Viqui Dill presents a series of three guest blog posts comparing the preparation of The Rough Drafts to playing our 60th Anniversary Party in Atlanta to an Agile sprint.
Bringing the Rough Drafts band to the 60th Anniversary Party for #STC13 was a big job that took a village to accomplish. I’ll describe our journey as a series of Agile sprints. 10 to be exact.
We’ve divided it into three blog posts. Here is the first.
Sprint #1: I’m with the band. Are you?
Our story begins back in September 2012 when I get an email from my favorite tech comm drummer, Rich Maggiani.
On Sep 21, 2012, at 12:42 PM, Rich Maggiani wrote:Okay, here is some, well, not so great news.Tommy can’t make it to Atlanta for the conference next year…His teaching schedule at the University of Edmonton precludes his coming.
You may recall from last year that Dr. Tommy Barker was named badass sexiest tech comm musician ever at #STC12. What? No Tommy? Can we even do this thing without Tommy? Every band needs a front man and Tommy is the best. Now what?
The Agile Manifesto is based on 12 principles, including “Regular adaptation to changing circumstances.”
We email Stephen Adler, who played a bit with us last year to see if he was available. We knew he could pick but was he going to #STC13 and would he even be interested? Turns out he was going and interested in playing guitar with us. Electric. Acoustic. He plays it all.
So instruments were covered. How about vocals? Would Robert like to sing a whole lot more? He said he could! Could I sing a bit of the songs, even the songs written for men to sing? Yes, that would be ok, too. So we had a real band:
- Rich Maggiani on drums and vocals
- Viqui Dill on bass and vocals
- Robert Hershenow on guitar and vocals
- Stephen Adler on lead guitar
The Rough Drafts 2013 were officially available for a gig.
Sprint #2: Who’s buying?
So now that we know who will play what in the core of the band, we discover that there’s no money for it. Some of the potential corporate sponsors either could not attend or were not in a position to donate this year. Why is it so expensive? Let’s have a definition of requirements. The event costs a couple of grand to pull together because we have to rent a lot of stuff and pay for a lot of labor:
- Kurzweil keyboard
- Fender Stratocaster
- Fender Telecaster
- Taylor acoustic guitar
- Fender P-Bass
- Complete drum kit with cymbals and throne
- Keyboard amp
- Fender guitar amps (2)
- Acoustic guitar amps
- Gallien-Krueger bass amps
- Overdrive pedals (2)
- Chorus pedals (2)
- Pedal tuners (3)
- Music stands (4)
- Guitar stands (4)
- Microphones with stands (4)
- Monitors on stage
- Delivery & pickup
- Set up and strike
- Sound tech crew for sound check
- Sound tech crew for the gig
Wow, that’s a lot of deliverables and resources we’ll need for the party sprint, if we even have a party sprint.
We played around with the idea of running a kickstarter.com program, but none of us had the gumption to get it going and we waited. By the way, if you think that’s a lot of stuff to coordinate, thank Elaine Gilliam. Elaine made the calls, compiled the lists, wrote and rewrote the agreements, scheduled the people and deliveries, and virtually pulled the whole thing out of her hat for all of us to enjoy.
Sprint #3: It’s off. Move on.
So no money and no Tommy and busy schedules in our other lives, too busy to organize it ourselves, we accepted the fact that the Rough Drafts were not going to play at #STC13. Grieve. Move on. Project canceled.
This is the first post of three. Stay tuned for act two.