Reflections On The Road (Guitar Player 1984)

JEFF BERLIN

BASS AND BEYOND column: Reflections On The Road

Guitar Player January 1984

AN EXTRA SPECIAL hello to everybody. This is my first column since returning from a tour of the U.S. with Allan Holdsworth and I.O.U. (which also included singer Paul Williams and drummer Chad Wackerman). I would like to thank everyone who came to our gigs. You people were fantastic, and the support you gave us was great. A million thanks.

While it's still fresh in my mind, I'd like to talk about some of the ups and downs of touring, because no matter what your status is as a musician, you have to pay certain dues. There's a lot of hard work, frustration, and many aggravations that you must cope with. On the road, the hour-and-a-half performance is in many ways the easiest part, because with all the logistics necessary for a good gig, it takes a superhuman effort on the part of the musicians and road crew.

First, you have to be concerned about expenses. The object is that by the end of the tour the musicians should come out at least a little better than breaking even. It takes planning and common sense, because there are lots of expenses. For one thing, you have to finance the tour. In our case, some of the expenses were lightened because Paul Williams had a vehicle to take the band around and another for the equipment. And if we didn't have those vehicles, then we would have had to rent some, which would have been incredibly expensive.

The band contributed in other ways as well. For instance, Paul and I drove, and we were like chauffeurs for ten hours a day. Then we set up some of the equipment at each gig. Just because you're well known doesn't mean you can avoid certain pitfalls. In fact, it's probably easier being a sideman. Scott Henderson, the guitarist with my own band, Vox Humana, is now on the road with Jean-Luc Ponty. He is guaranteed a salary and is otherwise taken care of. It's great for Scott, because Jean-Luc has a particular income where he can afford to pay for musicians and treat everybody in a proper way. When you're in an independent group, it means that you have to pool all your resources (and your expenses), and after the tour you split the money. And you may not do very well. The only guarantee that you receive from some places is that your expenses will be covered.

Some gigs had problems such as PA buzzes, monitors sounding like Fred Flintstone radios, and amplifiers that reminded me of the sound system at the Hollywood Car Wash. And (most notably) the bass player's fingers moved with the smoothness and grace of Godzilla tiptoeing into downtown Tokyo. One night I drank four beers before I went onstage to play. Now, the Berlins are notorious Nestle's Quik drinkers; we get three-day hangovers after eating a bowl of rum-raisin ice cream. I quickly discovered that beer and bass do not mix, because I played like a bad dream: slow, low, and wrong. To top it off, I found out that someone came to the club just to videotape me. Oh, no! At the end of the concert, I went right out to confiscate the tape (running by people who wanted to meet me, and I never stopped to say hello - very rude of me, and I'm sorry), but the guy bailed out before I could find him.

Hotels are very expensive these days. To save money, we stayed in some pretty bad places, simply because we had to put up six people night after night. Some that we stayed at resembled the barracks in Stalag 17. I mean, they were deadly. Our very first gig on the tour was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We drove ten hours to arrive at 3:00 in the morning at what should have been called Hotel Death. We checked in just in time for me to spot a guy who looked exactly like Charles Manson (we joked about how the Family probably chose this hotel for a reunion).

So we watched Charlie walk up to the ice machine, open it, and stare into it for ten minutes before he closed the lid and went to bed. Allan got so freaked out by the surroundings that he slept in the van that night. My room looked like it had been furnished by Devil's Island Interior Decorators, and the bathroom appeared as if it hadn't been cleaned since Columbus decided the world was round. I slept in that hotel only because Allan got to the van before me.

Fatigue is a real road hazard. Every member of the band got sick at one time or another because we were so weary. Allan got sick, then I got sick, and then Paul, and then Chad. Plenty of times I could tell that we weren't playing as well as we should have been, and we hoped that the audiences didn't feel that we were doing something substandard. I carried around a lot of vitamins, and then the other guys got the same idea and we all began to take vitamins regularly. It helped. For the first part of the tour we were our own roadies, but later on we got a couple of really helpful road guys who worked hard and made the rest of the trip a lot easier on us.

Since we drove the whole way, road directions, of course, had to be correct. In all, Paul and I drove the band 10,000 miles from Los Angeles due east to New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and then north into Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and finally Massachusetts. Turning west, we drove to the Great Lakes cities of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, and then southwest into Denver, Phoenix, and finally back to LA.

We got lost every single day.

Here's a sample of our directions: Take East 290 (it turned out to be north) until you come to a dead end (on an interstate highway?). Make a right, and go until you come to an Arby's (it was actually a McDonald's), and make a left; then go until you see a billboard with a cow painted on it. There wasn't a cow painted on the billboard - it was a damn horse, for God's sake!

We drove 400 miles a day to within ten miles of the hotel, and then we got so screwed up deciding how to interpret the directions that our search for a clean bed seemed to go on forever. Maybe there's a reason why the Who decided to break up: They just got tired of looking for the Holiday Inn.

And the food! We ate so many eggs for breakfast that when the sound man asked me how I wanted my bass sound, I said, "Scrambled." When I ordered a steak, I could still see the marks where the jockey was hitting it. Yeah, the food was rough, all right. If we had more money and time, we could have eaten in better places, but doing that much traveling means eating in some pretty shaky restaurants. Thank goodness for Carson's Ribs in Chicago (the best in the North) and Big Tim's barbecue in St. Petersburg, Florida - the best in the world.

Even though I poked fun at the more difficult aspects of our trip, one thing is clear to me: I would do it again in order to play in front of the terrific people I met on our summer tour. The night we played in Houston, Hurricane Alicia came ashore off the gulf of Mexico, blowing at nearly 150 mph. The next day we drove through flooded highways and the wind and rain from the storm's last gasps and finally reached Dallas - four hours late for the gig. Those incredible people who came to see us stayed the whole time waiting for the Steve Morse Group and I.O.U. to arrive. After driving all day and into the night, we arrived, and with no sound check and tired and hungry, we tried to play as well as we could.

In Baltimore, our gig was booked into a cesspool of a nightclub, and the people were jammed to excess, waiting over two hours (standing up) while the club's sound crew messed with the PA, trying to make it work. We don't take our own sound system with us because the rooms we played had their own sound systems-and they are often awful. There are certain laws of the physical universe that you can't change: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and the monitors will not work at least half of the time.

The Club Cesspool system finally worked, we went onstage, and that PA died four times again, until it finally stayed on through the rest of the gig. There was no air conditioning in the basement club, and I can't believe that these people put up with all that crap just to watch us play. God bless them!

I thought it would be fun to chat about the good and bad aspects of the I.O.U. tour, and hopefully show both sides of what it's like out on the road. Next month, we'll get our hands sticky with some music. I love you all, and I'll see you backstage at the next Ozzy Osbourne Joins Lawrence Welk concert!