Oh yea, almost forgot - Caribbean festival trailer rigs. If you don't have a big Jamaican / Carib population in town they try to recreate the big parades they hold in the islands. The 'floats' are flatbed trailers, everything from little 16 footers towed behind pick ups to 40 ft tractor truck jobs. We would put 16 KF850s and subs on a single 40 ft trailer with a big genny and it was stupid loud and if you like Caribbean food very tasty. There would always be a reggae and steel pan drum concert in the stadium parking lot at the end of the parade. After a couple of years they added vats of red clay mud to the trailers and women in bikinis would take a dip in the mud then pose on top of the speakers. One time for that was enough.
I swear we were finding traces of that mud in the rigging track cut outs 15 years later when I sold the rig. Did get to meet and work with Byron Lee though.
OHHHHH this is bringing back memories of carting around a Vertec rig to various gigs for the annual Caribbean festival in Toronto... Including the king and queen pageant, the steel pan drum battle of the bands in the stadium, and of course the parade. Our client's floats consisted of three 53' drop deck trailers loaded with the largest generators that they could find and and much Vertec as they could fit on the trailer, V racks, DJ booth on a riser made of stage decks, dance platforms, the whole deal. Once the parade starts there's really no way to get back on the float to troubleshoot if there were any problems, they wanted me as the system tech to ride on the main trailer. So I had a little hidey-hole in the middle of the rig with a cot, a fan and my laptop monitoring all of the amps, mixer, wireless... Depending on position in the parade the "show" could easily be 8-10 hours.
It was an absolutely insane gig for a number of reasons, it was an interesting challenge at the beginning but after a number of years I wasn't sad to see it go away.
