Tag: precarious lee (Page 10 of 11)

“Godammit. Look at it: so clean. So safe. Where’s the danger? Rock and roll used to be about danger, and not metaphorically: electrocution was a real possibility. Do you know that no one on the Road Crew knew the difference between a watt and an amp until 1971?”

“That seems almost impossible, Dad.”

“Forget about ohms, man. I mean: high-visibility, glow-in-the-dark tape? What happened to a drunk guy with a flashlight leading the way?”

“Can’t have that kind of–”

“Liability.”

“–liability these days.”

…

“Son, this is no country for old roadies. The tuggers have dried up, and the fun will not blossom. It’s about the money, not the adventure. I won’t have it.”

“All right, Dad.”

“Professional Lee, your father is officially out of the roadie game. Precarious Lee retires!”

“What?”

A MAN ON A BICYCLE RIDES UP. HE IS WEARING A HAT.

“Telegram! Telegram for Mr. Lee!”

“I’m Mr. Lee! Son, take care of the man, please.”

“Here ya go, kid. A shiny nickel.”

“Dude, you shitting me? A nickel? Just don’t give me a tip if you want to give me a nickel.”

“I thought you were from the ’40’s! A nickel can buy a Negro League franchise!’

“No, it’s 2015. How can I be from the ’40’s?”

“Well, everything exists simultaneously and there is quite a bit of poorly thought-out use of the Time Sheath, and, um.”

…

“Here’s ten dollars; please don’t mention this conversation to anyone.”

“You guys are creepy.”

“Be that as it may. Dad, what did it say?”

…

“Dad?”

“They want me to run the Museum of Modern Terrible Dead Art.”

“MomTDA?”

“Yeah.”

“Look at me when I talk to you, boy.”

“Dad, not now.”

“Right now! No one will listen to my ideas about stacking things on top of other things! Someone tried to put a safety harness on me like I was some heathen Wallenda! Who is this Osha person and why does he have so many damn rules?”

“Dad, please don’t do this.”

“I haven’t seen one fist fight between the light team and the sound team today!”

“Dad.”

“AND WHERE ARE MY GODDAMNED TUGGERS?”

In the north end of Levi’s® Stadium, not one man or woman stopped and listened. No one even heard the old man; he had drank and smoke and stayed up all night all his life and his voice didn’t carry very well anymore.

“Dad. It’s 2015. There’s paperwork and big money and people get outraged a lot. Road crews don’t behave like that. No one really behaves like that. It’s about, you know: safety and competence and all that boring shit. But more people live through it.”

“We lived through it! We were pirates with pocketfuls of backstage passes and we held the world together with duct tape and cocaine and we lived through it!”

…

“Me an’ Parish lived through it.”

“I love working with you, Dad, but you gotta get with the times.”

“It’s what I get for naming you Professional Lee.”

“Love ya, Pop.”

“Love you, too.”

SHWOKKATHOOM

“Why? Why did you punch me in the dick?”

“Precarious Lee chooses to rage against the dying of the light, son.”

Precarious Lee had worn his camo because he was going to war: with gravity, with common sense, with basic mathematics in some cases. Things needed to be piled atop other things. Which things? Those things; these things; some other things. The thing that was important was that they were piled atop one another.

Duct tape, plenty. Wooden chocks to hold up half-ton speaker columns, yup. Random ropes, cables, and wires to dangle freely from the naked scaffolding, you betcha.

Precarious wondered how many teenage tuggers he was going to get.

The first sign that he was not having a good tour was the “No Smoking” sign. How can heavy machinery be operated, Precarious asked, without a Pall Mall dangling from the corner of your mouth? I mean: you don’t wanna see too much when you’re welding.

Then, there was the safety gear you see him wearing: imagine getting a cat into a spacesuit. A real, NASA-built spacesuit that takes three PhD.s ninety minutes to put on. That’s the kind of blind, thrashing rage Precarious Lee went into when someone tried to get a neon vest on him.

(Precarious accepted the hard hat after first “proving” he didn’t need it by running skull-first into the backhoe, which resulted in him, you know, sleeping for a while. He’s human, after all.)

The safety meeting in the morning was now an actual safety meeting, Precarious was distraught to learn. The only safety at the safety meetings that Precarious was used to was the cut-off switch for the nitrous tank to keep it from freezing up.

There was no nitrous tank backstage at Santa Clara and Precarious Lee was beginning to think the world had moved some way he could not grasp.