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Bandit Lites 40 at 40: Kent Shafferman
Job Title: Retired Lighting Director/Technician
Kent Shafferman, brother of current Bandit employee, Eric "Rock" Shafferman, worked for Bandit Lites for 25 years. He started out as a lighting technician and then moved to crew chief. He was also a lighting operator and lighting director for superstar artists such as Garth Brooks and Alice Cooper among others. Below are a few questions we asked Bandit vice president, Mike Golden to get to know Kent Shafferman a little better.
Q: How did Kent get involved with Bandit Lites?
A: We all lived in the same neighborhood growing up and were in the same classes in school so we were all best friends, troublemakers, all of that stuff. Right out of high school, he went to work for Michael Strickland.
Q: What makes him an important part of Bandit's history?
A: Kent is a very special person. Everybody loved him and everybody looked up to him. He was a great technician and he could do anything. His personality was such that he fit in on every job/tour that he ever did.
Q: What is your favorite memory of working with him at Bandit?
A: Well, honestly my favorite memory starts back in 9th grade. I got tickets to an Alice
Cooper concert and that act was Kent and my favorite so I got him to go with me. Fastforward to 2000. I chased the Alice Cooper account and in 2000, we got it. One of my favorite memories of Kent was calling him up to ask him if he wanted to go out as a tech on Alice which would have been literally almost 23 years after the first concert we had ever seen together, so it was just really fantastic loop. And then he became the LD for Alice Cooper.
Q: Is there anything else we should add?
A: Well, Kent is the reason I am here right now. I was going to college, bored out of my head and he called me up (this was in 1979/80). He was at a bar in Knoxville and told me to get down there right away because Strickland was looking for a guy to do Kenny Rogers. The three Shafferman brothers actually all had an impact on our company because at the time, they almost made up a quarter of the entire company. The three brothers had really different personalities and all played an important role in helping develop and grow this company.
9th December 2008
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