Bluegrass Underground

- So today, the bathroom's are being tiled, and we're doing some electrical work and our Director, Jim Yaki, and Mike Brees and Jim, the Steadicam guy, Tim.

We're all here walking through various camera shots of angles.

Got a little heavy earth moving some stone, excavations and just a few things going on, framing a barn outside as well.

This is gonna be the concessions area .

And these are the bathrooms.

Come in here and I'll take you on a little tour here.

(drum solo music) (audience applauds) - [Man] As a director of a production, any production what you're looking to do is to tell a story visually that makes sense and entertains people.

(upbeat bluegrass music) - [Man] It opened up, look, that's more, ain't it?

- [Man] What's it doing right now?

- [Man] Water pouring in everywhere.

- [Man] The four inch is not holding up.

The two inch pump has been overwhelmed, the three inch is overwhelmed.

- [Man] We can't keep up with this water.

- Rainiest February in the history of the world and we're opening up in two weeks, three weeks, and I'm, I think we're looking at freakin' Bluegrass Underwater, man, and not Bluegrass Underground.

Man, would you mind, just cut this off please for a minute.

Call Templeton, seriously.

- When Todd Mayo told me he wanted to buy a cave, which I'd heard him say a few other times to me, in passing, it's one of those things when you walk by, and somebody says, we gotta do that someday, someday we're gonna do that.

But with Todd Mayo, when he says someday we're gonna do it, that day actually comes and it's a reality.

And there was a day, we were in the car together, and he looked at me and he said, it's time.

We gotta do it, find somebody, make it happen.

And that's what my job is to do for Todd, is to make things happen.

So I made a couple phone calls and he made some phone calls, and we found a cave.

- So many times in life, you start with the ideal and you kind of work your way down to reality and it was 10 years ago, this month, as a matter of fact, 10 years ago next week, a week from today, that I walked down into a cave for the first time.

I had never been in a cave in my life.

And had the idea, create a Bluegrass Underground, yadda yadda, here we are, taping season eight.

And that was a wonderful, wonderful, reality, but it wasn't ideal in terms of the production for Bluegrass Underground and for a lot of the patron experience, so here we are, literally we started with reality and we've made it ideal.

We found this cave about a year and a half ago and had a wonderful vision for it and we say the gist is, we used a lot of gist.

We brought in geologists, and biologists, and hydrologists, and archeologists, the first thing we needed to do was to find out, is this cave, from a geological perspective, structurally sound for what we do?

And when we first walked in to where the stage is now, I could touch the ceiling, that's how much dirt was moved out.

They talk about Michelangelo's David, and he said, that David was always in there, I just had to get all that marble out the way, you know?

And this cave was always there, we didn't use any dynamite or blasting, all we did was almost, archeologically unearth this, a little bit of bucket load at a time.

And I didn't really know what it was gonna look like, I knew where the floor was, because we had to bring in geologists and hit rock bottom, and at that point, it became a matter of excavating.

Somebody said it was like hunting for buried treasure and the buried treasure is the amazing room, The Caverns, historically known as Big Mouth Cave.

But really, it's underneath all the flotsam and jetsam of thousands and tens of thousands of years.

Once we excise that, here's this amazing venue.

And so, the thrill of it was the sense of discovery, because I didn't really know what it was gonna look like.

I will be singing like an angel 'til I'm six feet deep I found myself an omen And I tattooed on a sign I set my mind a wondering And I walk a broken line Hear now, you have a mind to keep me quiet And although you can try Better men have hit their knees And bigger men have died I'm gonna raise Raise Hell There's a story no one - My name is Justin Mayo I'm the property manager here at The Caverns and my brother, Todd Mayo bought the place.

And last year, we started working on it.

And we got out here and we had to excavate about 30,000 square yards of debris out of the mouth of the inside of this place to make it what it is today.

We stared last spring and summer and I came along and once the excavation part of it was done, we had to design the inside, as far as bathrooms and seating, electrical work, lighting, stage, everything had to be formatted and formulated to bring it to what it is today.

This cave, this is in Pain's Cove, this cave has been here ever since the beginning of time.

It's actually two caves, there's a cave where the event is, and then off here to the left is a smaller cave.

And there's two rivers that meet right at the mouth of the cave and that was our biggest logistical feat was trying to figure out what to do with all the water that carved out this cave.

Raise Hell Go on there, ring that bell (audience applauds) - What we're thinking is, we're gonna come in, the red right here is the road.

It's going up there and it goes on logistically.

So what we're thinking is that we can come in and have this whole area.

- There's a guy named Temple Bowling that was the man, really, he's the guy that owns a construction company, but more than that, he's a creative thinker.

And so, this was, a lot of this was nothing you could draw up.

There was no architects, there was me and Temple sort of riffing on, well this is where the stage is gonna be, and do we do this here?

And a lot of times, the tail of what the cave would tell us, would wag the dog of what we needed to do, in terms of where things went from an infrastructure.

- And then the water, naturally wants to come from the back of this cave and go out.

Well, what we've done is put a sump underneath the floor, we have a big gravel drain layer, so any water that seeps in, goes through the gravel, and we pump it to where it was trying to go anyway.

And then the big influx of water, you saw the creek when you were coming in, and then there's some that even comes up out of an east sump, that we don't try to manage it, we don't try to stop it, we let it go to where it goes, and so that's what those culverts and bridge you walk over, so when those big rain events happen, the water just goes that way.

There's some flow rates, when they have big rain events, of 150,000 gallons a minute.

Which is just a tremendous amount of water.

And naturally, this is what they call a bore hole cave, it was created by a river, it's not on a fault, so that's why you have a nice smooth ceiling.

One of the things that people always say is, "What y'all do to the ceiling?

How is it so smooth?"

Natural, water ran it.

You can even see the little scallops in parts of it, that you can see how the current was lapping on it.

But the water was the biggest issue.

Dealing with that water and once we came out with a way, our first attempts didn't always work perfect, and so, but the next attempt worked better than the last, and that was the progression we made, and after about four attempts, we got it right.

It used to only be three pipes out front, now there's five.

But, so we've got it and we're happy that we're able to manage the water, allow the cave to still live like it did, and enjoy it as a venue.

Then a flutter of feathers, then a shotgun to shoulder I thought of the Fourth of July She'll be home on the Fourth of July I bet we dance on the Fourth of July (upbeat bluegrass music) - So, as a director, I'm allowed to input to the point of how many cameras I feel is necessary to cover a certain stage, a certain production, with a certain number of people.

For Bluegrass Underground, it's nine, I have nine cameras, two of the cameras are robotic, and they're always placed on stage, within the instrumentation.

I have three long lens, closeup cameras, that are at the back of the house.

I have a jib with a wide lens, that gives all the big, beautiful, scenic wide shots and movement, I have a Steadicam that makes movement down front and around up stage.

And then there are two handheld stick camera that are either working handheld, depending on the band, or sticks shooting tighter lenses.

- So, Bluegrass Underground has always been so pleased that there's been a confluence of really amazing people that have come together, seemingly in happenstance or coincidence, or providential ways, or however you wanna say it, but meeting Todd Jarrell 10 years ago at the very first Bluegrass Underground, was the first epic coincidence, when he came to interview me for NPR.

- And I came down to do a radio story about a guy I had read about in the paper, who was doing concerts in a cave.

Quarter of a mile, inside of a mountain, 300 feet beneath the top of a mountain.

And I thought, well, you know.

- And I said, well my real vision for this, is Austin City Limits meet NOVA, you know?

On PBS, a show from a cave.

- And I said, well just a matter of fact, that's what I do, I produce shows for PBS.

And he said, what was your name again?

- And he was like, Todd.

And I was like, man, I can remember that dude.

And so we formed Todd Squared, the production company, in order to bring Bluegrass Underground to PBS.

- It took a couple years, and then Beckie McGurra, from WECT, I approached her, she was getting, she had been helping me produce shows for several years.

And they were getting a brand new suite of television cameras, a whole master control that was in flight packs, so they were very transportable.

And we called up Beckie and said, "Hey, how would you like to do your first shoot with all your brand new gear, 300 feet underground in a big, grimy hole?

- I knew that cavern.

So I knew it was way deep.

And I kept thinking, how would we do this?

So then we get this incredible grant.

We get a grant for brand new HD production equipment.

We're rural, we're really small, tiny.

I mean, we had like 12 full time employees.

But nine part time employees.

Tiny little station in the middle of the upper Cumberland in rural Tennessee.

And we get this great grant for brand new HD equipment.

A million dollars worth of equipment for us, that has to last a lifetime.

- You know, and it was a hell of a pitch.

And to her credit, her everlasting credit, to which we'll be forever grateful.

She said--.

- Okay, okay, I thought why not, why not, why not?

Because you know, it's hard to not go with a vision when somebody's really got a vision of something that could happen.

And they have the passion, and you know they have the passion to make it happen, and I knew they did.

I thought, we gotta be a part of that, we just gotta be a part of that.

- So she took a flyer with us, we shot the pilot, that was in February, went back in May.

We finished up the show, presented to PBS, who had never seen anything like this.

(upbeat bluegrass) This life of sin Has got me in Well it's got me back in prison once again I used my only phone call to contact my daddy - And the whole idea from the beginning, has been, we're not trying to do anything with this room, that's not already here.

Like the dirt got moved out, the rock stayed exactly like it is, the whole thing was tested out.

They drilled 10, 12 feet up into the ceiling, they put cameras up there, they see the layers of rocks, we put in pins throughout the place to strengthen everything in the walls and in the ceiling, we've tightened the whole place up.

So then it was about, how to make this a venue?

We brought in computer assisted design machines, drawing machines, mapped out the whole caverns, decided exactly where all the pipes needed to go in, so where the drill points are.

Had to bring in a special crew to drill all the holes, cement, or epoxy in, the hang points.

- When we're taping for PBS, here at The Caverns, because we're in a cave, plus we're working with high level artists.

We've got a lot of people here, we've got everything from a stage crew.

- My name is Carly Hennegan.

I'm the floor director and stage manager.

The moving parts that are more difficult is getting the band on and off stage, which is had to do through the crowd, through the audience that's here, getting banger on, getting banger off, getting a band on, getting a band off through screaming fans who just want autographs and just want to, or go get a beer, go to the bathroom.

- To the lighting department, which is top notch.

- On anything like this, you paint the scenery, whatever it may be, with light, or you can't see it.

It's not a huge amount of equipment, it's just, you put it on the cave in the right way, you paint it from the right angles.

We use white light basically, a little warm there, a little cooler there, but it's basically white light, and white light on the performers, and a little color in the background, just for variation.

And I appreciate the fact that I didn't get this opportunity until I was really older and experienced, so I had the discipline to let it be itself and not try to impose my own silly ideas on it.

It's great as it is, and we need to just let it be that.

- And yeah, we come from Havana, Cuba.

(upbeat rock music) Do you wanna close your hands so quiet, Or maybe you just talk too much But definitely what I hate the most Is when you're sweating a waterfall - I'm Larry Naker, I've been with the cave almost since the beginning and I've been doing interviews and then on stage emceeing and host.

I guess, the maitre d of the cave as it were.

I take the word host literally, in that it's like you're hosting people at your home, you're hosting people wherever you are, and you're kind of making, you're easing them in, you're giving them the information they need, for the restrooms and that kind of thing.

But it's also, part of it is, I love this place.

That's why I'm here.

I think that's why everybody's here, and I think that's what makes this place so special.

The crew, the bands have this all jaw dropping, childlike thing then they come in here.

And that's the joy, I think for the people who work here, is they see that.

- There's always something to do.

My job is technically associate producer, artist relations, so my job is to be there for the artists.

But yesterday, I was running around, fixing computers, and making sure people had flashlights and mops, and cleaning bathrooms, and all, everybody does everything.

I think that's what makes us a family, is we all kind of pull together and pick up pieces as they fall, and it all comes together.

But even after the cave shows are done being taped, my job still keeps on continuing, which is doing licensing, and making sure that we have lyrics for the closed captioning, so my job continues on and on and on, even when the cave show's finished.

(upbeat blues music) Falling in love When I see you With those pretty eyes And I don't know And I come back I can't even dance Some people run away Some people bite their nails But me myself, I bite my toes And when my heart beats fast Like it's gonna explode It makes me feel, love love Some people laugh out loud, Some people can't come out, I eat my soup when I get nervous Some people run away, some people bite their nails, But my myself, bar tabs - We come back, we have the chairs, we've got ushers, we've got people helping people find their seats.

- We're big Sam Bush fans, we go to Sell Your Ride every year, so we wanted to come check this out.

I think this'll be really intimate.

I'm really looking forward to hearing what the acoustics are like in there, and kind of just, the whole vibe of the room.

- A10.

- Yeah.

- So, you're gonna be (indistinct) - Drove up, I guess about three and a half hours from Atlanta today.

If you try to have a perfect life, This you cannot do This you cannot do Thought you may try It may look like others have this life This perfect state of bliss But if you scratch the surface, There is something that you missed - The audio is top notch.

- My name is Andy Curran, I'm the audio producer for Bluegrass Underground for PBS.

Recording-wise, we have about 50 channels or so, give or, 50 to 55 channels usually coming from in the cave, and so those are split three ways to front of house monitors and broadcast.

If you're tryin' to have all sunny days This you cannot do - We also have the production truck, where the feed from those cameras inside the cave is coming out, and these folks inside, there's shaders, there's director up there, the assistant director, there's lighting people in there, there's audio people in there, all in this truck that's on site.

It's pretty amazing in there.

- I was just walking down to the cave a minute ago, and took a picture, of the whole camera crew out there, just enjoying each other's company, hanging out, and they are some of the best live music shooters in North America.

And they all wanna be here every year, and it's the same people every year, come back.

The same engineers, the same shooters, the same color guy, the same director, the same lighting people, the same board operators, it's like a little family reunion.

- We've got concessions crew.

(upbeat jazz music) - Over a career feel more important, well this is one of those, because long after I'm dead and gone, the people who come here today with kids will be bringing their kids, and hopefully their kids can bring their kids, because obviously, this place isn't gonna burn down, termites aren't gonna get it.

It's gonna be a place for the ages.

And it looks good and it sounds good, it's respectful of the environment, it's respectful of our culture, and we see this as a perfect marriage of two things, for which Tennessee, if not America, can be most proud, and that is an amazing natural beauty, and a profound musical heritage.

(upbeat jazzy music) I won't stop I won't stop I won't stop I won't stop I won't stop I won't stop - Parking people, we've got security people, we've got ticket people, we've got, it just keeps going on, we have have a bus driver, because we've got a magic cave bus that helps shuttle people around.

That's a good baseline of what makes The Cavern's gears move.

- This happened about five years ago, my son was five.

I was sitting there working on the computer one night and he was watching The Prince of Egypt.

Moses was in a cave, I wasn't paying attention but Moses was saying on the cartoon, I am that I am, or God was saying that, excuse me.

I am that I am, to Moses, in a cave, on this cartoon.

And Jackson turns around and says, "Daddy?"

And I said, "yeah, son?"

And he said, "Did you know God could speak to you in a cave?"

And I had to answer honestly, I had never thought about it like that before but in a split second, I said, "Yeah, I did."

And he said, "You did?"

And I said, "Absolutely I did, you wanna know how?"

"Yeah."

And I said, "Because he spoke to me."

"He did?"

And I said "Yes, do you know when?"

And he goes, "No."

And I said, "Bluegrass Underground, boy."

And he's like, "Oh yeah."

But, I never will forget that.

I wouldn't of thought of it in that context.

But I do know and I look back on it and I look at how The Spirit, The Holy Spirit, the Great Spirit, God, The Creator, whatever it is, how it's impacted my life through the people that I've met in that cave and all these, you can always say, what's the difference between serendipity and providence, or coincidence, or chance meeting, or whatever you wanna say, it's not different words for the same thing.

If you're agnostic, I don't care much, it's the same thing, it doesn't matter what you call it.

But there is that thing, there's that something, and that's that same something you feel, what the music brings to me, and it always has.

And it's what nature bring to me, it's what people bring to me, so you take great people, and music, and The Spirit, in an environment like a cave, it's transcendent.

(upbeat funk music) (funky outro music) (funky outro music) - Well you know, we're gettin' a head start on the end of the world, this is gonna be our conclave, where we will stay away from the solar flares and the plasma and the disruption of the magnetic fields, and the return of those aliens.

The aliens are coming back.

- Get another hand on this wrench?

- Quiet on the set!