Bright lights, Sin City: How a small Montreal LED company lit up the spectacular Las Vegas Sphere
Music is a deeply personal subject. Some swear The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, but others who would consider that claim utter malarkey. Some don’t care about music at all, so they don’t stay abreast of who is currently hot or not, perhaps because they are too busy to kick back and crank tunes.
Fred Jalbout is a member of this largely non-musical tribe. An indefatigably cheerful entrepreneur, he came to Montreal from Lebanon in 1981 to study engineering. He didn’t know a soul in Canada, and neither did his younger brother Bassam, who joined him a few years later to also study engineering prior to the siblings co-founding Saco Technologies Inc. in 1987.
The small, privately held company would emerge as a big-time player in the decidedly un-rock-and-roll world of industrial control panel design and manufacturing. The Jalbout brothers did the panels for the nuclear power plant in Pickering, Ont., and they counted Hydro-Québec and a host of other utility companies across North America among their clients.
Saco’s panels were modular, easy to install and repair, but what gave the panels an edge over the competition was their programmable LED display screen. The screens could display any colour under the sun, and in a range of intensities, too. In the world of 1990s’ industrial control panels, this was revolutionary stuff.
Word got around, so much so that in 1997 the brothers were invited to Dublin to demo a prototype of an LED screen, measuring approximately two feet by two feet, for a famous Irish rock band that non-musical Fred had never heard of.
“I swear to God, and it is too bad for me to say this, but I wasn’t watching U2’s shows,” he said. “But Bassam, he told me, ‘Fred — this is U2 we are talking about — and if we can get U2, can you imagine the opportunity for us?’”
U2 today resides on the Mount Olympus of pop music deities, although lately the band has been hanging out in Las Vegas, appearing as the headline act at the Sphere, a US$2.3-billion, 18,000-seat spherical arena. It is the largest spherical structure on Earth, and a magnetic piece of eye candy in a desert town with no shortage of shiny attractions.
The Sphere’s wraparound, ginormous, fully programmable exterior and interior LED screens can display all manner of imagery, and in unprecedented detail. The moon, a tennis ball, a happy face emoji, the Rockettes, an eyeball, a luxury car commercial and more have shown up on the arena’s exterior — and gone viral on social media. The interior screen is even more awe inspiring, such that a writer for NPR could detect “the wrinkles in Bono’s forehead” during a recent concert.
He would be the same Bono the Jalbout brothers flew overseas to meet 26 years ago for a discussion that heralded the transformation of a Montreal-based industrial control panel manufacturer into a world-renowned, custom designer and maker of LED screens, including the massive ones key to Sphere’s appeal as a groundbreaking entertainment venue.
“We always knew that the LED displays would be among Sphere’s signature features, and that creating the world’s largest LED screen on the exterior, and the highest resolution media plane on the interior, would present unique challenges,” said David Dibble, chief executive of MSG Ventures, a division of Sphere Entertainment Group LLP focused on developing advanced technologies for live entertainment.
“Saco fully embraced the opportunity to push LED technology to new frontiers through Sphere, which is a testament to the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that Fred and Bassam have inspired in Saco since its founding.”
The annals of pop superstardom are lined with tales of unsung talents getting a big break, and making it count. Rod Stewart was a lowly busker with a bluesy voice when he was discovered on the streets of London; Sheryl Crow was belting it out as a backup singer for Michael Jackson, but dreaming of bigger things; Justin Bieber, the pride of Stratford, Ont., was just a kid when someone posted a video of him doing his thing on YouTube, and a star was born.
But Bassam wasn’t envisioning stardom when he purchased a U2 CD for his older brother to help bring him up to musical speed for that Dublin meeting held in a large studio space owned by the band. Following some polite talk with U2’s manager and concert production staff, in walked Bono and lead guitarist Edge to see what all the fuss was about. The Jalbouts programmed their LED prototype to display some cool images.
“As soon as Bono saw the screen, he said, ‘Where have you installed this before?’” Bassam recalled. “And Fred said, “Nowhere, it is brand new.’ And Bono said, ‘I love it. I want to be the first to use the technology.’”
The two-by-two-foot prototype became the basis for a 150-by-50-foot touring screen. It could be programmed to display images galore, but could also be broken down into smaller parts and packed into a single transport truck to ferry between concert stops. The Jalbouts and a crew of Montrealers spent six weeks on-site at an open-air stadium in Las Vegas in advance of the opening date of U2’s 1997 PopMart tour to finish building it.
They worked through the night to escape the desert heat, a nocturnal schedule that included some intrinsic perks. Bono, a night owl, often materialized at 3 a.m. to serenade the workers. The catered food on offer was prepared by five-star chefs, and the screen itself provided some dramatic tension, befitting its rock-and-roll purpose, since it was not fully functional until the night of the first show. As the clock ticked toward curtain time, Bono bumped into the older Jalbout, or so the story goes, and gave him a pep talk.
