From the novel The Jam
“What about a trip to the Smithsonian after the satellite radio thingy? We could get them lost in there for days...”
Frances raised a heavily outlined and perfectly arched black eyebrow sarcastically, as I proposed day scheduling in Washington D.C. for High Crime’s upcoming promotional tour.
“Only if they’re open at two A.M. and have a lax policy on snorting lines off the exhibits.” Frances giggled her reply, as she readjusted her chin length jet black hair behind her ears.
We were sitting for the third hour straight, in my corner office at AWR, tempting fate with our extended reclining stances in the slate colored Herman Miller Embody chairs.
Frances tapped away on her phone, correcting dates and details on it and the one next to it, the official Blackberry, across from my own pocket lifeline laying in front of me on the massive antique mahogany desk I spotted while on Portobello Road and had shipped from England late last year.
I scooted this way and that on the wheels of the chair, like a child full of Pixie Stix and Mountain Dew, trying to focus on working out ways to keep the down time the band experienced when one of us wouldn’t be on the road with them to a minimum. I was fidgety, because, admittedly, I wasn’t totally engrossed in the effort. Taming High Crime had suddenly become an exercise in futility I no longer seemed to think was one hundred percent achievable.
The mini-tour planned was six weeks in length, with only a two day break home during Christmas, which to be fair, is an excruciating stretch, if the performer has family and a life outside their music career. But with High Crime, life is all sort of relative, and anyway, no one in the band complained when the itineraries were given to them the day before. Of course, that’s probably because they hadn’t read them, and only two of the members actually showed up to the mandatory meeting to discuss the whole thing. Tamara, supposedly sick, again, was on speakerphone as I read the dates aloud, and when I finally tracked down Doug hours later, he claimed he mixed up the times and hung up before dates could even be discussed. But this tour, and the World tour after it, was in their contracts. Set in stone. In the end, the whole band would be on the road for the next year and a half coming very soon.
A tour, especially when you are a successful band with more than ample backing from your record company, is about twenty-two and a half hours of waiting a day. When you are at the status High Crime is, you as a band member have very little to do with the everyday mundane details of those hours, save whether you choose to use all that time you are allotted to sleep, drink, do drugs, chase groupies or all of the aforementioned. You have more free time than an animal at the zoo. Because the stuff normal people do in a day is done for you. You are free. Most of the time. To do whatever you choose, wherever you happen to be. The freedom can be the most dangerous part of the job.
Travel plans are made for you. Every city, every state, every country. Entire continents, worked down to numbers: Dates and times. Whittled down to minutes, when necessary. Work visas and travel visas and all that passport stuff? Taken care of. Luggage is carried out of the plane or bus, and placed in your room, taken out of your room, and placed back on the bus or plane as needed. Music gear and sound equipment is removed from under your bus or plane a few minutes after arrival time and/or unloaded at the venue, set up, tuned and maintained as necessary, loaded back up and also placed back under bus or plane minutes after the concert ends. You, in fact, may sometimes only touch your guitar when a roadie brings it to you, and literally places it on you, onstage, and plugs you in, in front of the audience, half a second before the first song starts.
Sleeping accommodations are always arranged months ahead of time, in swank hotel suites the size of million dollar Manhattan apartments, with flat screens mounted in every room like fine art, and private pools and private butlers, and stocked with more groceries and toiletries than you ever have at home. You have complained in the past about certain details in the room you spend no time in, like the lighting being too harsh, or the stereo you almost never turn on sounding too treble-heavy, and so these details, along with countless others, will be tended to and corrected this time around, just in case you come across these features ever again and haphazardly decide to use them.
You will be provided, per your specific tour contract demands, with a king size Stearns and Foster Legendary Innerspring bed in each master bedroom, and a queen size of the same in the two other bedrooms you will never even enter, unless you’ve changed your mind and prefer visco-elastic foam mattresses, in which case you will get a The Grand Bed by Tempur-Pedic. Either way, the mattresses will be made up with brand new snow white Frette sheets, the Rigato Ara design, because you like stripes but won’t sleep on sheets with any color in them. They will be prewashed in cruelty free fragrance free delicate washing powder, unless you request the Tocca Lingerie wash, in the fragrance Stella, again. The sheets are all one hundred percent Egyptian cotton, these being three hundred thread count, which goes completely against your contract demands of sheets of at least one thousand thread count, but these fine Italian linens are mercerized sateen, which has to do with the way the fibers of cotton are plumped and smoothed to produce some of the softest, finest fabric in the world. Your manager has made this executive decision for you, and you will not be told the thread count, because you have not complained before about these sheets, and besides, if you really knew anything about fine linens you would know that thread count is only a very small part of what makes bed linens luxurious. But you don’t, because you’ve only seen the numbers and thinking everything with a higher number is better, you have demanded sheets that don’t exist in this brand, and if they do in a different brand, they would certainly not be as deliciously soft as these, so in this case, what you don’t know will certainly not hurt you.
The beds will be overflowing with Siberian Goose down Euro pillows, and standard pillows and even a little boudoir pillow, all of them tucked into Frette stark white cases of the same design as the sheets, and the Frette Ischia design duvet covers over fluffy down comforters never used by any other hotel residents. You will be provided with more than enough time to get in a good eight hours, although you won’t. Your hotel rooms are, of course, cleaned multiple times a day, or left alone, if you request it. Your bed is turned down before midnight and then stripped when you leave, even if it hasn’t been slept in. The creamy rose petals carefully scattered on the floor in front of the bed will be vacuumed up. Whether you even stay the night in a city or are only there for an hour, there will be a room provided with all of these details in each stop. Just in case.
Your private plane and your entourage of tour buses are also stocked as amply, also cleaned before you notice they’re dirty.
Meals, according to any and all dietary demands and restrictions are arranged and provided in every city, in between cities, and even when you have no idea if you’re near any city. If you are eating only Twizzlers and Red Bull this week, you will be provided for. If you’re like Tamara, and mostly don’t eat, you still request ridiculous foods that change as often as your mood. They always arrive exactly as requested, and you let them sit in the baskets and fridges and ice buckets, untouched. You ask for things like Brocomole, a broccoli version of Guacamole, and tailor made vegan raw food that has to be Fed Exed to every new location on dry ice. It will be left behind, untouched, where it will likely be thrown out.
Of course alcohol is available. At all hours. Any kind under the sun. When you are hung-over and swear it off, it will quickly be removed, and when you angrily ask a few hours later where your wine is, it will all be replaced just as quickly. And drugs? Record company execs won’t discuss getting their clients drugs. They might even give you a long talk at some point, usually after you’ve either overdosed or half destroyed your budding career, about how drugs are bad for you, blah blah blah. Oddly enough, you find that your A&R guys in just about every city love to talk to you about this. It makes them feel important to hook you up with their dealer, so on the off chance you aren’t offered free drugs by your band mates and fans, and most times you are, you can always talk to A&R if you’re hard up. Just say the four letter word: Drug. And, like raindrops, pills will fall from the sky around you.
All of this expected luxury (minus the drugs) will be billed directly to someone at the record company who deals with and promptly pays for these things, so you will never have to see a bill or sign a bill or even carry money if you don’t want to. And eventually, like everything else on tour, it all comes out of your earnings from album sales and ticket sales before you get a dime in residuals. And even though you are rich beyond your wildest imagination, you will claim repeatedly you’re being ripped off by the record company, ignoring the daily waste you are guilty of even when you’re not on tour, and having no knowledge, and more importantly, refusing to inquire about the actual cost of your constant and ever changing demands.
That word economy does not apply to you. Not in terms of travel, not in terms of your bank account suffering because of it, and certainly not ever in terms of trying to be thrifty. If anything is economy sized in your life, chances are, it’s a mistake. You want the smaller size. But ten of them.
You have your record company people and public relations people and your personal assistants and costume designers and road managers and stage managers and guitar techs and drum techs and set designers and all the road crew that sets up and tears down your stage in every city, seconds after you play the last note. And aside from that, along with your on-again, off-again spiritual guides and Pilates instructors and motivational psychologists and chiropractors, there is a “runner” in each city. These people are either provided by the venue or by the record company if the venue claims that they don’t have the means, (which is B.S. because they’re usually unpaid interns anyway), and this person’s whole purpose on the planet is to cater to the band members’ whims for the entire length of their stay. Your attitude and demands make them question not only their future in the music business, but their future in general. You make anyone who works for you want to buy straight razors in bulk.
You are taken to interviews, or the journalists come to you. If you’re known for being prickly or difficult, (and you are), you will have a PR person accompany you so you don’t say or do anything indicative of your real personality. You will, undoubtedly at some point do just this, and show yourself to a reporter, who will then quote you word for word in print. The PR person will beg against it, will have your lawyers threaten to sue the magazine for billions, but it’s all on tape, and it will go to print, but will first spread to the Internet Blogosphere the second the trigger happy music journalist leaves the room, maybe even while he’s in the room, texting Gawker and Perez Hilton and TMZ about their great fortune.
You will read the terrible quote or incident, or have it read to you, because you always read all your press and your reviews, even though you vehemently deny it. You will throw a fit over what you were quoted saying, or doing, and claim that you are grossly misunderstood and taken out of context and have your newly replaced PR person send out a press release even stating that you no longer want to do any press, and that you hereby refuse to talk to anyone, about anything.
Of course, you will do more press anyway, because talking about yourself and what you do is too tempting and you want to sell more albums so you can support that habit. You have every daily paper that might have a review of your show or album, and every relevant magazine, delivered to you, wherever you are, and every day you have people who will print out and even read the latest blogs to you, as you pretend not to care whether you were mentioned or not. When you are talked about, you act disgusted with how they judge you. When you’re not mentioned, you mock the insignificance of whoever they are dishing about.
You are told where you need to go, when you need to go there, and when you need to leave. You mostly don’t listen. You are reminded when you have five more minutes until you will be late. You are woken up at precisely the right time, so you won’t miss your plane, even though the only thing you will be responsible for is your own body making it on, after someone delivers you to your gate, and even your seat, if necessary. Your flight is rescheduled when you do miss your plane, which you do too often. You are provided with every single need or want a human can imagine, from food to shelter to entertainment, all in exchange for about an hour and a half, when you are expected to do your job: Play music. That’s all.
You are asked to please try to get onstage at least two hours within the time that’s promised. Try to play about ten to fourteen songs, and try to stay upright, try to play in tune, try not to get so drunk you forget lyrics, try not to insult audience members, try not to get in a fight with a fellow band member, try to be somewhat of a professional at what you get paid ungodly amounts of money to do, just for one hour or so out of your life. Please? The rest is already taken care of.
Everything else is done for you. That is your sole responsibility.
You are catered to and spoiled and you’re worshipped and adored and every word you utter or note you play is treated as Gospel. You live in a bubble where even when bad things happen, when someone says or does something you don’t like, in print or in person, there are always people around you who turn these slights into positives, who soothe you until you feel better, even when that takes all night while you lie drunk and sobbing on the heated marble bathroom floor of your suite, threatening to quit or kill yourself, or both. When you pretend nothing happened the next morning, they do too. That’s their job. You can get away with things other mere humans would go to jail for. You can say and do things that would otherwise make you a certified narcissistic ego maniacal nightmare. You have the most unbelievable job in the entire world, and you get paid, in a month or so, more than most people will ever make in their lifetimes.
It’s easy. But easy can be boring. Easy can be surprisingly difficult. Because every city ends up being kind of the same. Every tour is pretty much the same. The only thing that changes is the color of the music journalist’s shirt, and you don’t notice things like that anyway. And maybe the name of the new bus driver you won’t really care about unless he hits a bump while your eyeliner is being applied, in which case you’ll want him fired on the spot. Or the brand of five dollar bottled tap water you demand two cases, chilled, but not too cold, onstage, before you’ll play one note. That might change. And the name of the new album you’re on this whole tour to sell, but whose title most of the time you can’t be bothered to remember unless someone reminds you. And the lyrics to the new songs change, but that’s why you have a teleprompter in your monitors and backups on paper in a notebook at your feet. Why should you have to remember the words to songs you wrote anyway?
Monotony is part of the job. It’s part of life. You’re not supposed to tell the fans that yes, you have been told how great you are, how talented you are, that you’re their favorite person in the whole world, a million times before. You’re not supposed to tell the music journalists that you know they’re frustrated musicians, and that you also know they’ll give you a favorable interview and leave out the parts about how you really act if they want to stay in your good graces in case you decide to tap them to ghost write your autobiography.
You’re supposed to act like this time, every time, with every album, in every city, it’s different. Meanwhile, someone else is loading up your gear, and someone else is making sure your wine is Spanish, and someone else is requesting dressing on the side of your salad that you will definitely not eat. Someone else is living the life part of your life for you while you are sitting backstage somewhere feeling sorry for yourself because you’re bored. Because you don’t really have to do much of anything, except incessantly talk about yourself, and then play for an hour or two, songs mostly all about you, and how you feel or what you like or don’t like. And you feel like Rapunzel, trapped in the castle. Like maybe this whole thing you wanted so badly is not what you thought it would be after all.
But in comparison to the monotony of a real job, maybe, say, an office job? Where every day you have to wake yourself up, where you make your own coffee, you drive yourself to work, you get the boss their mail, you type the same orders and answer the same phones day after day after day, you take the heat when something isn’t just right, where you have to stop by the grocery store after working ten hours straight without a lunch break and decide what to prepare and then eat for dinner, you have to put gas in the car, you have to pay the electric bill and you have to somehow figure out how to get enough sleep and try to fit in some semblance of a social life, and you have to do all of this with enough joie de vivre to keep doing it day after day after day? In comparison to that life? The other one, full of all that free time, all that waste and pampering, void of ever touching a gas pump with your hands or standing in the freezer section, dizzied and overcome with choices for frozen pizza? It ends up being what everyone dreams of. Until they’re doing it. And then, they’re dreaming of something else. Probably something normal. Like making their own coffee. Although, truth be told, they never really learned how to do that.
As I became more jaded over the course of a few hours than I had been in nearly ten years prior, we scoured online maps and Lonely Planet guides for quirky museums and exciting but tasteful restaurants, knowing with more certainty that the band wouldn’t actually go on any outings of our making.
They had their own agendas, which turned out to be extremely detrimental to the mandatory part of the tour: the playing live music onstage part. So we continued our quest, while I rubbed my feather in the pocket of my jacket between my middle and forefinger. I was nervous about seeing my dad in two days. I was worried I wouldn’t recognize him. I was nauseous thinking about giving him a hug when he arrived. But what else should I do? Shake his hand? Or worse, pat him on the back as he had done to me when he left me with his sister, never to return? I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t touch him at all. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t say anything, either. Maybe I should just stand there, staring at him, silent, and wait for him to explain exactly what he was thinking these last twenty years.
I moved my attention back to the feather. To my birds. Their routine. Five years. They get five years, in the wild, fighting every day just to survive. Literally having to wait for things to die and then begin to rot before they can eat, because their beaks are genetically too weak to rip into the flesh of something big and strong and healthy. Urinating on themselves to stay cool, and to clean the disease they must feed in off their bodies, shitting on themselves to save themselves from dying. Navigating through trash and traffic, pollution and trigger happy rednecks with nothing better to do than kill anything alive they happen to come across. Trying to live in the world humans have created, day after day, reviled and misunderstood. Even for just five years. What kind of a deal is that? What kind of life?
I found myself through the last thirty some-odd years, at times, feeling sorry for my situation, feeling like I was robbed of a childhood, that I was mistreated and wronged. And in human terms, surely I was. But in the general scheme of things, in Mother Nature’s eyes, I’m spoiled and ungrateful. There’s that Mother again. Isn’t she something? Constantly proving to humans that they can work to understand the most complex problems in the universe, and still, we’ve got nothing on her. I suppose my birds have even less time on their hands than the least fortunate of humans, and so, perhaps, they have less time to wonder what it might be like to take something, anything, for granted. They have less time for doing anything but waiting for the next thing to die, so that they might live another day.
“Nyla? Hello? Did you hear me? Which one?”
Frances was asking me which brand of Merlot Tamara had insisted upon this time around. I almost never forgot things like that. As a manager, it is my job to remember which wine Tamara wants backstage before the show, and which one she wants on the bus after the show. Also what temperature Chad’s coffee should be, which Indian takeout to send to the studio that they haven’t yet complained made them all sick, which breath mints made Tamara sneeze, which flowers gave Doug migraines and how many ice cubes went in Reed’s disgusting Mountain Dew and Vodka cocktail. It changes.
I’m expected to keep up. And I always did before. I rubbed my feather, and thought hard. Frances pressed.
“Nyla. Space Case. Stop fidgeting. I need a name.”
“I don’t care.”
“What?”
“I said I don’t care.”
Frances stared at me. “That’s not your answer.”
I nodded. “Yes it is. Just write down Merlot. Decent Merlot.”
Frances hesitated. “Um…Very funny.”
I didn’t laugh. I just rubbed my feather and tried to imagine telling Tamara she would have to pee all over herself when she complained that the tour bus was a few degrees too warm. I thought of all the ridiculous things they all made into issues that just didn’t matter in the general scheme of things. Frances rolled her eyes.
“I’m gonna call Tamara’s assistant because I don’t want to hear about this in a month at two A.M…”
I touched Frances’ wrist as she started to reach for her phone. She hated being touched. “She’ll never know the difference, Frances. She just thinks it matters. Just let the venue decide. She’s going to change her mind by the time she gets out on the road anyway.”
Frances shrugged and began tapping into her phone, muttering under her breath, “Okay, Deepak. When the shit hits the fan, I’m forwarding the calls to you.”
And I didn’t care. Finally. I calmly reminded myself that my job as a manager for these spoiled kids was just that: a job. And maybe Tamara would freak out and throw a fit. And maybe she wouldn’t. But I let it go, and thought of larger things, like where my life was going from here, and then more pressing questions, like, what was I going to have for dinner? And I had to admit, I didn’t have an answer for either one.
But it was definitely better than having someone else map it all out for me.
“What about a trip to the Smithsonian after the satellite radio thingy? We could get them lost in there for days...”
Frances raised a heavily outlined and perfectly arched black eyebrow sarcastically, as I proposed day scheduling in Washington D.C. for High Crime’s upcoming promotional tour.
“Only if they’re open at two A.M. and have a lax policy on snorting lines off the exhibits.” Frances giggled her reply, as she readjusted her chin length jet black hair behind her ears.
We were sitting for the third hour straight, in my corner office at AWR, tempting fate with our extended reclining stances in the slate colored Herman Miller Embody chairs.
Frances tapped away on her phone, correcting dates and details on it and the one next to it, the official Blackberry, across from my own pocket lifeline laying in front of me on the massive antique mahogany desk I spotted while on Portobello Road and had shipped from England late last year.
I scooted this way and that on the wheels of the chair, like a child full of Pixie Stix and Mountain Dew, trying to focus on working out ways to keep the down time the band experienced when one of us wouldn’t be on the road with them to a minimum. I was fidgety, because, admittedly, I wasn’t totally engrossed in the effort. Taming High Crime had suddenly become an exercise in futility I no longer seemed to think was one hundred percent achievable.
The mini-tour planned was six weeks in length, with only a two day break home during Christmas, which to be fair, is an excruciating stretch, if the performer has family and a life outside their music career. But with High Crime, life is all sort of relative, and anyway, no one in the band complained when the itineraries were given to them the day before. Of course, that’s probably because they hadn’t read them, and only two of the members actually showed up to the mandatory meeting to discuss the whole thing. Tamara, supposedly sick, again, was on speakerphone as I read the dates aloud, and when I finally tracked down Doug hours later, he claimed he mixed up the times and hung up before dates could even be discussed. But this tour, and the World tour after it, was in their contracts. Set in stone. In the end, the whole band would be on the road for the next year and a half coming very soon.
A tour, especially when you are a successful band with more than ample backing from your record company, is about twenty-two and a half hours of waiting a day. When you are at the status High Crime is, you as a band member have very little to do with the everyday mundane details of those hours, save whether you choose to use all that time you are allotted to sleep, drink, do drugs, chase groupies or all of the aforementioned. You have more free time than an animal at the zoo. Because the stuff normal people do in a day is done for you. You are free. Most of the time. To do whatever you choose, wherever you happen to be. The freedom can be the most dangerous part of the job.
Travel plans are made for you. Every city, every state, every country. Entire continents, worked down to numbers: Dates and times. Whittled down to minutes, when necessary. Work visas and travel visas and all that passport stuff? Taken care of. Luggage is carried out of the plane or bus, and placed in your room, taken out of your room, and placed back on the bus or plane as needed. Music gear and sound equipment is removed from under your bus or plane a few minutes after arrival time and/or unloaded at the venue, set up, tuned and maintained as necessary, loaded back up and also placed back under bus or plane minutes after the concert ends. You, in fact, may sometimes only touch your guitar when a roadie brings it to you, and literally places it on you, onstage, and plugs you in, in front of the audience, half a second before the first song starts.
Sleeping accommodations are always arranged months ahead of time, in swank hotel suites the size of million dollar Manhattan apartments, with flat screens mounted in every room like fine art, and private pools and private butlers, and stocked with more groceries and toiletries than you ever have at home. You have complained in the past about certain details in the room you spend no time in, like the lighting being too harsh, or the stereo you almost never turn on sounding too treble-heavy, and so these details, along with countless others, will be tended to and corrected this time around, just in case you come across these features ever again and haphazardly decide to use them.
You will be provided, per your specific tour contract demands, with a king size Stearns and Foster Legendary Innerspring bed in each master bedroom, and a queen size of the same in the two other bedrooms you will never even enter, unless you’ve changed your mind and prefer visco-elastic foam mattresses, in which case you will get a The Grand Bed by Tempur-Pedic. Either way, the mattresses will be made up with brand new snow white Frette sheets, the Rigato Ara design, because you like stripes but won’t sleep on sheets with any color in them. They will be prewashed in cruelty free fragrance free delicate washing powder, unless you request the Tocca Lingerie wash, in the fragrance Stella, again. The sheets are all one hundred percent Egyptian cotton, these being three hundred thread count, which goes completely against your contract demands of sheets of at least one thousand thread count, but these fine Italian linens are mercerized sateen, which has to do with the way the fibers of cotton are plumped and smoothed to produce some of the softest, finest fabric in the world. Your manager has made this executive decision for you, and you will not be told the thread count, because you have not complained before about these sheets, and besides, if you really knew anything about fine linens you would know that thread count is only a very small part of what makes bed linens luxurious. But you don’t, because you’ve only seen the numbers and thinking everything with a higher number is better, you have demanded sheets that don’t exist in this brand, and if they do in a different brand, they would certainly not be as deliciously soft as these, so in this case, what you don’t know will certainly not hurt you.
The beds will be overflowing with Siberian Goose down Euro pillows, and standard pillows and even a little boudoir pillow, all of them tucked into Frette stark white cases of the same design as the sheets, and the Frette Ischia design duvet covers over fluffy down comforters never used by any other hotel residents. You will be provided with more than enough time to get in a good eight hours, although you won’t. Your hotel rooms are, of course, cleaned multiple times a day, or left alone, if you request it. Your bed is turned down before midnight and then stripped when you leave, even if it hasn’t been slept in. The creamy rose petals carefully scattered on the floor in front of the bed will be vacuumed up. Whether you even stay the night in a city or are only there for an hour, there will be a room provided with all of these details in each stop. Just in case.
Your private plane and your entourage of tour buses are also stocked as amply, also cleaned before you notice they’re dirty.
Meals, according to any and all dietary demands and restrictions are arranged and provided in every city, in between cities, and even when you have no idea if you’re near any city. If you are eating only Twizzlers and Red Bull this week, you will be provided for. If you’re like Tamara, and mostly don’t eat, you still request ridiculous foods that change as often as your mood. They always arrive exactly as requested, and you let them sit in the baskets and fridges and ice buckets, untouched. You ask for things like Brocomole, a broccoli version of Guacamole, and tailor made vegan raw food that has to be Fed Exed to every new location on dry ice. It will be left behind, untouched, where it will likely be thrown out.
Of course alcohol is available. At all hours. Any kind under the sun. When you are hung-over and swear it off, it will quickly be removed, and when you angrily ask a few hours later where your wine is, it will all be replaced just as quickly. And drugs? Record company execs won’t discuss getting their clients drugs. They might even give you a long talk at some point, usually after you’ve either overdosed or half destroyed your budding career, about how drugs are bad for you, blah blah blah. Oddly enough, you find that your A&R guys in just about every city love to talk to you about this. It makes them feel important to hook you up with their dealer, so on the off chance you aren’t offered free drugs by your band mates and fans, and most times you are, you can always talk to A&R if you’re hard up. Just say the four letter word: Drug. And, like raindrops, pills will fall from the sky around you.
All of this expected luxury (minus the drugs) will be billed directly to someone at the record company who deals with and promptly pays for these things, so you will never have to see a bill or sign a bill or even carry money if you don’t want to. And eventually, like everything else on tour, it all comes out of your earnings from album sales and ticket sales before you get a dime in residuals. And even though you are rich beyond your wildest imagination, you will claim repeatedly you’re being ripped off by the record company, ignoring the daily waste you are guilty of even when you’re not on tour, and having no knowledge, and more importantly, refusing to inquire about the actual cost of your constant and ever changing demands.
That word economy does not apply to you. Not in terms of travel, not in terms of your bank account suffering because of it, and certainly not ever in terms of trying to be thrifty. If anything is economy sized in your life, chances are, it’s a mistake. You want the smaller size. But ten of them.
You have your record company people and public relations people and your personal assistants and costume designers and road managers and stage managers and guitar techs and drum techs and set designers and all the road crew that sets up and tears down your stage in every city, seconds after you play the last note. And aside from that, along with your on-again, off-again spiritual guides and Pilates instructors and motivational psychologists and chiropractors, there is a “runner” in each city. These people are either provided by the venue or by the record company if the venue claims that they don’t have the means, (which is B.S. because they’re usually unpaid interns anyway), and this person’s whole purpose on the planet is to cater to the band members’ whims for the entire length of their stay. Your attitude and demands make them question not only their future in the music business, but their future in general. You make anyone who works for you want to buy straight razors in bulk.
You are taken to interviews, or the journalists come to you. If you’re known for being prickly or difficult, (and you are), you will have a PR person accompany you so you don’t say or do anything indicative of your real personality. You will, undoubtedly at some point do just this, and show yourself to a reporter, who will then quote you word for word in print. The PR person will beg against it, will have your lawyers threaten to sue the magazine for billions, but it’s all on tape, and it will go to print, but will first spread to the Internet Blogosphere the second the trigger happy music journalist leaves the room, maybe even while he’s in the room, texting Gawker and Perez Hilton and TMZ about their great fortune.
You will read the terrible quote or incident, or have it read to you, because you always read all your press and your reviews, even though you vehemently deny it. You will throw a fit over what you were quoted saying, or doing, and claim that you are grossly misunderstood and taken out of context and have your newly replaced PR person send out a press release even stating that you no longer want to do any press, and that you hereby refuse to talk to anyone, about anything.
Of course, you will do more press anyway, because talking about yourself and what you do is too tempting and you want to sell more albums so you can support that habit. You have every daily paper that might have a review of your show or album, and every relevant magazine, delivered to you, wherever you are, and every day you have people who will print out and even read the latest blogs to you, as you pretend not to care whether you were mentioned or not. When you are talked about, you act disgusted with how they judge you. When you’re not mentioned, you mock the insignificance of whoever they are dishing about.
You are told where you need to go, when you need to go there, and when you need to leave. You mostly don’t listen. You are reminded when you have five more minutes until you will be late. You are woken up at precisely the right time, so you won’t miss your plane, even though the only thing you will be responsible for is your own body making it on, after someone delivers you to your gate, and even your seat, if necessary. Your flight is rescheduled when you do miss your plane, which you do too often. You are provided with every single need or want a human can imagine, from food to shelter to entertainment, all in exchange for about an hour and a half, when you are expected to do your job: Play music. That’s all.
You are asked to please try to get onstage at least two hours within the time that’s promised. Try to play about ten to fourteen songs, and try to stay upright, try to play in tune, try not to get so drunk you forget lyrics, try not to insult audience members, try not to get in a fight with a fellow band member, try to be somewhat of a professional at what you get paid ungodly amounts of money to do, just for one hour or so out of your life. Please? The rest is already taken care of.
Everything else is done for you. That is your sole responsibility.
You are catered to and spoiled and you’re worshipped and adored and every word you utter or note you play is treated as Gospel. You live in a bubble where even when bad things happen, when someone says or does something you don’t like, in print or in person, there are always people around you who turn these slights into positives, who soothe you until you feel better, even when that takes all night while you lie drunk and sobbing on the heated marble bathroom floor of your suite, threatening to quit or kill yourself, or both. When you pretend nothing happened the next morning, they do too. That’s their job. You can get away with things other mere humans would go to jail for. You can say and do things that would otherwise make you a certified narcissistic ego maniacal nightmare. You have the most unbelievable job in the entire world, and you get paid, in a month or so, more than most people will ever make in their lifetimes.
It’s easy. But easy can be boring. Easy can be surprisingly difficult. Because every city ends up being kind of the same. Every tour is pretty much the same. The only thing that changes is the color of the music journalist’s shirt, and you don’t notice things like that anyway. And maybe the name of the new bus driver you won’t really care about unless he hits a bump while your eyeliner is being applied, in which case you’ll want him fired on the spot. Or the brand of five dollar bottled tap water you demand two cases, chilled, but not too cold, onstage, before you’ll play one note. That might change. And the name of the new album you’re on this whole tour to sell, but whose title most of the time you can’t be bothered to remember unless someone reminds you. And the lyrics to the new songs change, but that’s why you have a teleprompter in your monitors and backups on paper in a notebook at your feet. Why should you have to remember the words to songs you wrote anyway?
Monotony is part of the job. It’s part of life. You’re not supposed to tell the fans that yes, you have been told how great you are, how talented you are, that you’re their favorite person in the whole world, a million times before. You’re not supposed to tell the music journalists that you know they’re frustrated musicians, and that you also know they’ll give you a favorable interview and leave out the parts about how you really act if they want to stay in your good graces in case you decide to tap them to ghost write your autobiography.
You’re supposed to act like this time, every time, with every album, in every city, it’s different. Meanwhile, someone else is loading up your gear, and someone else is making sure your wine is Spanish, and someone else is requesting dressing on the side of your salad that you will definitely not eat. Someone else is living the life part of your life for you while you are sitting backstage somewhere feeling sorry for yourself because you’re bored. Because you don’t really have to do much of anything, except incessantly talk about yourself, and then play for an hour or two, songs mostly all about you, and how you feel or what you like or don’t like. And you feel like Rapunzel, trapped in the castle. Like maybe this whole thing you wanted so badly is not what you thought it would be after all.
But in comparison to the monotony of a real job, maybe, say, an office job? Where every day you have to wake yourself up, where you make your own coffee, you drive yourself to work, you get the boss their mail, you type the same orders and answer the same phones day after day after day, you take the heat when something isn’t just right, where you have to stop by the grocery store after working ten hours straight without a lunch break and decide what to prepare and then eat for dinner, you have to put gas in the car, you have to pay the electric bill and you have to somehow figure out how to get enough sleep and try to fit in some semblance of a social life, and you have to do all of this with enough joie de vivre to keep doing it day after day after day? In comparison to that life? The other one, full of all that free time, all that waste and pampering, void of ever touching a gas pump with your hands or standing in the freezer section, dizzied and overcome with choices for frozen pizza? It ends up being what everyone dreams of. Until they’re doing it. And then, they’re dreaming of something else. Probably something normal. Like making their own coffee. Although, truth be told, they never really learned how to do that.
As I became more jaded over the course of a few hours than I had been in nearly ten years prior, we scoured online maps and Lonely Planet guides for quirky museums and exciting but tasteful restaurants, knowing with more certainty that the band wouldn’t actually go on any outings of our making.
They had their own agendas, which turned out to be extremely detrimental to the mandatory part of the tour: the playing live music onstage part. So we continued our quest, while I rubbed my feather in the pocket of my jacket between my middle and forefinger. I was nervous about seeing my dad in two days. I was worried I wouldn’t recognize him. I was nauseous thinking about giving him a hug when he arrived. But what else should I do? Shake his hand? Or worse, pat him on the back as he had done to me when he left me with his sister, never to return? I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t touch him at all. In fact, maybe I shouldn’t say anything, either. Maybe I should just stand there, staring at him, silent, and wait for him to explain exactly what he was thinking these last twenty years.
I moved my attention back to the feather. To my birds. Their routine. Five years. They get five years, in the wild, fighting every day just to survive. Literally having to wait for things to die and then begin to rot before they can eat, because their beaks are genetically too weak to rip into the flesh of something big and strong and healthy. Urinating on themselves to stay cool, and to clean the disease they must feed in off their bodies, shitting on themselves to save themselves from dying. Navigating through trash and traffic, pollution and trigger happy rednecks with nothing better to do than kill anything alive they happen to come across. Trying to live in the world humans have created, day after day, reviled and misunderstood. Even for just five years. What kind of a deal is that? What kind of life?
I found myself through the last thirty some-odd years, at times, feeling sorry for my situation, feeling like I was robbed of a childhood, that I was mistreated and wronged. And in human terms, surely I was. But in the general scheme of things, in Mother Nature’s eyes, I’m spoiled and ungrateful. There’s that Mother again. Isn’t she something? Constantly proving to humans that they can work to understand the most complex problems in the universe, and still, we’ve got nothing on her. I suppose my birds have even less time on their hands than the least fortunate of humans, and so, perhaps, they have less time to wonder what it might be like to take something, anything, for granted. They have less time for doing anything but waiting for the next thing to die, so that they might live another day.
“Nyla? Hello? Did you hear me? Which one?”
Frances was asking me which brand of Merlot Tamara had insisted upon this time around. I almost never forgot things like that. As a manager, it is my job to remember which wine Tamara wants backstage before the show, and which one she wants on the bus after the show. Also what temperature Chad’s coffee should be, which Indian takeout to send to the studio that they haven’t yet complained made them all sick, which breath mints made Tamara sneeze, which flowers gave Doug migraines and how many ice cubes went in Reed’s disgusting Mountain Dew and Vodka cocktail. It changes.
I’m expected to keep up. And I always did before. I rubbed my feather, and thought hard. Frances pressed.
“Nyla. Space Case. Stop fidgeting. I need a name.”
“I don’t care.”
“What?”
“I said I don’t care.”
Frances stared at me. “That’s not your answer.”
I nodded. “Yes it is. Just write down Merlot. Decent Merlot.”
Frances hesitated. “Um…Very funny.”
I didn’t laugh. I just rubbed my feather and tried to imagine telling Tamara she would have to pee all over herself when she complained that the tour bus was a few degrees too warm. I thought of all the ridiculous things they all made into issues that just didn’t matter in the general scheme of things. Frances rolled her eyes.
“I’m gonna call Tamara’s assistant because I don’t want to hear about this in a month at two A.M…”
I touched Frances’ wrist as she started to reach for her phone. She hated being touched. “She’ll never know the difference, Frances. She just thinks it matters. Just let the venue decide. She’s going to change her mind by the time she gets out on the road anyway.”
Frances shrugged and began tapping into her phone, muttering under her breath, “Okay, Deepak. When the shit hits the fan, I’m forwarding the calls to you.”
And I didn’t care. Finally. I calmly reminded myself that my job as a manager for these spoiled kids was just that: a job. And maybe Tamara would freak out and throw a fit. And maybe she wouldn’t. But I let it go, and thought of larger things, like where my life was going from here, and then more pressing questions, like, what was I going to have for dinner? And I had to admit, I didn’t have an answer for either one.
But it was definitely better than having someone else map it all out for me.
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