any job that needed filling and eventu-
ally being made tour manager.
“The number one question I get
asked by everybody I meet anywhere
is, ‘How do I get your job?’” says Lukas.
“My answer is, ‘go do it.’ Go to shows,
talk to people, meet bands. Even if
you’re not a musician, go hang out at
shows and talk to venues. Be in the
scene and be seen and offer to go just
for the sake of going and not even tak-
ing a salary. When you’re young, you’re
just crashing on floors and everyone is
crashing in the same room and sleep-
ing in the van – that kind of thing. That
is how you get that experience.”
That said, outside of maybe those
first ramshackle van tours with the
band’s friend as “tour manager,” pro-
fessional tour managers expect to get
paid, which means the artist needs to
account for that investment. So, what
should new tour managers expect to be
paid – and artists expect to pay?
“It comes down to what you nego-
tiate and what kind of rooms you’re
playing. It’s funny, there is just no real
standard to that,” says Beckwith. “I
would say at the very base for a front-
of-house person would be about $250
a day. When you get into the combo
roles you’re looking at a little more
than that, like $350 or $400 per day. It
just keeps going up, really.”
“Tour managing is hard and it’s
all hours of the day. I could be home
in my own bed at 9 p.m. and not an-
swering phone calls until 3 a.m., so, it’s
very much a day rate because it is a
24-hour job. I think that’s important to
keep in mind,” adds Brunet.
Tour managing is a crazy job. Every sin-
gle day on tour is different. Sometimes
it goes smoothly, and other times it
looks like it’s all going to come crashing
down. And then there are times when
it’s just weird. Like Lukas said, it’s all
part of the job.
“I had an artist get in a car, go to a
casino, and win a jackpot and then call
me at one in the morning, saying: ‘What
are you doing?’ ‘I’m sleeping.’ ‘I need you
to come bring me my ID.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because
I just won the jackpot and they won’t give
it to me.’ ‘[Sigh] OK.’ In the Uber I get and
go a half-hour to the casino and bring
the identification, the jackpot is collected,
and everyone is happy. Just weird stuff
like that,” Lukas recalls.
But he loves it, and so do the others
we spoke with. “These creative minds that
can create such beautiful art can also be
so abstract at what they want at times.
Just in their daily lives, they can be – I don’t
want to say ‘devoid of reality’ – but I’d say
very ‘creative’ in their requests,” he laughs.
Ultimately, the show must always go
on, regardless of what it takes. As Duffee
puts it so well in closing: “The goal is for
a show to go up; that’s the thing. So, by
any means necessary, you make it hap-
pen. My favourite moment of any day, no
matter how crazy the day is, is walking my
artist to the stage and that one second
before they go on. Sometimes it makes
my heart so happy to just know that we
did it and we’re off. We made it happen.”
Michael Raine is the Senior Editor of
Canadian Musician magazine.
AVERTING DISASTER
On a good day, everything stays on schedule and goes ac-
cording to plan. But even the best laid plans are subject
to bad luck. While everyone else can freak out, the tour
manager’s job is to fix any crisis and make the show hap-
pen. What better way to explain this than with a story?
Here’s one from Mike Lukas:
“I was in Chicago with [Steve Earle & The Dukes] and the
tour bus driver wrecked the bus leaving the hotel. He
beached it into the road, blocked three lanes of traffic in
downtown Chicago, and he jackknifed the trailer into the
bus and broke the engine. And this was on a Saturday, so
we couldn’t get a replacement bus, we couldn’t get any
parts, and we had to get a crane!
“I had to send the artist to the venue to do the show,
and then had to get a crane to lift the bus out of where it
was stuck into the concrete. On a Sunday, we had to find
Prevost parts and we had a show in Iowa City that night
headlining a festival. We managed to get the bus fixed and
managed to get to Iowa City in time for him to do a solo show.
I was on the phone with the promoters all day saying, ‘We’re
going to make it.’
“We had a time that I knew that if the bus wasn’t fixed
at this time, I had to cancel the show. And when you cancel
the show for that reason, you don’t get paid. So, missing
one show on the road is massive to your budget because it’s
MIKE LUKAS
very high overhead. So, I said, ‘I need you to get me this on
the stage and this to the console and we’re going to roll the
bus up, the artist is going to jump off the bus, we’re going to
hand him a guitar, and he’s going to walk on the stage.’ And
that is exactly what happened.
“[The promoters] didn’t want a solo show; they wanted
the band because they ‘paid for the band.’ But the artist
played right up until the curfew, was doing requests –
which he never does – and at the end, the promoters were
thanking me and saying, ‘That was the best-case scenario
we could’ve had.’ Meanwhile, the entire day was horrible,
just hell getting everything done, but the show went on.”
C A N A D I A N M U S I C I A N 41