DRASTIC (Book 4 of the Soundcrush Series)

Chapter 59: Smart Girls Love The Life

Marley

One Week Later

My watch says 10am, but it feels like midnight at least three days from now. I'm smoking a cigarette with Andy, Dalton, Tig and Javi—Soundcrush's full-time crew. These guys are paid year-round to be at the ready. They go anywhere and everywhere Soundcrush goes, whether it's an appearance on Fallon or an arena tour.

Andy is Soundcrush's personal sound technician who always liaisons with house sound to produce exactly what the band wants. Dalton is the crew boss for equipment set-up, and Tig and Javi are his fulltime backline specialists—the guys that know exactly how every member of Soundcrush likes every instrument set, programmed or tuned. Alone, these four guys can put up a Soundcrush set for a small venue in about an hour.

For the last two days, these guys have spent four times that much time with me, teaching me how the equipment is set, how it is interfaced, how it is used, and how it is broken down. They said they needed the speed practice anyway, because Grammy run throughs at the Staples center start next week and the schedule is tight for each act to set and break their stage.

That show will bring another set of challenges—pyrotechnics, moving props, complicated choreography, a troop of dancers, on stage costume changes for Leed and Mac, and even flight cables for Leed and Trace, but fortunately those concerns are not mine. That whole imbroglio is executed by the Grammy production staff and my only job will be to liaison between our stage crew and their staff for scheduling concerns. And between the band and their production staff for any artistic concerns. Riley will also be there for the first couple of days to school me on how to handle things.

Riley has assured me that if I can simply keep Leed on his cue, the Grammy show will run itself. He wants me look ahead, to the tour logistics.

In four weeks when the Double Impact Tour kicks off, there will be twenty more backline crew exclusively dedicated to managing Soundcrush's equipment, and an equal number of specialists for Skid Marc's equipment.

A shared pool of about 75 riggers, carpenters, audio, lighting, and video technicians plus 17 trucks of 90,000 thousand pounds of stage set, rigging, lighting, audio and video equipment will travel in advance of us and be managed by a logistics company that specializes in arena tours. With Boss Hawkins as their point man, of course.

My responsibilities for Soundcrush will be the welfare of our twenty-four dedicated roadies, twenty-two security guys, three stylists, one personal chef, four PA's, two runners, twelve drivers, one teenager, one infant, one teen minder, two nannies, one Insta-Star girlfriend, and five rockstars housed on nine buses, with three trucks of dedicated Soundcrush equipment.

Including myself, that's eighty people I have to keep transported, fed, housed, on task, and on time for sixteen weeks over the course of 31 regular shows, 6 festivals and about 215,000 miles.

And that? That's a mini-tour.

It's insane, but it's the most exciting project I've ever worked on. In the last week, I've completely filled Bodie's home office with tour plans.

At first, it was Bodie writing massive flow charts on rolls of paper, explaining to me how everything tied together, and me writing lists of questions sometimes for Riley and sometimes for Dalton or Andy about things that even Bodie, after five years of being in the thick of this business, couldn't answer. In the last few days, it's been stacks of resumes, piles of files of itineraries, hotel bookings, catering contracts, travel routes, venue contracts, insurance forms, and more pouring in as Riley hands over the tasks.

One of Riley's interns has been at our house for three days, scanning all the necessary documents onto an Ipad, and organizing all the incoming emails about bookings, because there's simply no way to travel with the information needed in any other way. Files would require another trailer.