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A Sense of Community

 

A couple of weekends ago I was at the Ohana Music Festival here in Southern California with Sleater-Kinney. First, being able to wake up in my own bed, have breakfast, drive to the gig and be back home in bed not long after 10 pm was truly amazing! However, the thing that I’ve been reminiscing on most was the number of people I ran into that I knew. This used to happen back in the UK but once I moved to LA, I was almost starting from scratch. Of course, this is not the first time this has happened but after such a long time away from touring, it really meant more.

When we tour, we are away from our friends and family for potentially really long periods. The people you tour with and the people you meet can become really good friends. You can also lose touch with your old non-touring friends. Instead of being sad about this, I think of it as just something that happens through life. An evolution. And anyway, it’s really just the same as your friends back home, except that when your non-touring friends go to the pub to meet up, we are maybe doing it at a festival in Germany!

It can be difficult missing all those weddings and events your friends have, but you have to look at it as how wonderful it is to be able to have friends all around the world and meet up with them in random places. Let’s keep the positive spin on things, it’s difficult enough out there!

For me, the rest of the year will be focused on family and life at home. I’ve been at home a lot, I know, but I think 2022 will be crazy busy, so I am enjoying what is left of 2021 whilst we iron out all the COVID kinks. It’s going to be great to get back out there and hit the road running (in my case it’s usually literally!)

A nod to those I spent some time with at Ohana:

Karrie “our fearless leader” Keyes, no explanation necessary, with Pearl Jam

Greg Bogart whom I met on the P!nk tour who was with the all-star band (phew, that was a lot of rockstars on one stage!)

Lauren Sego festival LD whom I toured with on Tegan and Sara, the hardest working crew member I know

Kate Lee system tech for Rat Sound Systems, shadowed me for the day during a Vance Joy show in LA, so much enthusiasm, positive attitude, and amazing work ethic

If the goal in life is to surround yourself with the people you want to be like, this is an A+ list.

Also, note I’ve included a photo of myself and my buddy Rachel Ryan who is a badass sound engineer. This is not from Ohana but from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I did not take a single photo at Ohana, I was too busy enjoying the day, but this also shows how awesome this industry is; to be able to run into friends in Brazil! Ironically we were meant to be working together the previous weekend at Ohana. One day we will work together Rachel!!

Eating Healthy on Tour

A few years ago when I started working out more seriously (more than a run for the bus type thing), I started looking at what I ate and how it affected me. I was vegetarian and vegan on and off for a few years and can now say I am fully plant-based. Yes, it’s the buzzword of the moment, but if that means there will be wider access to plant-based foods around the world, then I’ll take it!

Don’t get me wrong, there was a time when I would have two steaks a week at home and my favourite thing to do on tour was finding the best steak restaurant and order a fillet with an expensive glass of red wine (I thank the Raveonettes for introducing me to the finer side of wining and dining.. oh I miss those days!) I digress. These days it’s coffee and avocado toast. No animals were harmed and it fuels me after my workouts.

I find the hardest thing on tour is eating well. There will no doubt be pizza after the show on the bus. There will be wine flowing. There will be late nights. Trying to abstain from these indulgences is one of the hardest things for me. You want to be social, but if you stay up, you want to eat that pizza! I can tell myself I’m not doing my body any favours by eating it but the devil on the shoulder shouts louder. I think this is where moderation comes into play and setting yourself up for success by taking yourself out of the situation where you might succumb. If you’re serious about eating well and performing at your absolute best (clean foods, very limited alcohol, and good sleep) then you need to prioritise these things and send yourself off to bed after maybe making a nighttime tea, or having a bowl of oatmeal or a banana and nut butter. Doesn’t sound as exciting as a pepperoni pizza does it? Trust me, I know. but I also know how much better I feel when I don’t eat processed, salty food. It really all comes down to how you want to treat your body. You only have one, you need to look after it.

If you’re in your twenties, I’m not going to tell you to not go and party, but I can’t even imagine where I would be if I was living like I am now back when I was 23!

Give some healthy eating a go, you might like it and you might be surprised how good you feel!

Here is a good list of healthy foods to add to the bus stock list that will get you through breakfast, lunch, or nighttime snacks:

Ready for the Road?

 

I’ve been on the road for the better part of a decade, so I’ll easily admit that I’m biased in favor of tour life, but it’s fascinating to hear what other people think my work is like. Mostly they see the glamour of a life that some only dream of being paid to travel across the country or even the world. They’re less enamored when they hear what my work schedule actually entails and that I’m not some carefree nomad having adventures and playing pretend every night. Still, I bet most would give it a go if they ever got the chance.

So what does the reality of touring look like? Well, let’s start with the least appealing side of it and get that out of the way

Time and Stress

Since tours only make money when they’re actively on the road, the ideal is to be booked constantly. Most shows have a few weeks scattered throughout the schedule that aren’t booked and the actors, musicians, and crew are laid off. To a 9-5 worker, “layoff” is a horrible word, but on tour, it’s synonymous with a scheduled, short, unpaid vacation, and you’re still working 45-50 weeks out of the year. However, that means there’s limited time off to see friends and family back home or just to recharge, and it can be difficult to get time off for events like weddings, graduations, or even family emergencies.

Then you have your day-to-day work schedule. On a whim, I calculated how many days I’ve had off in an average year on tour. That qualifies as a day not in the theatre, not traveling to the next venue, nothing work-related. My average was 70-75 days off per year over seven years on the road. To put it in 9-5 terms, if you just count weekends that’s two days off a week, multiplied by 52 weeks, most people get 104 days off in a year, not even looking at holidays or vacation time.

(Touring data based on my 2019 year on tour with Miss Saigon, then Mean Girls.)

Plus, 40-hour work is the norm, but on the road, you’re looking at anywhere from a 60 – 80 hour workweek depending on how often you have to load in and out.

Moving on to stress

Somedays tour feels like holding 10 pounds of crazy and staring at a 5-pound bag, trying to formulate a plan that gets everything in. Each show and every venue have quirks and your job is to figure out how to work with or around them. Sometimes it’s easy: in Cleveland, there’s only space for the actual show deck onstage, so the local crew knows that amp racks typically go in an alcove in the house. Other times it takes some finagling: in DC, the Les Mis speaker towers weighed about 3000 lbs all together, but the structure the motor was attached to could only support 2000 lbs, so I calculated a way to build most of the tower, then slide the rest into place so we didn’t exceed the weight limit and still kept most of the build on the motor instead of overtaxing our manpower.

But, if you think that sounds stressful, those are the times when things went pretty well and we were able to come up with a solution that still accomplished the design. There are times you simply can’t do what you’ve planned: in Hartford, we had to get a mid-load in delivery of truss when the measurements we’d had for the rigging points were wrong. We found out partway into the day that the points were simply too far apart to safely fly the smaller truss we carried. Or something malfunctions right before the show is ready to start and you have a stage manager watching you, giving play-by-play commentary to the SM at the call desk as you attempt to suss out the problem, knowing the curtain is waiting on your troubleshooting skills.

These stressors can take a toll on your mental and emotional well-being, which affects your physical health. Fast and unhealthy food is much easier to access on the road, and the post-show default is to head to the nearest bar with your crew to unwind from the day and socialize. As an introvert, I had to learn to pay better attention to what I needed socially: some days it was respecting my need to relax, other times it was noticing that I’d lacked social interaction and, despite the habitual ease of just heading back to the hotel, I’d actually prefer to be out with the crew.

Mostly what it comes down to is fatigue. It takes a concerted effort to take care of yourself on the road: finding or choosing healthy foods, making time to exercise, checking in with yourself. Sometimes you don’t have the energy to deal with that after a long day of work, and your well-being falls to the wayside.

All that being said, touring sounds really appealing right? Well, let’s take a look at what’s kept me on the road for so long.

Experience

One huge benefit is experience. That same stress that fell into the Con column has equal footing in the Pro side by virtue of the adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Every load in and out, you’re handed new challenges to solve and, by the sheer repetition of it, you learn how to analyze situations faster and build a log of potential fixes you’ve tried before.

Plus, it’s all hands-on practice. You can talk about the theory as much as you want, but it will never be as beneficial as putting a contingency plan into action.

Along with problem-solving, you also (hopefully) gain people skills: just like analyzing situations, you also learn how to read people. Part of your job is learning if you can hand a project off to the house head and let them direct the crew, or if you’ll have to check in constantly to make sure it gets done. It’s noticing someone who’s willing to work, but is new and needs detailed directions, yet is too nervous to say they don’t understand. There are times you have to light a (figurative) fire to get a languorous crew moving, but others where you can joke and enjoy chatting and they’ll still get the job done.

The Pay

A large appeal of touring is the money. On the road, the company will provide you with accommodations or per diem for food and housing, so the majority of your survival expenses are taken care of. With that covered, it frees up the majority of your salary to pay down credit card debt, mortgages, or student loans, while simultaneously having some money to save or use for a guilt-free splurge. Personally, having the opportunity to up my savings percentage paved the way for me to discover the financial independence community, which is worth exploring no matter where you are in your financial journey. (Check out this list of FI blogs, or two of my favorites: JL Collins or Afford Anything)

The People

Last, but absolutely not least, are the people. Your crew and coworkers become family. Often boisterous and sometimes dysfunctional, you’ll find some of your best life-long friends on the road. When you’re together day in and day out, you help each other solve problems, pull off incredible under-the-wire show saves, or make it through a crappy day that you can laugh about afterward. Stagehands are the best kind of people I know to take lemons and turn it into an epic comedy of errors, and there are always new stories whenever you end up in the same city again to catch up.

Touring is life where the amp is always turned to 11

The lows are confidence-shattering and lonely, but the highs are soul-affirming and leave you with the feeling that there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.

I’m the first to tell anyone that they should absolutely tour if they have any desire to do it, but I’m also the first to say that it isn’t for everyone. I’ve learned that I’m built to tour. Even when I wasn’t sure if I was any good at sound, I still knew I loved touring: stressful situations are puzzles to solve and most days I thrive on the challenge, plus my family has always been understanding that I have very tight constraints on my schedule. The pros of touring outweigh the cons by a mile for me, however, even I (and my knees) know that the day I look towards getting off the road isn’t all that far down the line. For others, life on the road just isn’t appealing from the get-go: I know people who are amazing at their job but hate the lifestyle, the stress, and the mental and physical toll it takes.

It’s always important to take stock of how you honestly feel and refrain from talking yourself into signing up for another tour if the cons outweigh the pros. It’s not worth making yourself (and everyone you work with) miserable if you hate your life day in and day out.

But if you do like it, pack those suitcases and get ready for an adventure. I know I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything!

 

Tour Tribe

‘Human beings are social animals. Biological evolution equipped men and women for a communal existence, hunting and foraging in tribes of between twenty and forty people. We could never have survived this ecological niche by ourselves. We don’t have the strength, speed or agility of other animals. But we do have language. We can communicate with others, and we are bright enough to collaborate for purposes of hunting, collecting food, defense, and building shelters. A tribal group would work as a team, assigning to each member a role according to their character and skills.’

This an extract from a book called ‘Sick and Tired – Healing The Illnesses Doctors Cannot Cure’ by Nick Read. It’s a fascinating investigation of ‘functional illnesses’ which doctors are unable to pin down with a cure, such as IBS, chronic fatigue, depression, fibromyalgia, eating disorders and so on. Dr. Read explores the idea that, despite the fact that as a society we’ve ‘never had it so good,’ we’re sicker and unhappier than we’ve ever been, and the stressful pace of modern life and disconnection from our simple humanity is to blame.

His description of how we lived back in our caveman days struck a very loud chord with me. Twenty to forty people, living a nomadic existence and working as a team within roles according to their character and skills. Remind you of anything? No wonder we like touring – we’re basically channeling our inner caveman! I’m making light of it, but life on the road really does offer a sense of community that’s increasingly rare in modern life. We each have our roles to fulfill, which offers the opportunity for creative expression, problem-solving, and collaboration with others, and we have to do it within a timeframe, which means tangible satisfaction rather than never-ending procrastination. And our work may involve mind-boggling amounts of technology, but it also involves a lot of physical activity – pushing, pulling, climbing, lifting, standing up and walking around for most of the day – all of which means we use our bodies as evolution intended. Being away from home also provides a chance for genuine rest and downtime on days off, rather than racing around. I certainly find being on tour more relaxing than juggling different tasks back home, and suddenly I understand why that is, despite long hours and the potentially pressured environment.

This is not to say that roadies never suffer any kind of functional illness; of course, we do. There are ample temptations and opportunities to break yourself on tour as well as all this good stuff. But I think it’s interesting that studies increasingly suggest that it’s living out of sync with our caveman roots which has made us so sickly as a society. The rate of lifestyle change has dramatically accelerated since the industrial revolution, and the incidence of illnesses which have no obvious cure – despite immense, marvelous leaps in treating pathology – has accelerated alongside it.

When you think about it, it’s the least surprising thing. Take a being who has evolved for a nomadic, active, communal existence roaming in nature; who thrives on practical problem-solving, eating food hunted and gathered from the land; who derives satisfaction from doing the skills they’re suited for and not comparing themselves with others; whose body responds to threat by fighting or running for their life, and who rises with the sun and sleeps for as long as they need. Now, airdrop them into a situation where they spend most of their time static, unable to roam freely because of overcrowding; where their practical abilities and simple satisfactions have been outsourced to machines; where they eat processed chemical foodstuffs with precious little connection to the land; where they are encouraged to constantly compare themselves with others and measure their self-worth by their appearances and possessions; where they are vulnerable to artificial alerts and stimulation 24 hours a day and where, because of all of this, they’re in a constant state of stress from which they cannot run. Would we really be shocked if this being got sick? Of COURSE not!

We may not have been airdropped, but the few thousand years in which we have made these changes, in evolutionary terms, is the blink of an eye. Our physiology and psychology haven’t been able to keep up, and we’re now very bewildered space-age cavemen. So it feels good to have a taste of that more natural way of life, as we roam the world with our tour tribe. Touring doesn’t make modern life go away – heck, touring as we know it couldn’t have happened 100 years ago. But we do have some precious, crucial elements in there which I believe are a large part of the pleasure – even the romance – of touring.

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