Irreverent, at times bawdy and disarmingly self-deprecating, Roadkill: Misadventures & Mishaps takes the reader on a first-hand journey through the highs and lows of live music production, from coffeehouses to coliseums between 1975-1995, the golden age of concert touring. Anyone interested in a humorous peek beyond the bright stage lights will enjoy the unique perspective of this book.
There is no glamour here. Roadkill is a no-holds-barred view from the trenches, where the crew works, eats and sometimes sleeps. Tour buses and hotel rooms are merely brief respites from the protracted grind of show days. Kenny Nicholson’s particular - and somewhat peculiar - path is littered with incidents of curious happenstance; some self-inflicted, others for which only the bored meddling of a cynical deity might suffice as explanation or justification.
This memoir arcs from Kenny’s beginnings as a one-guy/one-truck sound company in Sacramento, California, through the harsh years of low-budget regional touring, and finally to the pantheon of major-league arenas. But trouble lurks behind every road case. The astute survive. The rest are Roadkill.
Roadie.
I have never liked that word. In it’s broadest sense I was one for over twenty years, but it still rankles. While certainly descriptive, and as epithets go neither inaccurate nor inappropriate, it has a demeaning undertaste that lingers like cheap wine. Truth be told, most touring professionals feel the same way. Next time you go to a concert look around at the stage passes dangling from the lanyards worn by everyone in the road crew. You won’t see one that says ‘roadie’ no matter how hard you look. Instead you’ll see ‘crew’ or ‘staff’. If you ask what they do, you won’t get “I’m a roadie” in response. They may be a guitar tech or a lighting designer or a rigger or a stage manager or a drum tech or a carpenter or, as in my case, a sound engineer. And they will tell you so in no uncertain terms. Therefore the above instances are the only time you’ll see the R word in these pages.
Here’s another popular adage:
Sex, drugs and rock and roll. I have no philosophical problem with
this one, except as it pertains to this book, and so a spoiler:
There are no sordid tales of debauchery in this memoir, and only a
few drug anecdotes. I could have written dozens of pages about
both, but I didn’t. The reason why can be expressed in one word:
Respect. It is a privileged access that is granted to the inner
sanctums of the musical road show. You see and hear, and do, all
manner of things for which you would never otherwise have the
occasion, inclination or even the imagination. I didn’t leave the
life embittered and thinking I wasn’t given my just due. I had no
axe to grind about relationships gone sour or dollars left
uncollected. The aggregated tales and travails herein are connected
to artists of repute only by the necessary framework of
circumstance and perspective. It’s what I did; whom I did it for
(or to) is incidental, mostly.
From LOUDER THAN WAR Magazine:
The spirit of Tommy Saxondale is
evoked in the memoir ROADKILL: Misadventures & Mishaps,
dedicated to highway hypnosis and the spiritual vibrations of rock
and roll.
You only have to listen to the legendary Troggs tapes to realize just how much those individuals on the margins, carrying equipment and operating sound desks have the ability to deconstruct the rock and roll myth with an almost impudent zeal. When you think about it, the whole shebang is a gloriously silly exercise of vanity. Men (for the most part) trying to act out their best Christ pose on stage, surrounded by similar silly buggers with the type of gusto that would make a scurrilous pirate blush.
As a chronicler of such things and with over twenty years of experience in the field, you would think this memoir by Kenny Nicholson would take us deep into the trenches of such insanity, but early on in this book he comes over all coy when announcing that this isn’t really a book based around debauchery, the fallout that comes with it and that even if he could, he wouldn’t have revealed his saucerful of secrets out of “respect” for his clients anyway. Which is a dangerous thing for this type of book to do, to leave out its war stories. What’s left is an authentic snapshot of the machinations of touring rock bands and a love letter to a bygone age, particularly in America in the 70s and 80s, where bands like Ian Shelter and Jet Red dreamt big and got to live out their best rock and roll fantasies, albeit at a very basic level.
Where this book works best is in the grey area of its working reality and the dark comedy that comes with it. There’s a stripping away of the glamour of touring, which becomes morbidly fascinating in a strange way. These odd, overworked figures high on “Krell”(Cocaine ) pop up in the book at regular intervals, then disappear without any real fanfare. There’s a sense of hustle too, as Nicholson and his band of rock and roll brothers swerve across America, at times hanging by their back wheels, at times glimpsing a utopian success they probably wouldn’t have known what to do with anyway.
That’s not to say there aren’t moments of real inspiration. Nicholson can write well and his description of an early Alice In Chains performance towards the end of the book is as insightful as any rock critic, but in many ways, this book’s lack of self-awareness gives it a real charm. At one point it even lists the type of screwdriver needed to (safely) remove a live electricity breaker panel or quickly repair a human foot (his) that has been impaled on a 6d nail, and with its constant realist view of the rock and roll life, ROADKILL: Misadventures & Mishaps favors grind over glamour, revealing the fascinating tribe of workers barely glimpsed beyond the velvet rope.
From SCREAMER magazine
Roadkill: Misadventures & Mishaps is an exceptionally readable book by former sound engineer Kenny (just don’t call him a “roadie”) Nicholson.
Nicholson spent his formative years in Sacramento, California and he goes into detail about splitting his time between running sound at clubs and at local television stations learning broadcast production. After that, he made the transition to sound reinforcement full time, working for production companies, regional bands and concert venues. Over the years, he worked his way up the music business ladder, culminating in going on tour with Tesla in the late 80’s to the early 90’s.
If you’re looking for a salacious book with lots of outrageous, detailed backstage stories a la Motley Crue’s autobiography The Dirt, you won’t find it here. There are a few such tales sprinkled throughout Roadkill, but they are more implied as opposed to tellings of “sex & drugs & rock n’ roll” with all the juicy details.
Roadkill is more about the technical side of what goes on backstage. What’s it like to be a sound engineer? What can go amazingly right and horribly wrong? The book describes the decidedly non-glamorous aspect of concerts that most fans will never see: The hours of backbreaking labor to offload the trucks in everything from broiling heat to freezing cold. Setting up, doing the soundcheck, and ensuring that everything flows smoothly during the show. Afterwards, tearing everything down, packing the equipment into the trucks, grabbing some shitty road food when you can and boarding the tour bus to (hopefully) grab a few hours sleep before doing it all again in the next city. And again. And again.
It’s
also about personalities: The conflicts that can develop between
crew and concert promoters. The friendships and personal
relationships that form when band and crew spend hours, days, weeks
and months together. The good-natured rivalry and elaborate
practical jokes between bands and crew that share the stages while
on tour. And in the end, all of the above is a much more fulfilling
tale than just another recitation of crazy stories of rock stars
behaving badly.