I spent twenty years on the road.
You drive or fly or ferry all night, across seas, over borders, down highways, to cities everybody knows. Up at dawn or no sleep; hotels, airports all fade into one gaussian blur.
It's the relationships you make, the fleeting bonds and the back room wisdom, that's why we do it. But no matter how close you get, once the tour ends, we all scatter in other directions, and form new bonds. Basic physics.
So you arrive, you check the gear, get the sounds right. Lay everything out, try to make it home. But if you're honest, you can't remember home any more. And if you're more so- it's the place you go to, to sit and miss the road.
When the show unfolds, and the energy blasts out into the crowd, and back from them... that's the drug. That's the feeling that utterly owns you. You can't get it anywhere else, any other way. It's the definition of magic.
And when it's over, and the gear is cased up and rolled away, the trusses come down, the arrays grounded, you look at where the stage used to be, and there isn't a trace of evidence to show any of it was even real.
The house lights are so harsh. The lines on the faces of the crew the opposite of glamour. This process strips a person down to the bones, road people are like reptiles. They know, it's ok.
And once the party is done, and you drag your aching body to the transport, the scene has been scrubbed clean, no DNA, sanitised. It's just a stage, or a patch of clean grass amongst a sea of trash and dirt, semi trailer tracks and patches of gaffer tape. Nothing you'd put on a poster.
And then you drive or fly or ferry all night...
You drive or fly or ferry all night, across seas, over borders, down highways, to cities everybody knows. Up at dawn or no sleep; hotels, airports all fade into one gaussian blur.
It's the relationships you make, the fleeting bonds and the back room wisdom, that's why we do it. But no matter how close you get, once the tour ends, we all scatter in other directions, and form new bonds. Basic physics.
So you arrive, you check the gear, get the sounds right. Lay everything out, try to make it home. But if you're honest, you can't remember home any more. And if you're more so- it's the place you go to, to sit and miss the road.
When the show unfolds, and the energy blasts out into the crowd, and back from them... that's the drug. That's the feeling that utterly owns you. You can't get it anywhere else, any other way. It's the definition of magic.
And when it's over, and the gear is cased up and rolled away, the trusses come down, the arrays grounded, you look at where the stage used to be, and there isn't a trace of evidence to show any of it was even real.
The house lights are so harsh. The lines on the faces of the crew the opposite of glamour. This process strips a person down to the bones, road people are like reptiles. They know, it's ok.
And once the party is done, and you drag your aching body to the transport, the scene has been scrubbed clean, no DNA, sanitised. It's just a stage, or a patch of clean grass amongst a sea of trash and dirt, semi trailer tracks and patches of gaffer tape. Nothing you'd put on a poster.
And then you drive or fly or ferry all night...
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