Weekday
The weekly feature page of the University Daily Kansan
April 30,1979
Turning Allen Field House or any large arena into a sound stage is the work of the roadies. Starting at noon and working through until 3 or 4 in the morning, the roadies unload and load three semitrailer trucks full of everything from rubber pig masks to Gibson guitars Doing 18 one-night stands in a 2O-day tour is only one small part of
Steve Hurd monitors lights as the Doobies rehearse late in the afternoon. "Whoever said 'this life is exciting was wrong,'" he said.
"Let the roadies take the stage, pack it up and tear it down. They're the first to come and the last to leave, working for that minimum wage. They'll set it up in another town."
from "The Loadout," by Jackson Brown Spotlights sprinkle the expectant faces of the crowd with light as taped warm-up music wafts from the loud-speakers on stage. For the audience, the show begins when the band appears and strikes in its first powerful chords.
But for the roadies, the show begins at noon, when they arrive with three truckloads of equipment to begin the tedious task of setting up the stage. For four hours, it is a carnival of activity as huge loudspeakers ride on for rikits to the stage and daring members of the light crew shriek with excitement, focusing and adjusting the multicolored lights.
By 4 p.m., the guys in the stage crew are making the final instrument installments as the band warm up for rehearsal. Their hair glows eerily as they work, first green then pink, then red, as color by color, the lights are
Backstage, other roadies lean against black packing crates; thick electrical cords snake around their feet. Some swivel their heads to measure the progress of a girl in gym shorts who joins on the track that skirts the
"Life on the road is, well, repetitions," said Timmy McCormick, a roadie with graying cains and a pewter sailboat earring. "It really doesn't matter where you are or what town you're in. It's still the same stage."
For the past six weeks, the schedule has not varied for the Doubie Brothers' 14* races: get up for a stage call on noer or earlier, unload the trucks and set up, do the concert, tear it all down, go to the hotel, have a party, go to bed and be at the plane in the morning to it all over again somewhere else.
"It's really a love-hate relationship," Michael Shean said, pulling electrical cords and piano parts from the depths of a black clatr. "Some tourists last for 10 weeks, and when you get home, everything has changed. Couples have broken up, people have moved away, but, at the same time, I never waste my life on one of those ordinary jobs."
The roads try to fill their backstage worlds with things
other than headphones, sound boards and broken microphone, and to make the backstage scene a bit more exciting.
The lid of one box is plastered with magazine clippings, some of women in seemingly impossible positions. A buxum bunny with shell-pink eeps ears from the lid of another, and the door of yet another cabinet is covered with a gallery of Dolly Parton memorabilia, including a realistic-looking "one Dolly bill."
The black boxes contain a seemingly endless supply of ammunition, some of them smokable, more surely to the
"The pink panther is Kato, and the pink elephant is Fiffi, and Popeye and Olive Oyl, well, they're just Popeye and Olive Oyl, I guess." jerry J. D.'D. Danielson tells us that to demonstrate how brittle the toys really are.
One roadie has arranged a small menagerie of benda plastic toys on the top of a cabinet facing the stage
"We put Popeye and Olive Oyl in lewd positions and have little movie movies back here during the show." He
"It like this," Reve Hurd said, hanging Olive Olive on an electrical cord and positioning Popeye in close pursuit. "We're so busy we don't have time to do lewd things ourselves, so we do them with plastic, inanimate objects."
It seems as if the roadies don't have time for much but work. One man pulps a plastic packet of multicolored pills from his travel bag and downs them with a gulp of expensive carbonated water.
"They're vitamins," he explained. "The Doobies supply all roads with multivitamin packets. When you're on the road six days a week, you don't have time to get that much good food, even though it's in our contract to be fed."
"I don't know," Shehan said, shaking his head. "I seems kind of backwards that we get tacos in Kansas and the Bay Area."
Somebody brings in a load of greasy tacos for lunch.
But the roadies think they have traded their settled lives for the hurried, nomadic existence of the road for good reasons. For some, it offers the chance to escape from a job that holds no meaning.
"I got my B.A. in history," Danielson said, swinging his legs off a backstage platform. "Then I taught freshman literature."
"We all need toy boxes back here," said Maurice Brunkow, who does the special of elf-
For others, it is a chance to be close to the world of music that they couldn't enter as performers.
For still others, the pay is reason enough to endure the long hours, tasteless meals and sterile hotels.
But the job offers fringe benefits as well, one of which is riding in a remodeled plank, just for the roadies.
"The plane is really one of the high points of my day," Mark Brown said. "It's really nice to know that wherever I fly, I'm going to the airport."
The "Doblineliner" is a home-away-from-home for the roads. It is equipped with couches, a gailley and a television set with earphones. After an endless Friday night of tearing down the set and returning to the motel for a post-concert party, the roads struggle onto the plane, bleary-eyed and yawning.
Hard switches on the television, flipping the dials in search of Bugs Bunny, and everyone else crowds into the kitchen.
One by one, the roadies stake out their chairs for an hour of sleep before they land in another college town for a day.
Photos by Randy Olson Story by Judy Woodburn
Off to another one-night stand, three exhausted crew members try to catch a little sleep or a bite to eat in the modified 42-seat