13 Nov The Road Crew – Part Two
Time for the second installment of The Road Crew, Gentle Reader(s). This section puts the gear wonkery behind us for the moment (but only for the moment, as gear wonkery is eternal) and sets the stage, as it were, for the Cretins’ tour through Mid-America in support of the Tom Kindler Band. Enjoy and stay tuned for another section before the end of the month—a Thanksgiving gift, from me to you.
Part Two
The Cretins had been on the road for just a few days this time around, having played the first of a string of gigs opening for the Tom Kindler band in a small arena in Colorado Springs two nights before. Tonight’s show was at a nightclub—the Cretins were the headliners (no opening act) and it was a fill-in date between gigs with the Kindler band. Initial indications suggested that it was probably going to be a medium crap gig—we were playing for a pretty minimal guarantee and a percentage of the door above that. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing—a fill-in gig to plug what otherwise would have been an empty day in the schedule. If all we got out of it was a bit of extra gas and food money it was still worth it.
The logistics of putting together an effective tour schedule required a complex balancing act that took into account an array of variables including the availability of venues, the capacities of venues, distances between venues, MTV video rotation, regional radio play, chart positions of albums and singles, media commitments and weather probabilities, leavened perhaps with revelations gleaned from the entrails of chickens and the patterns of flights of birds at sunset.
But this level of complexity was for the likes of bands well above the Cretins’ pay grade. For our purposes tour planning typically involved a Rolodex, a wall calendar, a road atlas and a rotary phone. A professional booking agency coordinated our co-ventures with Kindler & Co., but it was up to us to fill in the gaps between our opening act gigs with club and university engagements. The intent was to maximize the band’s earning potential on the road but it wasn’t logistically possible to fill the calendar with gigs every single day. Days off were generally welcome but they meant money going out and no money coming in.
We had started off from Albuquerque three days ago, heading north into Colorado, and following tonight’s gig we were heading off into the vast expanses of the Midwest. It was a route that we had followed before, approximately, either on a north-easterly trajectory that took us through Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois, or a more southerly route through Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas. This tour ultimately consisted of a bit of both, with a string of gigs that would take us all the way east to St. Louis and hopefully more bookings yet to come to break up the long drive back home.
The Tom Kindler Band was a power pop five-piece from the Bay Area that had recently scored a breakout hit with The Dating Game. Kindler was the singer/songwriter/guitarist—an affable and thoroughly inoffensive fellow who had been grinding it out on the road since the mid-‘70s before finally breaking through into the big time in the MTV era. Although we were sharing several stages with Kindler and his boys we didn’t really see much of our betters. The protocols of touring hierarchy dictated that we maintain a respectful distance backstage at the gigs and generally refrain from speaking unless spoken to. So far as we could suss out they seemed like nice enough guys who played rather unremarkable, friendly music. Catchy—sure, some of it—but if we were being honest (still unlikely), not exactly compelling stuff for edgy, artsy sorts such as the Goof and I fancied ourselves.
With the Kindler Band’s newfound acclaim they had gravitated towards the skinny-tie school of New Wave music that had rushed in in recent years to populate the gap betwixt and between punk and mainstream rock. No one seemed to be able to quantify what the exact parameters of New Wave were—as a genre it was more likely to be defined more by what it was not than what it was. Whatever it was or was not, Kindler seemed to fill the bill reasonably well. If a band wore the right clothes, had the right haircuts, and didn’t play something that could be clearly classified as metal, punk, folk, blues, soul or country music then they might possibly stake a claim to be considered New Wave. Even Neil Young had recently dipped a hippie pinkie toe into New Wave-y waters so, in theory, anything was possible.
After their brief flirtation with rock n’ roll fame Kindler and his boys were destined to fade away into one-hit wonder obscurity, their albums ending up as a staple in cut-out bins across the country and the particulars of their discography becoming answers in the pop culture edition of Trivial Pursuits. Actually, more like two-hit wonders, as Tom’s follow up to The Dating Game was the even more successful disco-inflected song Dangerous. Dangerous got as high as number two on the Billboard chart and the band was currently out touring behind the popularity of that song. These successes provided a significant boost to their previously obscure indie label, East Bay Records, along with the rest of the label’s roster of quirky rockers, but the company went belly up a year or two later just the same. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.
The music game was a tough, fickle business but if Kindler was smart and played his cards right he might be able to cobble together a reasonable living off of royalties from his two hits and, later, from playing short regional tours on the casino nostalgia circuit. That’s how it worked: All you needed was one song with the right beat, the right hook, the right sing-along chorus, and if the light shined on you brightly enough for just that one brief moment it could end up paying the mortgage, putting the kids through college and keeping the wolf away from the door for the rest of your life.
Of course there was an army of managers, producers, record company stooges, music publishers, lawyers and accountants to keep at bay, not to mention fellow band members, roadies, wives, exes, girlfriends or combinations thereof. It helped a lot if you wrote the songs yourself and retained control of your own publishing. The founding mothers and fathers of rock & roll—the majority of them Black, not coincidentally—had learned those lessons the hard way back in the day. Now, two generations further on up the road, if the white boys still hadn’t yet gotten the memo, well, that fell into the realm of tough titties.
In some ways, things hadn’t really changed much. Whether it was MTV or the Louisiana Hayride, it still came down to that one elusive song, that one moment in the light, catching the right wave at the right moment. It was the holy trinity of right song/right place/right time that the Cretins were trying to run down. Running it down was a rare, almost mythic, occurrence. The odds were insanely long but the slim possibility of doing so was enough to keep the middle and lower ranks of the music business endlessly striving and starving, criss-crossing the country ceaselessly, knocking it out in the bars and music clubs, plugging into the opening slots for the bigger bands—a raggedy-ass army of true believers slogging around in a motley fleet of ramshackle vans, secondhand busses and rustbucket station wagons, chronically a day late and a dollar short, but striving on regardless. And that’s exactly where we were now—the Cretins road crew.
At this point in time the Cretins road crew consisted of the band—Beano on drums and vocals, Rob on bass, bass pedals and backing vocals, and the Goof on guitar, vocals and bass pedals—Vinnie, who was the ostensible road manager and lighting tech, and myself. I functioned variously as guitar tech, sound man at-large, all purpose roadie, and nursemaid to the Goof. The prevailing fiction of the road crew was that we were in this gig as approximate equals, but the band was the band and the bottom line was that everything we did was about the band. The band and the gig. Get to the gig, play the gig, get paid, get to the next gig. Everything else was superfluous.
Vinnie had been working with the band for a couple of years but, in all honesty, he was steadily evolving into a vestigial appendage. Rob had lately taken over handling the road finances and the smaller venues often had little to offer in the stage lighting department while the larger venues typically had their own lighting techs on staff. The current string of shows was slated to be Vinnie’s last tour with the group and no one seemed particularly concerned about the prospect of his impending departure.
Vinnie claimed to have a gig lined up as the lighting designer for a forthcoming Michael Jackson world tour but based upon available evidence I was skeptical. He had been obsessively sketching out schematics for a proposed Jackson lighting rig and, with the slightest provocation, would enthusiastically spread out a large roll of paper that he carried everywhere in a cardboard mailing tube. All my untutored eye saw was a bunch of small circles about the size of a penny arranged in a broad arc, but I didn’t have the feeling that tutoring would render the diagram any more instructive. Vinnie’s pencil-drawn circles weren’t labelled or coded in any way, there was no color key—nothing. It all seemed a bit… vague.
Vinnie was a fantasist but everybody played along and pretended that they saw something more than a bunch of circles drawn on a rolled up sheet of white paper. The Goof, Rob, Beano and I would nod sagely and make vaguely admiring ‘ahhh’ and ‘hmmm’ sounds whenever the lighting schematic was produced. I suppose that qualified as us being indulgent and supportive—a rare phenomenon to say the least.
Vinnie had curly black hair and a Blue Öyster Cult mustache to match . Like all of us, he dressed strictly for comfort and utility when he wasn’t on the clock, as it were, but on special occasions (of which there were precious few) he would don his pride and joy—a tightly tailored black leather suit that he had acquired in L.A.. He wore pointy black Italian ankle boots to complete the ensemble, but he invariably paired them with white athletic socks which served very adequately to spoil what I assumed was the desired effect of rock & roll chic and sophistication.
Vinnie’s job as road manager, such as it was, was to strut around at gigs doing the dick dance with the local promoters, the venue staff and the road managers from the other bands, if there were any. When we were in a venue grand enough to have anything resembling a genuine ‘lighting system’ Vinnie was truly in his element as he considered himself a stage lighting artiste, first and foremost. He could, and sometimes would, spend hours before the gig aiming the lights and working out ‘scenes’ for the band. It was cool to play venues that had professional quality lights and when we did Vinnie would usually corral me to stand in for the band onstage, waving my arms around while seated at the drum kit or standing up front at the mics with the backup instruments while the band was fucking off backstage or whatever. This body-double duty interfered with my personal interpretation of Cretins road crew esprit de corps, which entailed fucking off in equal measure to the band.
This string of gigs with the Kindler Band was heaven for Vinnie as we were playing some fairly large venues as opposed to the usual medium to small clubs. These larger halls and arenas had full-on concert quality lighting systems with dozens of ‘cans,’ sophisticated consoles with an array of automated presets and such like. Vinnie was usually able to convince the house tech crew that he was of their tribe and they’d allow him to work the lighting board with a minimum of adult supervision. These were the biggest gigs the band had ever landed and all of us were working up a sweat trying to act nonchalant, like it was the level of touring to which we were accustomed. In truth, we were thrilled to have professional grade amenities such as actual dressing rooms and actual deli platters.
These sorts of backstage perks were stipulated as standard fare in the contract riders that were sent out for all Cretins gigs, but these were typically returned with most, if not all, of the language about food, drink, cleanliness, potable water, breathable air and other assorted creature comforts simply crossed out. In the hierarchy of touring bands we were beggars, not choosers, and the promoters exercised an exceptional degree of veto power over such minutiae. Oh well. At least we asked.
At most of the smaller venues we played there were no spacious dressing rooms stocked with icy coolers full of beer, soft drinks and mineral water, no piles of fluffy clean towels, no shower facilities, no local roadies to assist with load in or load out, no bowls brimming with M&M’s (with all the offending brown ones meticulously removed, as per Van Halen spec), and definitely no deli platters with appetizing assortments of sliced meats, cheeses, crackers, bread, veggies, dip and condiments. Extravagances such as these were typically just a pipe dream, but not for the Kindler gigs. The Cretins were making inroads into unexplored territory with these gigs: Bigger halls, bigger audiences, bigger money, broader recognition. This was the real deal—this was truly the road—and we were aiming to make the most of it for as long as we could make it last.
