Stage Setup Quotes

We wanted to incorporate lights and the like to really accentuate the music. We play mostly small venues, so we don't use it overboard by any means. The most important thing is the music. I think we do a good job of letting that show.

Our effects were primitive. Our stars were a black cloth with holes in it and light behind.

If I wasn't so lazy, or if I had a roadie, I'd have a line of guitars on stage. I'd have a lap steel and a nylon string up there, but who wants to keep up with all that?

The physical life of the scene is determined by whether the set squeezes people together or whether the set has an escape place in it.

I love looking out at 27 semis and being like, every single one of those semi trucks is there to put together my stage.

Touring with King Crimson wasn't a lot of fun for me. I had a lot of equipment, and when I was in improvised music I'd set it up myself, play the gig, and put it all away again.

Back in the days, we had to work with a shoestring budget. We had a movie screen, and we'd show movie trailers on them, and then we'd rip through it and started playing. Now we have a little money to play with to do a cool stage set.

I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.

I sang and played keyboard, so I was virtually a statue at the back of the stage. I'm not complaining about that; I enjoyed that role.

Over the years, when you're in a band with a catalog like Aerosmith's, you accumulate a lot of instruments to duplicate those songs.

The play is really a kind of nightmare. It ought to flow rapidly and effortlessly from one moment to another. In London, we had difficulty with the set, which required too much effort to move around. Having gotten the benefit of seeing it done once, I wanted to work on the script, to make it sharper and more pointed.

Nothing feels worse than having to break the stage down before the performance, and I mean nothing.

I think it gets boring (for the audience) for the lead singer to have a guitar hanging on them all the time.

Technology is 50% of rock 'n' roll - the magic, the art, the performance. If you don't have good technicians and a strong road crew who are devoted and believe in you and protect you, you're totally naked.

We have new technology that allows us... After we've blocked it, all the actors usually run over to the monitor and we can see the hallways and what's there. But I find it difficult, because you're in such a large room and you feel so small and inadequate. There's so much space around you and actors always want a prop or something just to make it comfortable.

The more guitars we have onstage the better, as I'm concerned.

Onstage I like to play with a an 18-inch speaker, which very few bass players do. I need that fat, underneath sound, which I've always had. It suits me admirably to do it like that, and I can imitate that sound by plugging directly into the board in the studio.

See, there's only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that - the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.

I don't like a lot of monitors on stage. I like the real raw sound of the open piano.

In an arena, with Girls Aloud, it's a big production and you don't have time to talk to the crowd about the songs.

You see some people on stage today, and they have these huge ear monitors.

What we do every day onstage, there's lights, there's lots of other musicians, there's an audience, there's a microphone and mic stands - layers of the onion we have to kind of hide behind.

I did tons of gigs where I didn't move around very much because I couldn't. There's a pole over here and wires and a monitor there.

I wear a hat on stage so that people won't be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don't wear a hat, there's no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

I've got a lot of pedals and a lot of knobs that need to be switching around during my performance, so I've taught my toes how to do that.