Joshua Kapellen must shout to be heard above the guitar riffs and sound checks at Philips Arena during last-minute preparations for Friday night’s performance by U2.
It’s a sea of confusion, right down to fog from a giant machine that will furnish enough smoke to fill the arena during the concert. The sound coming from the 250,000-watt sound system is so powerful it literally can be felt as a stagehand endlessly says "one, one … one, two … eeeee, uhhhhh" with the patience of a chanting monk.
At the back of the arena, there are banks of computers and one-of-a-kind video gadgets that will turn a beaded curtain behind the band into an enormous video monitor during the show. It’s a geek’s dream, and Kapellen is living it. He is a full-time technology expert who travels with the band, which is in Atlanta for Friday’s show and one more tonight. As Kapellen explains how he helps tend to 17 truckloads of traveling technology, his radio buzzes.
"Josh, Josh. Josh to production." In a flash he is rushing toward the production office, literally parting the fog. There’s no way of knowing what he might face. He’s mainly responsible for maintaining a wireless computer network used by everyone from front man Bono to one of the hundreds of stagehands.
"But at one time or another I’ve worked on almost everything here," he explains on the fly as he bustles through the door at the production office. "Our printer is jammed," explains a woman sitting at a computer. Kapellen, 28, is a former aerospace engineer and currently a member of Best Buy’s computer repair unit, Geek Squad.
The U2 tour hired the company to handle some technology tasks. In this case, Kapellen has no secret solutions to this problem. He does what you’d do at home. He pulls out the print tray, yanks at the stuck paper and watches in satisfaction as the printer returns to life. Even trivial problems can cause big headaches while on the road, explained Jake Berry, production director for the U2 show.
Technology in the form of wireless computer connections and cellular phones has made life on the road more tolerable than when Berry started in 1975. "Back then you’d call home once a week," he said. "Now, you’re in touch every day.
Some of the people here use the computer networks to see live video of babies back home." The terms of his contract won’t allow Kapellen, who is from Minneapolis and single, to tell any stories about U2 members. But he says he’s spent time with all four since the tour started Feb. 24. Besides keeping their laptops going, he’s helped set up game systems and retrieved data stored on PDAs that have gone on the fritz.
His days typically start around 5 a.m. and stretch around the clock to the early morning hours. So he has no trouble sleeping when he crawls into one of the bunks — stacked three high — on the bus that transports the stagehands when the concert moves to a new city. The tiny curtained enclosure is not much bigger than a coffin.
"You have to remember not to sit up quickly because, because you can’t," he said. Bono and the other band members needn’t worry about headroom. They travel by private jet. But the guts of the show — including hundreds of speakers and enough computer equipment to supply a good-sized company — move over the road.
And each time the high-tech caravan reaches a new city, hundreds of miles of cable and wire are connected to fire it up again. "In 20 minutes or so after we get the network equipment unpacked, we are up and running again," Kapellen says. And he’s ready to face new high-tech challenges, even if it’s just a balky printer tray.
- Atlanta Journal
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