Way back in the early 1990s I lived in Tallahassee, Florida. I worked gigs at the Civic Center regularly; we had rock concerts, LOTS of country shows and we were a regular stop for off-Broadway tours.
One day I show up for load-in and ask who the act is; I’m told it’s that new “hat” guy Garth Brooks. Oh, okay, I say. I had heard of him and even prolly played some his stuff when I worked at the country radio station, but I’m not a country music fan so my knowledge was very limited.
A typical load-in back then would be 40-60 people working from 8am until prolly 4pm or so, then we’d drop down to show crew until the load-out. That was a lot of people to get together midweek in Tallahassee back then, so there was a larger pool of people than just 60 to be sure the calls would be filled. That meant that you worked with different people all the time, even tho the core group was mostly the same.
Well, on this gig there were a bunch of new people. I do lighting, so I go off with the lighting folks. We start lining up the truss (it was all pre-loaded truss with PAR cans back then, pretty much), running the cables, etc. One of the new guys has come with us to do lighting. He’s maybe late 20s, early 30s, kinda husky. He’s got on a pair of sweatpants, a fanny pack (it was thing back then; don’t judge), a t-shirt and a baseball hat. I introduce myself: “Hey man, I’m Bo.” “Hey; Garth. Nice to meet you.”
Now, this is Tallahassee. I have friends named Garth. And Bubba. And Winston. So it’s just “right on; nice to meet you” and work continues. This guy is right there with us, and he seems to know what he’s doing: cool.
At lunch, I notice that he sits with the touring guys, which was unusual. Locals don’t really do that, at least not often. And I hadn’t really seen him buddying up with the Lighting Director or anyone all morning; he was right alongside me working. /shrug. Whatever.
After lunch, the rig is flashed and flown. The upstage truss flies first and one of us gets ready to climb the rope ladder to focus. Usually I did that, but for some reason today it was someone else’s gig, so I was off stage left just watching things happen. As the downstage truss goes up, the lighting director is on stage calling the upstage truss focus. He finishes just as the downstage truss reaches trim and walks over to us and says “alright Garth; I’m ready for you” and this new guy walks over to the cable pick (where the lighting cables come from the truss to the ground where the dimmer racks are) and climbs hand-over-hand up the cable pick, 40 feet, and focuses all the lights.
As he’s climbing I turn to the LD and I ask “waitaminnit… is that Garth Brooks?” The LD chuckles and says “yep.”
“What the fuck? Why is he focusing his own lights? And building the rig? I worked all day with him!”
The LD moves to start calling focus and tells me “he does this every show; he likes doing it.”
“Every show? Seriously?”
“Yeah; he likes doing it. He thinks it’s fun.”
“Well, it is, sure, but what the fuck? How long has he been doing this?”
“As long as we’ve been doing these big shows; before this we only played little clubs.”
They had met at a Holiday Inn in Tulsa, IIRC, in the early '80s and had hit it off and been working together ever since.
The next time I saw them the LD remembered me but Garth didn’t work with us. I asked him why and he said his insurance company had gotten wind of what he was doing and had shut it down. But I’ll always remember the feeling I had when I realized I had just spent the day working with the main attraction. I don’t care much one way or the other about his music, except that I’m glad other people like it a lot. And I wouldn’t care that much except for the fact that I know first hand that Garth Brooks totally fucking rocks. Absolutely one of the coolest “major stars” I’ve ever interacted with, and my career is approaching it’s 40th year.
ETA: Okay, not exactly “hilarious” but hey, waddaya want for free? 