Elton John's Piano

I work part-time as a stagehand at NBC, and I had an interesting evening earlier this month during the wrap up of Saturday Night Live. I was assigned to the music load out which is much easier than disassembling scenery or pushing it down to the 8th floor freight elevator and thence down to the subbasement loading dock, a job I have done many times at 30 Rock.

Sir Elton John, Jack Black and Brandi Carlisle were the show's headliners, and it was my work with Elton John's piano that I found the most interesting. He is, of course, if you didn't know it, a knight, an honor bestowed on him in 1998 by the late Queen Elizabeth II, hence the title "Sir". Sir Elton John, who is now pretty much wheelchair bound, passed me on his way out and it all happened so fast that I didn't even have time to tip my hat as he passed by. This wasn't my first load out of musical instruments nor my first load out of a piano but the fact that it was Elton John's Yamaha CFX Concert Grand Piano is what made it a most noteworthy event. It also didn't hurt that I have been an almost lifelong fan of Elton John as well, hearing his music for the first time as a high school junior in the late sixties.

This piano has been all around the world and weighs almost 1100 pounds, just over a half a ton. The rectangular wheeled metal crate it travels in stands up on its long narrow side, with one side removed, and you roll the piano up alongside and perpendicular to it. Three or four stagehands hold the piano up off the stage at the closest near rear corner while the piano technician unbolts the leg and puts a wooden prop in its place to keep the piece from prematurely falling over into the crate. With this temporary prop in place all five of the stagehands helping the technician tip the piano up and into the crate in a flat upright position with one hand pushing up and over, the other keeping the piece from going over too fast. If done properly the Piano will land in a grove in the bottom of the case and not flop back at you. With this accomplished and all hands keeping a hand on the piano, the technician straps the piano into the crate and takes off the rest of the legs and pedals which are stowed away in little shelves within the crate leaving the piano standing up and down on its side and flat in the standing case. You finish this off by putting a strut up against the middle of the flattened piano as an added precaution and then the cover to the crate is latched back on. With the piano firmly encased in its rolling crate, the piano is brought to the edge of the stage and lifted up and off with a forklift. The crate is about 2 feet wide and approximately 7 feet high and about 8 feet long with wheels on the bottom which allows you to move it within the building.

While we were doing this one of the crew asked the piano technician about this piano's various global journeys. The technician talked about a time in Europe when the concert hall was at the end of a cobblestone street and the issues that street surface caused with moving this piano into place. Likewise he told us about the time they had been in an undeveloped region, I believe somewhere in Africa or Asia, where the only road to the concert venue was dirt and they had to lay down sheets of plywood so as to create a pathway and at the same time keep the piano and crate from sinking down into the mud as it had recently rained. With those two stories in mind our job looked relatively easy by comparison.

Steven J. Gulitti
New York City
21 April 2025