Working for one of the most iconic artists in the history of rock music is, in the words of this LA-based designer, “a once in a lifetime high.” That’s easy to understand, given his client’s stature in the pantheon of rock music, but that’s only part, (and not necessarily the biggest one!), of the story. What’s most exhilarating about being associated with Bruce Springsteen? For Jeff Ravitz is the way it continuously compels him to push his lighting designs in new directions.

During the course of his long and fruitful career with Springsteen, Ravitz has had to stretch his creative horizons, doing things like making his designs adaptable enough to support sudden requests at arena shows, creating extended looks for 90-minute long encores, and focusing lighting fixtures on specific pieces of equipment, such as amps and even upstage safety rails, to reflect his client’s unique, and ever-evolving vision.

Keeping up with that vision hasn’t always been easy, but, as he explains in this interview, Ravitz prefers it that way. Being “easy” would never be compatible with the restless force that drives a Bruce Springsteen show. Neither the artist, nor his lighting designer would have it any other way.

Our friend Todd Kaplan had a photo on the cover of a magazine ten years ago of Bruce crowd surfing over the heads of fans in a mosh pit. It was emblematic of the kind of close relationship Bruce has with fans. How does this rapport influence the approach you take to designing his shows?
“One thing I’ve learned is how important it is to never get in the way of the strong bond between Bruce and his fans. I define my job — for this particular artist — as the responsibility of doing all I can to visually help him deliver his message across the mic line out to the back row of the highest balcony, but never distract. As big as any cue might be, it all draws the eye back to him and the band, not to the effect. As it turns out, he does a pretty good job all by himself of busting through that invisible barrier between the stage and audience, and crowd-surfing is just one example!”

Bruce is also one of the only (if not the only) arena artists we ever saw take requests from fans. How do you and your LDs adjust to that?
“The request thing began sometime around the Working on a Dream tour in 2009 and it initially caught us a bit off-guard. Yes, Bruce is notorious for departing from the set list or swapping song order, but he would typically run through off-list numbers in soundcheck so we had some opportunity to be prepared. Then, the fans started bringing poster boards scrawled with requests from his broad catalog of music, and to our surprise, he would walk across the lower runway and grab armfuls of these posters to show the band. Then, bam, they’d launch into the song of their choice and we’d just have to get with the program.

“With a show like Bruce and the E-Street Band, it’s impossible to have an orderly, pre-set show in the console, but instead, we program as many songs as we can, with fine-tuned cuing, and we jump around with a million macros to get to each song’s cues. But reality dictates that we need to be able to go anywhere and do anything regardless of what’s programmed or not.

“My tenure with this show goes back to the manual preset console days and busking was a little easier. When we transitioned to memory consoles, we had to create lots of “punt” cues. We have tons of those, and because the show is run on two consoles, we are able to mix and match colors, gobos, moving cues, etc. to achieve a wide variety of looks while still appearing to have been fully cued. Our long-time touring LDs, Todd Ricci and second console operator Brad Brown, are bona fide geniuses at making those spur-of-the-moment songs look like we pulled an all-nighter to program them.”

Even as a superstar, Bruce has continued to play in some non-arena venues, such as the Apollo Theatre in 2012. How does that influence your work?
“I love those opportunities to design for theatres and other classic spaces. The Apollo show was a great example of how Bruce and the band can adjust and transform themselves from stadium-mode to theatre-mode so naturally. Because of that relationship Bruce has with his audience, I know that he would actually love to play nothing but theatres because the energy that builds up in that room is atomic, like nothing you can achieve in the super-large venues he has to play to meet the ticket sales demand.

“The trick is to take the essence of the arena design and distill the most important elements to the smaller space. The fun part is that theatres can afford the chance to add ingredients to the mix that aren’t possible in an arena, where we sell completely 360. That configuration imposes a lot of compromises to avoid sightline obstructions. So, in a theatre, trim heights can change to be more intimate than we can do in an arena, low side lights can be added, and things like a balcony rail or box boom can give us angles that are impractical or impossible on the regular tour. Also, a really nice bonus is the ability to use super low-intensity lights to just add a touch of color from a different angle. Those subtleties are much harder to do in a large venue.”

You’ve been with Bruce since the Born in the USA tour. As you’ve gotten to know him over the years, how have your insights into his creative process, personality and work ethic evolved?
“Oh, yes, they’ve evolved very much! Bruce’s work ethic was obvious at a glance, and I knew how important it would be to keep pace with him on whatever level I could. The creative process and personality were a bit more obscure because you have to know someone for a while to truly understand that. But it came quickly because on that first tour, he and I spent a lot of time talking every day.

“He has evolved so much, and so I’ve had to grow, too. And there were times that it took me a minute to recognize a new phase of development. When I started working with Bruce, I think his approach — as brilliant as it always was — had more broad-strokes. But you could see where it was going when he performed the Nebraska numbers which were introspective stories that he played quietly and mostly solo-acoustic. Fast forward to the 1995 Ghost of Tom Joad tour, and there was an unmistakable metamorphosis that marked a new level of sensitivity and subtlety. He carried that through to future shows with the band, and that had to be reflected in the lighting.

“For me, from the beginning, I had to get into Bruce’s head right away if I was going to tackle the sizeable volume and varied styles of music to do them justice with the lighting approach. But as he developed as a person and artist and began paying deep attention to art, photography, and cinema, it became essential that I do the same. And he sometimes had to shake me into knowing where his style was progressing. Bruce’s work ethic was always at full-tilt, but the artistic maturity was on a never-ending continuum, and I’m so grateful he gave me the chance to support that.”

Is Bruce Springsteen easy to work with?
“No, and that’s a good thing. You don’t get to be the kind of ground-breaker that he’s become by being easy, because more than anything, he’s far from easy on himself. His standards are sky high for his own performance, the band’s, and of course, for his technical and creative teams. We all work to be on the same plane of execution that he is on. Everyone that works with Bruce wants to be as good at what they do as he is at what he does. He knows what he wants, even though he sometimes can’t articulate it until after the work has been done; and only then does he know instinctively, if it’s working or not. That can be a bit frustrating. But of course, any lighting designer that has ever worked with a programmer knows the feeling of spending a long time on a complicated cue only to later realize it isn’t right.

“On the other hand, the easy part of working with Bruce is watching his brilliance, and conjuring up evocative lighting that attempts to match his words, music, and stage performance.”

How involved does Bruce get in the lighting designs for his shows?
“It’s been a varied level of involvement over the years, but mostly it’s minimal in the pre-production phase. During rehearsals, and then throughout the tour, he is much more vocal when he feels the need to suggest or dictate the tone of the lighting for a song or a moment. Not to overstate it, but the overall look of the lighting system itself, and how we light the band and stage environment, is left to me and the lighting team since I managed to gain his trust early on. And for the most part, he has been satisfied with the cuing approach of the shows. That allows him and me to spend more quality time polishing moments that he has clearly envisioned. That fine-tuning may take the form of a specific request for a color or angle, or an entire cue. Sometimes it’s only few words of inspiration from him that suggest more generally what he’d like to see. During the tour, this continues with Todd and Bruce as new songs or special bits creep into the show. Todd is equally adept at turning these requests into reality.”

From a lighting design perspective, what is the most challenging thing about Bruce’s music to reflect with lighting?
“Like so many creative endeavors, lighting design is an interpretive art and there are many ways to give life to a musical moment. I’ve had fans and band members all come to me with their own concepts of color and cuing approach for individual songs. As the saying goes, (the clean version), “Opinions are like noses; everybody’s got one.” No problem…and in the case of Bruce Springsteen music, his devotees live with it, analyze it, worship it. As a result, they all have developed mental images of what they think songs should look like. I get it, and sometimes I need to remind myself that they’re all right. I listen to every bit of it, and then I just have to do what I think is best, unless Bruce himself has made the request.

“Aside from that, I think about other artists’ shows that strictly follow a set list. For those shows, it’s possible to create a more symphonic build to the show, with a beginning, middle and end that has some planned structure. A Bruce show can change in a split second and suddenly, there might be four blue songs in a row, if you get where I’m coming from. I might not have planned it that way if I had control of that aspect of the show. The solution is to work really hard to give every single song a very unique approach so regardless of similar color palates, the song reflects the story Bruce is telling. Also, we do know that by the end of the show, plus the very elongated encores, Bruce has taken the show to a fever pitch. Naturally, we latch onto the energy blast of that volcanic eruption to do the same with the lighting…And then there is the matter of dealing with unprogrammed songs that just pop into the show, such as the ‘requests’ we talked about earlier.”

Looking at all the shows you’ve done with Bruce, do you have any favorites?
“Working with Bruce and the band has been a magical journey with so many high points. Some were newsworthy and all were joyous celebrations. There is nothing like your first show with an icon like Bruce who runs on atomic power. My first show was life-changing.

“We had just finished two weeks of production rehearsals in Lititz and a day of shooting the famous Dancin’ in the Dark video (with Courtney Cox as the girl in the audience.) I felt as prepared as I could be and I “thought” I had a show ready to go. The hand-written set list had just been delivered.

Standing at the console with the clock already twenty minutes past start time, Bruce’s assistant appeared at my platform to say Bruce wanted to talk with me. I ran back to his dressing room, and he says, “Jeff, there are gonna be a few songs tonight that you won’t recognize. Have a great show.

“OK, Bruce…you too.” Heart pounding…feeling dizzy…running back to the console, I glance at the set list. It all seemed familiar. OK. Houselights GO! Song 1: not so familiar.
The sound engineer standing in front of me crumples his set list into a tight ball and throws it at me as he shouts, “Welcome to the tour!”

“At this point I was just sailing the ship through fast waters, so I naturally went into show mode. I had a great night and a lot of fun riding the roller coaster. What I had forgotten from the Bruce shows I had visited as a fan years before, was that it’s a crazy-long night of music. Rehearsals were never more than two hours. But that night, the encore alone was longer than some artists’ entire shows. Over 90 minutes of encore! The total show was eight minutes shy of five hours. When the adrenalin rush wore off, I was ready to collapse. But with a smile.’

Does Bruce have a favorite lightshow of yours?
“I really don’t know for sure, but there have been some special moments. The full band show is quite a mix of lighting styles to match the variety of music and dynamics. But when Bruce did his first solo-acoustic tour for his Ghost of Tom Joad album, I tapped into a new level of subtlety that was really satisfying, and I know he loved it too.

“Of course, what I created was a natural outgrowth of Bruce’s inspired performance. He found new ways to express himself vocally, physically and emotionally, lifted on the wings of the extraordinary stories his music was telling. It struck a nerve in me and I knew just what I wanted to do. I discovered new approaches to reveal or conceal Bruce’s face, to shape his body, and to interpret his performance with color, angle, shadow, and timing. He and I were on the same page, and I would have to say, since there was not much else going on except Bruce’s singular performance and the lighting, he could feel what I was doing, and connected with it as much as I connected with what he was doing. That’s possibly a once-in-a-lifetime high for a guy like me.”

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned from working with Bruce Springsteen?
“I had to learn how to light a show with no haze, no beams, no gobos, and no sightline obstructions. That means I had to actually use light and timing to make people and objects onstage look good, dramatic, and appropriate to the musical moment without the usual concert-lighting aids that we all had gotten used to. It took me back to my roots, when there was no emphasis on air graphics created by massive beamage, and gobos streaming through haze or projected onto surfaces.

“Bruce really disliked those looks that had become a feature closely associated with the rock ‘n roll visual tradition. Haze was banned because he was convinced it affected his voice and also because of the look. And we had no backdrop because the show was sold 360. Because of the importance of not obstructing anyone’s view of Bruce or the band, we had to be very careful not to hang lights too far below the truss or anything like that, which might have added to a creative “concert” look. And there were zero set elements to light, so Bruce’s background was only amps and band members.

“I had fixtures dedicated to light the amps, piano, drums and keyboards separately and distinctly from the musicians so I could create some depth and separation of Bruce and the band from what little background there was. I even had lights focused on the upstage safety rail across the upper runway, because it was something to light. And as I mentioned, the band members became background elements too, so they needed to be lit interestingly –same for the audience behind the stage. They had their own color and lighting treatment because they were the backdrop, except when there wasn’t any seating in a particular venue. On those days we had the venue’s black, flat duvetyn curtain that was too ugly to light! There was almost no tangible, visible light between the stage and the overhead rig, so taking full advantage of whatever I had at my disposal was essential. That was an important lesson.

“Of course, I learned even more watching Bruce, himself, and how he could manipulate the lighting to his advantage. At one point he asked that the follow spots stay put in one song so he could walk out of the light. It took me a moment to process that, but he’d do the same thing with his mic. He would back away so far from it and sing an entire line so it could barely be heard. And so, he did the same with the lighting on him…he did his own fades and dynamics. So brilliant.

“Over the years I continue to learn more each time I work with Bruce because he pushes forward in his own artistic expression, and that naturally, inspires me to grow and explore as my talented team and I attempt to give visual interpretation to Bruce’s evocative combinations of words and notes.”