Patrick ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson
Joshua Tree, CA
Sound Mixer
Question:
In your illustrious career, what is the most dangerous place that you’ve mixed sound in?
Answer:
Queens of the Stone Age released Era Vulgaris in July of 2007. We were tired of the same old concert experience, so management got us some interesting ones – a castle, a church, and old slaughterhouse.
On November 20, 2007, we played 2,300 feet below the earth’s surface, in an old salt mine in Sondershausven, Germany. We held a ticket contest, 300 people got to attend. It took a day to get the equipment down in the 10-person elevator. It took half a day to get the audience down – wearing matching jackets and hard hats.
This place was so psychedelic. The excavation machines left spiral patterns everywhere. The idea was to play a semi-acoustic set – it quickly turned a lot heavier with everyone getting excited.
My mind got the better of me after being 1/2 mile closer to the center of the earth. Maybe we shouldn’t be rocking out. What if we cause some seismic destruction?
An epic rock-n-roll death. What a way to go. Looking around we saw the giant machines and quickly realized these things eat rock and spit it out. We weren’t going to cause a cave-in making rock; these machines ate rock and they were bigger than all of us and our gear combined.
