Doppler, A Roadies View

Shameless plug.....and road story

I’ve had a few people ask if I have any good road stories, just recently as a matter of fact.

This story starts out with a plug. There is a new clothing company, Contempt Clothing. One of the owners is Ray Riendeau, former bass player for the bands Halford, Two and Machines of Loving Grace.

Why I mention this clothing is Ray and his former band Machines of Loving Grace. I tour managed and ran lights for them back in 1994 and 1995. I was hired in late summer 1994 at which point the crew and travel were pretty much in place. The band and I were to travel in a 15-passenger van and the crew traveled in large straight truck. This was the type of truck you rent at Ryder accept it had a double cab on it.

No it was not from Ryder. I won’t mention the company.

Anyway the tour was to start in Houston. We traveled from Tucson, the bands hometown. Took us a couple days to get there.

We were carrying our own sound and lighting along with our backline plus one of the opening acts gear. This thing was packed front to back.

Several days into the tour, things seem to be fine. The crew is already pretty tired though. Our shows were quite a distance apart and they were driving most nights after the show because of early load-ins.

Let me say I was never in favor of the crew driving the truck. I stressed to management from the beginning we should have a driver. Of course I get the standard “we cannot afford a driver” “besides the crew can handle it”.

So let me jump to New Orleans. We finish the show, which ends late, around 1am. I take the band to the hotel to shower since we are driving overnight to Atlanta. The crew says they are going skip the showers and will see us there.

Now we are traveling on I-10 going along the gulf through Mississippi, I’m driving and the drummer Brad is up front riding shotgun. The rest of the band is asleep. It’s early twilight just before dawn. We come up a small hill and see emergency lights. I notice the corner of a truck on its side off the shoulder down and embankment.

As we pass Brad says I think that is our truck. I pull over and sure enough he’s right. There is a 26’ bobtail on its side and there is equipment all over the place. I see our sound engineer who is looking over the mess. I ask if he is ok. He’s got a few cuts and a sprained ankle. I spot our monitor engineer next and he seems to be fine for the most part. Tom our guitar tech is clearly in shock. I ask him how he is. He mumbles fine. One crewmember is missing. I ask Tom where he is and all he can do is point to the ambulance.

Now at this point I get a huge knot in my stomach. As you can guess I’m think I have a dead crewmember. So as I approach I’m so pleased to see him sitting up inside. The paramedics are tending to some cuts on his head. They tell me he has a concussion but will be fine.

So I begin to assess the situation. We have to be in Atlanta by noon. This clearly is not going to happen. Not only is the crew in bad shape, the truck is totaled and we are not sure what gear still works. To make matters worse it’s still very early in Los Angeles were management is located.

Now you have to remember this was before most of us had cell phones. I had a pager though. So I had to use a pay phone at a rest stop a half-mile away.

Fast-forward a few hours. I get the booking agent on the phone and tell them what happened and that we need to cancel the next couple of shows. My first priority is to get the crew to a hotel and get our gear off the highway.

The truck rental company will not rent us a new truck at least on the bands credit card. I wouldn’t either since we just totaled a $45,000 one. They did agree to let me rent one on my card and that I must drive it. I agreed: wink:

We finally got the gear loaded in the new truck around 5:30pm, some 13 hours after the crash. This is after a sitting several hours at the emergency room with our crew guy that had the concussion. We then head on to Mobile if memory serves me and checked into a hotel.

So we have had to cancel several sold out shows. In the hotel parking lot we unload some of the band gear to make sure we can continue the tour. MLG used a lot of loops and sounds in their live show. If the equipment was damaged the tour was over. Fortunately everything was fine with the gear. The crew says they will be fine and want to continue.

So it’s decided that Washington DC will be where we resume. We have just over two days to get there and we made it. The tour resumed but not without some changes.

posted by Doppler at 10:24 PM