New book highlights vital role of road crews in the music industry

A new book titled The Road Crew: Live Music and Touring (Routledge) by Senior Research Fellow Dr Gabrielle Kielich is challenging traditional perceptions of the role of the road crews that help bring live music to audiences around the world.

Road crews, or “roadies” as they are commonly known, are often assumed to be there just to set up stages and move equipment around before and after concerts. According to music legend, roadies have sometimes enjoyed the same extracurricular activities available to the musicians they work for. 

However, Kielich’s book is an in-depth account that details the significance of and specialised roles that comprise road crews, and offers insights into how the working lives of roadies have evolved.

“I love live music, it is my greatest passion,” says Michigan-born Kielich. “But as well as loving concerts, I’ve been fascinated by the process and experience of touring. It's always seemed a little bit mysterious, and I was always interested to understand everything about what happens behind the scenes.” 

Road crews play a key support role

Her interest was further piqued during the break between the support and main act at a concert in New York in 2013.

“I was watching the crew test the equipment and set up on stage and I noticed that nobody in the audience was paying any attention to them whatsoever. I just found that so odd, that there was all this activity going on yet it was as if they were not there. That planted the seeds in my mind about all of these really important activities and these essential workers that are so minimally understood."

Her research revealed much that contradicts stereotypical views of roadies as hard living equipment shifters. A major theme of the book is understanding road crew members as support personnel.

“There is quite a hierarchical structure, and sometimes crew members have tended to be seen as secondary or subordinate,” she explains. “But being support is also about enabling and holding up, and it's more of an active, primary role so I argue for seeing them as primary workers. 

“What crew members do, and particularly what tour managers do, is provide forms of care for musicians on tour. Performance is a very pressurised environment and they can attend to the requirements of everyday life necessities.”

Life on the road is far from one long party

The book also analyses traditional views of life ‘on the road.’

“I also talk a bit about issues of mental health on the road, gender and diversity. I try to destabilise stereotypes and cliches about touring, that it's not just this big party, there is a very specific workplace culture, a lot of backstage activity is very mundane and repetitive. But that doesn't mean it's not important.”

As road crews have historically been male-dominated, touring “tends to be a highly masculine environment, but there have been a lot of steps being made to change some of that and to change some of those expectations.”

Her research showed that, like in other creative industries, getting started can be reliant on contacts and a touch of luck. But once they get a break and build working relationships with musicians, crew members can maintain lengthy careers. They “will work for maybe two or three different artists, then rotate who they work for on the touring and album cycle. They begin by working for the local promoter, and once they get their names out there they get those bigger bands.”

Having worked as a journalist in the US, Kielich’s interest in music led to postgraduate studies that culminated in a PhD from McGill University in Montreal, that forms the basis for The Road Crew.

She then received a UK Research and Innovation/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Huddersfield in 2022, and began a research project supervised by Rosemary Hill and now Jan Herbst. The university’s expertise in research on the music industry and music culture is a strong fit for this project, which explores the impact of online spaces on women’s electric guitar practice as well as the factors that motivate and enable women to become electric guitarists. 

Similar to road crew work, the electric guitar is seen as a traditionally male preserve. 

“With the way that electric guitar history has been told, the people that we so often associate as the dominant figures in electric guitar history have always been men. So much of that has been because of the way in which media representation has been constructed - women with electric guitars have always been positioned as novelties.”

Main image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay