THE MISSION: DEBUNKING ROADIE MYTHS

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Roadies, it turns out, are misunderstood. Will Smith learns a thing or two about the job while setting up for Jethro Tull ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

When my editor tells me I’m going to be a roadie for a day, a chill runs through my heart. The chill is warmed by the news that I’ll be setting up at the Fairfield Halls Croydon for Jethro Tull, the flute-based prog-rockers I liked in my late teens. But a roadie? Aren’t roadies just bikers with a wage? Will I be made to wear a vest and then mocked for my shrimpy biceps? What if I say the wrong thing and end up being hung from a speaker stack by my ankles? But roadies, it turns out, are misunderstood…

Myth: Roadies are hard drinkers.

Reality: The crew start work at 9am, unloading a truck they only finished loading up, hundreds of miles away, at about 1am. That’s the work ethic of Margaret Thatcher. You couldn’t handle it if you had a drink problem. Also, you’re part of a team moving heavy equipment and connecting it to large power sources. You don’t really want the guy next to you to be some twitching wreck who can’t start the day without pouring beer on his cornflakes.

Myth: Roadies are dopeheads.

Reality: One of the side effects of long-term marijuana use is memory loss. Every day roadies have to unpack and repack hundreds of items of equipment, and be able to account for everything—from speakers to plectrums—at any given moment. It’s like moving house, every day, for a month. Imagine doing that stoned. At the end of it you’d be living in a skip and texting yourself your own name.

Myth: Roadies all have nicknames.

Reality: Partly true. I met a lorry driver called Compass, because he always gets lost, and a coach driver called Yorkie, who presumably eats a lot of chocolate. I made the mistake of asking what my nickname would be. “Aunt Celia”. I declined to pursue the reason.

Myth: Roadies have tattoos.

Reality: Unconfirmed. I only saw one tattoo peeking out of a sleeve, and felt uneasy about asking to see more—it might seem creepy. Like my old games teacher who used to differentiate teams by getting one of them to play topless. He took early retirement and moved to Thailand.

Myth: Roadies say “Testing, one, two” into mics.

Reality: Nowadays roadies just tap each mic with a pen in an initial test known as a line-check, then wait for the band to play at the soundcheck. I didn’t ask them to do the “one, two” thing. It would be like asking Daniel Craig to say “shaken, not stirred” and make a gun shape with his fingers.

Myth: Roadies are half-deaf.

Reality: They need excellent hearing, as they pay incredible attention to the sound systems they install, using infra-red room scans and computers to decide where to hang speakers and at what angles, and delaying signals to certain stacks by microseconds so the sound from speakers high above the audience hits at the same time as ones right in front of them. Using a deaf roadie would be like making a TV show to discover if a nation had talent, by using a panel of judges with no discernible abilities of any kind. Oh.

Myth: Roadies are bad-tempered.

Reality: The ones I met were extremely friendly, though they did say there were some “very hard crews” out there, which I found exciting—like hearing about a rogue police unit that bends the rules to get the job done. But I never heard raised voices or detected any tension. The onstage power went twice before the show, and it was dealt with as calmly as my grandmother coping with a dribbly teapot.

Myth: Roadies have sex with groupies after the show.

Reality: Over 40 years, Jethro Tull have picked up the kind of fans who follow every detail as if hypnotised, then explode into applause at the end. They’re my kind of crowd: they won’t mock anyone for knowing the band’s about to play “Dun Ringill” because the guitarist has picked up the smaller of his two bouzoukis. So there are no groupies. And even if there were, after 15 hours of lugging boxes andgaffer-taping cables, I’d have turned down an orgy in case I put my back out.

Myth: Roadies eat badly.

Reality: Untrue. We broke late for lunch to find all the canteen had left was soup, pie and chips. Four of the crew plumped for soup; the others went to Wagamama. So the real-life roadie diet I witnessed was a mixture of light starter and Asian fusion. Rock’n’roll!

Will Smith is an actor and comic who appears in the film "In the Loop". In the last issue he learned to cage fight.

Picture Credit: Agenda