Baby in a Forklift
Dennis got fired last year for putting the word fucking in an email to the boss. He had his reasons. He also had other work—nobody has one job these days. But it did put a damper on things, because it was close to the holidays. The tree was sad. I bought some dog treats for Bibi and wrapped them up so we’d have more gifts under there.
Then Dennis got a call to do a production job. It was for Kanye’s record release far out in the desert. I know it’s Ye these days. I still call him Kanye sometimes. Anyway, this gig inspired the following bit we called How Kanye Saved Christmas.
Dennis: Kanye, Christmas is in trouble!
Kanye: Is it because of the j—
Dennis: NO! No it’s not, Kanye!
Some people wouldn’t take the job for obvious reasons, but we had fucking dog treats under the tree, so we were gonna get that money. Morals are for those who can afford them.
The show was the hottest of messes. It wasn’t even a show really—more like a phenomenally expensive stunt, pulled off by the currently reigning King of the Trolls.
For starters, his people revised the audio specs a dozen times after the crew had half built each version. Eventually, they ended up going back to the lead engineer’s original design, which was four massive stacks of mostly subwoofers approximately 14 feet high, all pointed inward toward the stage. Which had been conveniently buried under five tons of sand, delivered via dump truck.
During the course of the job, one of Ye’s entourage climbed up into a forklift with a one-year-old bjorned to his chest. He sat the baby behind the wheel, started it up, and let the baby drive this piece of heavy industrial machinery around the floor, weaving in and out of the production crew while they were working.
The hazers started. Hazers are smoke machines, used in production so that lighting designers can see the throw of their lights in the air. But in this case, the primary purpose seemed to have been to obscure everything. Dennis could not see past the tips of his fingers.
Then came the walk-in music.
Someone claiming to speak for His Yejesty demanded that the mix engineer play Burzum. Burzum is a one-man band consisting of a guy named Varg Vikernes. He’s primarily famous for burning down a series of medieval churches in Norway, then getting caught because he murdered two of his friends. He’s also a Nazi. He released a t-shirt with an SS skull on it and the slogan “Support Your Local Einsatzgruppen". A term referring to Nazi Death Squads. So … a bad guy.
Not having any Burzum tracks at his disposal, the mix engineer was forced to play it on his Spotify, ruining his algorithm forever.
Three hours of badly recorded shrieking later, Ye and Ty Dolla Sign hit the stage.
There were no microphones. Ye plugged his phone into a Shure belt pack transmitter and that was the show. Backlit by perimeter lights, diffused through the haze on the tech side of the room, the people on the other side in total darkness just saw big, loud silhouettes.
Oh, and the people.
Dennis occasionally had to snake through the dark to go to the bathroom on their side of the room. The audience was almost universally clad head-to-toe in white. Their shirts had matching slogans, illegible in the fog. Giving so much Reverend Moon.
The reason only the acolytes were in attendance was because Ye’s staff had given out the wrong geocoordinates for the venue—an impressively sterile warehouse behind a concrete plant, south of the Las Vegas Valley, accessible via a badly-kept road off of the interstate. This warehouse was on the other side of a mountain and across railroad tracks from the original wrong coordinates. When his team issued a correction, they inadvertently spawned a nighttime invading hipster horde. They swarmed over the mountain and across the railroad tracks to get to the concert, only to be stopped at the fenceline by armed guards wearing night vision goggles.
They let no one in.
Back inside, Ye played tracks off of his phone while it was plugged into the Shure transmitter. He also at one point started something so good the production team thought it was the next track. It was just him making DJ scratch noises with the clicking sounds that happened when he searched the tracks on his phone. Everyone was like - is that the new song? Then they realized he was just fucking around with his amplified menu click sounds. He’s not not a musical genius.
The owner of the production company called and asked the project manager to send someone to the perimeter. He had gone out for tacos for the crew but an army of pissed off cops weren’t letting him back in.
Members of the crew began to eye the exits. Strategies were quietly devised in groups of two and three.
Would they need to flee across the desert sands?
Finally, the show ended. The only light was coming from the production side backstage. The stage and audience side were completely dark. No one saw Ye and his entourage leave.
But they sure saw the angry cops arrive.
After busting in, the boss cop told the crew that for hours, he had had “enough of you.” The owner of the production company tried to explain that they were not a part of that “you.” The cops announced their intention to confiscate all the equipment. The owner talked fast. Eventually, the cops let them leave with their gear and Dennis drove the rough desert road back home.
He told me his adventure while we sipped 3 AM cocktails in the light of our Christmas tree, soon to get a little boost underneath it. Then we wrote a song together called Baby in a Forklift. You can hear it below.