USA - Jonny Tosserello, production manager and lighting designer/director for Lynyrd Skynyrd, is continuing his long-time use of Claypaky Xtylos for The Sharp Dressed Simple Man Tour with ZZ Top co-headlining. Tosserello is a principal of Rock’n’Roll Drive-in based in southeastern Missouri.
Lynyrd Skynyrd, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, kicked off the 22-city North American leg of the ongoing tour with ZZ Top in July in West Palm Beach and wrapped in Ridgefield, Washington in September. Premier Global Production Company, Nashville, is the lighting vendor for the tour.
“I started deploying Xtylos in 2021 when they became available through Premier,” recalls Tosserello, who has been Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lighting director since 2010. “I wanted more beam fixtures in the band’s floor package, and Steven (Creech) Anderson of Premier was super-supportive of the Xtylos from the beginning. They’re great fixtures - I love them!”
Tosserello designs the lighting rigs to be “chameleons” since they need to accommodate different venues: sheds in summer 2023, arenas last spring and amphitheatres on this recent leg. “The design features four broken trusses that are flown and a floating floor truss, which is great for set changes without having to move the upstage ground row.”
The Skynyrd show riffs on the band’s Hell House whiskey brand, named for the childhood shack that served as their practice space. “The rig is designed to look like the shape of the shack’s roof: the truss is trimmed flat for ZZ Top then arched down to emulate the look of the roof for Skynyrd,” he explains.
A long-time Claypaky fan, Tosserello has 18 A.leda B-Eye K20 fixtures in the rig, 12 flown and six on the floating floor truss. 12 Sharpys are also flown. The band’s drum kit sits stage centre with two carts containing amp lines and video screens adjacent. Three Xtylos are mounted atop each of the carts.
Lead singer Johnny Van Zant provides him with a lot of direction, Tosserello notes. “It’s fun coordinating with the lead guy. His instructions for this show were not to hold anything back.”
“The Xtylos are used full-force for the first three songs, and by the third they’re at 25% intensity with frost,” he explains. “They come back for Simple Man and in Sweet Home Alabama, pointing at Johnny singing downstage. Then the Xtylos are full-force again for Free Bird with them, the Sharpys and some spots hitting the bottom of a three-foot mirror ball that’s 10ft off the ground."
“The Xtylos have been a good workhorse for us,” he reports. “They are a good, solid light. I love the prism, and I’m a big fan of the red and green they produce – I’ve never seen a brighter red. Xtylos are like Sharpys on steroids, but we’re tasteful about how we use them.”
George Masek, Claypaky lighting design relations and product specialist, concluded: "I jumped at the opportunity when I heard of the possibility of putting Xtylos on Lynyrd Skynyrd for Tosserello. They are one of my favourite bands and I was excited for a chance to have our fixtures be part of their shows. Tosserello was a true pleasure to work with and I admire his willingness to accept this cutting-edge technology into his show.”
