We Care A Lot
October 22, 2020 10:08 AM   Subscribe

About what? About roadies (multi-link live YouTube post).

The music industry has obviously been hit hard by COVID-19, and while artists may be able to livestream sets and sell records, that's no help for the long suffering road crew. Guitar techs, drivers, merch, tour managers, sound and light engineers, anyone on tour from a DIY punk band playing in a sweaty back room, to a stadium filling K-Pop group will probably have at least one person with them.

It's a profession that's full of independent people and small businesses, doing it as much for the love of music as to make a living. They're now now without an income.

Slaves On Dope have put together this Kings Of Quarantine (fundraising bandcamp) cover of Faith No More's We Care A Lot, featuring members of Anthrax, Brutal Truth, Czarface, Filter, Korn, Mastodon, Men Without Hats, Our Lady Peace, Quicksand, Refused and Run DMC, along with one special guest at the end.

You can donate to the Save The Roadies fund here in the USA, or to Stagehand here in the UK.

In terms of fundraising for grassroots venues, there's also Save Our Stages in the US from the National Independent Venue Association, and Save Our Venues in the UK from the Music Venue Trust.
posted by MattWPBS (14 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
A friend of mine is a sound technician who worked with a lot of high-end bands/tours (Iron Maiden, the Tragically Hip's last tour, Metallica...many, many others), and I feel terrible for him because his industry and line of work is just...gone for the foreseeable future. It was a job he loved and was good at and which fit perfectly with his temperment, living arrangements with his partner, etc., and it's just so sad.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:19 AM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]


awesome. great post. i live in this world ~4mos out of the year, or i used to, until all this shit happened. it has absolutely stripped many many many of my friends of their livelihoods. it sucks.
posted by capnsue at 10:29 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]


My son's a concert, stage and event lighting designer/tech and has had basically zero work since March and not much hope of anything for the foreseeable future.
posted by octothorpe at 10:38 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]


TMBG are running a "crew aid" sale on their merch website
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 10:49 AM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]


Men Without Hats was always my favorite metal band.

This is weird because the original one by FNM just came up on my YouTube suggestions this morning (I've been listening to a lot of Primus lately) and I watched/listened to it and forgot just how good it is.
posted by bondcliff at 11:17 AM on October 22, 2020


My cousin owns a backline business providing and setting up amps, consoles, instruments, etc. for a large proportion of the live acts in Chile. He was hit pretty hard at first, fortunately he's been able to make a comeback working for broadcast TV, which still needs gear.
posted by signal at 11:25 AM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]


Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about what goes into a stadium rock show? It's a huge enterprise even for your normal type show (not like a Pink Floyd or U2 -style multimedia spectacle show). The economic loss from just shutting down the summer touring season must have been enormous, and that's before you look at the large theater circuit, and the medium, and the small. And the festivals.
posted by thelonius at 11:29 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]


Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about what goes into a stadium rock show?

I live right near Heinz Field; when there's a big show like U2 or Taylor Swift, there's constant line of tractor-trailers unloading for days.
posted by octothorpe at 12:17 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]


I've been worried about Metafilter's own soundguy99...
posted by Candleman at 1:01 PM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]


The Card Cheat: “[H]is industry and line of work is just...gone for the foreseeable future. ”
My friend's family business was event production. Went through a big expansion in 2019. Now he's looking at trying to use the truck for freight to keep the family afloat.

I mean, there are people dying and it's more important to keep distance and fight the pandemic, but it's still hard to watch my friend try to process going from being a business owner to having nothing in the span of a few months.
posted by ob1quixote at 1:17 PM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]


I've been worried about Metafilter's own soundguy99...

Oh, hey, thanks Candleman.

I am . . . OK (knock wood) on a personal level for the moment. I had the luck/good sense to take a full time salaried position with a small local production company years ago, so I qualified for unemployment compensation at a fairly high $$ level without any real problems and between Federal & state expansions I should be able to collect through spring of 2021. So my belt is tight but I'm not gonna starve or be homeless. And the company got a PPP loan and we had some business in August & Sept so I was employed again for a couple of months. And the company has received another couple of low interest relief loans & some more potential state/local funding is on the horizon, so it can cover the non-payroll costs well enough to remain a business until spring, so I'll have a job to come back to.

Of course, many of my friends and colleagues are not so lucky. Many people are moving back in with parents, trying to pick up work for Uber or DoorDash or etc., maybe leaving the industry entirely. Many venues and production companies are going to go out of business.

The word behind the scenes is that the events industry in the US is more-or-less collectively deciding that they're going to have to try to restart in May 2021 at whatever level they can, because some income is better than none. If that means trying to put 300 people into a 2000 capacity room @ 200 dollars a ticket, so be it.

One of the real kick in the pants of this is that presidential election years generate A LOT of money for the events industry and associated businesses (like caterers and tent & chair rental places.) Even if you're in a non-swing state that doesn't get the big rallies with the POTUS contenders, there are local and state races, and fundraising events, and voter registration events, and so on and so on, and they all need stages and sound systems and lighting. (Oh boy do they need stages - we own a bunch of portable staging and I think I'm a pretty even-tempered guy but by this point in a normal election year I would be throwing things just from the stress of having to juggle the constant barrage of needing to organize the logistics of dropping off and picking up stages of various sizes and configurations in various places and cross-renting stage parts to other production companies on top of our normal business.) I would not be at all surprised if there are companies in trouble because they bought a bunch of gear in 2019 or early 2020 expecting to have it largely paid off by November.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:08 PM on October 22, 2020 [10 favorites]


Although, um, my belt is also literally tight because I haven't been spending 16 hour days walking and moving heavy equipment under the summer sun . . .

I really need to lay off the chocolate chip cookies.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:14 PM on October 22, 2020 [8 favorites]


One of the things I love about Motorhead is the fact that they had the class to record a tribute to their own road crew as far back as 1980.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:15 PM on October 23, 2020 [2 favorites]


forgot just how good it is

The whole album Introduce Yourself is really, really solid, top to bottom. Obviously Mike Patton is an amazingly talented vocalist, and his work with FNM is great, but Chuck Mosley's (R.I.P.) balls-out, don't-give-a-fuck-about-intonation wailing is pretty fucking epic in its own right.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:47 PM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


« Older What A Thrill   |   Majoring in sports Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments