Long Train Runnin' by Pat Simmons

Author:Pat Simmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Tom

We were on the road so much that letting off steam could sometimes get pretty crazy. I don’t think anybody spent time dwelling on the fact that we were working and traveling our asses off, and it took a toll on everyone. There was nothing like the mid-1970s. I remember one time when Jeff kind of ran off with the road manager’s girl, and it didn’t help that she was okay with it. This caused a rift (fairly heavy) and Phil (road manager) wanted to dole out some payback in a big way. So because we used quarter-inch sticks of dynamite onstage every night, Phil decided he wanted to basically blow Jeff and the girl up in Jeff’s room. So one night Phil figured out what room Jeff was in with the girl and he had some roadies wire that door with a couple of these explosives, and then BOOM! The deal being that none of the crew would have anything to do with setting it off. That was on Phil. I don’t think we ever saw her again. And, of course, there were the TVs being tossed out the windows, all the women, mostly one-night stands just out to hang with the band. Some were stewardesses we met when flying commercial; others would just show up at gigs and get backstage somehow. I don’t think any band had anything on us when it came to wild behavior on the road but in the ’70s, anything went. And not just for us. We learned a great deal about “crazy” from other bands we toured with early on. Our crew was very inventive as well. They would sabotage hotel rooms so the rooms were basically upside down when you walked in. Or rewire the buttons on the hotel elevators so you couldn’t get where you wanted to go. We had rental-car races and door wars while driving. Some of those rental cars got wired differently and on and on. Everybody in the band and crew had their wild times, but it was really just a way to release the pressure of constant touring. And let’s face it, touring and the music business, in general, isn’t a nine-to-five type of lifestyle! And we all had our personal pressure valves. Be it the bar, certain chemicals, women, or combinations of the three. And sometimes, when the opportunity presented itself, a couple of us would sit in with the band at the hotel bar or a club in town where somebody knew the band. That happened in Europe and the States. A great example of this is the time we were in Amsterdam after playing Hilversum in July 1974, and everybody was down at the Melkweg, or Milky Way Club, a famous and crowded hangout for pretty much all bands that were in town as well as the locals. The Doobies were doing a couple of shows with the Allman Brothers, Van Morrison, and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, which would include a stop at

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