Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out had I not climbed aboard Barry Manilow’s lighting equipment truck shortly after I turned eighteen in 1977. I used to be called a roadie.  That was a pretty common term a few years ago, although now we’re called technicians, or just “the crew”.  Not many of us technicians like the name “roadie” anyway; it reminds us too much of what touring used to be like when we drove the equipment trucks, set up the show, and lived in the same clothes for four or five days in a row.

Michael Reed is the owner of Reed Rigging in Chicago. He is also an avid writer who will be adding his thoughts on life and rigging on a regular basis for Roadogz.

Ten years ago, Barry Manilow had a lighting system that fit into a twenty-two-foot truck nicknamed The Grey Ghost, which Richard, Bill, and myself drove from city to city.  The Ghost was dirty and it leaned slightly to one side and there were always crumpled candy and potato-chip bag wrappers in the truck – not matter how often we cleaned it.  It had a sleeper that you could crawl into from the cab with an amazing assortment of sheets, pillows, and blankets from hotels around the country.  Whoever finished their shift at the wheel got their turn in the sleeper.  At times the sleeper looked and smelled like a gigantic laundry hamper.

There were usually five shows in a row in five different cities before we had a day off in a hotel with a real bed.  A major portion of that day-off, however, was usually spent driving to the next city before we could sleep in that bed.  Because of the Grey Ghost, I became good at sleeping in just about any position.

I think because I started in this business at a fairly young age and tried very hard to be good at it, are reasons why I became so attached to the road.  But there was another attraction – or more accurately – a compulsion to my touring, which was the sensation of moving – constantly.  There was this feeling I’d get when it was my turn at the wheel.  The Ghost would be hurtling down an empty, fog-covered highway just as the sun was warming the sky and the others were asleep.  I’d be all alone with just my thoughts and the white line whizzing past the tires.  It was that feeling of movement – not away from, not toward anything specific – just moving – that felt just right.

In the eighties, shows increased in size to where they could no longer fit in straight trucks like the Ghost.  Shows began to get hauled around the country in tractor-trailers and the crew traveled in customized tour buses.  The obvious advantage was that we didn’t have to drive anymore, but the quality of the sleep changed very little.  We still bounced down the highway in our little bunks, tossing and rolling to the contours of the highway.

On the 1983 Elton John tour I traveled on a sleek, silver and green bus named “Silvertrain”.  The name “Silvertrain” was painted in bold letters across the back of the bus, and below that was painted a picture of the bus itself rocketing down a highway with no beginning and no end.  The inside had smooth varnished wood trim around the windows and bunks.  There were overstuffed sofas, carpeting, swivel chairs, a microwave, VCR, and two color T.V.’s – one in the back lounge, on in the front.

The bunks were in the middle portion of the bus and they were like large square shelves with curtains across them.  We nicknamed them “slabs”.  If you were looking for someone and they said, “Oh, he’s slabbing out,” that meant the person was sleeping in his bunk.  The road manager on the tour slept a major part of the day and stayed up most of the night.  We named him “Sir Slabley”.

I had a top bunk on Silvertrain.  The top bunks were different from the others because they followed the contour of the roof and so were slightly rounded on the ceiling.  In addition, the top bunks were upholstered with padded white vinyl, and I swear, with the curvature of the roof and the tufted vinyl, they looked just like the inside of a coffin lid.

One night on Silvertrain, I had a dream that I was lying on my back in my bunk (which I was), and the ceiling or “lid” started to come down and begin to crush me.  In my dream I started to shout and yell and try to get out from under the deadly lid.  I woke up shouting and flailing my arms trying to punch my way out of the bunk.  I whipped the curtains aside and looked out in wide-eyed terror at several other heads poking out of their bunks that had been awakened by my shouting.  Although I am not claustrophobic, I would not recommend sleeping on tour bus bunks to those who are.

Tour schedules changed very little from my earlier truck-driving days.  After completing a run of five or six (or eight or ten) shows that were all within a night’s bus ride from each other in the Midwest, for example, there would be a day off which would be spent driving to another part of the country.

Invariably, the day-off-drives were long.  On the 1986 Loverboy tour, there were a lot of them:  Portland, OR, to Salt Lake City; Indianapolis to Dallas; Philadelphia to Nova Scotia; Miami to Cleveland.  Our bus driver on that tour was a white-haired gospel singer from Tennessee named Coy Cook.  He said, “I’ve been drive’n twenty-five years and I ain’t never driven this much before.  I can’t wait to drive for a country band again – they’re civilized!”

There was one thing I always looked forward to on those long drives.  And that was getting up early in the morning, while the rest of the crew was still asleep, and watching the country roll past.  Those were my times.  No one else around – just me and the mountains, the cornfields, truckstops, junkyards, and destination signs all whizzing past like a movie shown only once.

Touring, for me, was relatively risk-free.  I could avoid making decisions based on my mobility.  Whenever I was faced with making a decision, whether it was my commitment to a girlfriend or where I was going to put my suitcase until the next tour, I always had the fact that I wasn’t going to be here (wherever ‘here’ was at the moment) much longer.  Once, I was in the Dallas Public Library and I picked up a book by Sam Shepard called “Rolling Thunder Logbook”.  It was written while Shepard toured on Bob Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Tour” in the early seventies.  I opened the book to the middle to a chapter titled “Pink Dunkin’ Doughnuts.”  Shepard tells of driving most of the night to the “next gig” when the band and crew stop at a Dunkin’ Doughnuts at four a.m. for coffee.  After sitting awhile in the restaurant and observing the behavior of the locals as well as his companions, Shepard comments that, “It must be that mixture of fatigue and that strange liberating sensation to know that this place is permanent to some and only temporary to us.  In fact it’s unreal to think of any place as permanent once movement has taken root as a way of life.”  I wrote that down in big letters in my notebook.  That was me.  The touring cowboy:  Sorry darlin’, gotta keep movin’, there’s a lotta work to be done.

It has been eight months since my last tour.  For these last eight months, I have lived and worked and played here in Chicago.  Eight months is the longest time I’ve stayed in one place in many, many years.  Although there was a transition period, I’ve become used to being in the same place for a while – and so have my friends.  It’s nice to have friendships with people based on the fact that I will be here tomorrow, too.  But I don’t believe my traveling days are over – how could they be – there is still so much more to see out there.  But right now it is nice to come home to a bed that doesn’t move and a ceiling that doesn’t look like a coffin lid.

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