at least I wouldn't bother writing about them here. But when Dan Deacon, Deerhunter, and No Age announced a collaborative "round robin" tour that will involve a stop this Thursday at the Terrace—with all three bands setting up at once, swapping and collaborating on songs, and summoning an experimental buzz-rock Captain Planet, or something—I started hearing some excited crazy talk from the college folk who book music over there, the Wisconsin Union Directorate Music Committee. Deacon by himself literally stirs up too much chaos for one venue to contain: During his last show in town, he had audience members form a human chain that paraded outside the Majestic Theatre's doors and back in again. So naturally, committee members like Peter Truby were thinking rather big, plotting to have three separate stages going at once on the usually one-stage Terrace.

"I was envisioning Deerhunter on the main stage, Dan Deacon standing probably on the lawn, on that bigger knoll-y section, I guess, and then No Age on a 1-foot riser on that alcove right next to the stage," Truby says. "I was basically ready to pull the trigger on a lot of stuff. We would've had to figure out lighting for all the multiple stages and making sure everyone has power. They were initially thinking of each bringing their own PA system, but the application wouldn't have been broad enough to cover the entire Terrace."

Truby recently discovered this wouldn't be necessary, as Deacon is apparently just bringing his signature table of gadgets (and the Trippy Green Skull, of course), as opposed to the huge dozen-or-so-strong ensemble he brought to the Majestic. But even with the number of musicians going at once reduced from 20-plus to seven, Truby was still sweating some of the details when he spoke with me last week: "They're rehearsing it this week. The tour manager doesn't even know what they're going to do. He said that Dan Deacon advised him to tell the promoters that it could potentially last up to three hours as one seamless set."

Then there's still the matter of how to get everyone plugged in to power and hooked up to the soundboard. Truby says, for example, that Deerhunter has 25 audio inputs and the Terrace's usual soundboard has 36 channels. (Granted, Deacon's one guy and No Age is two guys, so that might help.) "Between that and then also getting the mixes right for the monitors... it's gonna be why they're coming at like 2:30 p.m. for a soundcheck."

And once that's out of the way, there remains the question of how hundreds of people who just show up at the Terrace to hang out and drink beer will react to whatever wild clusterfuck of music results, not to mention Deacon's efforts to pull the crowd into elaborate communal party games. "The normal public Terrace crowd that's there for the atmosphere and the drinking might get a little overwhelmed," Truby says.