Rock & Roll Rigger
by Thomas G. Dolan
How would you like to do rigging for and then hang out with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison, and Johnny Cash? This is what Harry Donovan did for 22 years before settling down to his Donovan Rigging in Seattle.
How would you like to do rigging for and then hang out with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison, and Johnny Cash? This is what Harry Donovan did for 22 years before settling down to his Donovan Rigging in Seattle.
How would you like to be a rigger for and tour regularly with rock & roll, country/western, and popular stars such as Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Johnny Cash, Paula Abdul, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Jimmy Buffet, Eagles, George Harrison, Don Henley, Rick James, Elton John, Tom Jones, Judas Priest, Kiss, Barry Manilow, Boz Scaggs, and the Who – to name a few?
Such was the life of Harry Donovan for 22 years before he settled down to a little less hectic life as president of the Seattle, WA-based Donovan Rigging, Inc. and Rigging Seminars. Now Donovan no longer tours but still rigs shows and does contract work for permanent installations, as well as serving as an expert witness, teaching and writing, conducting seminars, and marketing his book and rigging computer program.
Donovan was born in 1943 and grew up in Connecticut and Maine. “My father was an engineer and thought I should be one too,” Donovan recalls. He went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. “Through a total accident I became involved in college theater, and was involved in backstage productions for several years,” he says. He entered college in 1961 and got degrees in both engineering and theater in 1968. He took a long time getting his education, he explains, because he dropped out a number of times to do both engineering and theater work.
After college he worked for three years for some stage lighting manufacturers. At one point, the one he was working for was going out of business. So, he got a job as rigger on a touring show. “I decided shows were more fun than sitting in an engineering office and paid a lot better,” he says. He started touring in 1970 and continued through 1992. However, in 1987 he started his own current company and eventually got enough work with better pay and far less strain than touring, so he retired from the latter in 1992.
“On tour we would hang 50,000 to 100,000 pounds on 50 to 100
electric chain hoists, and this rigging had to be done within a few hours,”
Donovan says. He would hang the chain hoists from the building beams and use
premade wire rope in modular lengths with eyes on the ends. The standard
lengths would be 5, 10, 20, 30, and 50 feet. “We would shackle together the
modular lengths we needed to make the distance from the building beams to the
chain hoists. Short lengths and adjustments are done with roundslings or deck
chains,” Donovan says. “When possible we rigged chain hoists with vertical or
angled dead hangs. Occasionally we used dead hangs with tag lines connected,
called breast lines in the entertainment industry. And there were many two or
three leg bridles.”
On tours Donovan would have one assistant and would hire between six and 16 stage hands for the labor. Donovan figured out, supervised and directed all the rigging. Most of the lifting of chains and cables was done by others, but Donovan almost always hauled some cables and chains himself. “I eventually got to where we could rig these points in three minutes per point with an accuracy of plus or minus six inches.”
During this period the worst injury was one broken thumb (not Donovan’s), and there was never an accident of anything slipping loose and falling to the ground.
To what do you attribute this safety record?
“I was careful,” Donovan replies. But he adds “I was careful never to ask anyone to do something he couldn’t do. You had to quickly figure out what each person on the crew was good for and use him for that.”
Donovan
figures he rigged about 4,000 one-night shows and about 200,000 rigging points.
“Being on the road for 22 years, and being in a different building just about
every day, I got as much experience in rigging points as anybody has ever had,”
he says. “During that time I gradually figured out the mathematics and geometry
and I realized that no one else had.” The main reason for writing the book was
to give working riggers a way to calculate forces and geometry.
That experience and hard-won knowledge prepared Donovan well for the work he does today. Unlike perhaps most rigging companies, he is not a distributor. Outside of an accountant/bookkeeper, he is his firm’s only permanent employee. Basically he is selling his knowledge. He also works as a show producer, doing advance planning, budgeting, designing basic show layouts, hiring crews of up to 300 people, and selecting subcontractors for sound, lighting, video, catering and so on. His large shows include those for Alcoholics Anonymous, which brings about 50,000 people to a stadium. He does other big conventions, such as those for Microsoft. At one point he was involved in a construction project rebuilding the King Dome with a crew of 47 riggers on the payroll for six months, working two to three shifts a day.
Donovan also does contracting for permanent installations, such as hanging sound and lighting systems in churches. And in some venues he takes care of not just the rigging but also supplies trusses and other equipment, such as control systems which synchronize several independent chain hoists so they work together. In addition, Donovan contracts for permanent art objects, such as the dozen planes in Seattle’s new Museum of Flight replica of the Voyager in the new Seattle-Tacoma Airport lobby, and Chihuly glass hangings.
He also does consulting on rigging systems for new venues on height, beam structure geometry, load capacity, and efficient rigging methods. This service is offered to architects and engineers.
Donovan designs and installs fall protection systems, including training classes, tests, hazard assessments, and inspections. He offers a seminar series called Rigging Seminars (www.riggingseminars.com) three times a year for the public and several more for companies that want to train their own employees. Donovan also serves as an expert witness in court for cases involving rigging accidents, including falls.
For about ten years Donovan has evolved his own computer program, which he’s recently made available to the public, with many modifications to make it user friendly. The program, called RigRight 1.0, computes lengths and forces for dead hangs and two- and three-leg bridles. It allows you to quickly adjust lengths and forces any way you choose. You can import locations from CAD programs, record files of beam and rigging point locations, and generate spreadsheets containing every bit of data that describe the solution for each point.
Donovan
has written and self-published a book, Entertainment Rigging, 720 pages,
published in 2002, selling for $97.50 (riggingbooksandprograms.com). “It’s
equivalent to a college engineering text, but it’s meant to be used by people
who do the rigging and by managers,” Donovan says. “It started out as lecture
notes for the seminars and developed over ten years, getting longer every year.
It’s the only thing like it ever written. Entertainment is much more
complicated than other rigging, and has to be done much faster. Typically it’s
done on tours where you just have a few hours. You can’t miss a deadline when
you have 15,000 people waiting to see the show. Show business rigging is
deadline-driven, unlike most construction rigging which is cost-driven.”
Some of the features found in the book are an introduction to materials use and hitches, hanging arrangements and fall protection. There are 58 pages of work methods and 36 pages of detailed pictures of proper and improper rigging. “Engineering 101 will provide you with all the engineering you will need to know,” Donovan says. Other topics include accident prevention and safety, proper use and strength reduction, load increase factors, shock loads, vectors, dead hangs, horizontal and vertical components of force, resultants, loads, advanced dead hangs, breast lines (tag lines), bridles, bridle force, three point bridles, cable sag, rigging for managers, information and equipment sources, OSHA, and weights of objects.
“This is the most complete book on practical rigging for any industry, and 90 percent of it is applicable to any type of rigging,” Donovan says. He mentions that he spoke to three publishers, all of whom wanted to publish it. But since they offered royalties of only 2-3 percent, he decided to self-publish for 100 percent.
Another project Donovan is working on, along with the NYC-based Entertainment Services and Technology Association is the development of a certification and licensing program for riggers. “Currently there are no certificates or licenses for riggers in any trade on any level of city, state, or federal government,” Donovan says. “This is insane, and should be corrected.”
Donovan found time to get married after he stopped touring, but still typically works from 8 a.m. to 9 or 10 at night, six or seven days a week. “I’d like to work much less, but I keep getting offered interesting jobs,” he says.
Yet Donovan’s workaholic schedule now is actually much easier than it was during his 22 years of touring. The rock and roll tours would typically have ten semi-trailers filled with various equipment for lights, sound, scenery, video, band gear, and special effects like lasers. There would be three to five buses with bunks built into them, and lounges in the front and back. Typical medium to large tours would involve 30-50 people.
Tours lasted anywhere from two months to a year. The typical tour was two to four months. “But two-thirds of the tours planned never happened,” Donovan says. “The record was not ready or the lead singer went back into rehab. Usually you needed to do three to four tours a year to make a living, but you had to line up two to three times that many to cover the ones that fell through.”
Work on the rigging would start typically at 8 a.m. “After I was done with the rigging I would stay until everything was raised to its proper height and I was sure that all departments were happy with the equipment. Then I would find a phone and do advance work on next month’s gigs.
He would try to get a nap in the afternoon and would generally prefer to miss the show. But he had to be present at outdoor shows in case of the wind, as well as indoor shows when there was scenery that moved up and down, to make sure there were no accidents.
Some of the shows he would rather not see at all, nor get close to the performers. With some others there was a significant disconnect between the charm projected on stage and what was projected in real life. But most were good people, Donovan says. With Johnny Cash, for instance, Donovan says, “What you saw was pretty much what you got. And the Jimmy Buffet tour had the best parties.” There was usually a good camaraderie between cast and crew, but the work took its toll.
“The show would last from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., then we would need two or three hours to take everything down and load it onto the trucks,” Donovan says. They would get on the bus about 2 a.m., drive six hours to the next stop, and, at 8 a.m., start the routine all over again. Theoretically there was six hours sleep, but not actually. Usually there was food and drinks on the bus and everybody needed to unwind a bit. Then when you tried to get to sleep, you were not on the most comfortable bed in the world. The amount of rest you got depended on the roads. It was easier to sleep in Kansas than West Virginia. “I learned to wake up when the bus stopped. I knew, then, we were at our next destination,” Donovan says.
This routine continued five to seven days a week and from 9 to 12 months a year. “Everybody got stressed,” Donovan says. “You didn’t get much sleep and what you did get wasn’t that good. Once on a tour you soon reached a plateau of fatigue and you stayed that way for the rest of the tour. You got so tired your entire body ached. Even your hair hurt.”
At the end of a tour, the group of 30 to 50 people would break up and Donovan would find himself in a new group. “Over the years, you eventually got to know just about everybody in the business. I made several good friendships and still stay in touch with a number of them,” Donovan says.
Unlike most businesses that represent some sort of entity outside the owner, which can be sold or passed on to somebody else, Donovan’s is all in his head. “When I retire, the entire edifice falls down,” he says.
At age 60, he still enjoys the work, and has no plans to retire. But he is, at least, taking some time off during the summers. “My father was a marine engineer and naval architect, who was a sailor. I love sailing too. I have a 52 foot sailboat. And every summer I try to cruise to British Columbia, which has some of the most beautiful coast lines in the world. I always like to take some of the guys with me who used to be with me on tour.