Dead Stages: George Fontes on the Shutdown and the Installs That Saved Payroll

Live events did not slow down in 2020, they stopped, and the companies that survived were the ones that could make money without a crowd. George Fontes had a production company, 32 people on payroll, and a business built entirely on rooms full of people. What kept the lights on was the work nobody mentions in the pivot stories: installs, church LED walls, and corporate events run over Zoom for audiences sitting at home.

That is the spine of S3-EP13. Havok and LX spend an hour and a half with the man behind World Ablaze with George Fontes, and the conversation starts in a dead industry and ends somewhere near thorium. Listen here: Dead Stages: George Fontes on Surviving the Shutdown and Changes (S3-EP13), or watch the video on the official Space Tomatoes YouTube channel.

Key Takeaways

• George Fontes has run Fontes Pro Sound & Light since it started as a professional sound company in 1999, and he had 32 people on payroll when COVID shut live events down in March 2020.
• Installs saved the business. Church LED walls and permanent systems kept revenue moving when there was nothing to rent and no crowd to serve.
• Monitor mixing is harder than front of house because a monitor engineer mixes a separate show for every person on stage while stage volume bleeds into open microphones.
• Wireless is a legal problem now, not just a technical one. The FCC repack cut the spectrum available to professional microphones, so frequency coordination is a core skill.
• Clients who buy the gear stop renting it, which is why tour riders, installed systems, and owned inventory push every production company in the same direction.
• The second shock came after the shutdown, when 2025 and 2026 budgets collapsed, festivals were canceled, and businesses were bought.
• The conversation ends far from audio: crowd psychology, Le Bon, Bernays, data center water fights, the AI build out, and thorium.

What 27 Years in Live Production Actually Teaches You

The shutdown is a math problem before it is a story, and the government math was enormous. Congress created the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant in the December 2020 relief package with $15 billion, then added another $1.25 billion through the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, bringing the program to $16.25 billion. Awards equaled 45 percent of 2019 gross earned revenue, capped at $10 million per applicant, and the SBA opened the application window in April 2021 for venues, promoters, theaters, producers, and talent representatives, according to the Small Business Administration. George's company was a production shop rather than a theater with a marquee, and that distinction decides what relief actually reaches you. Payroll of 32 people does not care about the shape of the program. It cares whether any invoice can still be sent.

Fontes Pro Sound & Light started in 1999 as a professional sound company in Ceres, California and grew into full event production: audio, video, lighting, stage, drape, CO2 effects, confetti, tour support, rentals, event management, and permanent installation work. The install side is what carried the shutdown, and the résumé behind it is not small. The company has covered UC's Cowchella and the Treats and Beats Festival and the Sierra Music Festival, which has hosted Craig Morgan, Frankie Ballard, Ben Harper, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and the Black Crowes, as reported by Sound & Video Contractor. The install that shows up in the trade press is the Mirage, a 22,000 square foot banquet hall in Sacramento, where the build was six FBT Muse 210 line array boxes per side, two Archon 110 boxes per side to cover the areas sitting outside the main hang, and four Subline 218sa subwoofers under the stage. George's stated reason for that gear is the reason the rest of the episode makes sense. It has to work when nobody can fix it mid show, because at 8 PM on a Saturday there is no second take.

Front of house is one mix for one room. Monitors are a different mix for every person on that stage, and every one of those mixes is fighting the sound of the room itself. Loud backline, a bass rig opened up, wedges pointed straight into an open vocal microphone: the monitor engineer is answering acoustic physics with a fader and about four seconds of patience. The technical layer on top is measurement and coverage, which is where tools like Smaart and line array prediction stop being software and start being the difference between a clean stage and a feedback loop in the second chorus. Wireless adds a legal layer that audiences never see. The FCC auctioned the old television channels 38 through 51 in the 2017 broadcast incentive auction, packed the remaining television stations tighter during the repack, and required wireless microphone users to stop operating in the 600 MHz service band by July 13, 2020, which left professional wireless concentrated in the television band below 608 MHz, per the FCC. Frequency coordination is now the part of the job that decides whether a lead vocal drops out during the biggest song of the night.

The economics of gear run against a production company in two directions at once. A tour rider names the console, the boxes, and the effects package it expects, and a rider is a contract rather than a preference, so the shop owns inventory it cannot substitute. Then clients start buying. A church buys an LED wall and never rents one again. A venue buys a system and the rental line vanishes from the invoice. The result is a warehouse full of equipment hunting for new work while the market resets around it, which is the same pattern Geoff Wacker described on S3-EP11 when he said a machine that can be shut off remotely was never really yours. George's version of the aftershock lands in 2025 and 2026: budgets that collapsed years after the shutdown ended, festivals that were canceled, and businesses that were bought. The shutdown was a cliff. The years that followed were the long walk down.

The last third of the episode leaves audio entirely, and it earns the detour. Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895 and Edward Bernays published Propaganda in 1928, and those two books are the ancestor of most mass persuasion running today. George follows that thread into modern audience management: masks in pockets, grocery store arrows, emergency use authorizations, and the percentage of people who simply said no. From there he goes to data centers, evaporative cooling, drought, and the closed loop systems the AI build out is forcing into public argument, then to thorium, demonstrated decades ago at the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory between 1965 and 1969 and still waiting on a commercial fleet. The through line is the same one that runs through the monitor conversation. Someone decides what the room hears, and it is usually not the people standing in it.

Meet George Fontes

George Fontes is the managing director of Fontes Pro Sound & Light, the Central Valley production company he grew out of a professional sound business that started in 1999 in Ceres, California. Under his direction FPSL expanded into complete event production: audio, video, lighting, stage, drape, CO2 effects and confetti, tour support, event rentals, and event management. Its client list runs from UC's Cowchella and the Treats and Beats Festival to the Sierra Music Festival, which has featured Craig Morgan, Frankie Ballard, Ben Harper, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and the Black Crowes. His install work includes the 22,000 square foot Mirage banquet hall in Sacramento, built on six FBT Muse 210 line array boxes per side, Archon 110 boxes for side coverage, and four Subline 218sa subwoofers under the stage.

He came into the pandemic managing 32 people on payroll and a business built on gatherings, and he came out of it with a company that had learned to sell what did not require a crowd. Church LED walls, permanent installations, and remote corporate events kept money moving while touring was frozen. He talks about that stretch without dressing it up, including the parts that were luck, the parts that were hustle, and the parts that were just refusing to lay everyone off. The aftershock gets the same treatment: 2025 and 2026 budgets that collapsed long after the shutdown, canceled festivals, and businesses getting bought up.

He now hosts World Ablaze with George Fontes, a politics, news, and geopolitics show built on OSINT research, direct argument, and guest conversations, and he co hosts Random Thoughts with Manuel and George, which streams live on Thursdays. On Space Tomatoes S3-EP13 he does what he has done in the field for 27 years. He explains how a room actually works, from RF coordination and monitor mixes to tour riders and backing tracks, then follows the conversation wherever it goes. He is also the guy who met Dio and lived to tell it, which matters to exactly the right people.

Where to Find George

• World Ablaze with George Fontes: worldablazepodcast.com
• X: @fontesablaze
• YouTube: @fontesablaze
• Fontes Pro Sound & Light, Ceres, California: fontesprosound.com

The Arguments, Timed

• 00:00 Welcome George Fontes and World Ablaze
• 00:50 27 years in events, the COVID shutdown, and remote corporate concerts
• 03:25 A payroll of 32, hustle mode, 1099s, and church LED wall installs that saved the company
• 07:00 Tour riders, Martin Vipers, and millions in gear you do not own
• 11:30 Why a keynote now has a rider, coverage patterns, line arrays, and actual physics
• 16:21 The real hangover: 2025 and 2026 budgets, canceled festivals, businesses getting bought
• 26:35 What the shutdown actually revealed
• 28:16 The 20 percent who said no and the accountability that never arrived
• 36:00 Le Bon, Bernays, Goebbels, and the slow drip
• 42:26 Data centers, evaporative cooling, droughts, and the AI war
• 53:10 Meeting the heroes: Dio, Jerry Only at NAMM, Ron Jeremy at the Peavey booth
• 1:02:00 Backing tracks, worship band laptops, and the Auto Tune country crime
• 1:05:47 Why monitors are harder than front of house, RF coordination, and being a drummer
• 1:08:51 Favorite gigs, Tech N9ne, Cash Cash, and Michael McDonald being effortless
• 1:17:54 Shoutouts and World Ablaze politics without the rage bait

Related Episodes

• Dead Stages: George Fontes on Surviving the Shutdown and Changes (S3-EP13), the full unscripted conversation this post came from.
• Why Monitor Mixing Is Actually Harder Than Front of House, the companion breakdown of monitor world, RF coordination, and stage volume.
• You Don't Own That Tractor with Geoff Wacker (S3-EP11), the same ownership argument applied to farm equipment and subscription tractors.
• Deliciously Free with Jon Francois (S3-EP7), another media veteran on what happens when the industry you trained for stops paying the bills.
• From Bronze Star to Plot Armor with Matt Hasty (S3-EP12), on what people do when the institution they served leaves them holding the bill.

Watch full video episodes on the official Space Tomatoes YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceTomatoes-Podcast

External Sources

• Small Business Administration, Shuttered Venue Operators Grant and other pandemic era programs.
• FCC, Wireless Microphones, including the 600 MHz transition and the July 13, 2020 deadline.
• Sound & Video Contractor, When Your Client Likes it Loud, Use FBT, on Fontes Pro Sound & Light and the Mirage install in Sacramento.
• Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (1965 to 1969).

Final Note

The shutdown gets remembered as a pause, and for the people inside live production it was a demolition. George Fontes is one of the people who kept a crew together through it, mostly by finding work that did not need an audience, and he is honest about how thin the margins got in the years after.

Mixers, riders, and radio frequencies are how he makes a living. The read on crowds and institutions is what he does with the rest of the night. Play the chapter at 26:35 and decide for yourself which half of the conversation you believe.