Headline: On the Road

 Arts and Ideas

Spring, 2000 issue

My first real opportunity to work "on the road" with a professional entertainment venture came about because the guy originally hired to deal with the set crushed his arm loading it into the truck. Panicked, the producer called me before dialing 911, and twelve hours later I was behind the wheel of a truck full of two tons of man-eating scenery with three days to get from Oakland to Ohio.

I was happy and proud. My answering machine said I'd be "on the road" for three weeks. For the first time I had a "per diem," which refers to a living allowance on top of salary, meaning the company was picking up my meals, hotel, entertainment, whatever I could provide receipts for. It changed me. I bought little luxuries I was usually too cheap to provide myself. That little per diem voice would say at the restaurant, "Why not get the salad bar with that?" While waiting in line to pay at the gas station, it would say, "Hey, look! Zingers!"

I had to drive during all my waking hours in order to get to Columbus on time. Crumbs and food wrappers littered the floor, since stopping for a meal meant an hour less sleep, and worse, breaking the momentum. I drove all day and into the evening. I stopped when Christian radio broadcasts started to make sense.

Three days of Zingers and A.M. radio took their toll. Though the voices in my head became increasingly witty and urbane, my normal conversational skills jumped ship somewhere in Nebraska. I arrived at the theater just in time to lunch in a posh restaurant with the cast, who had never met me. I found I could not answer their questions in organized sentences; nor could I seem to keep myself from laughing at inappropriate times. Loudly. They scooted their chairs away from me a little.

The problem persisted after lunch as I began working with the local crew at the theater. My role on the tour was to show them how to assemble the set. Since I had never seen the show or the set before, and I had the conversational subtlety of an agitated parrot, the local crew would have mutinied if the cast hadn't stepped in to help.

Later, during the show, I put too much dry ice into the fog machine, causing the hose to blow out and sending plumes of carbon dioxide fog high into the air before it settled back down and plunged the band into zero-visibility conditions. These are the sorts of stories that follow you throughout your professional career. "What must my friends back home be assuming about my romantic road life," I wondered.

On that tour I learned many things that remained consistent through various other touring gigs over the years, including a stint with a name-brand musician that took me to more than 200 theaters in 2 years. Most of these lessons are true of all travel: Eating out all the time can be tiresome, and you get fat. Hotels are bad places to kick a television habit. Most people cannot give good directions. Never start a conversation with someone on a plane unless you're willing to listen to them for the entire flight or pretend to sleep the entire trip.

Travelling as part of a performing group adds a thick layer of anxiety about being delayed in transit. A closed airport or highway can result in a cancellation. Knowing what I know now, I cut a little slack for the panicked guy at the airport who shoulders me out of the way to rage at the ticket agent about his cancelled flight. I'll still mace him, but I'll do it with compassion.

Then there is the whole fame and security thing. Really famous people must spend tours in a high security bubble. They sneak out of hotels via the kitchen to their limo waiting by the dumpster. Really un-famous people, on the other hand, embarrass you by making sure the waitress knows who they are and by slinking into hotel lobbies with sunglasses on, hoping to draw attention with their inconspicuousness.

Most tours, though, involve the temporarily famous. For instance, if you caught Art Spiegelman or Danny Hoch or Robben Ford on the street before their performance, you might not know them from a bus driver. After the show their face is fresh in your mind, so you're more likely to recognize them at breakfast the next day. Should you say something? Maybe they do and maybe they don't appreciate comments about their performance, or the ticket price, or how they just look so different here in this restaurant with a little fleck of egg on their chin.

Suddenly, if you're kind of famous, having a fleck of egg on your chin matters. People will tell their friends about seeing you, who just commanded the attention of hundreds of people, with egg on your chin.

And, worst of all, if you're in the business any length of time, chances are that eventually you'll pick up a stalker or some other creepy character that makes you wonder about your safety. At this point you no longer have the privileges of anonymity that the general public enjoys, and you change your behavior on the road, or at least in problem cities, by using an assumed name at hotels, taking unpredictable routes, and wearing uncharacteristic clothing and maybe even wigs (a rare instance where a wig is tax deductible).

Owing Your Soul To the Company Store

Touring schedules vary greatly. A few years ago touring productions of the show STOMP! absconded with a number of local stage technicians, who tell me that their typical schedule involves moving to a new town every week or so, setting up for a day, and running the shows in the evenings the rest of the week. This leaves them plenty of time to really get to know Toledo.

Other people on the road live in almost perpetual darkness. Years ago I worked with the David Copperfield's show at the Civic. At the time he did more shows per year than any other major performer. I was on the local crew, and I was there at 7am to help unload the trucks and set up the show. Suddenly the tour bus doors opened, and out stumbled the tour staff with a bad case of bed-head, squinting crusty-eyed against the light and clutching cups of bus-brewed Folgers. Their life was three shows per day separated by a night of trying to sleep on a moving bus heading to the next venue. If this is Tuesday, this must be Santa Cruz.

They were making lots and lots of money. A person with simple needs could retire after a few years on the road. The entire salary goes into savings, since living expenses are covered.

Big moneymakers like Copperfield, The Three Tenors, and Flintstones on Ice will typically have separate personnel for performing, driving, public relations, animal wrangling, and technical stuff. The cost of the production is consequently very high and requires a large venue to sell enough tickets to cover the expenses. Events that take place in smaller venues, then, typically can't afford to bring a lot of people, and so jobs get consolidated. When you watch a performance at UCSC some evening, consider that the artists' schedule for that day might have looked like this:

6:00 am: Hotel wake up call.

6:30 am: Ready for ride to airport

9:00 am: Land at San Jose airport

10:00 am: Arrive at Santa Cruz; eat at Denny's

11:00 am: Return 10 calls via pay phone at Denny's

11:30 am: Peek at ocean, no time to get out of car

12:00 am: Do interview

1:00 p.m.: Go to venue, meet with Chip, start setting up show

2:00 p.m.: Give away professional secrets at "master class"

4:00 p.m.: Check into hotel, return more calls

5:00 p.m.: Sound and light check

6:00 p.m.: Dinner arrives at dressing room

7:00 p.m.: Set up sales of stuff in lobby

8:00 p.m.: Forget all that and do a great show

10:00 p.m.: Go back to hotel; try to work on next creative project

11:00 p.m.: Give up, have a beer, go to bed.

Everyone always asks you when you're touring: "But isn't it lonely?" I've always found that if you're the kind of person who's kind of lonely at home, you'll be lonely on the road too. You can keep fairly well connected with home these days, with recent advances in telecommunications and E'mail. Personally, I liked wandering around cities alone and anonymous and invisible, like a ghost. I watched the sights and the people and spoke as little as possible. I was very happy not to have a famous face.

People on long tours always organize themselves into some sort of dysfunctional family. Like any family, there will be power struggles, jealousies, conflicts, grudges, allegiances, and love. Travel with any group and in no time you'll identify the parental figure, the rebelling adolescent, and the baby. And whether they can stand each other after three weeks together or not, this familial aspect tends to keep the worst of loneliness at bay.

Many people also presume that being on the road is like being a sailor in port, and every morning brings a new notch on the microphone stand. Some people are into that, but more common is the romantic coupling among members of a tour. This is very common and natural, since you spend so much time together and have so much in common. You can imagine the problems inherent in this situation. When you're not getting along, you can't escape each other. And all of the rest of your tour group will know everything and meddle. It's like being from a small town, but much, much worse.

Silver Linings

What's good about being on the road? Some would say it's simply a necessary evil to sell CDs or otherwise further a career. For others it is their whole life and they wouldn't have it any other way. I enjoyed and appreciated my time on tours- I got to meet a lot of interesting people, I saw the whole country and several others, I heard a lot of wacky accents (South Carolina surfer wins the prize), I saw amazing weather you never see in California, I made pretty good money, I learned how to strong-arm unruly fans, I learned a lot about my craft, and I saw a lot of beautiful theaters.

Best of all, I learned to love my home town.