EGN NEWS DESK
Funny place, the music enterprise — it devours the younger and ignores the outdated. Or at the least that’s the way it might seem. Aside from a handful of entrenched executives and a circuit of legacy acts, employment alternatives within the business for these of AARP age might sound slim. But there’s an interesting exception: Many of the business’s most revered and persistently employed roadies, instrument techs and stay sound individuals are nicely into their 60s and even 70s.
They’re the sound checkers who puff and depend into microphones; the runners in black who deliver guitars out between songs; the daredevils who climb into the rafters to regulate lights; the spelunkers who burrow below phases to tweak cables. Their job is to create a seamless expertise for the music fan and a painless expertise for the musician. They preserve the stay music business buzzing, and their ranks would possibly include extra Medicare-eligible workers than every other section of the music enterprise.
Kevin Dugan, 70, has been working with the onetime Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony since Jimmy Carter was president. Dallas Schoo, 71, has been within the enterprise for 52 years and has served because the Edge’s guitar tech since U2 was enjoying golf equipment and ballrooms (he’s been moonlighting with Bruce Springsteen). Betty Cantor-Jackson, 76, first labored a soundboard for the Grateful Dead in 1968, and he or she’s nonetheless doing loads of native gigs within the Bay Area. “We don’t at all times should fade away, you understand,” Cantor-Jackson mentioned. “I’ll do that till I can’t crawl in there.”
To the musicians who rent them, these seniors are sometimes preferable to youthful and fewer road-tested techs and sound folks. “I haven’t crammed out a job utility in 50 years,” mentioned Frank Gallagher, 77, who remains to be engaged on a Las Vegas residency for the B-52’s, which continues in April. (When he began stay mixing the Talking Heads in 1977, he had already been within the enterprise for 11 years.) “Somebody requested me for a résumé the opposite day,” he mentioned. “I mentioned, simply ask anyone I’ve labored with, you understand?”
Danny Goldberg, the veteran music manager and label govt, mentioned these roles entail a remarkably private relationship with the artist. “It’s like having a physician — you need anyone who is aware of you intimately. It’s an enormous benefit to the artist to have continuity, and also you don’t need to begin with anyone new for those who don’t should,” he mentioned. “If it ain’t broke, don’t repair it. Right?”
Anthony, the bassist, agreed: “Kevin Dugan has been working with me for 43 years,” he mentioned. “With that form of expertise, I can go up onstage each night time and really feel completely relaxed and assured that he has all the pieces dealt with.”
AFTER 10:30 A.M. on a Saturday morning in mid-October, Bob Czaykowski, often known as Nitebob, exited a Quality Inn in Seekonk, Mass., and climbed into the shotgun seat of the 12-passenger Sprinter van that took him and the band Lez Zeppelin to their subsequent gig. He had a full day of stair climbing, road-case lifting, line checking, microphone inserting, outlet testing, drum-carpet laying and sound checking forward of him.
Czaykowski, 74, was delighted at lastly feeling almost one hundred pc after two knee joint replacements. He could be doing the identical issues he has been doing for the final half-century that day: making unusual, wondrous, louche and loud bands sound as brilliantly unusual, wondrous, louche and loud as they probably can.
Czaykowski is probably one of the well-known folks on his aspect of the enterprise. Virtually each working tech reacts to his title with awe, as do many musicians, younger and outdated. Czaykowski did “entrance of home” — that’s the formal title for the particular person behind the knobs on the soundboard — within the early and mid-Seventies for the New York Dolls, the Stooges, Aerosmith and others; extra not too long ago he was the shut affiliate and guitar tech for Steely Dan’s co-leader Walter Becker. For the final 13 years, Czaykowski has primarily manned the board for Lez Zeppelin, the all-women Led Zeppelin cowl band.
“He simply desires to be on the street and mixing a band and hanging out with the band,” mentioned Lez Zeppelin’s guitarist, Steph Paynes. “That’s what a street warrior is, once you’re excited to get on the street, it doesn’t matter what. You both dig it otherwise you don’t,” she added. “Bob can get right into a van, a Sprinter, a bus, no matter it’s, sit there with the remainder of us for six hours. There’s by no means any form of cranky, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t sleep.’ He by no means complains about that. He’s simply constructed for the street.”
An excellent tech’s work is generally invisible to the viewers. “People go, ‘Wow, what an superior present, man. They performed 90 minutes!’ But you haven’t any thought what it takes to make these 90 minutes,” mentioned Ingo Marte, who has labored with laborious rock bands like Danzig, Saxon and Armored Saint for 41 years. (He’s a comparatively younger 65.) “I had really a extremely unhealthy coronary heart assault like eight years in the past,” he added, “and that’s once I thought, OK, I’m carried out. No extra touring. But I picked myself up and I’m nonetheless at it.”
Schoo’s work with the Edge entails sustaining and tuning as many as 27 guitars an evening, in addition to exactly finessing the mind-boggling array of results the musician makes use of, in actual time, to construct his sound. Schoo mentioned that U2’s residency on the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023 and 2024 was significantly arduous.
“There are 17 steps from the ground — the place my guitar world is — as much as that stage. So, I used to be 70 years outdated on the time, and I’m working up and down and up and down these steps with an eight-pound guitar, for 40 reveals. I receives a commission handsomely for that, however I’m at all times pondering, when will I journey? Is tonight the night time I fall down these stairs?”
He added: “I say a prayer each night time, I actually do. I ask, please assist all these machines. Please let my command of them work, not for me and never even for the Edge, however for these 30,000 followers. Let it work for them. They deserve that, they need to hear this nice act and these nice songs.”
Like Schoo, Lorne Wheaton, often known as Gump, has been intently related to one musician: Neil Peart of Rush, who died in 2020. After 50 years within the business, Wheaton not too long ago retired, at 69; his final massive drum tech gig was the lengthy Kiss farewell tour. But it’s a “free” retirement; he retains his membership in IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), and nonetheless does native theater and company gigs in his native Toronto.
Could he have ever imagined he’d work as a tech for half a century? “No, by no means,” Wheaton mentioned. “I didn’t suppose I’d stay to 69. Let’s be sincere right here. You’d by no means actually suppose that you simply’re going to hit 70 and truly retire out of this enterprise, as a result of it does take fairly a little bit of financial savings to try this.” He mentioned that working freelance is a continuing hustle, and the wear and tear and tear of getting old generally results in surprising penalties: “You don’t need to go away in your bus bunk or in a resort room.”
Knee and hip points appear particularly endemic within the tech business, due to the fixed must carry heavy tools and climb up and down infinite stairs. And street employees additionally should take care of a schedule that occupies them from midmorning till after midnight. Recently, Dugan, who has been working with Anthony for the reason that early days of Van Halen, knowledgeable his boss (who now excursions usually with Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani) that he was pondering of slowing down.
“When I first instructed Michael that I wished to get off the street, he mentioned, ‘I’m not going to try this, why must you? I’m nonetheless going to be on the market,’” Dugan mentioned. “And I mentioned, ‘Michael, are you attempting to check your day to my day?’” He defined how his work begins at 8:30 a.m. and wraps at 2 a.m. “‘You come out and do the present,’” he recalled saying. “‘You go away in a limo, return to the five-star resort, or return to a personal jet means and fly dwelling. Your day and my day are worlds aside.’”
A street warrior of a sure age working 14-hour days has to make sure changes. “I’ve pulled means again on ingesting on the street,” Dugan mentioned. “I can not fathom working with a hangover. I did that for lots of years. And once you’re middle-aged, you possibly can bounce again from a hangover, however now it takes too lengthy.”
There are comparatively fewer senior girls engaged on the street as a result of it was extraordinarily uncommon for girls to get work as techs earlier than the late Nineteen Eighties. (There have been, nevertheless, many feminine studio engineers and producers, and lots of venues are managed by girls.)
One notable exception is Betty Cantor-Jackson, who started working with the Grateful Dead in 1968, and the Family Dog two years earlier. She is a legend within the Dead neighborhood, and recorded the band a number of instances in since-released performances which have come to be often known as “The Betty Boards.” She continues to work gigs within the San Francisco space, and went on the street with Chris Robinson within the final decade.
“The street is form of a traditional. I spent a lot of my life on the street, you already know take care of it,” she mentioned. “I’m the outdated girl on the bus with all of the boys. I obtained my bunk, I’m good.”
With the exception of Wheaton, not one among these street techs has any plans to retire. “I could also be 74, however the humorous factor is, there’s at all times somebody older,” Czaykowski mentioned. “That’s as a result of the extra expertise you may have, the higher reveals you will get. When folks believe and so they belief you, that’s like one much less factor that they should cloud their mind. I do know this man will do the job, ’trigger he’s carried out that very same job for me 700 instances earlier than.”
