In the late 1970's, the ancestors of the four companies that now own all of your music and television were young, hungry, and awash in cash and blow. In other words, they were motivated and able to try bold new things, without the judgment to wonder if they were good ideas. This smokey crucible produced the enduring cash machine of the outdoor music festival, and money pits like the ELO spaceship and the made to order supergroup.
The definition of a supergroup (often capitalized for no reason I can understand) in those days was a group composed completely or in part of people who were already famous. The desire to create them came from early more or less organic successes like Cream, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
The main problem with supergroups is that they are full of inflated egos who are all convinced that their enormous talent is the only chance the thing has for success. They never last, though a record executive who could put together another Cream would probably be okay if they only did one tour. I think the reasons that any bands ever stay together after they get famous boil down to habit and long familiarity.
I got to witness two of the less stellar attempts at this new sport. The first was the RCO All Stars, which provided the venue for my initial hiring. I was fortunate enough to call SHOWCO on the day after Randy Lawson had failed to show up for work for the next to the last time ever, so the late great Kirby Wyatt** sent me down to the RCO show in town the next day for a job interview.
Actually, Levon Helm was having health problems even then, and the show was cancelled, so my interview happened in Budrock's hotel room. Budrock would go on to become Willy Nelson's long time lighting director, and if you want a mental image of him, use Charlie Daniels. I learned a lot about Budrock over the years, but the first thing I learned was that he could not brush his teeth without gagging. This problem had cropped up suddenly after his divorce and seemed to annoy him greatly, but he had found a workaround. If he lifted one foot off the ground, he was fine. So my first exposure to this new company was watching a man in cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat brush his teeth while standing on one foot.
Anyway, I got hired and the RCO All Stars never did really get much of a tour together, though they tried one or two more times. They put out one album that didn't sell very well, and all sort of drifted away, I think. We were all quite disappointed, because the band was reported to be very good.
The second was the Dudek, Finnegan and Kreuger band, or DFK.* This was a good example of trying to make a supergroup from great musicians who were not famous enough. We all liked them. Their music had a complexity that hipsters thought was necessary at the time, but was poppy enough to be enjoyable. Sort of Genesis meets Peter Frampton, to use an analogy of the day. But they didn't really have a great songwriter or front man, so they were probably doomed from the start.
The also could bring it live, which was the real litmus test for any band. We did a three week trans-Texas tour for them to tune their road chops, which included one of the best shows I ever saw. We played in the Ritz Theater in Corpus Christi, Texas on a hot night in late Spring. The great thing about decaying theaters is that the owners tend not to be overprotective of the upholstery, and just want to fill the seats, so pretty much anything goes. They were serving beer in big plastic cups, and by the end of the night pretty much everyone was drunk. Dave Mason made a surprise appearance to close the set, and he was Hasselhof drunk, but still playing guitar better than 99% of us could even fantasize. The show ended with Dave and Les Dudek lying boot to sneaker on the front of the stage, dueling with guitars and matching each other note for note, while the band kept up like only real professional musicians can do. It was magical. And sweaty.
Alas, DFK was not to be. They made a single album, which sold less than the RCO All Stars, but the band had already split before it was released. Musicians are not the only people with egos, and in this case the rumor was that management disputes made it unhappen. The record company released the album as a one-off, and DFK faded into the CO2 fog of history.
Neither these two, nor countless other experiences can keep the music executive from trying again. I assume it won't be long before we see the American Idol All Stars form a band. Or since technology has virtually eliminated the need for real musical talent, maybe it will be Donald Trump, Nancy Grace, and Dr. Phil, with Lindsey Lohan on drums.
* I know, right? A lot of this depends on your definition of "famous." Also, it was pretty obvious it was doomed since they couldn't even agree on a real name. I'm surprised they were able to agree on alphabetical billing.
** Kirby was the best and most terrifying boss I have ever had, all at the same time. He knew everything, he saw everything, and he had an answer for every problem. On several occasions I stormed into his office intending to quit and left a half hour later feeling lucky to have a job. I have never met his equal.
Showing posts with label SHOWCO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SHOWCO. Show all posts
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Friday, May 11, 2012
Road Stories: Fly like an Eagle
I love stupid jokes. One of my favorites is from a story told by Ron "Tater Salad" White, recounting a memorable flight on a small plane. At one point, after losing an engine, the nervous flyer beside him asks how far they can get on one engine. White replies, "All the way to the scene of the crash."
The month before I started at SHOWCO, Lynyrd Skynyrd took their last plane ride. Among the passengers on the Convair CV-300 that never made it to Baton Rouge that night were two of my future colleagues. DK more or less walked away with abrasions and some chest injuries. He remembered the crash site quite well, from coming to his senses strapped in his seat with one leg pinned back by a shorn tree stump, through the eternity waiting for someone to find them in the woods, with friends dead or dying nearby. He was back to work in a few months, and while he required a couple of stiff drinks to get on a plane, he would get on a plane. I flew with him several times, and he was steady, if a little hyper-attentive.
JO was less fortunate, though his injuries were only moderately worse than DK's.* He remembered nothing before the hospital, and it was a good long time before I saw him at work. Even then he moved like a ghost, and it was apparent to anyone paying attention that his worst scars were not physical. He didn't fly, and didn't particularly like riding in a car. Or much of anything that required interaction. Whatever wounds he carried took longer to heal than our association lasted.
REO Speedwagon had a plane, a Convair CV 240** nicknamed the Flying Tuna. Our crew had a bus, and didn't fly on it as a rule, but occasionally they would bring someone along for a creative discussion, an impromptu morning party, or an extended ass-chewing. On one long overnighter, when we knew that the buses would be very late getting to the next gig, one of the sound guys and I flew with them so that we could get the trucks unloaded before the rest of the crew arrived. As you may know, REO was not my favorite tour, so you can imagine how I felt about being locked in a flying deathtrap with them.
Fortunately for me I was exhausted, and slept from the time the motors started until the plane bounced onto the runway at Where the Hell are we Today Municipal Airport. This was not particularly easy since the heat was out in the cabin, and it was like 4 degrees in there, but roadies are world class sleepers and I had no trouble at all. In fact, I slept on road cases backstage during concerts on more than one occasion.
But I digress. The point is that I slept through the flight, and had to hear this story from my colleague the sound guy.*** About halfway through the flight he noticed fluid trailing back along the wing from the engine on his side. Since we had already made countless tasteless jokes about the similarity of this plane to Lynyrd Skynyrd's, he was understandably concerned, and summoned the woman who served as the hostess on the flight.
After he informed her of the growing stain on the wing, she didn't even bend over to look out the window. She just asked him how wide it was.
"What?"
"How wide is the trail?"
"I don't know, about four inches?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. We don't even have to get nervous until it gets to be this wide," she said, as she held up her hands about a foot apart. True story.
Most people assume that we would prefer to fly than ride the bus, but flying was miserable, even on real airliner with multiple jet engines and a professional crew. A bus or a crew van was like a rolling hotel, and you could claim your own tiny space and not have to pack up every day. More importantly, everyone but the driver was asleep by the time the vehicle rolled out of the parking lot, and could stay asleep until we rolled into the next one. Sometimes there was a Denny's stop for breakfast, but only if the drive was not too long. And waking up for that was optional.
If you were flying, you had to take a rent car back to the hotel, sleep, pack up, drive to the airport in time to catch the sunrise flight, turn in the rent cars, drink two Bloody Mary's on the plane, wait for luggage, get more rent cars, go to the next hotel and fight with the manager because it wasn't time to check in yet, and then get to the gig in time to miss breakfast. The time for "sleep" usually ended up being an hour or two.
As unpleasant as flying is becoming these days, maybe buses will make a comeback. If they do, count me in.
* Both had pretty significant facial lacerations. A plane crash will apparently create a large amount of jagged debris moving at good speed. Or maybe it's more accurate to say it throws a lot of debris in the path of the oncoming victims, who are moving at good speed.
** The CV 300 was a CV 240 with newer engines. So yes, REO's plane was identical to Skynrd's plane, except slightly crappier.
*** Lighting people and sound guys have always had a friendly rivalry about who's most important to a show. But we sincerely hated them for the fact that the got more sleep than us, and generally had less equipment to hump. And unless sound check ran really long, they got to dinner first. This is part of the reason we insisted on calling them "sound guys" instead of "audio engineers," which they preferred.
The month before I started at SHOWCO, Lynyrd Skynyrd took their last plane ride. Among the passengers on the Convair CV-300 that never made it to Baton Rouge that night were two of my future colleagues. DK more or less walked away with abrasions and some chest injuries. He remembered the crash site quite well, from coming to his senses strapped in his seat with one leg pinned back by a shorn tree stump, through the eternity waiting for someone to find them in the woods, with friends dead or dying nearby. He was back to work in a few months, and while he required a couple of stiff drinks to get on a plane, he would get on a plane. I flew with him several times, and he was steady, if a little hyper-attentive.
JO was less fortunate, though his injuries were only moderately worse than DK's.* He remembered nothing before the hospital, and it was a good long time before I saw him at work. Even then he moved like a ghost, and it was apparent to anyone paying attention that his worst scars were not physical. He didn't fly, and didn't particularly like riding in a car. Or much of anything that required interaction. Whatever wounds he carried took longer to heal than our association lasted.
The Convair CV 240. REO's was not nearly as nice as this one.
Image from here.
REO Speedwagon had a plane, a Convair CV 240** nicknamed the Flying Tuna. Our crew had a bus, and didn't fly on it as a rule, but occasionally they would bring someone along for a creative discussion, an impromptu morning party, or an extended ass-chewing. On one long overnighter, when we knew that the buses would be very late getting to the next gig, one of the sound guys and I flew with them so that we could get the trucks unloaded before the rest of the crew arrived. As you may know, REO was not my favorite tour, so you can imagine how I felt about being locked in a flying deathtrap with them.
Fortunately for me I was exhausted, and slept from the time the motors started until the plane bounced onto the runway at Where the Hell are we Today Municipal Airport. This was not particularly easy since the heat was out in the cabin, and it was like 4 degrees in there, but roadies are world class sleepers and I had no trouble at all. In fact, I slept on road cases backstage during concerts on more than one occasion.
But I digress. The point is that I slept through the flight, and had to hear this story from my colleague the sound guy.*** About halfway through the flight he noticed fluid trailing back along the wing from the engine on his side. Since we had already made countless tasteless jokes about the similarity of this plane to Lynyrd Skynyrd's, he was understandably concerned, and summoned the woman who served as the hostess on the flight.
After he informed her of the growing stain on the wing, she didn't even bend over to look out the window. She just asked him how wide it was.
"What?"
"How wide is the trail?"
"I don't know, about four inches?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. We don't even have to get nervous until it gets to be this wide," she said, as she held up her hands about a foot apart. True story.
Most people assume that we would prefer to fly than ride the bus, but flying was miserable, even on real airliner with multiple jet engines and a professional crew. A bus or a crew van was like a rolling hotel, and you could claim your own tiny space and not have to pack up every day. More importantly, everyone but the driver was asleep by the time the vehicle rolled out of the parking lot, and could stay asleep until we rolled into the next one. Sometimes there was a Denny's stop for breakfast, but only if the drive was not too long. And waking up for that was optional.
If you were flying, you had to take a rent car back to the hotel, sleep, pack up, drive to the airport in time to catch the sunrise flight, turn in the rent cars, drink two Bloody Mary's on the plane, wait for luggage, get more rent cars, go to the next hotel and fight with the manager because it wasn't time to check in yet, and then get to the gig in time to miss breakfast. The time for "sleep" usually ended up being an hour or two.
As unpleasant as flying is becoming these days, maybe buses will make a comeback. If they do, count me in.
* Both had pretty significant facial lacerations. A plane crash will apparently create a large amount of jagged debris moving at good speed. Or maybe it's more accurate to say it throws a lot of debris in the path of the oncoming victims, who are moving at good speed.
** The CV 300 was a CV 240 with newer engines. So yes, REO's plane was identical to Skynrd's plane, except slightly crappier.
*** Lighting people and sound guys have always had a friendly rivalry about who's most important to a show. But we sincerely hated them for the fact that the got more sleep than us, and generally had less equipment to hump. And unless sound check ran really long, they got to dinner first. This is part of the reason we insisted on calling them "sound guys" instead of "audio engineers," which they preferred.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Road Stories: The day the music died
About halfway through my road career I worked for a few months on Linda Ronstadt's Born in the USA tour. Whatever you may think of Ronstadt's work, it's hard to overstate her popularity at that time, and her influence on all sorts of music. Besides her undeniable position as the first female rock superstar, she exposed large audiences to the work of people like Warren Zevon and Elvis Costello, and introduced a new generation to the likes of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers. Her refusal to perform within one of the prescribed formats influenced a number of subsequent performers to "play what the music demanded."
Linda also had the most astounding singing voice I have ever heard. There are a number of women who have been able to belt out a song over the years. But whether your favorite is Aretha, Annie Lennox, Mariah Carey (shudder), the little fat one from the Dixie Chicks, or someone else, none of them combine the power and clarity of Linda Ronstadt. Not only was her octave range impressive, she could carry crystal pure notes from a stage whisper to a volume level I still can't believe a human can make, seemingly effortlessly. I would have sworn there were times I could hear her singing over the PA during a concert, as improbable as I know that to be. Linda says Maria Callas was better, but I never heard her, so I couldn't say.
Besides the technical quality of her voice, her interpretation of songs ranged from very good to goose-bump producing. The ballads -- like Blue Bayou and Alison -- would have the house so quiet that her voice seemed to fill your head, though everyone's favorite was undoubtedly her cover of The Eagles' Desperado. I watched the show every night from a spotlight perch about twenty feet up in the lighting rig, and I will admit to wiping a few tears during that song on several occasions.
But it was the rock songs, like It's So Easy, That'll Be the Day, and You're No Good that really showcased her with the band. And it was a good band. Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and guitar, Andrew Gold on keyboards, and (I think) Russ Kunkel on drums and Kenny Edwards playing bass.* Many of these people played together for other musicians, all had played on her album, and they sounded great.
For about the first thirty days, this was one of the best tours I was ever on. Linda and the band were having a great time, feeding off of each other's energy, moving around on stage, improvising -- you know, all the stuff we used to go to concerts to see. They loved it, the crowds loved it, and even the crusty old roadies loved it, though we would only admit that among ourselves.
This is from the tour before mine, and the lighting is terrible.
That's probably why they hired us.
The fun all ended when Peter Asher showed up about a month into the tour. Peter was Linda's record producer, and an influential force in music. He was the Peter of the 60's duo Peter and Gordon, before becoming A&R man for The Beatles' Apple records. He quit Apple to manage James Taylor, and produced some of the biggest albums of the 1970's. He was also a major wiener.
After watching one performance, Peter stamped his little feet, called the band and road management team together for a meeting, and read them the riot act. The gist of his diatribe was that this was not the Linda Ronstadt and Her Band Do Anything They Feel Like Doing Tour, it was the Linda Ronstadt Living in the USA tour, and people came to see the songs performed like they heard them on the records. He told Linda to remain at her microphone stand, ordered the rest of the band to "stay in their lights," and forbade any sort of improvisation or shenanigans.
Needless to say, that ended the good times. The music was still high quality, but the spark was gone. That tour became what most of the rest of them were -- a wagon train trek across the country. Each day ran into the next, all of us doing what had to be done, but looking forward to the day when we wouldn't have to do it again.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was one of the early shots in the annihilation of the concert as an artistic form of expression. Within a year, virtually every performer under major industry management was having their concerts packaged the way Linda's was packaged, namely as a set piece regurgitation of their recorded music. A couple of years after that, tape assist to fill in background tracks became common, which eliminated any ability to vary even the tempo of a song.
Music is a product now, carefully designed, produced, packaged, and marketed. Virtually all creativity and innovation is gone from the mainstream, and we are left with whatever Sony, Viacom, and the rest believe the bulk of us will continue to pay for. I know there are still people out there doing it from the heart, but music industrialization makes it ever harder for an old fart like me to find them. And it's a shame that most people will never have the opportunity to see their favorite musicians cut loose and have some fun.
* It was a long time ago, and for some reason many of my memories of that period are somewhat fuzzy. I put it down to sleep deprivation.
Linda was already having intermittent struggles with her weight by this time,
but she was always down to fighting weight for the start of a tour.
She rocked this Cub Scout uniform, and it was her favorite concert outfit for a while.
Picture from here.
Linda also had the most astounding singing voice I have ever heard. There are a number of women who have been able to belt out a song over the years. But whether your favorite is Aretha, Annie Lennox, Mariah Carey (shudder), the little fat one from the Dixie Chicks, or someone else, none of them combine the power and clarity of Linda Ronstadt. Not only was her octave range impressive, she could carry crystal pure notes from a stage whisper to a volume level I still can't believe a human can make, seemingly effortlessly. I would have sworn there were times I could hear her singing over the PA during a concert, as improbable as I know that to be. Linda says Maria Callas was better, but I never heard her, so I couldn't say.
Besides the technical quality of her voice, her interpretation of songs ranged from very good to goose-bump producing. The ballads -- like Blue Bayou and Alison -- would have the house so quiet that her voice seemed to fill your head, though everyone's favorite was undoubtedly her cover of The Eagles' Desperado. I watched the show every night from a spotlight perch about twenty feet up in the lighting rig, and I will admit to wiping a few tears during that song on several occasions.
But it was the rock songs, like It's So Easy, That'll Be the Day, and You're No Good that really showcased her with the band. And it was a good band. Waddy Wachtel on guitar, Dan Dugmore on pedal steel and guitar, Andrew Gold on keyboards, and (I think) Russ Kunkel on drums and Kenny Edwards playing bass.* Many of these people played together for other musicians, all had played on her album, and they sounded great.
For about the first thirty days, this was one of the best tours I was ever on. Linda and the band were having a great time, feeding off of each other's energy, moving around on stage, improvising -- you know, all the stuff we used to go to concerts to see. They loved it, the crowds loved it, and even the crusty old roadies loved it, though we would only admit that among ourselves.
This is from the tour before mine, and the lighting is terrible.
That's probably why they hired us.
The fun all ended when Peter Asher showed up about a month into the tour. Peter was Linda's record producer, and an influential force in music. He was the Peter of the 60's duo Peter and Gordon, before becoming A&R man for The Beatles' Apple records. He quit Apple to manage James Taylor, and produced some of the biggest albums of the 1970's. He was also a major wiener.
After watching one performance, Peter stamped his little feet, called the band and road management team together for a meeting, and read them the riot act. The gist of his diatribe was that this was not the Linda Ronstadt and Her Band Do Anything They Feel Like Doing Tour, it was the Linda Ronstadt Living in the USA tour, and people came to see the songs performed like they heard them on the records. He told Linda to remain at her microphone stand, ordered the rest of the band to "stay in their lights," and forbade any sort of improvisation or shenanigans.
Needless to say, that ended the good times. The music was still high quality, but the spark was gone. That tour became what most of the rest of them were -- a wagon train trek across the country. Each day ran into the next, all of us doing what had to be done, but looking forward to the day when we wouldn't have to do it again.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was one of the early shots in the annihilation of the concert as an artistic form of expression. Within a year, virtually every performer under major industry management was having their concerts packaged the way Linda's was packaged, namely as a set piece regurgitation of their recorded music. A couple of years after that, tape assist to fill in background tracks became common, which eliminated any ability to vary even the tempo of a song.
Music is a product now, carefully designed, produced, packaged, and marketed. Virtually all creativity and innovation is gone from the mainstream, and we are left with whatever Sony, Viacom, and the rest believe the bulk of us will continue to pay for. I know there are still people out there doing it from the heart, but music industrialization makes it ever harder for an old fart like me to find them. And it's a shame that most people will never have the opportunity to see their favorite musicians cut loose and have some fun.
* It was a long time ago, and for some reason many of my memories of that period are somewhat fuzzy. I put it down to sleep deprivation.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out, Part 2
This is one of the few artifacts to survive the ex-wife's great purge of 1984,
when she threw away anything that meant anything to me, in retaliation
for making her stay behind and sell the house when I got transferred.
So when we left our intrepid hero, I was screwing up the climax of REO Speedwagon's concerts and getting reamed for it every other day. I called the office after almost every show, begging them to ship me the real special effects board. But they were on some sort of cost-cutting kick, and decided that I should let Flash Gordon rewire the controller they had given me, because at least that would shut him up. I was positive this was a bad idea, but was given no choice.
Now, in their defense, the bomb cues were not coming off as planned. In my defense, this wasn't my fault. Each band member was playing to a different beat, the lighting director seemed to have no sense of timing, and the equipment was faulty. I ended up doing this sort of thing for many of the biggest acts of the day, including work for the late Kirby Wyatt, SHOWCO's own lighting director, a man whose fastidious attention to detail and standards of perfection make Tim Gunn look like a Squidbilly by comparison. This tour was the first and only time I ever had a complaint about cues.
The rewiring happened on a day off we had before REO headlined the Rockford Jam, an outdoor show at the Rockford Speedway in Rockford, IL. If you've never been to Rockford, don't sweat it. Life Magazine once said it was "as nearly typical as any city can be." It's probably best known in the rock and roll context as the home of Cheap Trick. The Rockford Jam that year featured Head East ("Never Been Any Reason"), The Cars, REO, and someone I can't remember. Since Bob was traveling on a different bus, there was no time for testing his work, but Flash wasn't concerned.
The Rockford Jam was remarkable, mostly for its lack of planning and nightmare logistics. Whoever produced this piece of shit knew nothing about outdoor shows. We had no alternate way in, so we sat in traffic for almost two hours before arriving backstage, where there was no place to park the trucks or buses. We rolled or carried the equipment piece by piece through the mud, and by the time we got the gear onstage and plugged in, it was time for the first act to start. There were no walkways cordoned off in the crowd, so every time one of us needed to go from the stage to the lighting and sound consoles at the center of the infield, we were required to walk over the crowd, trying not to step on the people, or their growing collection of fluids and other leavings. This also meant we had to run all of our cables over or around people*, and hope that no one unplugged anything. The whole day was a come-from-behind clusterfuck of epic proportions.
To make matters worse, the music was horrible. You don't take a job like this if you don't love live music, but Holy Hell this was bad. I knew by then that REO would be bad, but I assumed some of the other groups would make up for it. The first band, whose name escapes me, reminded me of the band that played my junior high dances. Head East sounded like they had all been born deaf. Worst of all, I had really been looking forward to seeing The Cars, but they were bored, wasted, off-key, and thoroughly unimpressive. Eventually, it was time for the main event.
Unfortunately, Flash Gordon wasn't even smart enough to realize that a fog curtain would be worse than useless outdoors, so I got to drag all of that crap through the mud, knowing that we would be lucky if any fog made it to the stage at all. And also knowing that it would put the band in a foul mood once again. I finally got the pyrotechnics prepped during what should have been dinner, plugged in my newly rewired pyro box, and waited for my cue.
This is the part where I have to teach you more than you ever wanted to know about concert pyrotechnics. A flashpot is generally some sort of metal container, wired with an electrical cord. The ones that are sold commercially are a couple of inches on a side, and are recommended to use up to a half teaspoon of flash powder. We used roasting pans and washtubs, and loaded between a half an ounce and a quarter pound of powder in each. An electric match or squib would be connected to the terminals on the pan, and placed in contact with the powder. When current is applied to the circuit, that's rock and roll.
Image from here.
There are any number of ways to close the circuit, from foot switches to plungers to just touching bare wires to a battery. Our board used 12 volts direct current generated by a 110 volt transformer, and had military-grade safety switches, like the setup shown in the professional grade artwork below.
Artists misconception: this isn't even right. There were
twelve switches, a push button for each, and one key
to arm the whole system. Just work with me on this.
Each flashpot had it's own circuit, with an LED, a safety switch, and a little red button. When the key was turned, the LED's for correctly wired circuits would glow green. When the rocker cover was raised and the switch was thrown, the circuit was armed, and the light changed to red. After that, pushing the button would set off the explosion. Or at least that was the plan.
Mis-wired circuits didn't light, and I always liked to turn the key a minute or two early, so that I would have time to run around and fix any connections that may have come loose during the show. This time when I turned the key, one of the pots exploded. Hmm, that was weird. The band members turned to me as one, and gave me a look that was, by now, all too familiar. All the lights were green except for the one that had just gone off, so I waited. A half minute later, when I threw the first switch to arm the first flashpot, the one at the front right corner of the stage went off. This was right in the middle of Gary Richrath's big guitar solo, so Kevin Cronin just happened to be dancing around on the right front corner of the stage, and the explosion was about three feet from him. If I close my eyes I can still see the fury in his face, his bro-fro blowing in the breeze from the big wind machines onstage, as he dropped any pretense of being involved in the music and pointed at me in the expression that universally means, "You are dead!" He remembered where he was after a second or two, and turned back to the crowd.
Flash was thoroughly panicked by now, and was yelling into the headsets, "Turn it off! Turn it off!" I flipped down the rocker switches to disarm the rest of the pots, and another bomb went off. When I turned off the key, one of the washtubs exploded. By now, the band barely knew where they were in the song, and everyone backstage was looking at me. The real bomb cues were approaching, and the best way to disarm one is to set it off, so in the end I just randomly turned things on and flipped switches until all of the remaining pots were expended. A couple were even on the beat. To this day, I can't tell you what the problem was, but it seemed like everything I touched was connected directly to some common firing circuit.
As soon as the show was over,** Kevin Cronin stormed over and gave me a cursing such as I have never heard. And I've worked retail. He cursed me, my company, my ancestry, and pretty much anything else he could think of, for probably two minutes. He was actually clenching his fists and stomping his little feet, he was so angry. It was like Richard Simmons impersonating Yosemite Sam. I may not have helped when I responded to this tirade with a cheerful-sounding, "Thanks for your feedback!" as he walked away. He turned and gave me another round, and I think he would have jumped on me if I hadn't been about twice his size.
I assumed I was fired, which was going to be the only thing that saved the day. Unfortunately, once people calmed down and things were explained, the band sent one of their minions to apologize for Kevin's outburst, and I think they even sent me a beer. Of course, not one of them was man enough to come himself, and Kevin always managed to be somewhere other than where I was after that.
By now, even the shop was convinced, and they shipped out my effects board the next day. One of our sound guys rewired the control box to bypass all of the safety circuits and interlocks to get us through the next couple of shows. I threw it in the dumpster behind whatever arena we were playing when the real board arrived.
I stayed on the tour for a few more weeks, when I was saved by Paul McCartney's tour to Japan. He was scheduled to use every special effect we owned, including bubble machines, so I was needed back in Dallas to get all that together and put it on a boat to Japan. That ended up being a fiasco of a different color, but that's a story for another time.
I'm only now getting to the point where I'm able to listen to a few REO songs all the way through. The onstage sound mixer for the tour, who has remained a good friend of mine, still can't make it past the opening synthesizer blast from "Ridin' the Storm Out" without suffering a minor panic attack.
* Typically, the control cables were run along the edges of arena floors, or along the side of the cordoned walkways for outdoor shows. This also tended to be the most convenient place for people who overindulged, or maybe suffered from hairballs, to relieve themselves of their gustatory burdens. You did not want to be the person whose job it was to roll up these cables at the end of the night, especially for a band like REO. And you could find the box those cables traveled in by smell alone.
** And I mean as soon as the show was over. He didn't even leave the stage after the song. The people in the front row were treated to an encore they did not expect.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Road Stories: Ridin' the storm out
So I've really been avoiding telling this story, but after Johnny Virgil wrote about taking his wife to see REO Speedwagon, I started having flashbacks of the tour that was largely responsible for me leaving the road. I still remember standing backstage in some arena in California, talking to the future ex on the phone, with Kevin Cronin in the background singing, "Golden country, your face is so red-uh," and hearing myself say, "I have GOT to find something different to do for a living."
REO had already been around for what seemed like forever when the 9 Lives tour kicked off. During my high school years, they rolled through town every three months or so, with Deep Purple, BTO, or Brownsville Station. One would headline a tour, and one of the others would open for them. When I heard that we had landed them as a client, and that I would be doing special effects for the tour, I discovered that I was drawing a blank on their music, so I asked one of the guys in the shop what songs they did. He said, "Oh, you know REO. They do ... uh ... umm ... let's go ask Garvey." I got exactly the same reaction from about a dozen other people over the next couple of days.* Finally, someone came up with Ridin' the Storm Out, which broke the memory block for all of us, and everyone started blurting out the names of REO songs: Golden Country, Roll With the Changes, Keep on Loving You, 157 Riverside Avenue, etc. I felt better. I knew and liked all of those songs, and midwestern rockers generally knew how to throw a tour.
The good feeling started to change as soon as we got to rehearsal. REO was nearing the height of their popularity, but they were also coming apart as a group. They suffered from the occupational hazard of terminal self-importance, facilitated by sycophants and douchebags, and intensified by impressive amounts of chemicals -- even by rock and roll standards. There were at least three gigantic egos onstage, and several more in the wings.
Gary Richrath, the lead guitarist, was undoubtedly the most talented, but he was fighting some pretty serious demons. We calculated that he was probably losing money while on the road. He tended to huff when he played (think Lamaze breathing), and by the end of the night there was a white crust encasing his microphone cover. I'm sure we could have scraped that off and gotten quite a buzz, but no one ever got that desperate. At least, not that I know of.
Kevin Cronin, the lead singer, was sure that he was the most talented, and suffered from major Napoleon syndrome. He insisted on playing guitar when he wasn't too busy prancing around in his little turquoise spandex pants, despite the fact that it sounded like someone sawing a guitar in half with a hacksaw. The sound man kept his guitar turned off in the house, so the audience couldn't really hear it, but it was loud and proud onstage, and contributed mightily to the cacophony that we endured nightly. Kevin was an amateur pharmacologist, and partially as a result, his mood swings were dramatic. One day we ran up on him sitting in the floor of a hotel lobby, pulling laundry from one bag and putting it in another, muttering to himself. We just kept walking.
The other members of the band were generally no more egotistical than your average rock star, but the environment was so toxic that they were always being pulled into one dispute or another. The road managers liked to play the band members off of each other to get whatever they wanted. The result was band members who barely spoke to each other, and a road staff that was not exactly the elite of the business. "Motor," their drum roadie was good, although he got a little weird when he went on the all-fruit diet. Most of the rest ... not so much. Oh, and the band sounded like crap most every night.
I forget exactly what effects I had to manage for the tour, but it wasn't a whole lot by my standards. We've already talked about the Spinal Tap quality fog curtain that opened the show. The other major effect was a series of fiery explosions during the last song, Ridin' the Storm Out. One of the reasons I was on the tour was that we had recently invented some giant flashpots built from #2 washtubs, and I was the only one at the time who knew how to load them, or that could be trusted not to blow up something important. We had developed them for use in the Superdome, and they created a flash and concussion in a regular arena that was hard to believe. Or justify. We had four of these that exploded together at the climax of the song (sort of a Star Wars Deathstar effect), and followed eight smaller explosions that built up to it.
The effect was really rather cool, except for two problems. The first had to do with my control board. We had two dedicated special effects boards, but one was in the shop for repairs, and the other was out with Nazareth, or Genesis or somebody. So the biggest burnout in the electronics shop soldered together a little box specifically for the first leg of this tour, until we could get back to Dallas and pick up the other board. The box was crap, and for various, mostly boring reasons, it tended to take half a beat between the time I pushed the button and the time the explosion happened. But only sometimes. While this would probably be fine in a mining operation, it was definitely not close enough for rock and roll. Bob was constantly trying to convince me that he could fix it "in a matter of minutes."
The other problem was that Bob wanted the sound of the explosion, not the flash, to match the music. Like lightning and thunder, the boomy part tends to lag behind the flashy part, especially if you are sitting a few hundred feet away. So he would call the cue a split second before the beat. I don't think he realized that the timing would be different at different points in the hall. I don't think Bob took a lot of science in school.
You know who wasn't sitting a few hundred feet away? The band. From their point of view, the bombs were going off early. Or late. Or both. And since they were already pissed about the fog curtain, and each other, and their lives, and everything else, and since this particular effect closed the show, it was the last thing they had a chance to be pissed about. So one or another of them would come over and yell at me and call me names every couple of nights. They even threatened to replace me a couple of times. I don't think they liked it when I begged them to go through with it.
So after about a month of this, we arrived at the day that would bring the worst concert I have ever seen, and convince me once and for all that this would not be my life's work. But that will have to wait for Part 2. This post is already getting very long, and I'm starting to feel like there are spiders on me. I'm going to need a whiskey float and a couple of hours of Bob Dylan before I can continue.
Updated: Part 2 is finished.
* I swear to Baby Jesus that this part is true. I never saw anything like it. We were all really familiar with the band. It was just that no one could come up with a song. And these people knew music better than any hipster you ever met.
** I grew up watching way too many westerns and WW II movies, and reading about people like Don Quixote and Robin Hood.
REO had already been around for what seemed like forever when the 9 Lives tour kicked off. During my high school years, they rolled through town every three months or so, with Deep Purple, BTO, or Brownsville Station. One would headline a tour, and one of the others would open for them. When I heard that we had landed them as a client, and that I would be doing special effects for the tour, I discovered that I was drawing a blank on their music, so I asked one of the guys in the shop what songs they did. He said, "Oh, you know REO. They do ... uh ... umm ... let's go ask Garvey." I got exactly the same reaction from about a dozen other people over the next couple of days.* Finally, someone came up with Ridin' the Storm Out, which broke the memory block for all of us, and everyone started blurting out the names of REO songs: Golden Country, Roll With the Changes, Keep on Loving You, 157 Riverside Avenue, etc. I felt better. I knew and liked all of those songs, and midwestern rockers generally knew how to throw a tour.
The good feeling started to change as soon as we got to rehearsal. REO was nearing the height of their popularity, but they were also coming apart as a group. They suffered from the occupational hazard of terminal self-importance, facilitated by sycophants and douchebags, and intensified by impressive amounts of chemicals -- even by rock and roll standards. There were at least three gigantic egos onstage, and several more in the wings.
Gary Richrath, the lead guitarist, was undoubtedly the most talented, but he was fighting some pretty serious demons. We calculated that he was probably losing money while on the road. He tended to huff when he played (think Lamaze breathing), and by the end of the night there was a white crust encasing his microphone cover. I'm sure we could have scraped that off and gotten quite a buzz, but no one ever got that desperate. At least, not that I know of.
Kevin Cronin, the lead singer, was sure that he was the most talented, and suffered from major Napoleon syndrome. He insisted on playing guitar when he wasn't too busy prancing around in his little turquoise spandex pants, despite the fact that it sounded like someone sawing a guitar in half with a hacksaw. The sound man kept his guitar turned off in the house, so the audience couldn't really hear it, but it was loud and proud onstage, and contributed mightily to the cacophony that we endured nightly. Kevin was an amateur pharmacologist, and partially as a result, his mood swings were dramatic. One day we ran up on him sitting in the floor of a hotel lobby, pulling laundry from one bag and putting it in another, muttering to himself. We just kept walking.
The other members of the band were generally no more egotistical than your average rock star, but the environment was so toxic that they were always being pulled into one dispute or another. The road managers liked to play the band members off of each other to get whatever they wanted. The result was band members who barely spoke to each other, and a road staff that was not exactly the elite of the business. "Motor," their drum roadie was good, although he got a little weird when he went on the all-fruit diet. Most of the rest ... not so much. Oh, and the band sounded like crap most every night.
Without mentioning names, the biggest pain in my particular ass was Bob "Flash" Gordon, the lighting director. I will spare you my critique of his lighting style, which wasn't really my biggest problem with him. The real issue was that he was sure he knew everything important, and most of everything else. I've worked successfully with a lot of people like him since -- mostly Army generals -- but I was younger then, and I considered his existence and success a personal affront to all that was fair and decent.** I hated him a lot.
I forget exactly what effects I had to manage for the tour, but it wasn't a whole lot by my standards. We've already talked about the Spinal Tap quality fog curtain that opened the show. The other major effect was a series of fiery explosions during the last song, Ridin' the Storm Out. One of the reasons I was on the tour was that we had recently invented some giant flashpots built from #2 washtubs, and I was the only one at the time who knew how to load them, or that could be trusted not to blow up something important. We had developed them for use in the Superdome, and they created a flash and concussion in a regular arena that was hard to believe. Or justify. We had four of these that exploded together at the climax of the song (sort of a Star Wars Deathstar effect), and followed eight smaller explosions that built up to it.
The effect was really rather cool, except for two problems. The first had to do with my control board. We had two dedicated special effects boards, but one was in the shop for repairs, and the other was out with Nazareth, or Genesis or somebody. So the biggest burnout in the electronics shop soldered together a little box specifically for the first leg of this tour, until we could get back to Dallas and pick up the other board. The box was crap, and for various, mostly boring reasons, it tended to take half a beat between the time I pushed the button and the time the explosion happened. But only sometimes. While this would probably be fine in a mining operation, it was definitely not close enough for rock and roll. Bob was constantly trying to convince me that he could fix it "in a matter of minutes."
The other problem was that Bob wanted the sound of the explosion, not the flash, to match the music. Like lightning and thunder, the boomy part tends to lag behind the flashy part, especially if you are sitting a few hundred feet away. So he would call the cue a split second before the beat. I don't think he realized that the timing would be different at different points in the hall. I don't think Bob took a lot of science in school.
So after about a month of this, we arrived at the day that would bring the worst concert I have ever seen, and convince me once and for all that this would not be my life's work. But that will have to wait for Part 2. This post is already getting very long, and I'm starting to feel like there are spiders on me. I'm going to need a whiskey float and a couple of hours of Bob Dylan before I can continue.
Updated: Part 2 is finished.
* I swear to Baby Jesus that this part is true. I never saw anything like it. We were all really familiar with the band. It was just that no one could come up with a song. And these people knew music better than any hipster you ever met.
** I grew up watching way too many westerns and WW II movies, and reading about people like Don Quixote and Robin Hood.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Passing on the Road: Ian Knight
In general, it seems that road dogs have a shorter than average lifespan. No surprise, really. That's part of what we signed up for all those years ago. Live fast, die young, I forget the rest. As Mickey Mantle is reputed to have said, if I had known I was going to live to be this old, I might have taken better care of myself.
Late last week we learned that Ian (Iggy*) Knight had passed away in London. Ian was never really a friend of mine, but we all knew him. He was a pioneer in staging and special effects design for concerts, and some of his effects inspired pervasive and lasting technology. He is also the inspiration for one of the most important lessons I ever learned about design.
Before you get the impression that Ian was some sort of intense, towering visionary, I'd better stick in a picture. This is Ian backstage at a Led Zeppelin show, striking a welding rod against a piece of railroad track to simulate lightning. He is wearing laser safety glasses, which of course offered zero protection against the welder.
Also, almost every time I saw Ian he was carrying a rum and coke, probably on the assumption that it was after 5:00 in London. I heard that he switched to screwdrivers for a while after his doctor told him that his drinking was killing him. He apparently decided that the cola was the problem, and that orange juice would set him right. I assume he eventually cut back or stopped drinking, or he never would have lived this long.
Ian is probably best known for some of the effects he designed for Led Zeppelin, but I knew him for the Genesis mirrors. If you were fortunate enough to see Genesis in the late 70's or early 80's, you saw the mirrors. Mylar was only just then becoming commercially available, and Ian designed six octagonal mylar mirrors, each eight feet across, able to rotate 360 degrees on two axes, and computer controlled. They were designed to hang over the stage, and we bounced every type of laser, spotlight, floor light, side light and flashlight we could find off of the things.
Here's where the design lesson comes in. Mylar was important because it was lightweight, so the mirrors could be hung in the lighting rig, turned with small drill motors and transported easily. The problem was that they were built in Holland, where at the time there was virtually no aluminum, and therefore practically no one who knew how to weld it. So they built the mirror frames out of tubular cast iron, which meant the motors had to be huge, which meant more power, etc. When it was all said and done, each mirror unit weighed in at 450 lbs. That meant extra bracing, extra rigging, extra power, and an extra truck to carry it all. As we used to say, from the people who brought you wooden shoes...
The mirrors taught me that one little detail can have tremendous and lasting ramifications. We hauled those things around for years. It drove us all crazy, but Ian took it all in stride. Ian took a lot in stride. I doubt he ever knew how many of us learned from him.
*All men from England named Ian were called "Iggy" in those days. I think it was a law.
Late last week we learned that Ian (Iggy*) Knight had passed away in London. Ian was never really a friend of mine, but we all knew him. He was a pioneer in staging and special effects design for concerts, and some of his effects inspired pervasive and lasting technology. He is also the inspiration for one of the most important lessons I ever learned about design.
Before you get the impression that Ian was some sort of intense, towering visionary, I'd better stick in a picture. This is Ian backstage at a Led Zeppelin show, striking a welding rod against a piece of railroad track to simulate lightning. He is wearing laser safety glasses, which of course offered zero protection against the welder.
If you don't stop it, you really will go blind.
Photo courtesy of Steve Jander
Also, almost every time I saw Ian he was carrying a rum and coke, probably on the assumption that it was after 5:00 in London. I heard that he switched to screwdrivers for a while after his doctor told him that his drinking was killing him. He apparently decided that the cola was the problem, and that orange juice would set him right. I assume he eventually cut back or stopped drinking, or he never would have lived this long.
Ian is probably best known for some of the effects he designed for Led Zeppelin, but I knew him for the Genesis mirrors. If you were fortunate enough to see Genesis in the late 70's or early 80's, you saw the mirrors. Mylar was only just then becoming commercially available, and Ian designed six octagonal mylar mirrors, each eight feet across, able to rotate 360 degrees on two axes, and computer controlled. They were designed to hang over the stage, and we bounced every type of laser, spotlight, floor light, side light and flashlight we could find off of the things.
Photo from here
Here's where the design lesson comes in. Mylar was important because it was lightweight, so the mirrors could be hung in the lighting rig, turned with small drill motors and transported easily. The problem was that they were built in Holland, where at the time there was virtually no aluminum, and therefore practically no one who knew how to weld it. So they built the mirror frames out of tubular cast iron, which meant the motors had to be huge, which meant more power, etc. When it was all said and done, each mirror unit weighed in at 450 lbs. That meant extra bracing, extra rigging, extra power, and an extra truck to carry it all. As we used to say, from the people who brought you wooden shoes...
The mirrors taught me that one little detail can have tremendous and lasting ramifications. We hauled those things around for years. It drove us all crazy, but Ian took it all in stride. Ian took a lot in stride. I doubt he ever knew how many of us learned from him.
*All men from England named Ian were called "Iggy" in those days. I think it was a law.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Road Stories 3: Band of Brothers (and a Few Sisters)
If you have ever been part of a (good) team under stress, you have experienced some of the bonding (designated by Corporate weinies everywhere as "team-building") that can happen as a consequence of the experience. The ultimate case of this seems to be soldiers in combat, who will literally give up their lives for their buddies. The roadie experience was nowhere near as dangerous or intense as combat, but it beat the hell out of playing in a golf scramble or climbing a wall for building trust and mutual respect.
If you want to teach people to get along at work, jam between eight and fourteen of them into a van or bus, deprive them of sleep and basic comforts, and put them to work supervising a different set of strangers* every day from the crack of dawn to the wee hours. Keep it up for a couple of months, and then repeat the exercise with a different -- but probably overlapping -- group. And make sure it's an endeavor that cannot fail on any single day without potentially catastrophic financial impact and possible loss of life.**
The CliffsNotes version of this experience is to stick two people in a crew van and make them drive it across the country. This was often done when tours started on one coast or the other, and allowed management to avoid paying a whole crew to sit and do nothing but ride for two days or so. The speed limit was 55 mph in those days, and for several reasons which we will not discuss at this point we chose not to speed. Also, that was about as fast as the vans would go.
Enter Kenny. He and I were assigned to drive a crew van from Dallas to San Francisco. It is hard to imagine someone more different from me, who is still enough like me that we would expect to be able to relate. After all, we were two white American kids who loved rock and roll. How different could we be?
I was born and raised in Arkansas. Kenny was from New York City (I forget which borough). Before going on the road, his understanding of American geography was New York, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, some other stuff and then California. I thought the most relaxing thing in the world was taking off to the woods alone with a backpack. Kenny thought Central Park was a waste of space, and he was afraid of squirrels. He saw them as rats with furry tails.
My favorite music was Joe Cocker, James Taylor, Little Feat and Clapton. Kenny listened to the Kinks, Ramones and some Sabbath when he felt "poppy." His Facebook profile picture right now is a shot of him with Glenn Beck. My politics are somewhat unconventional, but suffice it to say I have no use for Glenn Beck, except possibly as some sort of filler material. In short, I thought Kenny was an asshole of epic proportions, and he thought less of me. So the prospect of being locked in a van with him for the better part of two days did not exactly set me all atwitter.
We left Dallas a little after lunch, so that we would be sure to hit El Paso when the Tony Lama factory outlet store was open. (I think Kenny bought a pair of ostrich boots. I didn't find anything I liked.) The first half day or so passed fairly quietly, with one of us driving and the other trying to sleep. As the desert unwound before us and the music choices got more aggressive, we started to talk. I couldn't really tell you what the conversation was about, just that it progressed like most arguments. Sniping gives way to bitching, bitching turns to accusation, the exchange grows more heated, and somewhere in there, if you're lucky and there is no way to escape, someone starts listening and some sort of understanding is reached.
By the time we were pulled over by Immigration south of Los Angeles, we were friends. I mean, it's not like I'm going to gay marry Kenny. In fact, I haven't really talked to him in many years. But I did learn to respect him as a full blown actual person with as much right to listen to crappy music and have stupid opinions as I have. I am confident that if we ever worked together again we would be respectful and effective, driving results, doing more with less, making it happen, etc.
I learned important lessons and acquired an impressive set of enduring skills during my three years on the road. For example, I can coil an extension cord better than you. Seriously, I can. Deal with it. But none have been more useful to me in my personal and professional life than learning how to understand and respect the people with whom I work, while encouraging them to do their best. After you've slept fourteen in a bus, sharing an office is really not that hard.
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* The traveling crew usually formed about one-fourth or less of the labor required to set up a show. The rest were local stagehands, employed for the day, who had probably never seen this equipment before. They ranged from college freshman who were way too excited to be there to crusty and belligerent old union hands who were looking for maximum pay for minimum work. Most were hard-working, semi-professional*** people who did their very best to help and follow our instructions.
** While it wasn't combat or crab-fishing dangerous, people died doing this, either from falling or being crushed, or more indirect causes. We also took the risks to the audience very seriously, both from technical failures and the deaths that occurred more than once from poor crowd control.
** Not that they were at all unprofessional. It's just that this is not a full time job for most of the people who do it. They are usually cops or carpenters or wannabe somethings who work for extra cash.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Road Stories 2: Asleep at the Wheel.
I've written before about my life as a roadie back in the day, but I don't think it's possible to communicate the level of physical exhaustion that went with that job. Our work days averaged between 16 and 20 hours, six or seven days a week. And we weren't exactly living on protein shakes and Red Bull. A breakfast of beer and doughnuts -- usually before an 8:30 am stage call -- was pretty standard, chased with any number of "supplements" to get the day going. The day might end as late as 3:30 or 4:00 the next morning, followed by showers and often breakfast at Denny's before hitting the road to do it all again. It was not unusual to do 29 shows in 29 different cities in a 31 day month, and I was on the road for as long as three months at a time. If we got a day off, it was because the next city was too far to get the equipment to overnight.
But as hard as it was to do the work, it was the driving that made it really exhausting. And dangerous. By the time I left the road in 1980, virtually everyone was riding tour buses with professional drivers, but when I started we were driving (and living in) converted cube vans that the boys in the wood shop had fixed up with couches and bunks and little reading lamps. After a few tours with six or eight guys living in them, they all smelled like smoke and stale beer and ass. And that was when we started the tour. They drove like shit and had to be filled up with gas about every three hours, but we didn't really care that much.
This is about 10 years newer than our crew vans, but it's pretty much the same vehicle. Add six bunks, a couple of couches, ice chests, ashtrays and six or eight smelly hippies and you've got yourself a party. They added a mobile home style door to the back for easy access, and to ensure that we got pulled over by Immigration at every opportunity.
So after working what seemed like our zillionth 18 hour day in a row, all of us would pile in the van and someone would have to drive while everyone else got some sleep. That someone was often me, because I figured out early on that whoever drove first was not expected to drive very long, and got uninterrupted sleep thereafter. I also usually loaded the last truck, so I was typically freshly showered and as awake as I was going to get.
We were on a George Benson tour in Vancouver (or maybe Linda Ronstadt, I really can't remember anymore), when the engine in our van burned up. The transportation arm of the company, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it would be better to ship the van home to Dallas on a train than to spend 2000 of those crazy Canadian dollars to get it fixed. In the meantime, we would carry on the tour in two rental cars, which have most of the disadvantages of the vans and no place to sleep. So we became even more exhausted*, which up to that point I would not have believed to be possible.
My wife's favorite road story happened about a week later as we were driving out of Toronto on our way to Ottawa. I was too tired to drive first, so I took shotgun in the rent car and told whoever was at the wheel to wake me up when they got tired**. I fell asleep about ten seconds later.
Some time after that, I remember opening my eyes and trying to figure out where I was. We were on a two-lane road in the middle of nowhere, it was pitch black outside and the car was just entering a fairly significant left hand curve in the road. But something wasn't right with our trajectory. We were definitely not going to make it through that curve with this approach. I recall distinctly thinking, "Who's driving this thing?" That thought was followed a split second later with, "Oh my GOD IT'S ME!!!"
Now I was awake. Gravel flew as I wrestled the car off the shoulder and through the curve. My heart was pounding and my eyes were as big as ... well, as big as my eyes get. Pants may or may not have needed changing. I drove for another ten minutes or so, until I found a safe place to change drivers and wake up the one guy who had slept through the whole thing.
Apparently, we had stopped and swapped drivers and I had never woken up. The first guy swore that I had been driving for ten or fifteen minutes down that dark country road in Canada. He had already been fast asleep when I woke up. I had a history of sleep walking as a kid, and was apparently capable of performing fairly complex tasks and carrying on simple conversations, but nothing even approaching driving a car.
I was too shaken up to drive for several weeks after that. Luckily, the powers that be decided a few days later that the late/drop charges on the rental cars were getting out of hand***, and we flew the rest of the tour. This sounds better, but it's actually worse, because there are cars and hotels and airports and too much time is wasted getting from one to the other.
We all fell asleep on the sidewalk at an airport somewhere in California a couple of weeks later, waiting for the guy who had gone to fetch the rent car. Later that same day I asked someone during our lunch break how long we had before we went back to work. He told me 11 minutes. I told him to wake me up in 9 minutes and went outside for a nap on the grass. It was the best 9 minute nap ever.
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* We were also not keen on the idea of being guests of a foreign government for an extended stay, so the supplements were always left at the border. Except for Paul McCartney, but that's another story.
** This is telling of just how tired we were, since it was customary for someone to stay awake and co-pilot in the wee hours of the morning to help keep the driver awake.
*** We were supposed to return the rental cars in Vancouver the day after we picked them up. It was almost two weeks before anyone thought to call Hertz to find out what it was going to cost us to drop them on the other end of the country two weeks later.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Road Stories
Between the ongoing t-shirt discussion on the old roadies mailing list and This is Spinal Tap showing on Palladia last night, I have old road stories bubbling around in my head, so I might as well tell one or two. Actually, I was going to go another way with this, but let's start with the movie.
Spinal Tap is undoubtedly the best movie ever made about the rock monsters of the sixties and seventies. Besides being funny enough to make things shoot out of one's nose, it is a more accurate depiction of the people and the life than most documentaries* I have seen. Every stupid thing that happens in that movie reminds me of a (more or less) true story from the day, and every slimy or bitchy or otherwise ridiculous person in there brings to mind someone that I knew. And don't even get me started on the hair.
I remember a night, I think with Rufus (with special guest Chaka Khan!) and the Brothers Johnson in Kiel Auditorium (may it rest in piece) in St. Louis, where the promoter kept running back and forth to the ticket office to get enough money to pay us enough that we would turn on the lights and the show would go on. I'm pretty sure that was also the show where they served Manischewitz Cream Red and Cream White to the band to satisfy the contract requirement for red and white wine in the dressing room. Chaka Khan didn't show up. But she was like seven months pregnant, so that happened a lot.
REO Speedwagon trashed their dressing room one time because they didn't have the right color M&M's. The Kiss roadies stuck a girl to the wall of the Pontiac Sheraton with gaffers tape** a few days before we came through. Speaking of REO, they didn't exactly have lighted electric uteri to walk out of, but they did have the worst opening effect I've ever seen in person. Bob "Flash" Gordon, their lighting designer, thought it would be really cool if they started the show by walking through a curtain of dry ice fog. It wasn't actually a terrible idea. CO2 fog is considerably heavier than air, so if you can get enough of it way up in the air somehow it will fall rapidly and run over the front of the stage. The problem is getting the fog 20 feet up in the air and getting it to come out in any sort of even curtain, given that it is heavier than air and the fog machines weren't pressurized***. The only good solution would have been to put the fog machines on the lighting rig, but since they weighed almost 500 lbs. each, pulled enough power to light a small house, and had to be loaded with dry ice right before the show, that was a non-starter. I won't bother you with the details, but it usually ended up looking like five or six randomly placed fire extinguishers shooting at the stage. The band threw a fit about it almost every night. You would have thought that after thirty shows or so they would have figured out it was never going to work, but they were pretty much impervious to learning.
Image from here
Flash Gordon was also responsible for the worst day of my life -- at least until my first marriage -- but that's a another story. Oh, good. One of the elder alumni just stopped the t-shirt conversation with a 36-point typeface rant. It had been going on for over a week and was really starting to get on my nerves. So, any good concert memories out there?
______________________________
* Or "rockumentaries", if you will.
** Think of black, extra-sticky duct tape. Show business runs on it.
*** Our fog machines were custom built and famous for the time. Two of them could produce enough fog to asphyxiate Lionel Ritchie at the piano, though I am not at liberty to say how I know that.
Spinal Tap is undoubtedly the best movie ever made about the rock monsters of the sixties and seventies. Besides being funny enough to make things shoot out of one's nose, it is a more accurate depiction of the people and the life than most documentaries* I have seen. Every stupid thing that happens in that movie reminds me of a (more or less) true story from the day, and every slimy or bitchy or otherwise ridiculous person in there brings to mind someone that I knew. And don't even get me started on the hair.
I remember a night, I think with Rufus (with special guest Chaka Khan!) and the Brothers Johnson in Kiel Auditorium (may it rest in piece) in St. Louis, where the promoter kept running back and forth to the ticket office to get enough money to pay us enough that we would turn on the lights and the show would go on. I'm pretty sure that was also the show where they served Manischewitz Cream Red and Cream White to the band to satisfy the contract requirement for red and white wine in the dressing room. Chaka Khan didn't show up. But she was like seven months pregnant, so that happened a lot.
REO Speedwagon trashed their dressing room one time because they didn't have the right color M&M's. The Kiss roadies stuck a girl to the wall of the Pontiac Sheraton with gaffers tape** a few days before we came through. Speaking of REO, they didn't exactly have lighted electric uteri to walk out of, but they did have the worst opening effect I've ever seen in person. Bob "Flash" Gordon, their lighting designer, thought it would be really cool if they started the show by walking through a curtain of dry ice fog. It wasn't actually a terrible idea. CO2 fog is considerably heavier than air, so if you can get enough of it way up in the air somehow it will fall rapidly and run over the front of the stage. The problem is getting the fog 20 feet up in the air and getting it to come out in any sort of even curtain, given that it is heavier than air and the fog machines weren't pressurized***. The only good solution would have been to put the fog machines on the lighting rig, but since they weighed almost 500 lbs. each, pulled enough power to light a small house, and had to be loaded with dry ice right before the show, that was a non-starter. I won't bother you with the details, but it usually ended up looking like five or six randomly placed fire extinguishers shooting at the stage. The band threw a fit about it almost every night. You would have thought that after thirty shows or so they would have figured out it was never going to work, but they were pretty much impervious to learning.
Image from here
Flash Gordon was also responsible for the worst day of my life -- at least until my first marriage -- but that's a another story. Oh, good. One of the elder alumni just stopped the t-shirt conversation with a 36-point typeface rant. It had been going on for over a week and was really starting to get on my nerves. So, any good concert memories out there?
______________________________
* Or "rockumentaries", if you will.
** Think of black, extra-sticky duct tape. Show business runs on it.
*** Our fog machines were custom built and famous for the time. Two of them could produce enough fog to asphyxiate Lionel Ritchie at the piano, though I am not at liberty to say how I know that.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Concert Season
There has been a veritable flurry of activity from the old roadie community lately. I have several e-mail chains that are at least 10 messages long, with a couple hundred recipients. So far I have resisted the urge to reply, "Unsubscribe!", which is usually my oh-so-subtle way of pointing out to people that "Reply all" is not the only option. Anyway, it started with some semi-coincidental commemorations, both happy and sad. Several couples are celebrating high numbered wedding anniversaries, and there have been a couple of weddings, finally legitimizing relationships lasting 30 years or so. I try not to consider the possibility that these are related to some of the sadder events, and I secretly hope that no one has been driven to the altar by thought of being cut out of an inheritance that they helped to build because they do not enjoy the legal status of a spouse.
On the other side, we have commemorations of old friends gone to that great gig in the sky. Old friends with names like Poodle, Dirty Mike, Goat, BJ, CD, Lunar and too many others have fallen to causes accidental and self-inflicted, and with each one there are stories. Lunar was queen of the electronics shop, and for years she was the only one anyone trusted to solder snakes. These were the 99-pin monster cables (not to be confused with Monster cables) that ran from the control boards out in the house to the lighting and sound systems backstage. The 99 wires were color coded with little stripes, and all had to be soldered to the right pin on a plug only about three inches across. Someone asked Lunar one time how she dealt with all of those itty bitty pins and wires, and she said, "I just smoke a joint or two and they get bigger*." I guess Steve Martin had something with that "getting small" thing, after all.
Several other old comrades are celebrating the anniversary of their first show, which is less of a coincidence than it might seem. Summer was outdoor show and big festival season, and everybody who was anybody was packing up all the equipment they could scrounge and heading out for Red Rocks or Pine Knob or the Meriweather Post Pavilion, where they would play for a few thousand of their closest friends. Wineskins and blankets were everywhere, and the SHOWCO shop was usually empty save some old curtains, a few bubble machines (don't ask) and the Who's giant spotlights. Of course, for every Genesis show at Wembley Stadium, there were too many like the Bee Gees at the Pontiac Silverdome, REO Speedwagon at the Rockford Jam. or KC and the Sunshine Band at a drive-in theater in Buffalo (all stories for another time). As August rolled towards September we would hit the state fair circuit in the upper midwest and Canada. All the gigs were at racetracks or rodeo arenas or just out in a random field, and the roadies had to drag all the equipment through the mud and string miles of extra cable and make it all work somehow each and every day. We didn't really care for State Fair season, though I'm still a sucker for a corn dog and some cotton candy.
Summer was the time to get hired if you wanted to be a roadie, and more than one was picked up at a show and learning the trade on the road a few days later. It wasn't always pleasant, it was never easy, but it was more than any other time of year the reason we were all there. And it definitely broke the monotony of 100 more or less identical hockey/basketball/multipurpose arenas in a row.
The conversation has moved on to t-shirts, some of which are now worth $1000 or more. So if I ever gave you a shirt, you should be ashamed of yourself because I know what you probably did for it. But you should also see if you can find it, because all of mine are long gone. There is actually talk of trying to find the old silk screens and making some new ones. If it happens, I expect you all to buy some.
_____________________________________
* Just say no, kids.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Lost in Time
I've talked a little about my days as a roadie, back in the day when shorts were small and socks were tall, but it's been a while since I've thought about what I gave up to take that job. I had wanted to work for SHOWCO ever since I knew there was such a place, and had already made one ill-fated move to Dallas to try to get hired on. In fact it was the fallout from that move (long story best left untold) that found me living in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the Fall of 1977, sharing a studio apartment with a part time accident photographer and working various food service jobs to make my half of the $125 per month rent. (That's not where most of my money went, believe me.)
About two months after moving to Fayetteville I met Anne. She had attended the college where I met my roommate, and they apparently renewed their acquaintance when both moved to Fayetteville. Anne was tall and blond and beautiful -- I mean really beautiful -- and for some reason she seemed to like me. The next six weeks or so comprise one of the most amazing periods of my life. Without going into detail, let me just say that we enjoyed each other a lot. A lot. A lot. She taught me to drink spiced tea with milk and honey. I don't know if I taught her anything. I don't remember a cross word passing between us. She got frightened once and I was the one she called. We went everywhere together. No wait -- we didn't. We went where we wanted when we wanted and we both seemed good with it. It was perfect.
And then the first week of November I made the call. Every time I called SHOWCO they always told me to check back in a few months. So I would call and they would tell me they didn't have anything and I would live another chunk of my life. Except the first week of November when I called, they had just lost someone and needed a replacement and the RCO All Stars are playing in Fayetteville tonight so why don't you go down and talk to this guy Buddy Prewitt and he will tell us whether we should hire you or not. And I did and he did and they did and I was gone two days later.
And just like that Anne was out of my life. Well, not just like that. We talked of her moving to Dallas after I got settled, and for a couple of months I really thought it might happen. But she got a job she wanted in advertising and our relationship did what long distance relationships tend to do, and within a year or so I had completely lost track of her.
Since then I have evolved really mixed feelings about those weeks. I don't think Anne ever knew how close I came to turning down that job. If it had not been my life's dream* I probably would have stayed where I was. She also has no way to know how long I pined for her, or how close I came to packing it in on multiple occasions that first few months, when I was lonely and homesick and the new job wasn't what I expected. I had some pictures of her that would almost (but apparently not quite) disqualify someone from being Miss California, and I kept them for far longer than was appropriate. My ex-wife finally threw them out during a move about a decade later. No one would ever have suspected how much time I spent looking at her face in those pictures, though the other parts were good, too.
On the other hand, it was six weeks. Almost all good relationships are good for six weeks. And I don't even know how much we really had in common. I'm sure we carried the seeds of our destruction, and if I look close enough I can almost see them. There was probably a sad or bitter or fiery end in our future, and we just never had to live through it. I think in some ways we were too much alike, which I only found out was bad many years later.
Or maybe that's all just rationalization. The entire weight of my life since then conspires to ensure that I am happy with my choice. Either way, the direction of my future balanced on a knife point one day many years ago, with two of the best things I can imagine on either side. I chose. What else can we do?
In the end I decided to treat those six weeks as sort of a capsule, like a great book or a favorite song**. Those weeks are almost completely disconnected from the main thread of my life, no longer food for regret or wistfulness or nostalgia. At the same time those weeks embody for me a feeling of love and relaxation and good fortune that is as personal and private as anything can be. It is without cause or effect or consequence, except to remind me that I have been blessed. Wherever Anne ended up, I hope she remembers the time half as fondly.
*I know. I was 20. Shut up.
** Or the time when I was fifteen and an eighteen year old girl I had never seen before stuck her hand down my pants on the Silverton railroad. It was a really good day.
About two months after moving to Fayetteville I met Anne. She had attended the college where I met my roommate, and they apparently renewed their acquaintance when both moved to Fayetteville. Anne was tall and blond and beautiful -- I mean really beautiful -- and for some reason she seemed to like me. The next six weeks or so comprise one of the most amazing periods of my life. Without going into detail, let me just say that we enjoyed each other a lot. A lot. A lot. She taught me to drink spiced tea with milk and honey. I don't know if I taught her anything. I don't remember a cross word passing between us. She got frightened once and I was the one she called. We went everywhere together. No wait -- we didn't. We went where we wanted when we wanted and we both seemed good with it. It was perfect.
And then the first week of November I made the call. Every time I called SHOWCO they always told me to check back in a few months. So I would call and they would tell me they didn't have anything and I would live another chunk of my life. Except the first week of November when I called, they had just lost someone and needed a replacement and the RCO All Stars are playing in Fayetteville tonight so why don't you go down and talk to this guy Buddy Prewitt and he will tell us whether we should hire you or not. And I did and he did and they did and I was gone two days later.
And just like that Anne was out of my life. Well, not just like that. We talked of her moving to Dallas after I got settled, and for a couple of months I really thought it might happen. But she got a job she wanted in advertising and our relationship did what long distance relationships tend to do, and within a year or so I had completely lost track of her.
Since then I have evolved really mixed feelings about those weeks. I don't think Anne ever knew how close I came to turning down that job. If it had not been my life's dream* I probably would have stayed where I was. She also has no way to know how long I pined for her, or how close I came to packing it in on multiple occasions that first few months, when I was lonely and homesick and the new job wasn't what I expected. I had some pictures of her that would almost (but apparently not quite) disqualify someone from being Miss California, and I kept them for far longer than was appropriate. My ex-wife finally threw them out during a move about a decade later. No one would ever have suspected how much time I spent looking at her face in those pictures, though the other parts were good, too.
On the other hand, it was six weeks. Almost all good relationships are good for six weeks. And I don't even know how much we really had in common. I'm sure we carried the seeds of our destruction, and if I look close enough I can almost see them. There was probably a sad or bitter or fiery end in our future, and we just never had to live through it. I think in some ways we were too much alike, which I only found out was bad many years later.
Or maybe that's all just rationalization. The entire weight of my life since then conspires to ensure that I am happy with my choice. Either way, the direction of my future balanced on a knife point one day many years ago, with two of the best things I can imagine on either side. I chose. What else can we do?
In the end I decided to treat those six weeks as sort of a capsule, like a great book or a favorite song**. Those weeks are almost completely disconnected from the main thread of my life, no longer food for regret or wistfulness or nostalgia. At the same time those weeks embody for me a feeling of love and relaxation and good fortune that is as personal and private as anything can be. It is without cause or effect or consequence, except to remind me that I have been blessed. Wherever Anne ended up, I hope she remembers the time half as fondly.
*I know. I was 20. Shut up.
** Or the time when I was fifteen and an eighteen year old girl I had never seen before stuck her hand down my pants on the Silverton railroad. It was a really good day.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Nights to Remember
I can't let this day pass without mentioning a time and a place and a group of people that meant a great deal to the direction of my life. Somewhere around the dawn of time (1970), when rock concert tours were starting to be a big deal, a couple of musicians from Dallas discovered that they were actually better at building sound gear than they were at making music come out of it. The demand for their equipment was high enough -- and the interest in their music low enough -- that they decided to start a sound equipment rental company. This was the beginning of SHOWCO, Inc., a sound -- and eventually lighting, staging and special effects -- company that became almost synonymous with the golden age of big rock shows in the 70's and 80's.
Besides providing sound equipment, lights, pyrotechnics, lasers, spotlights, mirror balls, projectors, bubble machines, chase lights and practically everything else you can imagine to the biggest names in the music industry, SHOWCO and its people helped create and define an important segment of the entertainment industry with constant innovation and a commitment to excellence that was second to no one. If companies had mission statements back then, theirs would have been, "Make it happen." I once saw them charter a Lear jet to fly a laser to Canada for a stadium show that was going to start in a little over eight hours.
The lighting division of SHOWCO was eventually consumed by their own invention, the Vari-lite, while the sound arm was purchased in 2000 by their major rival. The company that bought SHOWCO used both names, like FedEx Kinkos, until they decided this past year that time had run out on the SHOWCO brand and retired the name, presumably forever.
The company provided services to more top tier bands than I can list here. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Black Sabbath, The Bee Gees, Genesis, Three Dog Night, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, David Bowie, ZZ Top and James Taylor are a very few examples. In addition, they produced several large fashion shows, conventions and special events, including the annual convention for Mary Kay Cosmetics, whose big pink headquarters was around the corner from their own. Oh, and their lighting director programmed the big light ball on top of the Dallas Hyatt Regency. Most people don't know that the lights were supposed to flash in patterns. The first couple of nights they used it there were so many accidents on I-35E that they had to stop.
The scale of some of these tours, and the work required to put them on, was hard to conceive. The very large tours would have up to 15 semi trailers packed full of equipment that had to be unloaded in the morning, put together, tested, repaired and adjusted, used to its limits during the show, and then pulled down, taken apart and put back in the trucks. All fifteen trucks would then have to drive three or four hundred miles to do it all again the next day. Along the way they faced and solved technical and artistic challenges on a daily basis. Whether it was chroming the entire lighting system for the Bee Gees, mounting six huge, rotating mirrors above the Genesis stage that totaled more than 2500 lbs., making music sound good outdoors and still be loud enough to make your ears bleed, or simply figuring out how to put together pyrotechnics that would rattle the Superdome, SHOWCO people made it happen time and time and time again.
The workload was brutal. It wasn't Alaskan crab fishing dangerous, but there were definite similarities. Thirty-six hour days were common. Days off on tour were rare, which meant that the traveling crew were living on two or three hours of sleep (sometimes less) for weeks at a time. One becomes very familiar with the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy. Very few people lasted a year. I once fell asleep on the sidewalk at the Sacramento airport while someone went to fetch the rental car. And when Jackson Browne said that roadies were "working for that minimum wage," he was being charitable if you consider the hours worked. His was another SHOWCO crew.
So why did people do it? One thing: the music. Not "partying with the band," not the women (they were only interested in the musicians, anyway), and not the glamorous lifestyle. When you were on tour with a good -- or even better a great -- band, the two hours or so of live music made up for all of the pain and loneliness and frustration. There is nothing like being at a great concert with 25,000 of your closest friends, unless it's being onstage for it. I can't even imagine what a rush it is for the musicians. No wonder so many of them go all crazy. Oh, and tour jackets were cool, but they weren't really worth the effort without the music thing.
I was fortunate enough to work for SHOWCO for three years in their heyday. I worked with some of the biggest acts on the planet, visited 45 states and 3 foreign countries, stayed in practically every Holiday Inn in America, and became intimately acquainted with theater and arena design. To this day I don't even have to think about where to find the bathrooms in a public arena. And I made a few lifelong friends. I met some of the best and most interesting and unique people I have known, and each and every one would show up to help you move. I learned things in that three years that most people will never even suspect.
Tonight at the Arcade Bar in Dallas a bunch of nondescript, middle-aged men and women are gathering to mark the passing of the SHOWCO name and raise a glass to the days when sex and drugs and rock & roll were as much a part of the fabric of the country as consumer credit and reality shows are today, and the dinosaurs of entertainment ruled the earth. I'm sure many lies will be told, and even more true stories that are harder to believe. At least as much of it as they can remember. If you happen to be there, or if you ever run into an old roadie in a bar, buy them a drink. They will almost certainly have an interesting story to tell.
Besides providing sound equipment, lights, pyrotechnics, lasers, spotlights, mirror balls, projectors, bubble machines, chase lights and practically everything else you can imagine to the biggest names in the music industry, SHOWCO and its people helped create and define an important segment of the entertainment industry with constant innovation and a commitment to excellence that was second to no one. If companies had mission statements back then, theirs would have been, "Make it happen." I once saw them charter a Lear jet to fly a laser to Canada for a stadium show that was going to start in a little over eight hours.
The lighting division of SHOWCO was eventually consumed by their own invention, the Vari-lite, while the sound arm was purchased in 2000 by their major rival. The company that bought SHOWCO used both names, like FedEx Kinkos, until they decided this past year that time had run out on the SHOWCO brand and retired the name, presumably forever.The company provided services to more top tier bands than I can list here. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Black Sabbath, The Bee Gees, Genesis, Three Dog Night, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, David Bowie, ZZ Top and James Taylor are a very few examples. In addition, they produced several large fashion shows, conventions and special events, including the annual convention for Mary Kay Cosmetics, whose big pink headquarters was around the corner from their own. Oh, and their lighting director programmed the big light ball on top of the Dallas Hyatt Regency. Most people don't know that the lights were supposed to flash in patterns. The first couple of nights they used it there were so many accidents on I-35E that they had to stop.
The scale of some of these tours, and the work required to put them on, was hard to conceive. The very large tours would have up to 15 semi trailers packed full of equipment that had to be unloaded in the morning, put together, tested, repaired and adjusted, used to its limits during the show, and then pulled down, taken apart and put back in the trucks. All fifteen trucks would then have to drive three or four hundred miles to do it all again the next day. Along the way they faced and solved technical and artistic challenges on a daily basis. Whether it was chroming the entire lighting system for the Bee Gees, mounting six huge, rotating mirrors above the Genesis stage that totaled more than 2500 lbs., making music sound good outdoors and still be loud enough to make your ears bleed, or simply figuring out how to put together pyrotechnics that would rattle the Superdome, SHOWCO people made it happen time and time and time again.
The workload was brutal. It wasn't Alaskan crab fishing dangerous, but there were definite similarities. Thirty-six hour days were common. Days off on tour were rare, which meant that the traveling crew were living on two or three hours of sleep (sometimes less) for weeks at a time. One becomes very familiar with the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy. Very few people lasted a year. I once fell asleep on the sidewalk at the Sacramento airport while someone went to fetch the rental car. And when Jackson Browne said that roadies were "working for that minimum wage," he was being charitable if you consider the hours worked. His was another SHOWCO crew.
So why did people do it? One thing: the music. Not "partying with the band," not the women (they were only interested in the musicians, anyway), and not the glamorous lifestyle. When you were on tour with a good -- or even better a great -- band, the two hours or so of live music made up for all of the pain and loneliness and frustration. There is nothing like being at a great concert with 25,000 of your closest friends, unless it's being onstage for it. I can't even imagine what a rush it is for the musicians. No wonder so many of them go all crazy. Oh, and tour jackets were cool, but they weren't really worth the effort without the music thing.
I was fortunate enough to work for SHOWCO for three years in their heyday. I worked with some of the biggest acts on the planet, visited 45 states and 3 foreign countries, stayed in practically every Holiday Inn in America, and became intimately acquainted with theater and arena design. To this day I don't even have to think about where to find the bathrooms in a public arena. And I made a few lifelong friends. I met some of the best and most interesting and unique people I have known, and each and every one would show up to help you move. I learned things in that three years that most people will never even suspect.
Tonight at the Arcade Bar in Dallas a bunch of nondescript, middle-aged men and women are gathering to mark the passing of the SHOWCO name and raise a glass to the days when sex and drugs and rock & roll were as much a part of the fabric of the country as consumer credit and reality shows are today, and the dinosaurs of entertainment ruled the earth. I'm sure many lies will be told, and even more true stories that are harder to believe. At least as much of it as they can remember. If you happen to be there, or if you ever run into an old roadie in a bar, buy them a drink. They will almost certainly have an interesting story to tell.
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