Alan Parsons in Nashville, TN Oct 27th, 2007
How This Day Actually Turned Out - page 4
After a moment or two, I head over there and lean down to whisper, "I don't mean to be a dick about this, but I am extremely passionate that we get this to work. If you don't trust the Sony analog outputs, take them off the Millennium decoder because they surely can't be doing anything for you there, right?" He thinks about it for a few seconds and then goes back to the DVD player / decoder setup sitting on the board. He won't remove the analog cables but instead finds some other cables and starts to get some channels. I can see the board LED lights come on for two then three channels. More cable swapping and it eventually reaches 5.0. He mucks about for several more minutes, I whisper that maybe the decoder's DIP switches are set to down-mix for 5.0? Neither of us knows the switch settings and now we need to honor a musical cue for AP.
For the discussion, somebody located a stereo copy of DSOTM which I placed in the player and cued up to Money. Alan P talked again about the making of the loop with the money hitting the table and the cash registers et al. He looked to the back and the fellow running the board gave me a nod and I hit the Play button. We heard the music that demonstrates the wild techniques being discussed but it just wasn't the same. It was potted (faded) down and then I cued the disc for the clocks in Time. When you know how impressive it can be, it's hard to settle for this.
By now I'd spent most of the two hours standing at the back desk trying to encourage some success to no avail. AP had to catch an evening flight for a concert in Clearwater Florida so there would be no going past 4pm no matter what. Sadly I accepted the fact that I was not going to hear ANY 5.1 material today and scaled down my expectations accordingly. At 3:40pm, AP signaled that it was time to wrap up to allow some time to sign items for folks before he had to leave for the airport. Okay, now the opportunity really felt gone. The tech I was trying to help had already lined up to get his poster signed; that was his mission I suppose.
Since I already had my autograph and chat time with Alan, I decided to hang around up front and watch Alan sign items and take pictures with fans. This is when I took several of the photos included here elsewhere, People of the entourage kept tapping Alan and reminding him that it was time to leave for the airport; this included his wife. It was almost 4:30 when he got up to leave, but he never appeared ruffled no matter what. I stood there looking at him getting ready to walk to the stage door. He looked at me and I said "Alan, thanks for coming out, have a great relaxed show tonight, when do you think we could rain-check that xxxxxxxxxxxx in 5.1, He smiled, thought for second, possibly reflecting on this poor surround chap in Nashville who tried to help at the mixing desk for a long time. And then he told me this:
"Send me the postage and I shall see that you receive a copy of it...."
With that, Alan Parsons headed out the door for his trip across town to catch that concert plane. The End? For now...