5:00 AM. The Bus Stops.
Somewhere between 5 and 6 AM, the bus pulls into the venue lot and the engine shuts down. That's the start of a show day. Not the sound check. Not the doors. Not the performance. The moment the bus stops moving.
"Normal" is a word we use loosely in this business. On a normal day, we roll in at 5. On a less normal day, something has already gone sideways before anyone is fully awake. But the goal is always the same: get 11 buses, 3 of them with trailers, 10 semi trucks, and a 26-foot box truck parked exactly where they need to be... quietly, efficiently, before the building even knows we're there.
That doesn't happen by accident. The night before every show, I send out a detailed parking plan and arrival notes to all my drivers. By the time we pull in, my two lead drivers have already read it. They're pros. I build the plan, they execute it. Twenty-five vehicles in the right positions without me having to make a single call. That's the goal, and more often than not, that's exactly what happens.
Coke Zero and Funk Music
The first person off the bus is my head rigger. He's a smoker, and the no-smoking rule on the bus means he's up the second we stop rolling. By the time I make it to the front lounge, he's already outside.
My stage manager is right behind me. Then the second rigger. Then our Production Coordinator. We all end up in the same place... the front lounge, half-awake, toothpaste still happening, music already on. Funk, specifically. That's non-negotiable.
Coffee gets made. Coke Zero gets cracked... that's mine. The coffee comes later. This window, maybe 20 or 30 minutes, is the one part of the day that belongs to nobody. No work talk. No radio. No problems to solve yet. Just the crew, the music, and whatever the day is about to ask of us.
Unless there's a parking issue. Then I deal with that. But otherwise, the work comes soon enough.
"That front lounge window is the one part of the day that belongs to nobody. The work comes soon enough."
Walk and Chalk
Once we're off the bus and the building is open, the first order of business is Walk and Chalk.
The chalk part is literal. My rigging crew marks the floor of the stage with all the rigging points... every motor position, what type it is, what department it belongs to. Before a single piece of gear goes up, the whole floor plan is drawn out on the deck so everyone knows exactly where everything goes.
The walk part is me. I do a full walk of the backstage area with the building's event manager. We talk through anything last minute, work through the building's quirks, and try to remember the details from the last time we were here. Where did we put the artist last time? Did that door work? Where did we stage the cases? Buildings change. Staff turns over. What worked last visit isn't always how it works this time.
While that's happening, my stage manager is doing his own version of the same conversation with the Labor Steward... walking through the day, mapping out where dead cases go, where the opener gets their build area, how the load-in sequence runs. By the time the local crew call starts, everyone already knows the plan.
Load-In
This is when the lot gets loud. Trucks opening, forklifts moving, cases coming off... the whole building goes from quiet to full volume in about twenty minutes.
And me? I'm getting breakfast.
That sounds like a joke. It isn't. If I'm running around putting out fires during the first hour of load-in, it means my advance wasn't thorough enough. The questions that come my way in that first hour are almost always things that should already be answered... and usually are, if people check Master Tour before they come find me.
A grab-and-go works fine. An omelette station is a good day. Biscuits and gravy is a great day. The point is, that first hour shouldn't need me. It needs the plan I already put in place.
Dressing Rooms — Artist World
While load-in is running, my PA and I are working through dressing room assignments.
Quick clarification on the roles, because people confuse these: a PA (Production Assistant) is day-of-show focused... she's all things backstage, manages hospitality, handles guest lists, and runs one of our four runners. A PC (Production Coordinator) is advance-focused... she handles hotels, flights, per diems, road cash, and is the face of the production office. She manages the other three of our runners, and the opener has a runner of their own on top of that. Two similar titles, two very different jobs. We're lucky enough to have one of each.
On our tour, the PA owns hospitality, which means she and I do the room assignments together. And the single most important thing to know about room assignments: our artist and band don't like change. That's not unusual... it's actually pretty common across this industry. So the conversation is always some version of "Where were we last time we were here, and has anything changed in the building since then?"
Get the rooms right and nobody thinks about it. Get them wrong and you'll hear about it.
Checking In With the Artist
I talk to my artist once or twice on a show day, usually between dinner and showtime... in the dressing room, not over the radio. It's not a long conversation. I'm not running a briefing. I just want to know if anything bothered them from the night before, and I want to flag anything that's different about today's show.
The most common variable on our run right now is the thrust... whether there is one, and if so, what shape and size it is. That changes night to night, especially during festival season. The grand piano position is another one. Depending on the stage size, it moves. The artist needs to know that before they walk out, not when they're standing on stage wondering why things look different.
When the show is running like it should, the artist shouldn't notice anything. If they're spotting problems from the stage, the crew has already lost that battle. Our job is to hide the venue's limitations well enough that the artist never has to think about them.
"If the artist notices something is off, we haven't done a good enough job hiding the oddities of the venue."
Show Ready
The set change leading into our performance is the last stretch of time I spend on the deck before the show. I walk the whole stage. Not to hover over anyone... the crew knows what they're doing. But there's a checklist in my head of small things, details that probably don't matter to anyone outside this crew, that tell me whether we're actually ready or just close to ready. Those two things are not the same.
When that list is clear, I radio my stage manager. He goes department by department... audio, lighting, video, rigging, stage... and collects a Go or No-Go from each head. When everyone has checked in, he comes back to me on the radio.
"Earl, JA Crew is Show Ready."
That's the call. Every show, same words.
I get back on the radio and talk to the crew for a minute. Thank them for the day, call out anything specific we dealt with... bad weather, a compressed load-in, a long festival day that started at 5 AM and goes until 11 PM. Whatever it was, I want them to hear that it was noticed. Then I send them into the show.
"Great show, everybody."
By that point, the Tour Manager has arrived with the band and the artist. We do a quick fist bump around the group. The TM hears the all-clear over the radio. He and I look at each other, and without much ceremony, we hand the stage to the stage manager and walk to the wings.
The lights go down. The crowd goes up.
Everything that happened in the last 14 hours disappears. Nobody in that building knows any of it. That's exactly how it's supposed to be.
Pass It On
A lot of people want to know what touring looks like from the inside. The honest answer is that it looks like a lot of early mornings, a lot of preparation, and a lot of people doing their jobs so well that the audience never has to think about it.
If you're coming up and you want to talk through what a show day actually looks like at this level... or you're trying to figure out how to build a day that runs this smoothly... reach out. I'm glad to talk through it.