Lenny Sasso Pumps Up Smashing Pumpkins Lollapalooza Show with CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE MCHICAGO – Multiple Grammy winners Smashing Pumpkins have never held back in their iconic career, whether it’s in the form of mashing musical genres, or tearing up the stage with their ferocious intensity. This made the band from Chicago a perfect fit for lighting designer Lenny Sasso when they came home to headline the Bud Light Stage at Grant Park during Lollapaloosa July 31.
Sasso dug deep into his very fertile bag of tricks to create a multi-faceted Four Act design that moved seamlessly with the band note for power-packed note on this hot summer night. Running through his lighting narrative was some deft strobing that not only packed a punch, but also morphed and changed directions during the show to keep things vibrant and interesting. Oh yeah! I definitely like to lay into it when the band goes there, Sasso said of his strobing.
Billy (front man Billy Corgan ) definitely lets me rip it. Also, I like to match a lot of the snare rolls and big hits from Jimmy (drummer Jimmy Chamberlin). Key players in Sasso’s strobing arsenal were 46 CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE Mmotorized strobe-washes, 16 of which were from Fuse Technical Group, which supplied the floor package, while the remained were part of the festival stage rig. The Color STRIKE Ms really killed it, said Sasso, who worked with PM Dennie Miller. I was always running them in full tilt 97-channel mode.
During the show, I went back and forth from actually hitting the bar with the STRIKE M’s shutter, and then also incorporating the bar into swipes, sweeps, chases, etc. This was usually during big guitar solo moments, but also sometimes during softer mellow ones. For the verses of Tonight, Tonight, it was just all of the strobe bars doing slow dim chases. We also worked with our console to create a nice twinkling star looks.
When we got into heavier tunes like War Dreams of Itself, we’d use heavy, rapid sync strobes. I loaded the STRIKE Ms in a straight line in 40-foot truss, continued. Sasso. We placed them upstage directly behind the three inflatables. So, the STRIKE M’s really served two purposes – providing back light to strobe and blow through the band, and then as an uplighting source to create a wall of light that accentuated the ‘Puppets,’ as we called them.
Just as he did with strobing, Sasso varied colors to create a distinctive, captivating aura on stage. This was evident right from the start, when the band opened the show with 1979, a song from their landmark album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Throughout the entire number, he kept the band lit in a teal/turquoise feel, while uplighting them in a dark pink to make them pop against this background. The color scheme captured attention and laid the groundwork for the exciting things to come.
I’ve always just gone with my gut regarding what I felt a song needed in terms of the color, said Sasso. I don’t know if that’s some form of synesthesia, but I’ll hear a song and just immediately know ‘Yep, that song’s blue.’ Over the course of the last few tours with The Pumpkins, I’ve been trying to dial back the amount of colors used in a song. I approached this Lollapalooza set as monochromatically as possible, with a secondary color punch here or there.
Sasso followed his vision throughout the four acts of his show. The first act featured the set’s inflatables with their colorful rainbow side facing the audience. During this section of the show, he controlled the video wall as a single color block, hitting strobes, big flashes, or just hung on a solid color. The focus remained on the band, with fewer movements, and a lot of backlight.
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