- Joined
- Sep 9, 2012
- Messages
- 419
- Location
- Poland, Warsaw (Central Europe)
- Tagline
- I love BIG amplifiers!
MJK & THE QUAD SQUAD
As Pink Floyd were preparing for their touring onslaught of 1972, another new crew member arrived on the scene. Mainly known today as the founder of MJK Productions, and the man at the helm of productions such as The BRIT Awards, as well as the recipient of the 2005 TPi Lifetime Contribution Award, Mick Kluczynski had worked with a number of Scottish bands since 1965, one of whom received an offer to record in London in 1971 as Cliff Bennett's backing band. Kluczynski accompanied them but the whole deal soon fell to pieces. One of the band members, Chris Adamson, survived by working as Floyd’s road manager and arranged for Kluczynski to also join their small team as part of the ‘Quad Squad’.
"There was no formal crew, just four of us loosely employed to handle all aspects of the sound and rigging," says Kluczynski. "My first job was to empty the tour manager's garage, and return all the old WEM PA columns to Charlie Watkins, because we had just taken delivery of the latest generation of PA. The 2 x 15-inch bins had a Vitavox horn on the top and a JBL 075 bullet super tweeter, and I used to carry these things on my back up into balconies!
“When we played the first Earls Court show, we used our maximum number of Kelsey and Martin bins and horns. The bins were three high, with 13 at each side of the stage, and in the centre piece where there were bins missing was a column of JBL horns. On top of those, we had a row of double Vitavox horns, on the back of which were throats that we had made up, which took two Electro-Voice 1829 drivers in the same throat. Electro-Voice claimed it wouldn't work, but we got up to four in one throat.
“One quad section would drive two horns in one phase direction, and another quad section would drive another two in the opposite phase direction. But EV wouldn't believe it until they saw 15,000 people walk out of Earls Court at the end of the night dazed and speechless."
In an A/B text during rehearsals, the band's existing WEM amplifiers came second place to the new American Phase Linear models, discovered by Kelsey, and so yet another injection of quality was given to their PA. It was common for Pink Floyd to modify off- the-shelf equipment for their own purposes, thereby creating unique products.
Along with Crown and BGW, Phase Linear became one of the few brands of amplification taken seriously by the top touring bands of the early '70s. Whilst the Phase Linear 400 and 700 models were taken on board by the Floyd, because of their superior sound quality, in their regular domestic format they were unfit for the rigours of the road due to their slight physical construction and the weight of the transformers on their chassis. To compensate for this, the band's technicians designed a new metal chassis into which the amp would fit, while the mains transformer was removed from the amp and supported horizontally on the outside of the chassis.
Acclaimed by critics as "rock's first conceptual masterpiece", The Dark Side Of The Moon (TDSOTM) was officially premiered as Eclipse over the four nights of February 17-20 at the Rainbow. The standard show at the time consisted of two sets: the first featured earlier numbers such as ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, and ‘Echoes’; the second consisted of what was to later be known as TDSOTM (then without the ‘Eclipse’ finale which was yet to be written). ‘One Of These Days’ was reserved as a breathtaking encore.
Kluczynski recalls that his first show as a crew member, the opening night of this tour at the Brighton Dome, ended in disaster. He says: "In those days, we didn't understand how to separate power sufficiently between sound and lights. That was the only show that we had to cancel and re-organise, because we were all sharing the same power source. The Leslies on stage sounded like a cage full of monkeys, because they were sharing a common earth...
As Pink Floyd were preparing for their touring onslaught of 1972, another new crew member arrived on the scene. Mainly known today as the founder of MJK Productions, and the man at the helm of productions such as The BRIT Awards, as well as the recipient of the 2005 TPi Lifetime Contribution Award, Mick Kluczynski had worked with a number of Scottish bands since 1965, one of whom received an offer to record in London in 1971 as Cliff Bennett's backing band. Kluczynski accompanied them but the whole deal soon fell to pieces. One of the band members, Chris Adamson, survived by working as Floyd’s road manager and arranged for Kluczynski to also join their small team as part of the ‘Quad Squad’.
"There was no formal crew, just four of us loosely employed to handle all aspects of the sound and rigging," says Kluczynski. "My first job was to empty the tour manager's garage, and return all the old WEM PA columns to Charlie Watkins, because we had just taken delivery of the latest generation of PA. The 2 x 15-inch bins had a Vitavox horn on the top and a JBL 075 bullet super tweeter, and I used to carry these things on my back up into balconies!
“When we played the first Earls Court show, we used our maximum number of Kelsey and Martin bins and horns. The bins were three high, with 13 at each side of the stage, and in the centre piece where there were bins missing was a column of JBL horns. On top of those, we had a row of double Vitavox horns, on the back of which were throats that we had made up, which took two Electro-Voice 1829 drivers in the same throat. Electro-Voice claimed it wouldn't work, but we got up to four in one throat.
“One quad section would drive two horns in one phase direction, and another quad section would drive another two in the opposite phase direction. But EV wouldn't believe it until they saw 15,000 people walk out of Earls Court at the end of the night dazed and speechless."
In an A/B text during rehearsals, the band's existing WEM amplifiers came second place to the new American Phase Linear models, discovered by Kelsey, and so yet another injection of quality was given to their PA. It was common for Pink Floyd to modify off- the-shelf equipment for their own purposes, thereby creating unique products.
Along with Crown and BGW, Phase Linear became one of the few brands of amplification taken seriously by the top touring bands of the early '70s. Whilst the Phase Linear 400 and 700 models were taken on board by the Floyd, because of their superior sound quality, in their regular domestic format they were unfit for the rigours of the road due to their slight physical construction and the weight of the transformers on their chassis. To compensate for this, the band's technicians designed a new metal chassis into which the amp would fit, while the mains transformer was removed from the amp and supported horizontally on the outside of the chassis.
Acclaimed by critics as "rock's first conceptual masterpiece", The Dark Side Of The Moon (TDSOTM) was officially premiered as Eclipse over the four nights of February 17-20 at the Rainbow. The standard show at the time consisted of two sets: the first featured earlier numbers such as ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’, ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, and ‘Echoes’; the second consisted of what was to later be known as TDSOTM (then without the ‘Eclipse’ finale which was yet to be written). ‘One Of These Days’ was reserved as a breathtaking encore.
Kluczynski recalls that his first show as a crew member, the opening night of this tour at the Brighton Dome, ended in disaster. He says: "In those days, we didn't understand how to separate power sufficiently between sound and lights. That was the only show that we had to cancel and re-organise, because we were all sharing the same power source. The Leslies on stage sounded like a cage full of monkeys, because they were sharing a common earth...
... You made my day!
