Ghost Light.

Musings from the off-season.

“A ghost light is an electric light that is left energised on the stage of a theatre when the theatre is unoccupied and would otherwise be completely dark.” - Wikipedia

When you’re in a new town every day, dealing with all kinds of tedious live show things and live show people, Christmas has a habit of sneaking up on you. One day, at some venue in some town, you shuffle your way onto the loading dock at six in the morning to be met with the sudden sight of tinsel and colorful lights attempting to spruce up otherwise cloudy grays and dusty blacks of the interior. Then, when you make it out to the venue lobby, you’re hit in the face with twenty-foot-tall Christmas trees covered in colorful orbs, and every flat surface is layered with fake snow and reindeer.

There are two non-negotiables I have for any touring contract I sign. The first is that the tour can’t go to places where being an American in the wrong place at the wrong time could result in my detainment. So no Russia, no China, no Middle East. The second is that the contract must allow for me to be home over Christmas. I miss every single other holiday most of the time, but I must be home for Christmas. So when I’m on the road and these decorations start popping up around me, I can’t help but think that it’s only a matter of time before I get some rest, and it fills me with relief and generalized excitement.

I love Christmas.

In the world of music, there’s a lot of talk about mental health. But in the touring world specifically, it has become a hot topic in recent years, I guess because COVID did completely derail the lives of everyone involved, and I suppose as a society we’re starting to acknowledge casual alcoholism as a bad thing. I hear it repeatedly, how being on the road means the highs are really high and the lows are really low. You often have little to no personal space or time to yourself. The rush of getting from place to place and those first opening notes of each show can get your adrenaline pumping like crazy. But for everyone from headline artists to production assistants, there seems to be the shared experience of going through all that then one flight later you’re home and it’s… quiet. Dead quiet. Or otherwise, you’re like a pebble falling from the sky and splashing into the steady stream of everyone else’s daily life back home: You can’t flow with them, and as a result, the water slides over you like you’re not even there because it has no time to stop. It’s not personal, it’s just how it is. One could say that a lot of touring people don’t handle that well. And the quietest, slowest, stuck-in-the-mud part of any roadie’s year is the winter.

It’s always a similar scene for me every December, thrilled and relieved getting back to my hometown with a backpack and the suitcase I’ve been living out of for the past several months, stuffed with the bare minimum. These days, I’m in this WhatsApp group with thousands of roadies who this year have decided to flood the chat with photos of them arriving home and sending general well wishes for everyone through the holiday. A virtual support group that typically happens every other week is said to be happening weekly from now through the end of February to combat the off-season blues.

After a quick meal with my parents, who graciously make sure my car battery doesn’t die in my months of absence, the first thing I always look for after driving my car back to my apartment is bugs that have crawled in over the past months and died unceremoniously out in the open. This time, there is a dead cricket in my sink, a couple of tiny unknown bugs on the floor, and cobwebs brushing the tips of my fingers as I raise my hands and spin in every corner of my two-bedroom oasis. Worryingly, my back door is unlocked; a new set of keys for it was left in the kitchen with a note saying the locks got changed by management. They presumably left it there so I wouldn’t get back home from work on whatever day that was, shocked that I couldn’t get in. I shiver thinking about how long it must’ve been sitting there and take an extra survey of the apartment to make sure I haven’t been robbed and there’s no one secretly in there with me. After securing the perimeter, I go to the bathroom and realize my water has been turned off at some point. Luckily, I have a stash of plastic water bottles that can get me through the night just fine.

And it’s so quiet. Always so quiet. But once the heater kicks in enough to thaw out my dwelling, I pass out and am dead to the world for three days.

During my short stint in grad school, my roommate who shared my enthusiasm for K-pop music often asked me what touring was like. One of our teachers gave her a book to read about it, a very blunt recounting of touring experiences by a woman that - based on a couple of pages I took a peek at - had a great voice for chronicling her adventures. But a week later, my roommate shared with me that she had finished the book, exclaiming that she’d rather die than ever go on tour. (this was Tour Book by Rachel Hales)

“Everyone is here because they know how to put on a show,” I find myself saying to artists and crew alike at the start of most runs, “it’s all the stuff that happens between shows that’s the hard part. But you are not the first to do this and you will not be the last. My door is always open. Except, of course, when it isn’t.”

Most first-time touring people I work with don’t take to it very easily. They’ll finish out the contract most of the time but it’s hardly something they want to make a life out of. Touring for most people is a brief season in their life, not unlike something such as college - a few years of adventure at most. That is a sensible response. But there’s usually one or two who always get back home to that quiet they’ve been craving, only to realize after a few days or a few weeks that they want nothing more than to get back out there. In other words, they’re crazy. Those are the ones who make a career out of it. People like me who’ve been in it for ten years and counting.

I recognized the importance of structure during these times without much fanfare in my early twenties. And so now, after my three days of being dead to the world, I set my alarm for 10 AM to do some semblance of exercise, eat a real breakfast, watch my favorite TV westerns at their normally scheduled times, practice piano, sit down to really lock in on my writing, and start cleaning up my space (goodbye, dead cricket). Then I will eventually be brought back into the outside world to pick up shifts with my various local employers who are happy to hear I’m back in town for a little while.

Most people peg me for an introvert, but it would be a lie to say I don’t enjoy being around people (if anything as a chronic people-watcher), catching up with their lives, or hearing about the otherwise mundane. Suddenly I am not confined to the same six black shirts and three pairs of black pants of my touring suitcase, but after dusting off my forgotten wardrobe I’m cruising through town in my colors of choice and blasting my favorite music, preening at the normalcy of scanning tickets at the movie theater, buzzing people into the front door of an event center, or waving cars through in a stadium parking lot. Conversation with coworkers in these environments is easy, even if I mostly take the role of the listener. After sometimes meandering to the closest corner store at the end of a shift, we go our separate ways until the schedule puts us together again.

There’s other work during this time too, stuff closer to my actual normal. I find myself in a familiar loading dock, back in my show blacks, unloading gear off a truck for some kind of conference. Or I’m setting up the backstage green room at a nearby venue in anticipation of the entertainment for New Year's Eve. But it’s easy to drift in the background in these cases, joking around with other local hands seemingly natural. Because, unlike on the road, I’m not everyone’s boss this time. I’m not running the whole damn show. I’m just here to help out. You say jump, I’ll ask how high. Then, sometimes after all the heavy lifting is done, we’ll all be in the back alley opening up a pack of beer and passing around a blunt, both of which I will politely refuse, but stay for a bit anyway because sure it’s cold but it could be colder and the company of people who are more in line with my world is oddly comforting.

Meeting up with my actual friends can take some time - if it happens at all. Like I hinted at before, falling from the sky into the stream of someone else’s life can be disruptive if you insist too much. But if the logistics work out, I’m once again eager to hear about the finer and (in their view) mundane details of their lives. After a decade of only physically being within their orbit for 10% of any given calendar year, I try not to come off as desperate for connection and in doing so have my questions brushed aside with “oh, nothing interesting,” before everyone just wants to hear about my latest batch of crazy tour stories always responded to with comments about how exciting it all sounds but how they’d never want to live the way I do. I’ve refueled enough by this point, somewhere between my three days of being dead to the world and two weeks of casual local work, Christmas and New Year's now behind me.

“I live by myself in the middle of nowhere,” writes the tour manager of a well-known rock band in the WhatsApp group, “and I would’ve spent Christmas alone drowning myself in alcohol if not for someone in this group inviting me out to Los Angeles to hang out. Thanks, roadie fam.”

Several other people respond saying they also live quite isolated from the industry. Just as many others chime in from hubs like New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville, talking about how great having groups of roadies to talk to in the off-season has saved them from falling too deep into bad habits. “It’s nice to be around other people who get it.”

“Sending love to you road dogs,” someone says, “this is why I had to quit.”

Inevitably, as Christmas decorations give way to far more sparse forecasting of Valentine’s Day date nights, I begin to get antsy. I wake up at 10 AM, do some light exercise, fix my breakfast, practice the piano, work on my writing, and watch my TV westerns. All of my friends have been seen, all of my stories have been told, I helped fix whatever was broken at my grandmother’s house, I took my aunt to her doctor’s appointment, I walked the streets of my childhood and found them barren of the comfort provided by the people who once resided there. I get bored. It’s usually at that point when the work emails start coming in that I realize two things:

1. I don’t belong here. Not really.

2. I’ve got at least one more of these adventures left in me.

I know this lifestyle of mine is not forever. Everyone gets off the road eventually and there’s a lot of discussion amongst career roadies about when or how that should happen. How do you know? I’m aware of how close in age me and the divorced alcoholic tour manager with chronic anxiety living in the middle of nowhere with no nearby family left to speak of are. I know I’m lucky still finding such convenient peace and comfort in the off-season as I do. I know I’m addicted to the high of the next gig, even though it’s just a job. I know all of that. But none of that knowledge keeps me here in one place. Hindsight will always be 20/20, but for now, I choose to be the pebble because… it just feels right. Or rather, it only feels right when I know that the next thing is on the way.

It’s in the last gasp of February that I pack up my bags, that “back to school” feeling simmering in my veins. Sure, I’ll complain about it: The waking up early, having to deal with all the people, all the problems, all the usual things people complain about when it comes to work. But lacing up my boots and pinning my new all-access credential on is a soothingly familiar armor as I brace for the impact of whatever this next journey will consist of. I may be leaving home, but in a strange and perhaps misguided way, I am also coming home to myself, and the thrill of it brings the barest hint of a smile to my face.