On that fateful day when your manger finally says, “Hit the road, Jack,” will you be prepared? Just in case the answer is “No,” Gear-Monkey has enlisted a blue ribbon panel of street-smart rockers to recount their bloodiest war stories and tell you how to dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous touring. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
JERRY CANTRELL
(Alice In Chains)
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) Get a great tech and don’t spare any expense.
2) Don’t spare any expense on your gear, either. Make sure you have a backup sysem—always.
3) Never wear your socks more than three days in a row.
4) Always take a dump before going onstage.
THE GIG FROM HELL
We were on the road with Ozzy somewhere in the Midwest. At the soundcheck and all during the show, I kept getting zapped left and right—my lips were fired! All I could think was “There’s a million dollars worth of lights and PA gear, and no one could invest in a fifty-cent foam microphone cover? Geez”
RULES OF THE ROAD
1) Take the phone off the hook when you go to sleep. Sleep on the road is sacred because you don’t get much of it.
2) Always use a condom. Always.
3) If you meet Zakk Wylde or Slayer and they are drinking, run the other way, because you will have a hangover the next day.
MATT LUKIN
(MudHoney)
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) Duct tape.
2) A collapsible bong.
3) Earplugs for drum soundchecks.
RULES OF THE ROAD
1) If there is no beer, there is no show.
WORST TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
We were on a nonstop flight to England from Minneapolis, and Dan [Peters, Mudhoney’s drummer] and I got stinking drunk. At one point we ripped off our shirts and started screaming and hollering. For an encore, we noticed that the por dude that was seated next to us had fallen to sleep, so Dan and I pulled our cocks out and shook’em in his face. After we landed, these two cops grabbed us. They asked why we were idiots, and why do assholes come into their country and scare people? How do you answer a question like that?
PLACES TO AVOID
The State of Florida. I don’t need to elaborate on Florida to any musician who’s ever played there.
TED NUGENT
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) Attitude
2) Attitude
3) And of course, the Attitude of the Attitude
THE GIG FROM HELL
I’ve never had a bad gig.
RULES OF THE ROAD
1) Be on your toes all times.
2) Remain cocked, locked, and ready to rock.
3) No drugs, no alcohol, no insubordination, no laziness, no irresponsibility.
4) The more guns on deck the better. The more women below the deck, even better. And never the two shall meet—except on my deck!
WORSE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
It was in 1969, touring with the Amboy Dukes between Jackson, Mississippi, and Louisiana—somewhere down in the swampy bowls of America. We were driving a ’67 Cadillac limousine two or three in the morning, and I have to take a shit. So I pull over to the side of the road, and I see a tree with my name on it. So I get out and take a good dump—not a wet shirt; I eat venison and I’m talkin’ an American Dump. That mother asked permission to come out. So I got back in the car and started driving.
Then, sure as hell, here comes a state trooper. And he puts a spotlight on me, and it was classic Americana: thumbs in belt, huge gut, and he looks at me with his sheriff hat tipped and goes, [Southern drawl] “What you think yer doin’ there, boy?” I go, “I took a shit officer.” I’m not one to beat around the bush—especially not the one I just shit in! And he goes, “You what?” And in my mind I wanna come out and say, “Yeah, I know you guys haven’t figured out we actually pull our pants down first.” But I didn’t say it because he would have shot me. Then I would’ve had to shoot him. So I go, “Officer, I just took a shit.” And he says, “Where’d you do that?” And I had to explain it all, that I had to take a shit in the woods. And he says, “Well, you get right back there and pick that up!” And I wanted to say, “Oh, hungry are we?” But I knew what he was doing—he was using me, playing games. He made me pick it up and put it in the fucking trunk.
How I kept from shooting him where he stood is beyond me. That was the mentality of our wonderful Southern brethren at the time. Had I been a black guy, God knows what he would have made me do.
PLACES TO AVOID
Gay bars and vegetarian restaurants. Like I said before, you gotta appreciate fiber—and you can’t get what you can use in either of those places.
J. YUENGER
(EX-WHITE ZOMBIE)
RULES OF THE ROAD
1) Always talk to fans, no matter how tired you are.
BIGGEST DIASASTER
Probably the time our tour manager killed a guy. We were staying at a motel in San Antonio, Texas, and our tour manager got into an argument with the hotel manager over our rooms. Just before they started throwing punches, the hotel guy—who we found out later had a heart condition—turned blue and collapsed. Our tour manager gave him mouth-to-mouth and revived him, but he died on the way to the hospital.
PLACES TO AVOID
Holland. I hate it there. The people are so stoned all the time. It’s like playing in front of a bunch of people watching TV. They also have a bad attitude because they were once a superpower, and now they’re not.
KIM THAYIL
(EX-SOUNDGARDEN)
BIGGEST DISASTER
The night I broke my favorite Guild S-1. I was in the middle of playing my guitar solo, and, as a joke, the rest of the band decided to leave the stage. When I tried to get them to come back, they just started laughing at me. So I took the guitar and threw it across the stage and snapped the headstock. I was really bummed that it was broken. So I took it to the be repaired in Lawrence, Kansas, and the guy there started yelling at me. Apparently Nirvana had been in the previous week and brought in some broken gear. The guy chewed me out, going, ‘What the hell is the matter with you guys in Seattle? Is that the way you treat guitars up there?’ He was really pissed off.
THE PERFECT ROADIE
The guy’s gotta have a lot of experience and should be trustworthy, clean, reverent, brave, cheerful and kind. Basically a Boy Scout—a rowdy Boy Scout.
PLACES TO AVOID
A club called the Trees in Portland, Maine. We only played LSD night for a bunch of forty-nothings who were reliving their Grateful Dead past.
GENE SIMMONS
(KISS)
RULES OF THE ROAD
1) Don’t forget to wipe.
2) Don’t call her back.
3) Try and play in tune (although not always necessary).
4) Stay in a room close to the exit.
BIGGEST DISASTER
My worst onstage disaster occurred during the late Seventies when, among other foolish things, I used to fly up to the top of the light truss about 50 feet above stage, traveling at six feet per second. Usually, this was the highlight of the show, but on this one night, they guy working the controls pushed the wrong button and I went straight up into the light truss and crashed right into it. I have since prevented this from happening again by never flying up to the light truss without better safety inspections.
GARY HOEY
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) Nail clippers
2) A micro-recorder for taping ideas in the middle of the night.
3) Amp fuses
4) Name tags for inside my luggage
RULES TO THE ROAD
1) Leave ‘em hungry for more!
2) Don’t sign anything without a lawyer
3) Don’t be disappointed when things don’t happen the way you were told—everyone exaggerates.
GARY THORSTENSEN
(TAD)
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) Red Devils [Absolut and cranberry juice]—and plenty of ‘em!
2) Fresh socks on your concert ride.
3) Jar full of Tums and Immodium AD.
4) Earplugs. Tad snores like a fiend.
THE GIG FROM HELL
You mean aside from playing 30 shows with Primus?
ROAD RULES
1) Eat plenty of roughage. On the road it’s either laundry or bowel movement. Eighty percent of your day, outside of drinking and rocking, revolves around those, I swear; chasing down a Laundromat or a bathroom.
2) Use the women’s washroom—it’s cleaner.
3) Never ask directions at a Mini-Mart.
4) Never crap on the bus.
5) Never crap in a Mini-Mart.
BIGGEST DISASTER
Any club next to a radio station would qualify. Nothing like having country music coming through your Marshall stack. We played Seattle’s King Street Theatre, which has an underground cable from a nearby news stations running near it. I plugged in and heard a station signal coming through. What you do to fix it is take a sheet of tin foil and put it across the face of your amp, then plug in right through the tin foil. That’s a little studio trick that sometimes works; it works in Manhattan, at least. I don’t know why it doesn’t work in Detroit.
PLACES TO AVOID
Belfast, Ireland. Ireland has no sense of humor for American rock bands. We were in a hotel when the IRA bombed it—an early morning wake-up call by the IRA. Kerblam!
ALEX NEWPORT
(Fudge Tunnel)
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) Sense of humor.
2) A wife
3) A distortion pedal
4) Another distortion pedal
5) Friends
THE GIG FROM HELL
We played a club in Paris that was actually an underground warehouse. There were no windows and no toilets, and everyone had to piss upstairs onto a ramp that ran down into the venue. So the venue filled with piss…and then the lights went out. There was almost a riot.
GARY ROSSINGTON
(Lynyrd Skynyrd)
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) A good wife..
2) An acoustic guitar to play on the bus and in the hotel room.
3) A great guitar tech. Never skimp in this area, because sooner or later he will save your ass.
RULES OF THE ROAD
1) Stay healthy.
2) Don’t overdo anything you like to do. Those are my old mans rules. Here’s the Lynyrd Skynyrd circa 1977 rules:
1) Do whatever you want.
2) Don’t do anything you don’t want.
WORSE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE
Well, our plane crash was the worse, of course. But our second worse happened after we opened up for Dave Mason at San Francisco’s Winterland, very early in our career. Sly and The Family Stone took us to an all black and Chicago bar, where we had a great time, shooting pool with them all night long. When we left at three in the morning, there were four rough-looking Chicano guys on our buss. We found out later that they just wanted to check out the bus, but we didn’t know that, so Ronnie [Van Zant, singer] told them to get the fuck off, then pushed one of them down the steps. He fell on his ass and called Ronnie out for a one-on-one fight. We never turned down a fair brawl so Ronnie went down after him, but there were 20 guys waiting for him. It turns out the guy he pushed was the leader if a Chicano gang and they were all there, and we got the shit kicked out of us. There were 20 guys just pummeling five of us. We finally dragged ourselves back to our hotel.
The next morning, there was a knock on the door and the leader was out there with 10 guys, all of them armed with knives, bats and chains. He said, “You ripped my shirt last night, so you have to buy all of us new shirts.” We had no choice but to say okay. So he said they were going to go buy shirts and bring us the bill. As soon as they left, we tried to slip away, but they had 10 guys waiting around our bus. So we waited until they came back, and we paid that bill, which just killed us, because we didn’t have two spare pennies to rub together. That was one of our first visits to the big city.
TOM MORELLO
(AUDIOSLAVE)
ROAD ESSENTIALS
1) The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
2) Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
3) Backlash by Susan Faludi
4) State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilych
5) Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
THE PERFECT ROADIE
I have to be able to beat him at Xbox.
BIGGEST DISASTER
(With Rage Against The Machine)—Our T-shirts for our first European tour had a “How To Make A Molotov Cocktail” guide on the back, which we got out of a handbook the CIA had distributed when they were helping the Contras in Nicaragua. Well, the French customs officials didn’t find it very funny and they impounded the T-shirts and almost arrested us.
PLACES TO AVOID
A suburb outside of New Orleans where they sell license plate frames with “Repeat the 13th Amendment.” For those who don’t know, the 13th Amendment was the one that outlawed slavery.
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