(For more on these topics, see the Notes of the Beat department, and for a last-minute primer on things to do locally with your Super Bowl experience, see Picks of the Week).
The old, and now refurbished to the hilt and turned into an ongoing night spot, Armory in The Cities has a local man at the forefront of getting the place ship-shape for pre-Super Bowl concerts, which have been held in the highest esteem among those shows available when written up by Twin Cities newspapers.
This local mainstay in the hip hop producing business, who in this latest case is working on the production end such as sound and lighting at the venue a few blocks away from the Super Bowl stadium, says its not as easy as it looks.
The venue in the days before the Super Bowl hosted concerts by Pink, Imagine Dragons and Kelly Clarkston, (who has chimed in about the pressures of performing on this type of weekend), and also showing at the venue, to be seen, are Kanye West, The Arnold and Mike Tyson.
The very young man from Hudson tells story about how some stickler venues have micro-managed the situation that some workers showed up without the obligatory steel-toed boots and were not allowed to go on the job, one where time is money and the lag can cost upwards of thousands on dollars. There are different approaches to such questions by various event venues, and among the many companies they have worked for in arranging large-scale gatherings, Blue Cross Blue Shield proved to be stellar as far as just going with the flow and being practical.
Perhaps the most difficult venue to deal with in such a way, as far as exactingly meeting the letter of the law, is Mystic Lake Casino, he said. The casino got embroiled in some legal troubles over such things in the couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, but the show(s) there did end up going on.
Guitarist Carlos Santana, performing a bit earlier at his venue, already has his $70,000 in pocket, the local man said about 10 days ago, so he doesn’t care, but the show must go on even if others aren’t so lucky. His company is in the loop to get $40,000 for their services, but at that time we talked their money was not in pocket yet, so as far as being corporate …
And my first question for him was the prevalence in their work of ensuring that there isn’t another warerobe malfunction. He said that at there production meetings, it is a constant topic of discussion.
– There have been some folk who wanted to visit Hudson during the past week, but get far out of town before it got nearer to the game and the craziness spilled over. One such couple from the West Coast was at Dick’s Bar and Grill late-night just before bolting ship, as they had been in Hudson for a few days doing construction work, but said on Thursday that they were making it an aim to get out of town pronto after that. They had been at Buffalo Wild Wings earlier, and as one person to another wearing hunting caps, he said as leaving that he was apologizing for some offense that had been taken about a comment that was made: “I’m sorry, but I am from Washington,” since as I was to find out in detail in a later conversation, things are a lot different there.
– Finally, this wrap-up on how the Super Bowl scene has played out in Hudson. After a couple of slow nights midweek locally, largely because of the cold, bartenders said there were a lot of Super Bowl visitors out early on Friday night, although things slowed later. Such things were back to being mostly dead on Saturday night, even slow at a standard-bearer, The Smilin’ Moose, as out-of-towners were mostly out in Minneapolis. This was the top night for partying there outside of the Super Bowl itself, a bit more so than Friday night. Bartenders late Saturday were holding out hope that there would be the not unusual bar time rush from The Cities, even the Minneapolis end.