Title “King of the road“ over a photograph of a stadium concert. The stage, flanked by its two enormous PA/lighting towers is dwarfed by the tens of thousands packed in front of it. Bottom center, a large front of house console backed by a very small (in proportion) sound engineer, with one hand on the faders, the other maintaining a death grip on a bottle of beer. The engineer sports a baseball cap and the universal roady garb of battered jeans and a T-shirt printed with a message that could be obscene, or possibly vaunting the merits of some tour, group or musical instrument manufacturer ; it is too worn to tell.
I fear this will have to be an autobiography, as anyone else would try and make it believable (one of my criticisms of “Spinal Tap“ is that they never went as far as the truth, let alone exaggerating it) This means long winded, over descriptive text ; still, you weren’t going to buy it anyway, were you ?
Blurb
In the dissolute, permissive world of music in the sixties and seventies, roadies are the lowest of the low. Drugged and drunken, they were considered irrelevant by the audience, dangerous by the organisers and satanic by hoteliers. The general image is of a filthy, ignorant foulmouthed barbarian, inarticulate and almost certainly functionally illiterate.
Now, a survivor of this epoch gives the lie to this stereotype ; using no ghosts he’s written his own account of those years on the road, including anecdotes on many of the favorite musicians of the time, promoters, managers and, of course, the groupies.
Sleepless weeks, jet lag and fading youth took him off the touring circuit, and more anecdotes, now about the studio environment, divas and the damaged, how to force essentially discipline free musicians into a routine that will deliver the final product only a few months late follow, and the book winds up in the cinema industry, its similarities and differences with the world of the nomad music creator.
