FLORENCE — California country singer Cam walked gingerly on the metal ramp bridging the Country Thunder stage and catwalk Saturday night.
She was wearing yellow high heels, not impossibly high but high enough to intimidate when faced with a potentially slippery metal surface.
On her first attempt, she crawled, sitting on the ramp and scooching down. After a few attempts, she conquered her fears — "Oh snap! I got the ramp!" she exclaimed. But the thought of her taking a spill was too much for Richard Basile and Steve Abrams, two veterans of the Country Thunder backstage crew and longtime Tucson residents.
The pair and a couple of their colleagues — also from Tucson — sprung into action, grabbing wooden steps from beneath the stage and switching out the ramp for the steps. Problem solved.
That's what these guys do, solve problems to help create magic on the giant Country Thunder stage here so that the 27,000 or so who have turned out for the 2016 festival each of the festival's four days can enjoy some of the biggest names in country music.
Basile, Abrams and Joseph Galioto have been leaders on the backstage crew for Country Thunder for 16 years, traveling to the festival's sister events in Wisconsin and, briefly, Texas; Country Thunder lasted one year before pulling out of the Lonestar State. The crew likely will hit Canada when the festival debuts in Calgary, Alberta, for a three-day event Aug. 19-21.
The trio and their crew is responsible for setting up the stage before the festival kicks off and taking it down when the festival raps up. They manage the backstage, from sound engineering and stage set up to loading and unloading band equipment stored in heavy crates and cases. They are fast and efficient, with a crew of more than a dozen all hailing from Tucson, and they have good rapport with the artists. Cam barely missed a beat when Basile and Abrams snuck onto her stage to switch out the ramp.
Basile, Abrams and Galioto have been fixtures in Tucson's music scene for years, doing sound and stage engineering at venues including the old New West and Gotham, Kino Sports Complex and Desert Diamond Casino.
"You build a relationship with the people," Basile said, mentioning Sunday night headliner Eric Church as an example. "These people remember you. They come up and say hi."
One of Galioto's fondest stage memories was the time he kicked Taylor Swift off the stage in Wisconsin because she didn't have the proper credentials. The little girl — Swift was in her early teens at the time — obliged and Galioto remembers his fellow stage hands looking at him with shocked expressions.
"That's the headliner you just threw off the stage," they told him.
"I had no idea," he recalled.
The Tucson crew might have their hands full on Sunday. The weather forecast early on called for rain off and on throughout the day accompanied by mild winds. Early Sunday as a the clouds blanketed the Country Thunder West festival grounds and a cold drizzle soaked the dirt and alfalfa fields surrounding the stage, Abrams led a crew of workers in covering stage equipment with plastic carps. They also reinforced the lighting apparatus in the event the wind picked up.
Thirty minutes later, the sun was blazing hot and bright and the clouds had turned from an ominous black to fluffy white. But moments before the first act was to go on stage, the rain returned with a steady stream, the wind picked up and it got downright cold. The Tucson guys stood by ready to leap into action.
