By George Petersen

Superbowl week is always a little strange, with the entire country focused around some semi-meaningless game (you can tell that MY two fave teams didn’t make it this year). But the thing that amazes me about the Superbowl is the audio and the nearly impossible job of coordinating all those simultaneous frequencies of wireless from not only the network, security, caterers, and every other service working the event, in addition to the sea of local, national and international press that descended on Miami for the event. THAT—by far—has got to be the toughest job in audio.

Doing the halftime show is no picnic either, with hundreds of performers, his purple majesty himself and a unpronounceably-shaped stage platform moved to the 50 yard line for the 12-minute extravaganza. With rain coming down by the boatload, it’s times like this that a certain amount of lip-sync (like 100%) makes every bit of sense. If I want to hear Prince perform live, it should at least be in some kind of controlled environment where his purple Strat doesn’t have water pouring out of it and the horn throats of the stage wedges aren’t filled with water.

But there are some tricks for dealing with inclement weather. In fact, I used to work with Ron Rivera when he played with the Bears—actually the California Golden Bears of “THE Play” UC Berkeley fame. [This was way back before he was with the Chicago Bears …er… Dallas Cowboys.] I was moonlighting for Don Neilsen of Oakland’s Swanson Sound, doing the audio for the (UC) Bears home games. These weren’t exactly podunk events—the stadium seats 75,000, but the real irony was that we got the gig at all. Evidently, we were the only sound contractor that walked through the site that didn’t freak out at the vintage Western Electric tube amps that were housed in field boxes below the horn covering each stadium section. These things had been hard wired into their AC feeds sometime back in the 1940s and stay on 24/365 and still keep working. [The university also has several lecture halls with similar can’t-shut-them-off amp setups that are still in service].

The job was great when the sun shined and it really sucked when it rained, especially having to clean thousands of feet of cables and snakes that were completely caked with mud, Gatorade, spit, snot, blood, grass and who knows what else. Ugh! [Did I mention that audio is a glamorous profession?]

Anyway, back to our story… Every once in a while (meaning almost every game) there was some kind of halftime event—hardly a Prince performance–but usually somebody getting an award presentation or a “regular-Joe-customer-gets-a-chance-to-try-kicking-a-field-goal” type competition for a radio station or used car lot promotion. This usually meant running about 250 feet of mic cable out to the center of the field—rain or shine. Fortunately, we weren’t using condenser mics (not that the contractor owned any, back in the 1980s) but the venerable–and sadly now discontinued–Shure SM56, which essentially is an SM57 with a swivel pistolgrip and an on-off switch.

You could literally pound nails with these (sometimes we did) and they’d keep on ticking, but even they didn’t like being underwater. The ever-resourceful Don showed me a cool trick of putting a Baggie plastic bag over the mic and duct taping the bag so it didn’t blow away. I asked him if he taped it too tightly, because there was no way the announcer could pull the bag off briefly to make an announcement. Don just looked at me like I was crazy and said “don’t take it off, just talk into the mic.” So I gave it that classic “testing 1-2” and it boomed cystal-clear (at least crystal-mic clear) through the stadium. I was amazed. There’s no way I would have ever guessed that you’d have any sound at all—much less intelligibility—from speaking into a mic in a plastic bag, but it’s a great bad-weather trick that still amazes even the most grizzled old audio pros. So the next time you wonder if a studio stocking filter or foam screen is REALLY transparent…

SIDE NOTE: With its convenient swivel mount, the SM56 is the perfect mic for snare, guitar amps and almost everything else. So Shure, give some consideration into reviving this much-needed classic. Please?

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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