A letter from the bay door on Cowan Street.

Nine years on, the bay holds three permanent racks of Cam-Lok feeder, two paralleled Multiquip DCA-150 gensets we share-lease with C.P. Rigging when they need to make a run, a Motion Labs PD-48 head-end distro, four PD-24 sub-distros, a wall of Type W in 5/0 and 4/0 and #2, eight Honda EU7000is portables on hand-trucks for festival back-feed, three pelican cases of stage-plot tools, a printing press the previous owner left as well (which we use, badly, for the cycle covers), and six people who have, between them, twenty-three years of touring road time. The shop has never grown past six. We had a chance to grow once and decided we liked being able to look at the rack and know which cable Marcus had numbered and which one Etta had — and so we stayed small.

Why a programme book

This site is laid out as a programme book — a saddle-stitched, paginated quarterly with a masthead, a Table of Contents, departments, features, a Letters section, a Reference plate, a colophon — because the work already comes in those shapes. A tour has a cover (the masthead, who’s producing). It has a cast (the production manager, the road manager, the lighting designer, the tour manager). It has a stage plot. It has a cue list. It has a credits page. When we sit down to advance a show, we draw the same six pages every time, in the same order, with the same hand. After enough years, we started numbering the issues.

The web edition you’re reading is Volume III, No. 2, May–June 2026, the seventeenth issue. Past issues live in /tours/ as back-of-book covers. The reference plate — NEC Article 525, NFPA 70E, OSHA Subpart K, ETCP, ANSI E1.19 — lives at /standards/. Letters from the road sit at /letters-from-the-loadout/ in the format road managers actually use: a question, asked plainly, with the answer rendered as an editor response.

What we work, what we won’t

The shop works a tight list. Cam-Lok feeder runs from the venue tie-in to FOH, monitors, lighting, video, and rigging distros (P-01). Distro builds and rentals from 100 A to 400 A, Edison through Socapex output (P-02). Generator paralleling on Cat XQ and Multiquip DCA sets with Woodward easYgen-3500 controllers (P-03). Stage-rigging electrical — motors, fixtures, follow-spots, hanging audio — under ETCP card (P-04). Broadcast remote power for OB vans and headend infrastructure (P-05). NEC Article 525 temporary service for festivals, fairs, and outdoor events (P-06). That is the whole catalog.

What we don’t do: house wiring, residential service, EV charger installations, photovoltaic, or commercial fit-outs of any kind. We refer those to friends who actually do that work — usually Gaylor Electric for commercial or any of the four IBEW Local 429¹ shops we share lunch with at the diner up Dickerson Pike. We are not a sign electrician, a low-voltage shop, or a service-call business. If you want a panel rebuilt because your kitchen tripped, that is not us.

We work for tours, festivals, regional theaters, broadcast remotes, and the occasional one-off that needs paralleled generators — film unit, outdoor wedding with a 60-foot bar, a sound check at the Cordell Hull on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody else can take the call. We have turned down work over the years. We turn down most stadium-scale festivals that want us as a sole vendor; the math on labor versus payout doesn’t work for a six-hand shop. We have turned down corporate dinner work where the buyer wouldn’t commit to a walk-through with the AHJ. We turned down a Christian rock tour in 2022 because the lighting designer wanted us to feed a 200 A circuit from a 100 A panel without a sub-distro, and when we said no on a phone call he laughed.

“If you can name the cable you laid this morning, count the breakers you set, time-stamp every cue-out, and walk the venue with the AHJ before doors — the show goes. Everything else is talk.”

How the work is named

Everything we ship has three identifiers. A production reference (PRD-2026-058) for the booking. A cue number on the show paperwork (CUE 14 · LX) for the moment the work runs. A cable label (BSP-058-FX-A1) on the physical cable in the truck. We have never lost a cable in nine years; we have lost two crimp tools. The labeling is overkill for a six-hand shop. We do it anyway because the alternative is the production manager calling us at 23:47 asking whether the gain on the audio iso transformer is downstream of the L-N bond, and we want to be able to say yes, I can see the cable, I labeled it Tuesday, here’s the schematic.

The cue numbers come from the show — they are not ours to assign. The cable labels come from the shop and follow the format BSP-{tour-no}-{system}-{slot}. The production reference is sequential. We are at PRD-2026-058 on the day this issue is filed, which means we have shipped fifty-eight things this calendar year, eight of which are still in advance, fifty of which have load-out cleared and the cable hung on the rack to dry.

Standards we work to

Every job runs against the National Electrical Code (NFPA 70), 2023 edition, which Metro Nashville adopted with the local amendments listed in the Metro Codes & Building Safety bulletin of January 2024.² For touring work specifically: NEC Article 520 (theaters), Article 525 (carnivals, circuses, fairs), Article 530 (motion-picture studios), Article 590 (temporary installations). We hold three ETCP Entertainment Electrician cards (Driskill, Okonkwo-St.Clair, Singh-Hartley) and two ETCP Rigger-Arena cards (Okonkwo-St.Clair, Polites). Every member of the shop carries a current OSHA 30-hour Construction card and a Tennessee state Limited Licensed Electrician credential at minimum.

For rigging-class electrical we work to ANSI E1.19 (Recommended Practice for the Use of Class A Electric Power Equipment) and ANSI E1.6-2 (powered rigging hoists), both maintained by ESTA. PPE is selected against NFPA 70E arc-flash labels at every panel we open; we keep two CAT-2 and one CAT-4 kit in the truck. The shop has not had a recordable injury since a barked shin in 2019 (R. Driskill, against the leg of a Multiquip frame on a hot July loadout — uninsured for one day, learned a lesson).

Why we say no to the things we say no to

Two questions, before we book: does the work fit inside the catalog at /protocols/? And can we walk the venue with the AHJ before tie-in? If either is no, we refer out. The shop has built nine years of business on saying yes only to work we can ship, and we have not regretted a referral.

If you’re a road manager reading this in pre-prod and the tour is coming through Tennessee, Kentucky, North Alabama, North Mississippi, North Georgia, the Bootheel of Missouri, or the I-70 corridor through Indianapolis, the way to start is to send an advance through /advance/. We need the stage plot, the rider, the gauge plan, and the load-in window. We answer dispatch within four working hours during business days and within forty-five minutes on the on-call line for shows that are loaded in.

Thank you for reading. The issue continues with the Protocols index, the Tour archive, the Cue Sheets archive, and a fresh batch of Letters from the Loadout. As always, errata to errata@briley-stage.example; we publish corrections in the next masthead.

— R. Driskill, on-call dispatch · 815 Cowan Street, Bay 3 · Nashville, TN 37207