Published Oct. 14, 1991|Updated Oct. 14, 2005
At exactly 10 p.m. Friday at the Florida Suncoast Dome, just eight minutes after the Orlando Magic handily defeated the Detroit Pistons 103-88, a short, soft-spoken Dome worker named Jeff Walton stepped onto the basketball court, armed with a radio, and said to no one in particular: "It's happening." Even before the last well-endorsed sneaker had cleared the court, Walton's crews were at work _ pulling up the wooden floor to expose the concrete beneath, one puzzle-piece at a time, slamming down the rows of chairs in the portable grandstands like dominoes, trotting through the aisles of blue seats with large garbage bags.
They had 10 hours to convert the Dome from a basketball arena that hosted 13,000 to a concert hall that would pack in 25,000 people for British rocker Rod Stewart.
They wanted every second of it.
By 8 a.m. Saturday, Stewart's tractor-trailers would pull into the Dome and back up to the stage, where a crew of up to 80 would work frantically all day to set up. If Walton was late, there would be hell to pay, and reputation, and money.
This was the double-play of the dome business, the hat trick, the daily double _ converting a behemoth multiuse stadium for major events on successive nights. It was the tightest turnaround for the Dome since opening in the spring of 1990.
You could tell that the Dome staff, which consists of only two dozen full-time employees but hundreds of part-timers, had an almost desperate desire to please the sports teams, and the promoters, and especially the Stewart tour. Word gets around, and even an offhand criticism from a promoter, a star or a road crew can cost another big event down the road.
"People in the business talk to other people," said Jim Folk, Dome operations director, who came from Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1989 as fallout from St. Petersburg's courtship of the White Sox. "Your reputation is based on your last show, and one bad experience can wipe out 100 good ones."
But maybe it wasn't just the promoters the Dome staff wanted to please. Maybe they wanted to show something to themselves, and maybe even to the landlords _ the people of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, who have not exactly been unanimous in an outpouring of Dome-love.
Face it. Sometimes the place seems hexed.
It was built for baseball, of course, and baseball hasn't come. The building aches for it. Every design feature was built for baseball first, and it is painfully poignant to see the outlines of the pitcher's mound and the bases covered for other events.
There were construction glitches and soaring costs. Critics hooted when the city razed public housing for additional, and so far non-existent, parking. They jeered when the Dome held a garage sale, calling it an admission of failure, even though the sale paid the rent and was conceived well before June's devastating baseball decision.
Then there was hockey.
Only two weeks before, angry fans had littered the Dome floor with cups and beer when a National Hockey League game was canceled because of ice quality. The Dome had absolutely nothing to do with it _ the promoter hired the ice system _ but you know how it played with a lot of people:
The Dome can't do anything right.
Losers.
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The backboard support sighed with the release of air pressure and folded quietly to the floor. Jeff Walton straddled it and untaped the tiny "swish mike," which captures the sound of the basketball in the net.
Next to him Bill Schultz tackled the first of 204 pieces of the $60,000 floor with a crowbar, gently wresting the tongue-and-groove connection that linked one piece to its neighbor.
Teams of workers grasped the pieces as they came free and stacked them on rolling dollies, laying cardboard between them for protection. In a little over an hour the whole court had disappeared, headed back to climate-controlled storage.
The next big job was moving the grandstands.
The left- and right-field grandstands of the Suncoast Dome are made up of eight portable units, four on each side, weighing up to 96,000 pounds apiece, drawing power and water from the floor.
In a baseball game, these grandstands sit snugly against the outer wall. But in an arena setup, they form a more intimate rectangle with the permanent seats that run along the first- and third-base lines. It seats up to 30,000, compared with 43,000 for baseball.
Two grandstands that had been the "end zone" of the basketball game had to go for the concert.
Some domes use a rail system. Others use wheels. But the Suncoast Dome uses a unique system of propane-driven "transporters," which look like large I-beams with wheels, that are jacked up beneath the grandstands.
The transporters lifted their burden without a sound and took them away at a brisk 3 mph, revealing the stage that already had been erected behind them.
Through the night Walton and his crews worked, moving 2 tons of garbage, sweeping and scrubbing the floor, and setting up most of the nearly 4,000 floor chairs for the next night's concert.
Then some of them went home for a couple of hours. Some didn't. Folk, who had brought a shaving kit and a change of clothes, staggered to the well-stocked infirmary and collapsed on one of the four cots.
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Sometime between 7 and 8 a.m. Saturday, the tractor-trailer rigs full of Rod Stewart's gear pulled into the Dome. The crews found a clean arena, a blank stage erected to their specifications and the massive overhead grid for their sound and light gear, helpfully lowered to 6 feet above their heads.
They also found CeCe Bowman.
Bowman does a lot of things for the Dome. She designs new seating arrangements on her desktop computer. She supplies incoming events with technical information about the building.
But on the day of an event, Bowman's principal job as senior event coordinator is to keep promoters happy _ and that is not always a pleasant duty.
Sports teams and rock stars don't rent the Dome directly. That's done by promoters, who act as the matchmaker between events and buildings, and have separate contracts with each side.
For the Stewart concert, Bowman had to line up:
The stage, 60 feet wide, 48 feet deep, 5 feet high. (Later in the day the band decided it needed more space, and the Dome scurried to oblige.)
The "mix platform," a ministage about 100 feet in front of the main stage, where sound mixers and technical staffers sit amid the audience. (Likewise, the Stewart tour decided to move the location.)
The position of the overhead grid, which the Stewart contract said would be required to hold up to 45,000 pounds.
Spotlights, forklifts, security, barricades, laundry services, local labor, crew meals, golf carts for the band and promoter, and electricity _ the Dome can provide up to 2,200 amps to the stage. Go compare that to the figure on your circuit breaker.
Dome offices for the promoter, production crew, tour management and tour accountant (rock stars have traveling accountants as well as roadies).
Then there were the creature comforts, which might sound extreme to those of us who return to our comfortable homes each day, but which are said to be outright necessities on the road.
Stewart's dressing room was to be stocked with six cans of cola, a bottle of rum, a half-case of beer, bottles of wine (Mateus Rose and Pouilly Fuisse), four large bottles of Evian bottled water at room temperature, two Gatorades (one green, one orange), a fresh fruit platter, glasses, cups, ice, a corkscrew, a bottle opener and napkins.
Under "miscellaneous," the contract asked for 24 "regulation good quality soccer balls" _ Stewart, who played soccer in his youth and flirted with it as a career, likes to kick them into the crowd _ as well as oxygen for the performers, and a bagpipe band.
"This is a special and specific request of Mr. Stewart," the contract says of the bagpipe band, which played before the concert. The crowd loved it.
All day long, Bowman juggled the Dome's resources to meet last-minute requests for tickets, equipment and other changes. By the early evening she was tight-lipped and weary.
Even so, the Stewart concert was far easier than some. Some road crews are demanding and rude. Some performers make far more ridiculous requests. One act _ the Dome staff wouldn't say who _ demanded that the dressing room be supplied with M&Ms, with all the brown ones picked out.
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The Stewart crew had hoisted its walls of speakers and lights into the air and erected a fantastic set by early afternoon. They had timed the sound from the "delay stacks," or speakers hanging toward the rear of the house, so that all the music reached the back seats at the same instant.
But there were last-minute hitches in the large video screens that would hang on each side of the stage, and the Dome staff had to hold the gates for 20 minutes past the scheduled opening of 6:30.
Bob Hough, the Dome's food and beverage director, urged that the gates be opened anyway. There were some 250 people working almost two dozen concession stands. Some were charity workers, but some were on the clock, and inventories sat unsold.
Finally, the Stewart crew gave the go-ahead, and operations director Folk barked into his walkie-talkie: "All right, everybody off the air. We're going to open them up RIGHT NOW." The guests, clutching the stubs of their $21.50 tickets, began to file in.
Stewart's limo tooled through the Dome's service tunnel just before 8 p.m., and a few minutes later Stewart had the crowd screaming by opening with Maggie May.
Half of his red, white and blue curtain _ hung by his crew on his scaffolding _ failed to open right away. "The reviewers will probably blame that on us, too," one Dome worker said.
Nobody on the staff had time to see the concert.
On the second deck, in one of the glass booths above home plate, the staffers of the "command post" watched silently, scanning the crowd with binoculars, their radio headsets crackling.
This nerve center was headquarters for the St. Petersburg police and fire departments, the hired security force and the Dome staff. Together they commanded an army of maybe 500 people.
Someone's radio was interfering with Rod Stewart's cordless mike, but nobody was using a frequency even close. Maybe it was a cellular phone somewhere. The shuttle buses had failed to pick up a few ticket-holders at the Bayfront Center. The usual number of guests got drunk, threw punches, became sick.
In the basem*nt, Ken Lane watched his air-conditioning system, which was running easily on only 2,300 of the 3,300 tons of air chillers at his disposal.
Via computer screen, Lane monitored the air inside the Dome. He says the size of the crowd, the excitement of the event and even the amount of beer consumed can affect the heat and humidity, although his colleagues are skeptical about that last point.
Considerable effort in the evening was put toward calculating how much to bill Rod Stewart. The deal is settled the night of an event, with the Dome writing a City of St. Petersburg check to the promoter out of box-office proceeds.
Event coordinator Bowman had kept a careful list of all her expenses. So had Jeff Walton down on the floor. Building superintendent Bill Stephenson went out and read the water and electric meters to get an exact usage figure (the power bill for a single event can be as high as $3,500).
All the numbers were given to senior finance director Dan Murphy, who prepared a settlement sheet for the promoter. These sessions can be hairy _ some promoters argue over the price of a sandwich _ but the Stewart settlement went smoothly.
The box office receipts were around $500,000. Of that, the Dome keeps between $50,000 and $100,000 _ the exact amount is a trade secret, so other promoters don't get a bargaining advantage. The Dome also gets revenues from parking, concessions and merchandise sales. The rest of the gate receipts went to Stewart and the promoter. Mostly to Stewart.
But everybody made money.
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Once again, Jeff Walton's crews hit the floor as soon as the event was over, around 10:20 p.m. The front chairs had to be moved, quickly, so the concert crew could get its equipment out the door. At times even senior managers jumped in to break down chairs.
Sometime after 1 a.m., the floor had been cleared and swept, the road crew had almost cleared the stage, and the stands were almost empty of garbage.
Folk, the operations director, sneaked into the press box for a post-event ritual: a cigar. The next event at the Dome wouldn't be until Thursday, when area teachers will gather to protest budget cuts.
Jeff Gragg, an event coordinator who had been doing double duty on a forklift, fell exhausted into a chair next to Folk, lit his own stogie, took a long, tired look across the Florida Suncoast Dome, and then looked back at Folk with an impish smile.
"Well," he asked, "wanna get the basketball court back out?"
