When you go to a live show these days, you are expecting to see a spectacle — some artistic production that will blow you away. Behind the scenes, there’s one person responsible for bringing this production to life, wrangling dozens of people and fixing daily snafus: the production manager.
Episode 4 of Music Citizens goes behind the scenes with Nashville production manager Tori Butash. We explore how her job has become more complicated in recent years and how the pandemic continues to impact touring.
Butash’s first working gig was running sound for her dad’s band, Trial of Lucy, in Akron, Ohio.
“I started working two to three inputs on an Allen and Heath GL 2400,” she says.
One time, while doing monitors for a gig in Luckenbach, Texas, a man in a giant cowboy hat and thumbs in his jeans walked up to her and said, “Well, I’ve never seen a lady soundguy before.”
As a “lady soundguy” she worked her way up, doing sound for Rob Thomas, Imagine Dragons and other bands including Sylvan Esso — and it was that last band that realized Tori was highly organized, a good communicator and, most importantly, a good hang. They say that those are the perfect ingredients for a production manager.
Tori explains the role as “the tour manager, but for the crew.” Her job is to make sure that other people are able to do their job and to execute the artists artistic vision of the tour.
The artistic visions have gotten bigger. COVID reset artists to be on the same touring cycle and artists are touring more often. And then once a tour starts, every tour date is a litany of snafus that the production manager has to solve to make a show happen flawlessly.
Tori Butash is The Wrangler.
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