Road Case Stories: Episode 1 with Bryan Worthen

Episode Highlights:

• Accidental Audio Origins: Worthen got his start in Phoenix by helping his neighbors carpet boxes for 15-inch JBL speakers, which eventually led to him mixing at a punk club called Mudbugs.
• Baptism by Fire: His first major tour was with Dave Rat, where he simultaneously ran monitors for L7, the Melvins, and Wool, returning home very hard of hearing.
• The Painful Digital Transition: Worthen was forced to switch to digital consoles around 2005 when Foo Fighters' management wanted a smaller FOH footprint to sell more tickets. He initially chose the DiGiCo D5 because its visual layout closely mirrored an analog board, though he later experienced a nightmare scenario with an SD7 making an arena sound like a windstorm in Paris.
• Deftones' Microphone Destruction: During the 1998 Warped Tour, Chino Moreno ran three Shure SM57 microphones through a switcher box. Moreno performed so aggressively that he would constantly break them, forcing the crew to send 25 to 30 broken SM57s back to Shure for repairs every single week.
• Proving He's Christopher Cross: Worthen once received a random phone call from a man claiming to be Christopher Cross looking for a FOH engineer. Convinced it was a prank by his industry friends, Worthen refused to believe him until the caller actually sang "Sailing" over the phone.
• Travis Barker's Left-Footed Tour: While on tour with Blink-182 in Australia, drummer Travis Barker slipped on a curb and broke his right ankle. Because Barker is naturally left-handed and left-footed, he simply rearranged his kit and flawlessly played the rest of the tour using his left foot.
• The Secret "Taylor Cam": To manage stage bleed from Taylor Hawkins' incredibly hard drumming, Worthen set up a private, close-up camera on the drummer to know exactly when he was actually singing, allowing him to mute the vocal mic the rest of the time.