09/29/2026
Thank you, today I celebrate 45 years in business!
I started down this path at the age of 14, when my best friend Dana A. Farmer called up and asked if I could do lights for his band's first gig in the Knox Presbyterian Church rec hall.
I had no clue what I was getting into, nor what I was doing, but I had a lot of fun doing it.
I built my first lighting 'rig' out of colored flood lamps and rotary dimmers. They were footlights in wedge shaped boxes that looked like an oversized floor monitor, and we built them out of the least expensive material we could find, MDF particle board. Man were those things heavy! I did have electrical ins and outs on each box, with cables labeled and bundled together in a hod, it was simple to set up in a hurry, which was a good thing, because I was the sound guy as well.
Through junior-high and high school, I did lights for various incarnations of the core band.
I am happy to report that I am friends with most of those guys today Dana, Rick Morefield, Rob Swirbul, Pat Ross and Jay Hall.
After high school, I tinkered around working a few 'real' jobs, all the while still experimenting with lighting as a hobby. In 1981, with a new Dana Farmer band project in the works, I bought out a couple of local guys who had a small lighting rig that consisted of 12 500 Watt PAR 64 cans and two Alice Model 1 lighting controllers. Basic 4 channel dimmer/controller. Interesting units and they actually used multi-cable outputs, which made setting up a breeze.
What I didn't know at the time was that these two guys were the only people around who did lights for the local bands when they needed more lighting. Since they got out of the business, when they would get a call from a band, they referred them to me.
My first gig was for Allen Blasco and his band Savanna, at Bogarts, on September 29, 1981. That was the first time I actually got paid real cash money for doing lights, and mark it as the beginning of my professional career in event production and the start of the company.
Over the next several years, I worked around town in other live music hot spots such as The Lonestar, Blaney's and of course John Swetnam's venerable live music venue One Block West.
The 'Block' had such a large stage compared to the other places around Kansas City that almost every band wanted more lighting to fill the stage. The '80s were the days of 'Big Hair' production bands and every band that came to the Block wanted to one-up the last band that was there. It was a great, fun time and a wonderful opportunity to grow a small lighting company.
I can’t play a lick of music, but have a decent sense of rhythm, and loved adding to the songs with light and color. One of my favorite bands still was, and still is Rush, and they always put on a great concert. The light shows created by Howard Ungerleider were amazing, big, bold saturated washes, which I tried to emulate with my little rig. Colors like RoscoLux 27 and 74, or Lee 181, really don’t cut through with only 500 Watts behind them. Promoter Rep Keith Lucke referred to me as the ‘Prince of Darkness’, because I was always using such saturated colors.
By the time the Block closed their doors in 1987, I had grown those 12 500 Watt PAR 64s into a 160 1000 Watt PAR rig, with 6-bars, Socapex multi-cable and enough dimming to put on full blown, big production shows that looked like a scaled version of the biggest touring productions of the day. More power is definitely better.
Good times and great memories!
