Farm Aid 2007 hosted a unique musical collaboration: Gregg Allman performed a special acoustic set with Willie Nelson and Dave Matthews. Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds and The Allman Brothers Band all played full festival sets. Other performers included Counting Crows, Guster and Montgomery Gentry.
The first Farm Aid concert was organised by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp in 1985. They wanted to increase awareness about the loss of family farms and raise funds to keep family farms in business. Dave Matthews joined the Farm Aid Board of Directors in 2001. Farm Aid has raised more than $30 million dollars to promote family farm systems of agriculture to date.
Lighting Designer, Brad Mackie used 24 Martin MAC 2000 Profiles and 58 Martin MAC 2000 Washes, 38 MAC 600s, 200 MAC 300s, 22 Coemar Halos and 22 Coemar LED Pars and four Lycian 1271 Starklites to light the event.
Mackie said that the lighting design and overall production design worked hand-in-hand. The production team sat down with Mackie several weeks prior to discuss the look of both the staging and lighting. Since they were shooting this event for television, and in high definition, there were many variables to deal with. Mackie said there was a very fine line between keeping the perspective of a concert and lighting it for television that he needed to balance.
Another challenge was incorporating lighting that worked well both during the day and evening, as the show started at noon and didn't wrap up until midnight. In retrospect, Mackie said that the biggest obstacle was keeping the work hours to a minimum so that the organisation could keep their bottom line down (hence, they would raise more money).
"To stay within budget, we put together a rig that would go up quick and cover all the needs that could be thrown at us," Mackie explained. "Avolites built the theatre into their visualizer programme for me so when we got on site we only needed a couple of hours to set our preset positions.
Bandit CEO, Michael Strickland, was thankful to be part of this cause once again. "It is always an honour and a pleasure to work with the staff at Farm Aid. Glenda Yoder, Carol Mugar, Ron Stern, Lyle Centola and the rest of the staff are the most amazing people and we at Bandit are very honoured to be involved each year," he said.
(Jim Evans)
