I so hate to use a line I have used before in a column, but sometimes there is no getting around it. Remember that TV show, Hill Street Blues? (For you pups out there, it was way back in the dim past in a time called the '80s.) Every show would begin with the crusty old Sarge doing the daily briefing for all of the street cops, and he would always end it the same way–"Be careful out there." That is the spirit in which I hope everyone will take this. I actually have had a real hard time putting this on paper (or in bytes, or whatever you call it when your pad of paper becomes a laptop) because I know it could easily come off as preachy, and that is the last thing I want to do. I know all too well how unqualified I am for that particular activity. So take this as a well-intentioned "heads up" and not a finger-pointing sermon.
I was talking with a musician I know recently. This guy has toured with some very big names, and these days, does mostly local work. Really good player, and a nice guy who gets along with everybody, so I always wondered why he gave up the whole rock 'n' roll lifestyle thing. A song came up in the conversation, and he told me about touring with that band at the same time they went from FM album rock only to mainstream pop hit-makers. He told me about a New Year's Eve gig with the band in their hometown and how girls were literally trying to pull them off of the stage. I joked that everybody got some that night. He laughed, agreed and then told me about the tour with a real rock god who never took advantage of the flesh banquet offered up after each gig, but that did not stop the band from partaking freely. Then he got serious and said that this tour was the end for him. "When it was over, I realized that if I did not quit, it was going to kill me," he said. And he stopped touring.
As is too often the case, other events in the following weeks kept bringing me back to that "quit or die" choice. Most powerful was notice of the deaths of a couple of touring sound guys who died long before their time. I got this note from the crew at the House of Blues about their friend Scott Richards.
Walter "Scott" Richards was born in Troy, New York on July 31, 1951. After graduation from Lansingberg high school in 1968 and Oswego State College in New York in 1972, Scott moved to Boston and began working for Maryland Sound.
Scott mixed shows for Manhattan Transfer, George Benson, Dionne Warwick, Joe Jackson, Luther Vandross, Frankie Valli, Ian Hunter, Kenny G, Anita Baker, Mary J. Blige and his personal favorite, Kris Kristofferson. In 2000, he moved to Las Vegas after a Mary J. Blige tour and began working FOH at the House of Blues, located in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, where he continued through September of 2004. On May 29, 2005, Scott passed away in Las Vegas due to complications from liver failure.
If that were the only such notice I had received in the past few months, it might not have hit me this way, but it was just one of several where a too-young touring guy was taken away by the lifestyle that draws some of us to touring in the first place.
Hey, it can be a big party, and that can be a lot of fun. As long as we don't try to make the party go on forever, day in and day out. I know a lot of people who have lived hard on the road. Some of them got married and settled down, some just saw the writing on the wall early enough and–like my musician friend–changed their ways or got out. Others –too many others–are dead or mere shells of the people they once were.
Touring is, by its nature, moments of intense stimulation and work and reward surrounded by hours and hours of mind- numbing boredom. It is easy to fill those hours with stuff that can hurt you. Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll is a mantra, and partying in all of its forms is one of the perks of touring. Knowing how much I like those perks is one of the reasons I have stayed away from touring. And I really don't want to have to bury another friend who could not get away from a lifestyle that went from terrific to toxic before it was too late. No sermon, just something to mull over during one of those endless bus rides…
