The trials and tribulations of the Jam Van’s air conditioner situation could be a mini-series all to its own. If you cram enough musicians and instruments into a small space and have them pour their all into a performance it tends to heat up that space and so we’ve put some artists in the furnace, literally. There’s been times when we were set up in some very unfavorable heat conditions and had no air conditioning at all. So when we went to Vegas our plan was to finally put an end to that issue. Our solar power had been a great success and carried us through most of the summer, but our AC had been mostly nonexistent. Until Vegas. That was where we were going to try out our brand spanking new unit. It was all shiny and hi-efficiency, and had a whole bunch of BTU’s, which is some techy-air-conditioner term, and it cooled the beast’s belly damn well… for a day.
When you’re running a full studio off of solar power inside of a 1992 series RV you sometimes encounter technical difficulties. At the end of day one at Life is Beautiful we had some of those in regards to our new AC unit. It just didn’t want to come on. As clever as our crew is, none of us have a background in air conditioner repair, so we were screwed. Most Thieves showed up wearing all black, told us they worked for The Killers and had been on tour all over the world, and our gut reaction was that these dudes weren’t going to be stoked about sitting in our hot box for an hour. Oh how we were wrong.
They didn’t mind the box fan replacements one bit. Couldn’t have been friendlier, and our shoddy air conditioner situation wasn’t even a situation any more. It’s fixed now, we know what we did to mess it up, so we’ll never encounter that problem again, and all bands that pass through the van will not be subjected to the heat as their predecessors were. However, we took an important lesson from our AC experiences. Aside from a small outlier, most of the musicians we met don’t care about external factors like heat. They care about their music, and as long as we’re aiming to help them make that, then they’re willing to get a little sweat on their brows. In the end there will be a lot of factors that set a band that makes it apart from the rest, but not giving a shit if it’s hot in a van is one of them, that I’m sure of…