30 Dec The Road Crew – Part Five

Here we are, Gentle Reader(s), deeply in the depths of the Holidaze Season. With another Christmas now safely behind us a new year beckons, full of potential and uncertainty. What shall become of us, one and all? Impossible to say, of course, but I’ll remain hopeful as is my nature. As a parting gift to the year that was I offer forth another installment of the saga of The Road Crew. In this chapter the Cretins put their best foot (feet?) forward for the good people of Wichita, KS, and manage to recruit a few more fans to their cause, whatever that might be. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Let us hope for the small victories in 2026, and perhaps a big one once in a while, just for yuks. Fond regards to one and all!

P.S. – Rumor has it that DJ Inky will be returning to the Matador on 1/1/26. Stay tuned!

Five

The structure of our days on the road was determined by a clearly defined sequence of activities: Load in, set up, sound check, play the gig, load out.

Our mandate was to show up at the designated place at the designated time and execute these maneuvers with a reasonable degree of punctuality and precision. Regardless of whatever the hell else was going on in our world, this was the process, day in and day out. Whatever happened before, after, or in between any of these elements was of no consequence to anyone but ourselves.

Whatever the degree of incompetence or proficiency we encountered from our colleagues on the other side of the equation, it was up to us to adjust accordingly and deal with it. Every gig was different and you never knew quite what to expect until you got there. Sometimes our hopes and expectations were exceeded and sometimes they were dashed upon the treacherous shoals of rock and roll on the road. Whatever the circumstances, we soldiered on: Failure was not an option.

After sound checks the road crew generally had the options of hanging out backstage, returning to the bus to hide out, or wandering about the immediate vicinity on foot, if there was anyplace worth wandering to. Once parked at the venue the bus typically didn’t move again until after the gig or the next morning—it wasn’t a very practical vehicle for sightseeing or running errands.

On this afternoon Vinnie and I had walked the short distance from Croaker’s to a McDonald’s down the street and returned with bags of burgers and fries for the crew. Having vetoed essentially everything in our show rider, Croaker’s had provided no food but the road crew was allowed two complimentary drinks apiece from the bar and water or soda as needed. All of us typically foreswore from alcohol before gigs, although the Goof sometimes took sips of peppermint schnapps during a set as he claimed it was good for his throat. Occasionally the touring budget stretched far enough to allow for the acquisition of a pint bottle of Jägermeister.

With little to do and often nowhere to go it was the period between sound check and show time that could be the jumpy part of the day. We tried to keep ourselves occupied with our our carefully curated libraries of books and magazines and cassettes but sometimes we just got bored and irritable and started getting on one another’s nerves. Time to go for a walk or try to track down a phone for a collect call back home.

It was rare for us to engage with venue staff in any real depth. Usually our backstage interactions were limited to a minute or two of polite chit chat before we addressed ourselves to the task at hand. It wasn’t our intention to be aloof or remote, but the road crew was by nature a highly insular unit. With each passing day on the road the gap between Us and Them—‘Them’ being pretty much everybody else on the planet—grew a bit wider, a bit more clearly defined. As a rule, we were friendly and businesslike but the longer we were on the road the weirder and more cloistered we must have seemed to those outside of our bubble.

The late afternoon and early evening had dragged slowly by at Croaker’s but finally it was getting close to show time. The boys went out to the bus to change clothes and I brought Rob’s backup bass and the #2 Strat out to the stage. I switched the #1 Bassman on to get it warmed up, plugged in the Goof’s pedals (which remained unplugged when not in use to conserve battery power), turned on the reverb unit and taped copies of the set lists down by the bases of the mic stands.

I found Nick sitting at a table near the sound board eating french fries and drinking a beer and informed him that the band would be ready in the wings in 20 minutes. Happy hour was almost over and there was a fair number of patrons crowding the bar at the far end of the club.

Returning backstage I retrieved the #1 Strat from the Goof and tuned it one more time. The radio DJ dudes reappeared and Vinnie ran through a bit of Cretins schtick with them for their introduction: REA recording artists, the pride and joy of Albuquerque, New Mexico, currently on tour with the Tom Kindler Band, etc etc..

At 7:00 PM on the dot the DJ dudes went out and launched their routine, which was something along the lines of ‘Hey there everybody, it’s your old pals Gordy and the Gopher from KROT 89.9 FM and we’re here to welcome our good friends the Cretins to the stage at Croaker’s! Let’s hear it, Wichita!’

They pitched their afternoon rock & roll slot on the radio station and plugged some other appearances they would be making at the grand openings of laundromats and dog grooming parlors and such. They tossed rolled-up KROT t-shirts and bumperstickers to the crowd that had congregated in front of the stage. Some of the bumper stickers landed on the floor and no one bothered to pick them up.

I didn’t quite catch which one was Gordy and which was the Gopher, but they seemed pretty much interchangeable.

The crowd around the stage had grown quickly once the band launched into the energetic opening song, Clock In, Clock Out. The sound in the house was good and the band seemed satisfied with the monitor mix. After two songs I left the sound board to Nick and worked my way backstage to my shadowy lair behind the Goof’s amps.

There were no broken strings during the first set and the brief episode with the Shoe had been the only glitch. On the whole, the Croaker’s crowd seemed to be largely receptive and enthusiastic. The club had apparently done a respectable job of getting the word out and our temporary affiliation with the Tom Kindler Band had helped to generate buzz sufficient to produce a decent turnout on a Thursday night.

‘Not bad, boyos, not bad at all,’ said the Goof as he mopped his face with a towel backstage at the break. ‘I think we’ve got ‘em right where we want ‘em.’

‘Did you see that cute brunette down front—the one with the red headband?’ said Beano. ‘I think she wants to have my children.’

‘Did you see the seven-foot-tall goon she’s with? I think he’ll be picking his teeth with your scrawny rib bones before that happens.’

‘Really? I didn’t notice him.’

‘Well he sure as shit noticed you, Beans. Dude was giving all of us the stink-eye, but especially you.’

Vinnie appeared with Nick in tow.

‘Hey guys, great set,’ said Vin. ‘You’re killin’ ‘em.’

‘Apparently some of them want to kill us,’ muttered Beano.

‘No way! They love you! Hit ‘em hard with the second set to seal the deal and we’re golden. The lights are for shit but it sounds great.’

‘Love the spotlight though,’ said Rob. ‘It’s like we’re playing in a high school gym—very nostalgic. And Nick—a bit more of Beano’s vocal in my mix for the second set, please.’

‘Sure, no problem,’ said Nick. ‘Everything else okay?’

‘How’s the snare sound out there?’ asked Beano.

‘Like the Mighty Thor’s fucking hammer, dude,’ said Vinnie.

‘Cool! We worked hard on that, right Nick?’

‘Oh yeah. Very hard,’ said Nick.

Croaker’s was a fairly large club and it looked as though there were at least three hundred or so people spread around the room by show time, though some of them had undoubtedly arrived early for happy hour and had been grandfathered in. Either way, it was a good portent: It looked like we stood a reasonable chance of beating our guarantee and pulling in a portion of the door proceeds—pretty much all one could hope for from a late fill-in gig such as this was.

From the lighting board/box Vinnie had been casting an appraising eye over the crowd, cogitating on a thumbnail estimate of the attendance. This was the kind of thing he was good at and if someone had to yell at the club owners about any perceived discrepancies in the head count at the end of the night the rest of us were more than content to let it be Vinnie. He took a certain pride in his bonus gig as the band’s designated head knocker.

Wichita was a fairly typical mid-tier, large mid-western American town: Tuned in sufficiently for the locals to have some idea of what was going on in the wider world such that they didn’t seem to regard the Cretins as complete freaks, but small enough so that they weren’t overly jaded about a bunch of struggling nobodies such as ourselves. At gigs like this the band typically played two sets totaling its over an hour and a half of music.

Usually we managed to pull an encore or two in which case the band would play a particularly catchy original song held in reserve for the purpose and a cover of some sort. Lately the cover song of choice had been Mony Mony by Tommy James and the Shondells—one of Beano’s picks. Audiences typically loved it when a band playing primarily original material threw in something familiar, regardless of how corny it might be. Mony Mony had the type of fist-pumping shout-along chorus that seemed to work perfectly just about everywhere we went and the Cretins’ high-energy interpretation worked a treat.

Vinnie had done the best he could with flipping the switches off and on and had actually worked out a few multi-finger moves that flashed the lights back and forth from Rob and the Goof at the front of the stage to Beano at the back. The house technique for highlighting members of the band was quite novel: For lack of anything more substantial they provided Vinnie with a handheld emergency spotlight—the sort with a stretchy spiral power cord that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter in a car. When the Goof played a guitar solo or Rob tapped out an intro on the Taurus pedals Vinnie switched on the spotlight to focus on one or the other of the boys. Try as he might to hold it steady, the beam still wobbled around through the haze of cigarette smoke like we were at a high school dance or something.

Nuggets of absurdity such as this perfectly straddled the line between pathetic and hilarious and became fodder for the anecdotes that we relished for months on end once the episodes were safely behind us. The dramatically embellished telling and retelling of our assorted misadventures and boondogglements comprised a significant portion of our touring amusement: The oral tradition of Cretins lore—a landlubber rock & roll version of the Odyssey starring the Three Stooges.

When the band finished the final song of the second set, the Goof and Rob whipped off their instruments, and Beano stood behind the drum kit waving to the crowd. The Goof raised the black Start in one hand and yelled ‘Thank you, Wichita, Kansas, wherever you are! Thank you, Hattie McDaniel! Thank you, Joe Walsh! Don’t forget to eat your vegetables and don’t croak! Good night!’

The band headed offstage left and the Goof handed me the Strat as he passed. I knelt down behind the Marshalls, plugged it into the Korg tuner and gave it a quick check. The G string had gone a bit sharp and high E a bit flat, as per usual. I got it back in tune, hit the whammy bar a few times, checked it again and, finding the results favorable, placed the guitar on the stand in front of the Goof’s left Marshall cabinet.

As a dedicated disciple of Jimi Hendrix the Goof was an unrepentant whammy bar madman and that always presented a challenge in terms of keeping the guitar in proper pitch. In recent years various mechanisms had appeared on the market that purported to remedy the tuning issues that had long been the downside of aggressive applications of whammy technique. These devices typically required heresies as drilling new holes below the bridge and above the nut to accommodate the unsightly new hardware. We were strict purists and considered latter day modifications such as Floyd Rose locking tremolo systems to be grotesque disfigurements—suitable perhaps for candy-colored metalhead monstrosities such as Jacksons, Deans and Charvels with hockey stick headstocks and aggressively angular B.C. Richs, but not for fine and noble instruments such as the Goof’s vintage Strats.

Sperzel locking tuners had just come on the market and they offered an attractive, less invasive alternative, but drilling holes in back of the headstock would still be required—grounds for disqualification, even if no one in the audience could see the offending modifications.

In the Goof’s world everything had to be done old-school, so the guitar tuning regimen went like this: Tune the guitar, whammy the shit out of it, gently pull up on the strings one at a time at the 12th fret, strum chords vigorously up and down the neck. Repeat. Repeat again. At the beginning of every set this routine had to be followed religiously, two or, preferably, three times. If any of the strings were new they would require at least three tune/whammy/tune cycles at a minimum before they were fully stable. If the process was executed properly the Goof could pull off his signature dramatic whammy bar dive bombs without going badly out of tune… in theory, at least.

Standing in the dark off stage left the boys lingered for a minute, gauging the level of enthusiasm for an encore.

The audience pressed up against the edge of the stage and continued to cheer and clap. After about a minute they began to chant ‘CRE-TINS! CRE-TINS!’ This was exactly the desired effect and the band headed back up the four steps to the stage and took up their positions as the crowd yelled their approval. The boys counted into Mony Mony and the audience sang along with Beano enthusiastically.

The second encore number was Long Division, a Goof original that, if there was any justice in the universe (Note to self: Was there any justice in the universe?), should have had ‘hit single’ written all over it. It had the perfect balance of melody and drive—both vertically and horizontally, so to speak—a raucous clanging chord progression ala Pete Townshend and a minor key bridge section that expertly goosed the three-part harmonies of the final chorus. The band charged into the song directly after Mony Mony and the crowd was loving it. Long Division was one of those songs that somehow seemed instantly familiar even if you’d never heard it before. A real earworm, perfectly calibrated to lodge itself irresistibly in the audience’s collective cerebral cortex, or medulla oblongata—whichever was best.

The band pulled off a perfect crash bang crescendo closer to Long Division, Vinnie flashed the lights with as much gusto as he could muster as the band ran off stage left again. The crowd put up a pretty good roar, but that was the end of the show: Always leave ‘em wanting more.

I could tell that Beano had wanted to throw his drumsticks into the crowd but the ceiling was too low. He’d tried this move previously in similarly constrained settings, but succeeded only in bouncing the sticks off the ceiling and hitting Rob in the back of the head. Rob wasn’t happy about it but at least we got to keep the drumsticks. They didn’t grow on trees, after all.

As the band headed off I moved over to the side of the stage and, in tried and true rock n’ roll fashion, shined a mini MagLite flashlight I wore on a lanyard around my neck at the band’s feet as they descended the treacherous steps to the backstage area. It was the kind of rock & roll cliché that Beano lived for. It made him feel like a true rock star and if I didn’t shine the little light at his feet and he stubbed his stupid toe on the way backstage (he always played barefoot) I’d get grief for it.

The Goof couldn’t abide the flashlight-at-feet routine—at least partially because Beano relished it—and would occasionally pull me aside and threaten me with bodily harm if I did it again. Given the choice between being the recipient of the Goof’s admonishments or Beano’s aggrieved whining I would go with the admonishments every time.

Croaker’s had turned out to be a solid gig, wobbly spotlights be damned. We came, we saw, we conquered. The Cretins had probably recruited a few more fans, generated some positive word of mouth, and a wad of American currency went into Rob’s zippered bank bag. There would be no need for Vinnie to stomp around and yell at any of the club staff unless he was feeling particularly inspired to do so or just felt that he needed the practice.