A Roadies life, can be dangerous, but use your brains and all will be well

The life and work of a roadie is now very different I think from when I was doing that work, Health and Safety and Unions have now wormed their way into that world as well I gather.

In my day - he mumbled through his toothless jaws - there was effectively no such thing as Health and Safety, we simply used our common sense and experience to avoid death and injury, in what is on the face of it, a very dangerous profession.   One is working under extreme pressure with high amperage live electrical cables, hanging lights high up and generally working in very dodgy situations. 

But, whilst I frequently found myself on top of very high and very wobbly aluminium towers with huge follow spots, which of course I had had to carry up there on my back, or fumbling around in the pitch dark on stage during a gig to reconnect very thick (up to 400 amp) live cables that had come disconnected somehow and similar things, we almost never had any accidents or injuries in all the years I was doing that work.   In fact the only deaths and serious injuries that happened to my colleagues tended to be road accidents, which were horribly common.

Safety harnesses and lines were unheard of, and anyhow, we simply didn't have time to fiddle around setting up security lines and similar things, we had to get on with the work in much less time than was actually required, get the gig set up and ready to go.. frequently only finishing as the audience were coming into the hall, or stadium.

There were times when it was really scary work though.  I remember a concert we did in the Olympia theatre in Paris, which is an old and venerable theatre where all the greats of French musical life have performed.. .Piaff and the rest of that gang.   Well, my job on the gig we did there was to operate an enormous and extremely old Carbon Arc follow spot that was positioned in a sort of hanging tray under the ceiling of the auditorium.   In order to get to it I had to walk along a series of narrow planks placed on the ceiling beams of the auditorium, no handrails of course and with nothing except a thin layer of plaster between me and the floor of the auditorium below.. And it was dark up there too, so I had to use a torch to find my way to the damn follow spot.  

A Carbon Arc Follow Spot.   Not the one I used, but similar. The one I used was about 2 meters long, had its colour magazine at the end, and a small chimney above the big box at the back, which issued great clouds of evil smelling smoke as it worked.

 When I found the thing, I discovered that I had to sort of clamber down off my plank and into a very flimsy operating position, which consisted of some scaffolding with a few wobbly planks to stand on, and which also supported the considerable weight of the enormous Carbon Arc follow spot, that had to date from about 1920.   However it did at least have a sort of safety rail around it, about 60 cms from the floor, as the follow spot needed to be able to point at any part of the auditorium except directly below it.  

It had a set of colored gels in frames at the end of the follow spot, but this was about 150 cms outside the "safety rail", so I had to hang onto the spot and lean out as far as I could to change the colours of the spot...  Not a nice feeling, as everything wobbled like mad when I did that.  And anyhow, Carbon Arc lights are tricky things to work with, as you have to keep feeding the two carbon rods towards each other, keeping them exactly the right distance apart for the spark between them, but not too close, or else they would explode, and not to far apart as the light would go out.  So what with doing that, changing colours, pointing the blasted thing at the right place and not falling over the low safety rail, it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience all around.  I survived it, but swore never to work in that theatre again, no matter how famous it was.

Of course I had no safety line... Nor was there anywhere to secure such a line in any event.

There are loads of such stories that every roadie can tell, but as I said earlier, in general we were professionals who knew what we were doing, and the only risks we took were taken with serious and experienced judgement of the actual dangers involved.   And as no one was there to make all manner of safety rules, we had to depend on our own judgement and that of our colleagues, which is exactly what we did, and the result was a remarkably accident free working environment.  Probably fewer accidents than happen today, when people rely on rules and safety apparatus rather than their own skill and sense.

In fact, in all the years I worked in both theaters and rock and roll, no one I knew had more than minor injuries resulting from their work.   As I said above however, loads died and were injured in road accidents.