A Letter to Coronavirus, From a Roadie

63 hertz in the chest. You won’t get that from AirPods, noise-cancelling headphones, or “smart” speakers.

In the pandemic world, people say “one of the things I miss most is concerts — there’s just something about them, it’s hard to describe.”

One of those “hard-to-describe” things is 63 hertz hitting you in the chest. It gets you in the heart. Different frequencies hit you in different ways. You feel them in different parts of your body. 80 hertz you will feel a little higher up, in the sternum, the chest-bone, like a dropkick.

You know when a show is about to start, when the house lights are still on, and there’s the ambience of people milling about, chatting, waiting? Then the lights drop, everyone screams, and rushes to find their place — some lose their MINDS. But you are still typing that one last email, getting in a quick text, still staring into the glow — know what I’m talking about? You aren’t engaged. But then the kick drum hits, and you feel it in your chest, it knocks you back, you look up and say “whoa”. It draws you in. The warm THUMP in the heart is 63, and the dropkick is 80 hertz.

You are actually getting hit with a complex spectrum of frequencies that bend and wrap around you. You’re swimming in sound. Your cells excite as your brain tries to perceive all that is happening.

Frequencies a bit higher, rattle your voice box and temple. Above 160 you don’t really feel the sound any more, you just hear it. Even though it’s all the same to your eardrums. In other words, your eardrums transduce all sound waves the same.

Lower than 63 gets you in the diaphragm and gut. “Brown note” comes from the ultra-low frequencies shaking everything loose. That low, they just rumble the earth.

The low-end is important if you want to feel a concert. It takes a lot of work to haul around and stack those subwoofers in front of the stage each night. They’re heavy and take up a lot of truck space.

But the subs supply the bass. And the bass is what gets people going.

So, concerts are special because you feel the music in a way you don’t in other situations. You don’t have that in your home or car. You might have subs, but they aren’t the same. I’m talking about the real deal.

You also don’t have an audio-nerd scientist battling the physics of the room with analyzing software and ears that have been around the world and heard every kind of room. You don’t have lighting and video designers to paint the sky and push you toward your emotional response threshold.

You don’t have that.

What exactly is a hertz? Or sound, in general? I wouldn’t bother. Frankly, it’s boring. You’ll drown in terms. It’ll make your eyes gloss over. But audio engineers and systems techs can talk about that stuff for HOURS.

All you need to know is that a hertz is a unit of measurement. Humans hear roughly 20 to 20,000. 20 is really really low like the rumbling of an earthquake, and 20,000 is really really high like just below a dog whistle. You can feel the lower end because the waves are physically large and shake your bones.

In the pandemic world, people say “connection — I miss the connection.” That’s right — you can watch music on a screen through tinny speakers but you don’t have warm bodies there to soak up the waves and make the sound warmer.

You know when you hear a new record and there’s something about it and you want to share it — but it’s also yours? It just came out, or it’s important. It grabs you — know what I mean? But is it really palpable until it’s live? Is it electrifying — do people scream and cry and jump while listening at home?

At the show, there’s a connection. Everyone is there. Maybe you’re down in the pit of people piled on top of each other, pushing, swinging. Or up in the triple-A balcony people-watching the crowd like a Post-Impressionist painting. Or standing in the back, nodding. Or dressed-to-kill in the outfit you picked out last month. Or crammed against the barricade in front, singing til you’re hoarse, having waited all day on the sidewalk. Or swaying back-and-forth. Or tripping balls. Or dancing in the aisle. Whatever the show, there’s a scene, an aura about it.

Humans are social. Everyone knows that. We thrive in social situations.

Music is language. Organized sound. It connects, conveys feeling. People need connection — right after air, water, and safety. You speak the same language as your favorite artist and you know it well. The lyrics, yes, but also that little keyboard melody in the bridge you sing in your head. All the instruments. Now, take others who speak the same language, put them in the same room, and have everyone sing the little keyboard melody too.

Music isn’t a business, selling music is a business. “Music” derived from ancient Greek “mousike” meaning “art of the Muses”. The Muses were inspirational goddesses, the source of knowledge in poetry and song. So, “music” comes from the need to express emotion, tell a story. Is there anything more human?

In other words, there will always be a demand for live music, and where there is demand, there will be supply. I’m not worried about live shows coming back, it’s just a matter of time.

Concerts are a new phenomenon in our existence. The amplification and social-setting are new to our brains. It’s like a drug. A tune reinforced plus a few thousand people singing along. Add some ambience — outdoor sweet summer-air or indoor winter-warmth, haze, glow, an effervescent crowd — and tell me you have something better to do, somewhere better to be. I’m not talking about the FOMO-inducing selfie for social-media that people scroll past in their mindless, endless, search for something better. I’m talking about the MOMENTOUS OCCASION OF THE HERE-AND-NOW.

And corona took it away. It rattled, evicted, bankrupted, divided, and subjected us to hysteria.

It took my livelihood, stripped me of my identity, and caged me in.

The highway was my home. The meditative hum of the bus rumbling rhythmically down the road, overnight, into the expanse, while I slept in my bunk, was what I knew. On to the next city. Down every road there was always one more city. Until there wasn’t.

**********

Dear corona, you’re testing my mettle. But honestly, I can see through you already.

What, did you think I was gonna wither and die? I learned early on to go weeks, months, without pay. I never wanted to, but was forced to learn the vicissitudes of a freelancer. The ups and downs. I can stand in the rain a long time.

And I have stories.

I swim in the background, sleep four hours a night, and knock shows out. I help make people’s hearts sing. Nightly. And I’m average AT BEST. I’m not special AT ALL. Everyone in the concert business is — CRAZY. Forged in fire. Motivation is easy because we just get rid of all the ones who aren’t motivated. They get spit out.

I started out working rock clubs in Manhattan, 12-hour weeks at minimum wage, scraping by, eating pizza SIXTEEN times a week because it was cheap.

A few years later, I was hitting 70 hours regularly. I remember riding the train home at 7am on a Monday. Coming up out of the subway, I was against the grain. Everyone else was a zombie dragging to work sleepy-eyed, coffee in-hand. I had just worked ALL weekend and never felt more alive. I hit 96 hours one week not including the one-hour train-rides. I did 20-hour days. If you do two or three 20-hour days in-a-row, you’re beat. After four, maybe five you break down. That’s the limit.

I hit the road, started touring.

We’ve had 5, 4, 3am lobby calls. Easy. I had a 130am lobby call for a morning TV show in Times Square. We did the recording, got on a plane, flew to Boston, met the same truck we had just loaded a few hours prior, and loaded in another show.

You hit a stride out there.

I drove over black ice on I-80 for twelve hours in Wyoming during the polar vortex. The wind was so strong I had to lean into it and drive 30 mph in third-gear while staying inside the ruts created by truck tires ahead of us leading the way. Every few miles we saw a turned-over tractor-trailer lying like a speared woolly mammoth on the side of the road. THEN we hit a snowstorm in Utah in pitch-black as we went over the mountain pass. The snow was so heavy and blinding, like a blanket, the world shrunk and got silent. I rode the rumble strips in the shoulder just to stay on the road, to not drive off into a snow bank. We made it to In-N-Out just as they were closing. Then woke up at dawn and drove 795 miles from Ogden to Seattle. I drove across the U.S. six times that winter.

Everyone has stories.

I did an outdoor festival in Vegas in June in 115-degree weather. Our set was at 5pm in the fire of the sun. Afterward, we got on a plane, and took a redeye to London LHR. Had the bus pick us up at the airport and overnighted to Glastonbury Festival (pr: Gláss-tun-bree). The monitor console took a shit on the changeover. Just … broken. Nothing we could do. The stage manager kept hovering and screaming the countdown. “10 MINUTES 5 MINUTES 3 MINUTES 1 MINUTE 30 SECONDS”. I told him I was well aware of how much time we had. The manager, the agent, the band all standing by, helplessly. We had a 30-minute set. With eight minutes remaining, we capitulated and put the lead singer on to do one song, acoustic. They served us hot dogs for lunch. We jumped on the bus directly after to start an 18-hour drive to a festival in Germany the next day. On the way, that festival was rained out. So, we just turned north and headed to the next festival instead.

I did an outdoor show in Minneapolis in February for the Super Bowl. It was 6 degrees and snowing sideways. The audio gear froze and shut down and we had to re-patch everything on-the-fly. The show producers freaked out and I saw the white in their eyes. I told them it was fucked up because the gear wasn’t made to function in that weather, and that it’d take a few minutes but we’d fix it. We fixed it and did the show and the guitar player’s fingers froze. Those crazies in Minneapolis were standing outside, PACKED, singing, as far as you could see.

We did a show in Moscow, coming from Warsaw. Our freight truck with all the gear got caught at the Latvian border. He sat in cue for sixteen hours, then was told to go to the back of the line. We had to SCRAMBLE day of show, worked with the promoter and hit up EVERY store, vendor, musician in the city to scrape enough together to do the show. Just after doors, the truck arrived with our gear, but we just said “fuck it” and did the show with what he had strung together. The crowd screamed so loud, like they were STARVING, I never heard anything like it.

I broke down in a van on I-76 in Pennsylvania between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh in the Allegheny mountains once. It was 11pm, raining and freezing. There was barely enough shoulder to pull off, and we were stalled on a bend. Tractor-trailers were blazing by at 75. The road is so dangerous on that stretch, that PennDOT has a state-sponsored “Roadside Assistance” program with State Farm where they actively patrol twenty-four hours a day. We got towed to a mechanic’s shop who said he could fix it in five days. We had a gig the next. We bribed the shop guys with a case of beer and some band t-shirts and were out in the morning.

I had a monsoon cancel a flight once last-minute from Seoul to Osaka. We had a festival gig the following day. It was a holiday so ALL the flights into Osaka were instantly rebooked and sold out. I called the emergency line of our travel agent, and while texting the Japanese and Korean promoters, looked at Google maps and the NOAA weather site. There were eight of us. We shot from the hip and booked flights into Tokyo instead. Just made it to the airport. On arrival, the flight circled twice, and landed as the clouds descended, as the monsoon made it north. Then we took the bullet train into Osaka, and did the festival the next day.

I did a show in front of 100,000 on the Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. When we arrived at the perimeter gate, our bus driver was at the limit of his driving-hours, and we HAD to get through or risk having the bus shut down in the lunacy of beeping, darting Parisian drivers in tiny cars. The police guards had machine-guns and didn’t believe us, they had no idea what was going on, and didn’t speak English. “Impossible” they kept saying, OM-POSS-EE-BLAY. They thought it was hilarious that I thought I could park the bus there. I was calling the promoter over and over but he wasn’t answering. They quickly lost their sense-of-humor and raised their voices. The promoter bumbled up smiling just as it was getting out of hand, and they let us through. We parked the bus right in front of the tower, a parking spot money can’t buy.

I had a bus break down in the middle of the desert three hours northwest of Vegas on State Highway 95 on EASTER SUNDAY at 5am. We had a show in San Fran that night. Our driver put out an SOS, and by complete coincidence, his friend was deadheading a bus to LA after finishing a tour, and was a couple of hours away. He picked us up, we transferred personal gear, left the broken bus on the side of the highway, and dropped his friend at an Enterprise. We drove all day, hit the Bay Bridge at sunset, inched-forward in the line of red taillights, arrived three hours AFTER doors, threw some gear on stage, and did the show.

Here’s a typical fly-date: woke up at 4am to find our flight had been rebooked due to weather to depart from Newark instead of LaGuardia. That is NOT the same when you are waking up in Brooklyn. We had done a gig the previous night and got in late. The car service had to pick me up, then head to Northern Brooklyn to get the artist, THEN cross through Manhattan on Canal Street to the Holland Tunnel. On the way, there was a truck stuck on Bushwick Ave, unable to make the turn. I got out of the van, stopped traffic, backed him up, forward, up, forward, up, forward into a 16-point turn to get him out of our way. We picked up the artist, made it through Manhattan just as traffic turned maniacal, JUST made the flight, and loaded in the gig on the other side. Just before soundcheck, the front of a thunderstorm blew in out of nowhere, like only they do in the South, and LIFTED our playback rack off the stage and smashed it onto the cement eight feet below. It then down-poured for an hour before clearing into rainbows and sunshine. In the meantime, we put everything back together, prayed, did a 30-min linecheck and it all worked.

I had a molar pulled in Kansas City when I had a choice between either Option A: $2,000 and be out-of-commission for two days to fix it properly, or Option B: $125, some rye whiskey, and make load-in that morning.

I had a German bus driver threaten the life of an English stage manager once when she asked him to park in the mud and he had a psychotic break.

I had an Australian piano tuner threaten my life once after I fired him from a gig for showing up drunk and he had a psychotic break.

I’ve ridden through blizzards and over ice in the Rockies and the Alps, through black smoke in Australia. Circumnavigated monsoons. I tracked and outran a tornado in Nebraska.

Just a few stories. There are a good deal more, some I can’t tell.

And there are plenty who work harder and have more experience. Some have traveled backwards on a bus more miles than I’ve gone forward. Even the artists. You think being in a band is easy? They’re out there “developing character” too.

Hell, we’ll do the shows for free, we get paid to travel. Whether that’s to the next city or commuting deliriously, endlessly.

A pandemic is just another story. You’re testing my mettle but you’ll have a hard time breaking my sense-of-humor.

We have shows to put on. The outlaw spirit and need to speak a language — to connect, convey meaning — will live on proud and tired.

NOTES:
This is a follow-up to “Travel in the Time of Coronavirus”, which I wrote flying home from Europe on Thursday, March 12, 2020 after our tour was abruptly cancelled. For most people in the concert business that was the last weekend they had a gig.

I also wrote this as a follow-up to my friend Seth’s essay on missing live music.

Thank you to Davey Martinez and Austin Stillwell for their help with the audio. They could talk about that stuff for hours.