Roadies

The Wall Street Journal (of all things) had a long piece on Road Managers - Roadies - on Friday.

Roadies have always interested me as a representative of the class of people who move around to provide support while the overall lattice of support - interstates, electricity grids, diners - stay static, along with their personnel. I've never managed to get any of that feeling into my fiction but this article got me thinking again. When I first thought about it - in the early seventies (I still have the first three issues of short-lived mazagine International Roadcrew) moving around like that meant you were dissociated from much of your static support - for example, wives and new job offers - throwing you completely on the support of other mobile members of your community. Nowadays, your webpage, cellphone number, Facebook and so forth is in cyberspace, so it neither moves nor needs to move physically. In a way, that diminishes some of the kick of it but I might be able to find a way around that.

One may notice that I'm mentioning the roadies rather than the bands they (obviously) travel with. I *have* managed to get that type of travel into fiction, and so have lots of other people, even though the difference is in many ways just one of degree.

I'll also note that nobody says to a roadie, "The world don't owe you a living mate. If you love your job so much you'd do it for free!" But they do say that about musicians, a lot, for some reason.

WSJ: Roadies: Unlikely Survivors in the Music Business Roadies’ elevation to ‘concert technicians’—the term many practitioners favor—is reshaping their culture