Heavenletters

Gloria, and God, thank you for this one, it comes at a time, I'm getting back from a challenging week, I was one of the promoters at this years large rock fest in Oklahoma called ROCKLAHOMA, I had one of two a 2nd stages down there that was helping more unknown talent become more known talent to a large audience attending for the main stage artists playing the event.

My deal was with the festival itself, and there was much promised and much of it was delivered but many details lost in the shuffle, it was a big event, but for the time spent, seemed to be somewhat poorly organized. Some of this ultimately reflected on myself and my partners that were doing our best to make a good situation for our artists. It was a 5 day event, with many well known artists on the main stage, and a very tightly run schedule, that sometimes because of the rains and the weather left some artists out of the show on the two side stages.

Unfortunately on Saturday, we had such a violent rainstorm / thunderstorm with 60 mph strait line winds where we could see the horizontal rain that came in and toppled both our 60'x80' side stages, it was a miracle no one was seriously hurt, only one person got a large bruised bone on her arm from the lighting trussing coming down and knocking over some road cases that fell on her. WE WERE VERY BLESSED not to have any one killed.

Someone showed me a Doppler radar image of the storm afterwards, and while it is a possibility that it was doctored up, I believe it to be the real deal..... at the eye of the storm was Rocklahoma the 465 acres of an amazingly large festival grounds, and above it the violent storm was in Red, the red sections were in a PERFECTLY formed cross. I was stunned when I saw this image on one of the festival organizers phone. The eye of the storm was directly in the middle of the 4 angles of the cross, this was most definitely a storm sent by God for some reason. I'm thankful that he protected us and made sure no one was hurt, I'm thankful the storm hit when the main stage (with a permanent structure, solid and secure) was playing Trixter, and neither of the side stages were running. I'm looking for answers as to what his message was there for us still.

In the wake of the storm, we rallied the crews and were able to get 90% of the bands from the rest of that day, and the last day on Sunday to play on three small stages that we set up Sunday morning in 3 large beer tents. Sadly a couple of artists, could not play because of flight schedules out early on Sunday, but all in all we rose above the problems and the mud and lived to rock another day. The fans seem to appreciate the tents, because the sun was incredibly hot on Sunday over 100 degrees and it seemed that the sets were actually better attended in the tents during the day than the huge side stages we had been using.

It's rock and roll, I learned a lot about what we did wrong on this deal, and will endeavor to do things differently next year.
I thank God for his mercy and hope for clarity of the message I know I was meant to receive from this. I love you all!

Lance King

Here are some pictures of the side stages after the storm
http://www.bringbackglam.com/journal/2008/7/13/breaking-news-rocklahoma-...