Music’s Lost Livelihoods
As concerts vanished in 2020, roadies, truckers, and other crew have seen their lives upended
Since concerts vanished in 2020, roadies, truckers, and other crew have seen their lives upended.
In an alternate universe, Nic Weldon would be focusing one of his video cameras on Janet Jackson right about now. At 35, he’s spent most of his working life on road crews, as either a director or a cameraman on tours with the Eagles, Kings of Leon, and Ricky Martin. Thanks to him, footage of arena crowds is seamlessly woven together with shots of live onstage antics and prerecorded visuals; he can be almost as integral to a concert as the headliner.
But these days, instead of capturing Jackson and her dancers on her planned Black Diamond arena tour, Weldon spends every day in the same city — San Jose, California — heading not to an arena but to his local Whole Foods, where he spends his time chopping up chickens for customers, for $17 an hour. “I miss being able to create something big, to tell a story,” Weldon says one night at home after work. “I miss seeing the fans and their reactions. You can hear their cheers and screams when they see something cool on the screen.”
Covid-19 has impacted every aspect of life and work around the planet, and from delayed movie premieres to stalled TV productions, the entertainment industry has hardly been spared. But even in that particular ecosystem, the music world has been slammed the hardest. Recording studios locked their doors, album-release plans were disrupted, and everyone from the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan to Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift has been forced to cancel or postpone major tours. “Everyone is just sitting around waiting to see when’s the best time to do this,” says Tom Johnston of the Doobie Brothers, whose 50th-anniversary tour was postponed from this summer to next. “It’s disappointing, but at the same time there’s not much you can do about it.”
Some tours have been postponed for at least a year, and many clubs have closed indefinitely — interruptions that have wrecked the livelihoods of an army of men and women who work behind the scenes. The truck drivers who haul a band’s gear to an arena, the roadies who prepare a stage before a show, the people who scan your tickets or sell you beer, the security guards who make sure that obnoxious person hasn’t taken your seat: Starting last March, these people and others who do similar work in the business saw their paychecks and plans vanish overnight.
In a first for this industry, those workers are now scrambling to make any sort of living they can — while coping with mental-health and identity issues that come from suddenly being cut loose from a world many have known for decades. “This is an all-new way of life,” says Weldon. “It’s very scary and unsettling. You just do what you can to not focus on it too much.”
By every indication, 2020 should have been one of music’s most profitable years, especially on the road. Experts predicted a $12 billion windfall in the live-music business, and the workforce behind this industry was thriving before Covid. In 2019, 271,948 concert and event-promotion employees were working in the U.S., according to the market-research company IBIS World,
which predicted the number would have risen to 274,275 in 2020 without the pandemic. That would have been a 0.9 percent uptick in growth.
Then came the calls in early March: Festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza were off, and soon so were tours. AEG Presents — the secondlargest presenter of live music and entertainment events after Live Nation — expected to lose 10,000 North American shows in 2020 alone, plus at least half of that in 2021, a loss of $2 billion to $3 billion. Live Nation is looking at a loss of 20,000 shows. Within the livemusic world, furloughs and firings happened industrywide.
After 44 years in business, one of Boston’s most beloved music venues, Great Scott, closed for good — and hundreds of other venues fear they may face the same fate. Last spring, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) surveyed 1,300 member venues and found that 90 percent did not have cash on hand to last more than six months without federal intervention, and 55 percent said they did not have enough to last more than three months. “These independent venues are where tomorrow’s stars get their start,” says NIVA head of communications Audrey Fix Schaefer. “You would not have Lady Gaga if you didn’t have that 250capacity room in New York City, the Bitter End. You wouldn’t have Elton John if you didn’t have the Troubadour.”
And those nearly 275,000 backstage jobs predicted by IBIS World? That 0.9 percent uptick in growth has since been adjusted to minus 0.9 percent.
Until now, landing a behindthescenes job in the music business could be alluring and profitable. Many roadies began working on crews in their twenties and immediately took to the ontheroad lifestyle and surprisingly high salaries. According to one sideman, touring musicians (in backup bands of solo artists) can earn between $1,500 and $8,000 a week, depending on the level of the acts. Crew members on the Stones’ summer 2020 tour — 150 of them — would have been paid between $30,000 and $150,000 for three months’ work. “One of the things I tell kids who say they want to get into this business is, ‘You sure you want to do this?’” says tour manager Malcolm Weldon (Nic’s father), who works regularly for Cher and other pop acts. “A young kid can make a lot of money . . . and once you start doing it, it’s kind of like a drug. You get used to the amount of money you can make.”
That pay is often unreliable, though, since touring work is largely seasonal and freelance. Moreover, roadies, unlike musicians, aren’t unionized and haven’t had any major advocacy groups. “We don’t really have access to some of the support systems you might want at a time like this,” says Bryan Scheckel, a Childish Gambino and Passion Pit production manager. “Most of us don’t have great health insurance and don’t have access to unemployment insurance or anything like that.”
At the start of the pandemic, most workers — and their bosses — assumed they would be out of work for a few months, and many filed for unemployment. Live Nation launched its Crew Nation initiative and raised $15 million to disburse to crew members early on (applicants had to meet hyperspecific qualifications and could only receive a onetime payment of $1,000). Some roadies were fortunate enough to work for bigname bands like the Eagles, Pearl Jam, My Chemical Romance, and Tool, who qualified to receive Paycheck Protection Program funds from the government. (These loans allowed the bands with salaried crews to provide financial assistance to their employees.)
But as the Covid crisis dragged on, many crew members were forced into other lines of work. Caitlin Ray, a tour merchandiser and VIP coordinator recently on the road with Avril Lavigne, volunteered for two months last spring at a makeshift homeless center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for women affected by the pandemic. Wardrobe specialist Jennifer Jacobs, who was supposed to go on the road with the Chicks and Earth, Wind, and Fire, now delivers linens to wards at a hospital during the day and packs orders at an Amazon warehouse at night. In a schedule that’s arguably even more grueling than road work, she’s expected to be at the hospital from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays and at Amazon from 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday. “I get to a point probably around 2:30 or three o’clock [at night] — that’s what I call my bewitching hour — where it just wears me out,” Jacobs says. “I’m so tired. I really can’t keep my eyes open.”
Other roadcrew employees are delivering mail, working as carpenters, training for appliance repair (especially appealing for guitar techs), and becoming life coaches. “We began telling people, ‘Hey, we’re not sure what’s going to happen, but your schedule is going to disappear pretty soon and we’re not sure when things are going to come back,’ ” says Jerome Crooks, a veteran tour manager who was on the road with Tool when the call came to send everyone on his crew home. “We didn’t have a game plan. We all just started looking for work.” Crooks landed a parttime job booking private planes, which, if he’s lucky, gets him a day or two of work per month. He estimates he will lose out on about $200,000 this year.
Mike Stamps was gearing up for what looked to be a busy year. At 58, the trucker has been in the business for more than 30 years, starting with Pink Floyd’s Momentary Loss of Reason tour in the late Eighties. In early March, Stamps was in Nashville, preparing to load up production gear for Elton John’s summer tour when he got the call to stop and put everything back in storage. In one sense, Stamps was fortunate; his 18wheeler can be used to deliver what he calls “common freight,” so he’s been working for Amazon and other companies. Even so, Stamps has had to take a pay cut, going from several thousand dollars a week (at best) to less than half that amount. Stamps derives a certain satisfaction from what he’s doing — “I’m helping my country during the crisis; I’m keeping things moving, so that’s a little pride” — but also says he is “mentally devastated” and that “it’s horribly lonely right now.”
As Stamps implies, the complete collapse of an industry, with little or no relief in sight, carries more than just a financial toll. In a survey conducted for Rolling Stone, Paul and Courtney Klimson — a couple who own their own concert company, Theory One Productions — emailed 400 fellow roadies about the negative side of gig life. Of the 179 who replied, a little more than half admitted to struggles with money and feelings of isolation, and 45 percent to mentalhealth issues; 18 percent admitted they were now coping with substance abuse. (In a related development, the Klimsons have since gotten to work on a new advocacy group and a brickandmortar oasis called the Roadie Clinic.)
The financial stress is itself overwhelming. Multiple concert workers — such as Debbie Taylor, a production coordinator for Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, the Stones, and BTS; and Malcolm Weldon, who was preparing for
another run with Aerosmith in March — tell R olling S tone they’ve been forced to dip into their retirement funds to avoid bankruptcy. “I’m living off of whatever money I saved for my eventual retirement, which I was hoping would be like 10 years from now,” says Malcolm Weldon. “I’m dipping into something that I didn’t want to dip into.”
There have been other, more unexpected consequences. As a black man who’s never had to settle down in America for this long a period, Nic Weldon is also experiencing a new level of fear. He says that life in a mostly white, rock-tour bubble — filled with nice hotels and metropolitan destinations — sheltered him from public displays of race-related violence. Suddenly stagnant in middle-class suburbia, he feels as if he’s seeing a part of America he’s never had to observe before. “Now, I’m forced to drive on my own, so I’m more likely to get pulled over,” he says. “There’s just a lot more weighing on my head now. I’m faced with the reality of civilian life in America.”
Even more chilling, according to one source in the business, are reports of suicide. On a recent night, one longtime tour truck driver who was watching TV at home with his wife excused himself to go to an upstairs bathroom; there, he pulled out a gun and died by suicide. Allegedly, he had been worried about how he would support his wife. The source says that another technician took his own life in the weeks after the shutdown. Crooks and Marilyn Manson tour director Matt Doherty have formed a new support group, the Touring Professionals Alliance, to stay in touch with crew members. Neither had heard the suicide reports, but they also weren’t completely surprised. “People may start turning to alcohol and drugs, and we don’t want that,” says Crooks. “We want everyone to be of sound mind and body, and we want everyone to come back.”
At some point, the work will resume. The virus will peak, a vaccine will be available, trucks will be loaded up with amps and instruments, and road crews will begin prepping stages and lighting gear once again. It’s the moment most of the now-unemployed armada of music professionals are waiting for, and it’s the reason most of them, at least right now, are sticking with their profession. According to a survey of 1,350 live-industry pros by Pollstar and VenuesNow, 55 percent of those polled said they were not willing to leave the industry, although 42 percent admitted they were considering another profession.
Stacey Maranz has carved out her own niche in the business, organizing and arranging VIP tickets for major tours; this summer, she had been scheduled to work on Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival. But since she doesn’t get paid until after shows take place, she needed work fast and opted to take a course to become a Covid compliance officer — a virus tester — for Viacom/CBS, where she helped with temperature checks and PPE at MTV’s Video Music Awards. “I miss my road family,” she sighs. “I miss being out there and putting on these shows and making people happy with the music. I don’t want to do something different. I’d like to go back to my job.”
But when will that happen, what will be left of the industry, and what will the work look like for music professionals? Many are newly concerned that full-on touring may not resume until the end of 2021 or even 2022.
“I don’t know how much of the industry would be left in 2022,” says Doherty. “They’re going to go find different jobs.” According to the PollstarVenuesNow survey, nearly a third felt that the industry would not be fully back in business until that year, and a third felt their businesses could close in the next year.
Elton John’s recent announcement that his Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour would not resume until January 2022 worried many in the industry, and hopes for a busy and hectic summer 2021 touring season are beginning to fade. NIVA’s Schaefer thinks it will take three to four months — once it’s safe to open up completely — for the concert business to bounce back because of the intricacies of scheduling all the tours.
Even when the work returns, the scenario may not be the same one workers left. Fewer people in the seats means a reduced need for jobs like ushers and vendors, and road crews could double up on their work and rely on local stagehands to do the rest. “Maybe [there will be] a few less crew members and downsizing the size of lights and video,” says Crooks, who has only just begun considering options. Steve Kirsner, a vice president at the SAP Center arena in San Jose, is talking of creating “seating pods” in his venue, reducing the capacity to 5,800 people from nearly 20,000 — four or six people together, separated by rows, which would likely mean less work for ushers and others who work in the building. Moreover, those who toil in the business may not be eager to return to the usual working conditions. “Sickness can spread really quickly, especially [on tour buses],” says Malcolm Weldon. “I’ve seen it go through a crew really quickly.”
NIVA was hoping that Save Our Stages — the movement that’s pushing for new PPP funds for the clubs that rely on sound engineers and other workers, some of whom take those jobs when not on the road — would have been baked into other Covidrelief packages. When it wasn’t, “We thought, ‘Of course, Congress will have to pass something before they go on recess at the end of July,’ ” says NIVA’s Schaefer. “They didn’t. They just went on August recess without passing anything.” In October, the House passed a $2.2 trillion Heroes Act that included $10 billion for Save Our Stages, but the money is in limbo.
Meanwhile, a variety of music companies — including Live Nation, AEG, the Recording Academy, CAA, UTA, and WME — have partnered to support Save Live Events Now, which is geared toward all live-events workers, including those hired for sporting events and conventions. “We were the first to close,” says Schaefer, speaking on behalf of America’s independent venues. “We will certainly be the last to reopen if we can hang on long enough to do it. The whole premise of this business is to be gathering places in close proximity. If I had a crystal ball, it would just be shards of glass at this point.”
In the meantime, concerts’ unsung heroes will keep trying to adapt to the best of their abilities. Nic Weldon attempts to lift his own spirits by encouraging lighthearted banter among his new grocery-store colleagues and clients — to little avail. “I’m no longer this traveling man,” he says, wondering if and when his former life will return. “It’s all I’ve known my whole life. It’s who I am. Now I’m just wrapping up chicken and slamming it on the counter.”