Matt Guminski

Photo Credit: Joe Okpako

Lighting & Production Designer

Alice in Chains / The Cult / Misterwives

CHANGEOVER: Tell us about who you are, where you’re from and a bit of your history in the industry.

Matt Guminski: I'm a freelance lighting and production designer living in New York but originally from Boston. I moved to New York about two years ago to try something different. I’ve been working in the live music industry for about ten years. I started out working in theater. When I was looking to supplement my income back in Boston, I started working house gigs in venues like Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, the Wilbur Theater, places like that. I started being a house lighting designer and from there things started taking off. Then I started touring. My first touring musical act was Neon Trees. I was with them for about six years. In the music industry, the people that you come across can lead to opportunities. From there, I started working with bands like Misterwives, Tesla, Jon Bellion all the way up to today where I'm working with bands like Alice In Chains and lighting directing bands like Evanescence. That's the short version of my career. 

How has COVID-19 affected your job in the industry? 

When this all started happening, I was deeply involved in a project working on a new build cruise ship in France. I had been there once in January previously. I'd also been to Nashville to do some preproduction work for it and I was actually in France when the shutdown order came from the President. We were evacuated off the ship and sent home immediately. It has pretty much been silent and dead for me since March 14th when I came home. Fortunately, I've had two gig opportunities. For one of them, I got a phone call a week before the gig. It was the Chainsmokers show in Long Island. I lit the wristbands that were handed out to the crowd, basically just known as the wristband activation. I wasn’t involved with the production itself in terms of designing the show, but it was a really great opportunity to work in the industry. That happened in July which means my first gig that I got to work was four months after the shutdown. The next gig that I did was a couple of weeks ago. It was a socially distanced live stream of New York Fashion Week on the rooftop of a building in New York City. Those are the only two gigs that I've done. I had some potential opportunities for live streams, but they didn't really pan out. I'm just constantly trying to find something to do. 

Were you slated for any tours this summer?

Yes, I was supposed to go out with Misterwives. They were going to do a tour in May and June, and potentially longer. I was also slated to go out with the Cult again, who I had been introduced to and did two tours with late last year. Both of those tours got canceled, unfortunately. I also lost the potential for whatever work was going to come at me for the rest of the summer and the rest of the year. You might not have a gig lined up but give it a couple of days and you might get a phone call. Unfortunately, our industry is the first to shut down and it's going to be the last to start up again. 

Photo Credit: Oliver Halfin

Let's talk about ‘We Make Events.’ Explain what that is and how you got involved. 

It's really interesting, actually. It started with a group of individuals in the U.K. who over the span of about six to eight weeks were able to pull together this Red Alert thing. What they were doing was lighting venues, performance spaces, music venues, arenas, and theaters all across the U.K. They lit up about 750 buildings. Then they did this really amazing kind of visual installation along the Thames River where they brought in stagehands from the West End and various concert venues. They lined the Thames River and illuminated themselves up with either lighting fixtures or an app that they downloaded on their phone to light up red. They did a huge social media push. I'm on a zoom group that meets every Wednesday - we call it virtual happy hour - where it's a bunch of industry people across the US and the world that come together to talk about what's going on, what the government is doing to help us, and as a personal support group. We banter for about an hour and a half and talk about things that are happening in the industry worldwide.

One of the things we talked about was this Red Alert/We Make Events thing that happened in the UK on August 11th. We talked about how it would be really cool to do it in the US and bring awareness to what our industry is going through. The moderator of the of the group, Marcel Fairbairn, of Gearsource, was interested in trying to get this going. Me and about eight or ten other people in the group volunteered and then had another zoom call that Friday with Gary White, who is the production manager of the UK event. He said, “yeah, we want this to take off so whatever you need, we'll give it to you.” They gave us all of their assets, videos, logos and advice from what worked and what didn't work based upon the six to eight weeks of legwork that they did. That allowed us to put together our Red Alert event in about three weeks here in the United States.

We got about two thousand plus buildings, everything from residential homes of stagehand's, to theaters, to arenas, to structures like bridges and spires like the World Trade Center here in New York City, lit up in red. We had Capitol Records in Los Angeles turn red. We had the Empire State Building, MetLife Stadium, Gillette Stadium in Boston lit up. The list could go on and on.

Photo Credit: Joe Okpako

To take a step back, eight to ten people can’t do all of this. What we decided to do after that meeting was reach out to our contacts throughout the United States. We wanted to bring on people in the role of a regional director that knew their location and had an infrastructure that they could call on. The eight to ten of us reached out and talked to people and pinpointed about twenty to twenty-six different cities that we thought would be important - everything from Boston to New York City, Seattle to San Francisco, L.A., Denver, Dallas and all across the board. Those people then brought on their team and reached out to people to do their own PR, reached out to rental houses to get gear donated, reached out to venues personally, that kind of stuff.

I worked with Brad Nelms, who was our overall manager, or rather our director, of We Make Events. We put this whole organization together within a couple of days and then empowered each of the regional directors to go out and do their own thing in their own cities. That's where the strength came because you have rental houses that would normally compete with each other for business that were now coming together. You had union stagehands and non-union stagehands working side by side because we're all in the same place. We're all dying to work. We don’t want to sit at home and not do our gig. I think our industry is the most die hard, “get it” kind of people. We like what we do. We love being on the road, meeting the people, having that camaraderie with our brothers and sisters and getting to travel and see new things and eat at those restaurants that you like. For me, every time I go to Pittsburgh I want to go to Primanti Brothers and get one of those amazing sandwiches. When we're at these locations, you get to see friends you normally don’t get to see and catch up. We very much want to work, but our industry is being told that we can't.

Our whole philosophy is if we’re being told we can't do what we do best, we need government assistance, we need government aid. The government assistance and aid that we had was coming in the form of the pandemic unemployment and these PPP and EIDL loans that were going to the rental shops to keep their doors open. We need those shops to stay afloat because if they're not afloat when this industry comes back then there won't be companies to rent the lighting and video and the sound gear from. On top of that, it also distributes down into the restaurants, hotels and airlines. We have a very symbiotic relationship in places where people go to shows. For example, New York City. When people come to New York City, they stay in hotels and get here either by car, Amtrak or flying on a plane. That's a part of the economy. Then they stay at these hotels within the city and then they go to these restaurants, bars and spend money to see the sights. They come here to see Broadway shows, concerts or for events. Without those events, especially here in New York City, the people are not traveling. There is no tourism right now because Broadway is a ghost town. It's really sad.

Unfortunately, the government is very tone deaf. They say that the economy is doing great yet there are 10 million people in the entertainment business that are not working. That brings a lot of money into the GDP. I've seen numbers anywhere from 300-800 billion dollars that our industry contributes to the gross domestic product of the United States and that's not happening. We have always been the type of industry that's been told ‘if you don't see us, we're doing our job properly.’ Unfortunately, we now need to be seen because we need to be supported. That's what Red Alert is all about. With these buildings going red, people ask the question, what are you doing? Why are the buildings red? It gives us a chance to explain that our industry is on the brink of total collapse.

It also puts images, or people's faces, to numbers that you see on the news or on Facebook or from the social media blast that we're doing. Each city did ‘activation.’ Here in New York City, we did a 172 road case installation in Times Square and had stagehands stand next to them in solidarity showing that we are ready to work. We want to work, but we can't. Some cities did a road case push. We wanted to do a case push here in New York City from Madison Square Garden to Times Square but due to the climate of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the trouble that has been happening elsewhere, we didn't want to put our people in harm's way. Instead, we just did an installation. We got the approval of the Times Square Alliance, and New York City Police Department, and they were fully supportive of us. I went up to a police officer before the event to thank them so much for helping us out. They said that we had been really communicative and made it known that they were there for us and that our industry was just as much a part of New York City as the police. It was really nice to see the camaraderie of even the police department being fully supportive of what we were doing. We did a live stream that you can still find on YouTube. It's a couple hours long and we did it all with smartphones via Zoom. It allowed people from all across the United States and the world to see what we were doing in different locations. For being put together last minute, it went very, very well.

Have you seen any change since these events?

I feel like there's a lot more awareness of our industry and what we're doing. In addition to this event, we also did a lot of calls for actions through organizations like NAMM, through our organization, through a gentleman by the name of Michael Strickland, who is the founder and CEO of Bandit Lites in Nashville. Through his philanthropic endeavors, he has a lot of contacts with senators in Tennessee. Through them, he got contacts with people everywhere from Nancy Pelosi's office and Steve Mnuchin’s office and all the senators in between. He has been in contact with them on an almost daily basis. The feedback that we're getting is, ‘yes, we hear you, we see you, and we understand your place.’ Unfortunately, it’s a situation that comes down to the politics of everything. Nothing gets through Congress quickly.

It's taken so many months since the CARES Act has basically expired and they're still sitting on their butt. It doesn’t look good when there are bills sitting there that could have been debated for months and then, all of a sudden, there's the unfortunate loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They want to steamroll a Supreme Court justice through when there are people in the United States who are suffering and losing their homes on a daily basis and are losing their businesses on a daily basis. Not just in the entertainment industry, but throughout small businesses that support the entertainment industry and vice versa. That comes down to people who work security in venues and restaurant owners to wait staff to Broadway actors to stagehands to the people driving the trucks from the rental shops. The list goes on and on and on. It's just a really sad state of affairs when Congress can't come to a consensus to help the people that voted them into power. It hurts. Every day you try to have hope, but in the back of your head you lose a little bit of hope when you just hear about the bickering back and forth.

Photo Credit: John Zocco

Let's switch gears and talk about what you miss about being on the road. 

I miss the family. I miss the camaraderie. I miss waking up in a new city every day doing the same thing, but meeting new people. Experiencing things that you would not normally experience. Ultimately, I miss work. I miss getting to create and bring art and entertainment to people that, especially in today's society, could definitely use some entertainment and a little distraction from their everyday lives. That’s what we do in the entertainment business. We give people a distraction from those moments that need a distraction. 

What do you think is the future of the industry?

I think it all depends on how we handle testing and how we handle the mitigation. I feel if people wear masks, and if we can get these rapid tests, that we can go back to work sooner rather than later before a full vaccine comes out. Ultimately, for the world to open up the way that it was before this pandemic, we need a vaccine and we need herd immunity. If you follow the science, that doesn't come overnight. It takes several months and people wanting to take the vaccine to be able to do it. That is going to be what brings us back to being able to do Rock am Ring and Rock im Park in Europe where you have 180,000 people all around you watching a band or at Madison Square Garden where you have thousands of people that are watching an artist on stage. Even a Broadway show where you have 190 people sitting in a packed Broadway house, and then everything down to the small clubs, that are 100 percent capacity.

There's no feasible way for there to be a successful business model with reduced capacity patrons. Reduced capacity means you have reduced revenue, but the operation costs are not changing. The operation costs for a show are still going to be the same. When you do a show at Madison Square Garden, it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce one show for that one night. If you reduce capacity from, say, twenty thousand people to a reduced capacity of four thousand, that's a five times cut to your bottom line, which means you're not even making a fraction. You're not making any money. You might not even break even. You might lose money, so that's where it becomes a huge problem. Our success lies in the numbers of patrons. We need touring to come back.

I read an article recently about tour bus companies that are going under. Places are slowly closing, like rental houses that have the equipment we need to do our job. They're closing slowly. I feel like it's going to just start picking up speed as October and November and December start rolling on. People are just holding on for their dear lives. There are companies that are literally closing up their shops and putting gear into storage because it's the only way that they can survive. Their gear is sitting in shipping containers and trucks where they have no offices anymore. It's choices that people need to make to survive.

What do you think is some of the best advice you've ever received? 

Take every job opportunity that's thrown at you to learn, even if it's not exactly what you want to do. Learn and have decorum and ask the right questions at the right time. Continue to push hard and learn your craft. I learn something new with every project I work on and it might not be just one new thing. I might learn something new every single day. Nobody knows everything about everything. Continue to learn, continue to strive and take any opportunity you can, even if it doesn't pay a lot of money when you're first starting out. The life experience and the people that you meet are going to be payment enough because that will unfold down the road tenfold.