![]() The commute is not ideal, and a camper isn’t a home. At the same time, ticket prices nearly quadrupled. By 2019, that number had dropped to $11.1 billion. ![]() Inside the garage are another Mustang, six motorcycles, an ’87 Mercury Colony Park wagon, and eighteen bicycles. Outside, under covers, sit two Mustangs and a Triumph. He owns a house fifty miles east, in Pottstown, a bungalow with a three-car garage out back. Sturdy, built like a barrel, with a thick gray beard and slate-blue eyes, Ferenchak is always in shorts, cargo pockets preferred. Then he realized he didn’t: His niece, a nursing student who was moonlighting as a show runner, was qualified to administer it. It was Sunday night, and Ferenchak thought at first he’d have to call in the only ambulance service in Lititz. Once, during rehearsals for her 2016 Formation tour, Beyoncé needed someone to administer her B12 shot. He takes care of anything within its walls: ensuring the day’s local labor is set, checking in on catering, answering a truck driver’s question at the dock, replacing toilet paper. That was back in 2014, when he retired from life on the road, after twenty-five years as a sound engineer, to join Rock Lititz as the Studio’s production and operations manager. Today, the campus is surrounded on three sides by protected farmland. The ninety-six acres of Rock Lititz had to be rezoned from agricultural to industrial land before construction could begin. A big black box in the middle of nothing. The first time he saw the Studio, Ferenchak thought, This looks like an organ-harvesting facility. The production will be one of the biggest that Rock Lititz has hosted-as massive as Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour in 2018, which became the top-grossing concert tour in U. For a major band planning a major tour, the companies that constitute Rock Lititz aim to be a one-stop shop: They build the stage, they design the lighting, they do the sound, and after a couple days or a week or a month of rehearsals, they send you off to tour the world.īTS is sending ahead thirty shipping containers of equipment, which will become Ferenchak’s temporary new neighbors. But since opening the Studio in 2014 and establishing Rock Lititz, its owners have adapted to the new reality in the music industry: Record sales are a fraction of what they once were, and while streaming has helped the bottom line, the big money is in touring. The town, in Lancaster County, has been home to a sound company and a staging company for decades. The Studio is part of a larger operation called Rock Lititz, a ninety-six–acre campus that also sports a hotel and a cluster of businesses specializing in live-event production-concerts, as well as product launches, theme parks, cruise lines, and e-sports. They have booked the Studio for almost a month to practice for their summer tour. The Studio is the greatest rehearsal space in the world, used by the biggest acts in the world. A grid of steel beams along its ceiling can hold up to one million pounds of chains, motors, bumpers, trusses, lights, speakers, and screens. It stands one hundred feet tall and has four loading docks and a door that a semi can drive through. Next door is a building known as the Studio, a fifty-two-thousand-square-foot box sheathed in matte black sheet metal. Parked outside is a ’95 Subaru Legacy, his regular drive, and a ’92 Geo Tracker with locking hubs, which he’s trying to sell. FREDRIK BRODENįerenchak, who’s fifty-six, sleeps some nights in a double slide-out CrossRoads Zinger camper in the gravel lot at the edge of a cornfield in Lititz, Pennsylvania. ![]() Before managing the Studio, Gary Ferenchak spent twenty-five years touring with acts like Gwar, Selena Gomez, and Wiz Khalifa.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |