Canadian Musician - March / April 2020 | Page 41

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