On the Road

Worlds collide when a touring crew must play nice & labor with a film crew. The two mind sets just don’t get one another. When you mesh us with them, it becomes us against them. Rock against film.

Touring with a rock band, for the most part, is a military operation of utter efficiency…. an incredible spectacle to behold. We fast track life & do it all to the very extreme. We move 23 trucks, 17 tour buses & 110 people around the country overnight. Setting up an entire show in one day to perform, tear it down and move to the next city, duplicating it all over again. Touring life provides a definitive beginning, middle & end to each day. Directly opposite of that is the film crew. The level of inefficiency is shameful. Months of planning go into executing a 4 minute music video. Those four minutes of video you watch on MTV can take two or more, 18 hour days of filming and weeks of editing before you see a finished product. Hurry up and wait is the filming way! We drag the artists out of bed, at hours they normally never witness while on tour. To then be found at 8 am on a back lot of a studio, waiting to perform in their own music video. Where scads of people can be found, running around the set and the busyness of it all is pretense. Only a handful of people take the decisions and execute them. The rest of us, rock stars included, hurry up & wait to hear “That’s a wrap!”

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