Health-conscious musos ditch drugs for saunas and smoothies
Back when the Rolling Stones were young, touring musicians were expected to perform five nights a week and spend the small hours despoiling hangerson and hotel rooms while subsisting on roughly the same diet as Hunter S Thompson.
But as bands return to the road in the aftermath of pandemic restrictions, many have adopted a lifestyle closer to that of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Where there once was debauchery, there are now postperformance ice baths, saunas and personal trainers.
Some still feel the need for regular injections, but the shots contain water-soluble vitamins credited – if not by the medical community – with enhancing energy levels.
In a video in which they stride triumphantly from an arena after a show, electronic dance group Rufus Du Sol were greeted not by a tray of cocktails but by their personal trainer Ben Smith, an ex-army officer who is now a fitness and nutrition coach in Los Angeles.
Once, they did whisky shots before the show – now, they take ginger, the group told The Wall Street Journal.
‘‘The ice bath is waiting for us as we come off stage,’’ said keyboard player Jon George. ‘‘We’ll go in one at a time, and we’ll have Ben leading us through that to help calm us down.’’
Smith is said to prepare workout routines and meals, and to lead the band through breathing exercises and three-minute dips in a 450-litre ice water tank.
On his Instagram page, he advises followers who slept badly the night before to ‘‘take a beat. Check in with your body’’ and ‘‘ground through the breath’’. He also endorses smoothies that are supposed to boost mitochondria, to improve muscle endurance.
Another rock group, the Zac Brown Band, travel with a gym in one of their trailers, as well as a sauna.
‘‘I’m doing my pre-show warmup,’’ Daniel de los Reyes, the group’s drummer, announced in a Facebook video, going through some exercises that were almost certainly never used by Keith Moon. ‘‘I always come to the sauna about an hour before.’’
Graham Frank Wright, a former roadie for Black Sabbath, could not quite imagine the members of the pioneering heavy metal band in an ice bath, though they adhered to a gruelling schedule.
‘‘Especially in America, we were doing five gigs a week,’’ he said. ‘‘We would be flying everywhere, some days a couple of flights.’’ But it was still possible then to show up just 15 minutes before takeoff. ‘‘Then the cigarette light would come on, everybody would light up and start drinking a Bloody Mary.
‘‘In those days, everybody was young – even the Stones were young,’’ he said. ‘‘In the last Black Sabbath tour I did, in 2017, people were in their late 60s, early 70s.’’
Stones guitarist Keith Richards boasts in his memoir of spending years in which, with the aid of certain performanceenhancing substances, he got by on no more than two nights of sleep a week. ‘‘This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes,’’ he wrote.
Norm Parenteau, former manager of Old Crow Medicine Show, said the band once subsisted on cigarettes and beer, occasionally supplemented with some soup, while travelling thousands of kilometres. ‘‘They tried everything. It was wild, but they survived.’’
Ketch Secor, the band’s frontman, now regularly frequents the gym and is very careful about what he eats. More recently, as the musicians had married, ‘‘it’s a different world on the road with nannies and children’’, Parenteau said.