Roadie Therapy
By Natalie Silver
Photograph by Natalie Anderson
I guess I’ll start by saying that people like me, who do what I do, we’re pretty much good guys. Good guys who do bad things, sometimes. But you wouldn’t put yourself through this sick excuse for labor if you didn’t love the music.
The music is our branch of the global renegade against bullshit, arbitrary suppressions of freedom, and a loud and chaotic pursuit of it, itself. The longhaired, coked out, lusted-for rockers parade the frontline, but we’re in the reserves, behind the screens and scheming from afar, away from the glory. We do the heavy lifting, take care of clean-up, and shoulder the burden of the war we’ve waged against the happy people, eagerly performing obnoxious and ritualistic sacrifices of our own happiness, gleefully and productively so as if it was at the expense of theirs.
I would liken it to the Bernie Bro maniacs’ fervent rampage against the establishment—both the Trump, and Dem-endorsed moderate America’s acceptance of, well, what can only be described, at best, as moderately okay. They’re high on their collective naïveté—or maybe it’s simply wisdom—getting off on knowing they’re the enlightened ones, stroked and pleasured by a they/them cross-denominational Gxd. This is what my mother will never understand—that their fury fossilizes into complete resignation and an artificial expertise, one that is composed of jaded, failed experience, yet is still clung onto with tenacity and self-assurance. And that’s how we get caught in this hopeless circle jerk, rejecting new sounds, vibrations and ideas, and futilely worshipping a sub-par status quo. That’s why I followed music; at the peak of my enamoration with it, it seemed to be the only thing that would save us. The revolution needs the music, and the music needs all of us—even those of us parading the periphery of punk-rock, gangster, change-the-world-at-high-volume glory and clinging onto a barely-there membrane separating Us vs. Them. Even the roadies.
Everyone in our world is collectively engaging in a screaming intercourse with the ego, waging holy war on anyone not paying attention and dubbing over the hoots and hollers of those messianic hedonists on the various covers of Rolling Stone, egging this whole eternal baptism along in electric swagger. Often, the outside world will mischaracterize our type as nihilists, but I would argue it’s much more innocent than that. We’re dreamers. But therein lies the paradox of the whores of the music industry—we’re so seduced by that rage and resistance, yet we remain paralyzed and dumb, doing nothing to advance any of it. I guess that’s why I’m here, just as the world catches on fire and we Hail Mary to the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, racing the threats of martial law and the death of all that is free—including my beloved, sacred rock and roll.
Let’s back it up. Before starting in on this twisted career of mine, I guess you could say I was naïve. I mean, I thought Mumford & Sons was as bad as commercially successful music could get. And I take shitty, yet widely celebrated music personally. It’s insulting to the people who tried to make it and didn’t, and now remain, at best, awkwardly suspended. It’s the most glorious invalidation there ever was, limply watching from backstage with a hangover and a futile dream.
I fell in love with music when I was nine years old. My best friend’s parents knew the owners of The Stone and let us hang in the wings for a Mother Love Bone show. I’m pretty sure I literally had a prepubescent wet dream that night—which is a spectacular band name, now that I say it out loud. Coincidence? I don’t know. You’re the doctor here. My mama bought me my first guitar the next Christmas—a beautiful mahogany dreadnought. To this day, it remains my dearest friend, even though my fingers lost their calluses long ago and dust from 1996 sleeps between the frets.
It happened when I was scaling the barbed perimeter of Cal Expo to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse. I was 17 and the lead guitarist in a band called Four Gram Minimum. My confidence was at an all-time high; my hair was shaggy and black with a streak of bleach in the front, kind of like 1973 Joe Perry on his band’s first album cover. I was two backstage blowjobs into my career—a solid start for a kid—and things were looking up… and not just for her.
Anyway, I was sneaking in and just jumped too soon. The wire caught my left hand and tore right through my radial nerves, basically ridding the entire appendage of function, let alone dexterity. In the years that followed, I tortured myself by reassigning the blame from bad luck to stupidity, and vice versa, ultimately deciding I was the victim of both fate and my own natural idiocy. I’m at peace with the accident now, and sometimes I think about the fact that because I was able to stay for the show, it may have even been worth it.
I later tried to pick up the drums—but to really dominate that instrument and throne the best seat in the house, that’s just a personality, man. It wasn’t me. Stan The Man, however, is the best in the game now, and being able to work with his band is an incredible stroke of good fortune. To see him play is to witness someone perform a true conduction of raw human conviction, charge and rhythm, and shepherd all of the unassigned energy on the stage into an ultimate crescendo of artistic grandeur. Equally amazing, as soon as he walks off that stage, bravos ignored, he reverts back to his non-performative state of being, an encore private only to the band, the girls, and motherfucking me. He, without fail, instantaneously abandons basic human competency as soon as he exits stage mode, such as urinating in a toilet, eating when hungry, and treating people with respect.
For this behavior we can probably blame fame, the burden of artistic genius, heroin, and a zealous entourage of girls and employees who will fuck and dance and sustain and nurture and go to every possible length to keep the band afloat. Without Stan, there is no band. Without the band, I have no job, no music, no access to the 21st century rock ‘n roll—dark underbelly and all—and therefore no purpose. So yeah, I’m part of that team that enables his recklessness. By keeping the dude around I keep myself afloat; it’s enough to keep me fed, laid, and distracted, even though the lifestyle is hard on my mutilated extremity, 5’10” frame, and heavily polluted lungs.
Point is, I’m surviving—just like we all are. But it’s starting to weigh on me.
To be completely honest, it would be a tremendous relief to be the type of guy who listens to Flume, pulls on Tinder, roots for the Patriots and is hot enough to be boring, and free enough to not care. To have standard ambitions and mediocre skill, lots of confidence and a solid network; to love FIFA and enjoy trips to Las Vegas; to choose to go to bed early or late, it depends on the day and ultimately never matters; to snort coke without consequence and abandon responsibility without guilt, and then pick it right back up in the morning along with a backpack and an electric scooter; it’s a strange taboo, yet my ultimate fantasy.
It’s a little jarring, because I look at our industry, which I always assumed was so inherently counter to the vanilla, and feel ashamed; we’re on a never-ending loop, doing the same old shit, manipulating the same elementary vocabulary and recycling lyrics that become emptier and emptier each time, playing oldies, digging the same grooves, worshiping the ‘60s, and then the ‘90s, changing no new minds, contributing nothing to the discourse of the present. Is our operation one epic, masturbatory survival or is it—my—our—collective Achilles’ heel? Either way, neither the nobility nor normalcy that I long for is accessible in this world, yet here I willingly remain.
In a moment of honest introspection, when questioning why I feel so absent from the fraternity of the common young adult, I know it’s not the sex, or the drugs, or even the music that brought me here; it’s the ego. I share it, and I can handle it, and that’s why I’m so good at my job.
I know when to look away, what to condone, and how much is too much. I am uniquely in tune with this fragile, converse relationship between the purity of the art and the wellbeing of the artist—an erratic vacillation between this lifestyle’s great hazards and its epic, meteoric moments of brilliance. The unpredictable swing itself is violent; but it’s not the violence that’s the threat. It’s our own self-importance—and, what invariably comes with it—our loathing.
I guess on paper, the roadie’s job is to lift equipment, and I guess to some extent that’s what I do—plus a little bit more. I lift instruments, speakers, rigging, microphones, cameras, comatose bodies, the ethical burden of this lifestyle. And it would all be worth it. It was all worth it, until I woke up from my fog of secondhand stardom and realized that the music, at least now, is trash.
Maybe it wasn’t that bad at the beginning, because something must have compelled me to sell my soul to this band. But you know how I know this new album, in particular, is horrific? It has charted at #2 for the last seven weeks in Germany. You know, home of the bleeps and bloops and speed-driven pseudo-euphoria we misidentify as genuine fun. Also, it’s home of the Scorpions.
I think deep down Stan knows the album is garbage because he’s getting off more and more on grandiose and obnoxious displays of fuck-all attitude, theatrically mocking his own work and throwing life down the drain—and dragging me along in his own narcissistic fantasyland—even, once or twice, interrupting me mid-coitus to sustain it.
The last thing he “needed” from me was zero waste dime bags. He saw a video of Greta Thunberg in a passionate plea and kind of is… into her? What he doesn’t know is that they only make the bags in snack sizes for carrots and lentils and whatever the fuck else vegan hippies eat, and are not exactly designed to transport a lump of or two of black tar heroin.
Or like the other night—I was driving the guys back to the studio; we’re blazing down San Vicente and the dude whipped a pistol out from under the seat, put it to his head and said he would pull the trigger if I didn’t indulge his idea of a little nude photoshoot on the median. An hour post-shoot he became consumed with this paranoia that the photos would be mocked, and deleted all of the images. You can’t make this stuff up. I wanted to die.
And the absolute worst part of everything is the girls. I know you think it would be the best perk of this entire operation. But simply put, I think they are horrible people who are completely absent of dignity. It’s not even that I don’t respect them for their awful taste in men; I don’t respect them for their awful taste in music.
And when your music’s bad, and you’re delegating your own instrumental parts to contracted musicians, and you’re adding saxophones, tambourines, keyboards—adding, adding, adding distractions, and you’re too fucked up to remember your own vapid and repetitive choruses on stage, all of a sudden, being a belligerent asshole is no longer sexy.
As the third party here, I wouldn’t mind if you set off fireworks from the roof of your Holiday Inn, turn the 25th floor into your local red light district, or go nuclear on continental breakfast goers in the morning, slip ‘n sliding through the hash browns and croissants, if you’re, you know, a good band. Good as in being capable of writing multisyllabic rhymes, and, I don’t know, remembering them on stage. I guess I’m no moral authority on this, and maybe I’m just sick of the guys, but that’s my two cents.
So now I’m questioning if I even benefit from the industry that captured my soul, that baptized me without my own goddamned consent. The music industry is greater than the sum of its parts—its intricate, interesting, stoned and in-therapy-as-we-speak parts. Parts raised by gypsy mamas and fathered by ego, cultivated to be a part, and, thus, apart, since conception, yet always yearning to be whole.
Like the other night, I went to a show at The Hole and I didn’t even want to be in the pit. I just listened and focused on the drummer. He was like a medium for the sacred beats and melodies and life of the song from above to pass through, translating its energy into earthly sound, and all the kids danced. The energy was umbilical, the audience knowing no life other than a vibrato violently shaking our cores and harmonizing with the pitch of our rage perfectly, the sacred sound of Om resonating with the primal howl of the dissident. It sounds dramatic but it was real. You don’t get a lot of moments like that in life.
So then I come home in this daze, right? Tapping my scarred hand against my thigh all the way back to the band’s rented practice space in the Marriot, I prepare to enter a predictable scene. Lo and behold, I walk in to Stan sipping nitrous straight from the canister’s mouth over the live soundtrack of moans emanating from the bathroom. I suavely make a pedestrian U-turn and exit the space, pausing to slip fifty dollars into a passing bellman’s pocket. I skillfully execute my indirect 911 call while infallibly avoiding blame detection and also ensuring that the guys make it to a 12 p.m. sound check.
I lift the emptied tank of nitrous oxide off the ground, the shattered remains of a 36 inch Sony flatscreen from the mantle, and a strung out keyboardist-who-shall-not-be-named from an overflowing bathtub, all on professional autopilot. I collect some remaining, unidentifiable pills for bribes or leverage down the road—most likely, tomorrow morning—and begin to walk toward the door, suddenly stopping in my tracks to pick up my last item of the night—a red notebook with a hasty sketch of the Sigil of Baphomet on front. Time to stop lifting and start putting down, I think to myself, and smile at the poetic arc of my tried musical career. I pocket the notebook. It’s weightless in my jeans. Because after all, words are the hardest part.
And that brings us to the present. When I finally decided to check them in and the counselors began to ask me all of the questions, I guess I had a flash of an emotion that I hadn’t had since the early days, when the lyrics came from the desperate heart, a bubbling pool of artistic, tortured hubris, and the music came from above and it was raw, powerful rock ‘n roll: It was jealousy, debilitating voyeurism, giving me psychological blue balls from the sidelines. I wanted someone to talk to. And for the first time since way before the adolescent backstage blowjobs, I made the first move. I came to you.
I think the basis of the human ego is the desire and ability to effect change and pursue freedom. And that’s all that rock ‘n roll is really about. But like any art, it’s ambiguous, right? You can make it mean whatever you want it to mean. And so I guess that’s how we all end up here: the pursuit of freedom. And then you think about what we do, on a personal, cellular level—like lifting equipment, kissing the promoter’s ass when every band member and road manager and agent is too loaded to be polite, all the bullshit I just disclosed to you—and it all means nothing. But it’s all okay because what we’re a part of is the most prolific and accessible and poignant source of raw fuel for change, while simultaneously offering access to the actual pursuit of freedom. This is the Arts!! This is Rebellion!! This is Rock ‘n Roll! So why do the melodies lurk around basic scales, why do the lyrics talk about partying and chasing women and jerking off American capitalism in a manner and eloquence that even Donald Trump can’t outperform?
Who is it all for? The industry serves the people who fund it, the people who need music delivered to them to find it, the people who had lives without it, those who were happy to begin with. And that’s how we get a positive feedback loop of baby talk and poppy bobs and true, undeniable garbage. Thus is the paradox of the rock ‘n roll roadie, and the sick irony of 21st-century music. We’re riding on a dissident label, a renegade ego that has since been fetishized and commodified by the suits and ties we were raging against in the first place. And that’s how this dystopian industry I've found myself swept into lost its pursuit. It became a convenient celebration, and the industry dedicated its entirety to manufacturing fuel for a never-ending bonfire, hosting a party altar for the beautiful people to gallop around in robotic rage. Music was once a primal quest to navigate the darkness. And now, decades beyond my first lustful encounter with its song, our industry has become a beautiful, red-hot blaze of strength and protection to defy the night. I have always thought I was pursuing the night. But now I’m gaining clarity, and that’s not it. I am the night.
So, in response to your question, “What would I like to get out of this?”
I’d like to get out.
Natalie Silver is a native Californian who recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Media Studies. She believes that the critical millennial voice is the most prolific threat to contemporary systems of oppression, and she would rather die than work in tech. Alas, she fell into independent journalism.
