CREW CHIEFS

I was talking with an colleague/friend just yesterday and the conversation lead to the subject of leadership. Leadership amongst road crew. When a young person starts out in this business and manages to get a gig as a member of a road crew, it can be one of many roles. Maybe a young audio tech who hangs PA, working for the vendor. Maybe the role is still a vendor crew but in a different discipline, or not vendor crew but working directly for the artist as a guitar tech, a playback engineer or one of the many other roles. You have to start somewhere and the bottom is where most people do this. I sure did.

We look up to those that lead us and covet their jobs…”That will be me one day” we say to ourselves.

A road crew is made up of departments and this is true no matter how many or how few total crew there are. The departments have the different roles broken down and allotted according to the experience or skill of the individuals and so we crew types work our way up the smaller department ladders first. Each department has a head or crew chief.

The job of a crew chief is a massively important one for any production. Production Managers like myself have certain crew chiefs that we like to work with and when we can, things are generally better for everyone. Knowing how people work, having similar work ethics, and basically knowing what to expect from co workers is important for any workplace but in ours it can often make the difference between a success and a failure. Not the failure of the production or show as such but maybe the failure of an internal scheduling, or a way of doing things in a certain amount of time (which is basically a description of a roadie’s job). No one wants to swap people out and deal with the disruption that can cause.

A good crew chief runs their department (not the other way around) and is the interface between that department and stage management. Most often the crew chief is also the senior representative of the vendor on the tour and so the production is their client.

OK, so you have the picture. My friend was actually lamenting the current state of this important leadership role, obviously with regard to his own experience….so with that known, I am not going to go into the details of his complaint, but rather am choosing to use this post to talk about what a crew chief should be doing and how important their role is to a tour.

But first let’s go back in time

Four decades and longer ago, the people who did what we did were called roadies. Some of us did not like the term as maybe some of us were trying to portray our job as more than someone who hangs out with a band and helps set up the gear (Hi Dad). Also back then there were some questionable habits and practices in our work places…(at the gig), but there were also some very positive aspects. One of these was a special camaraderie, something you only felt if you were ‘one of us’. You looked out for your fellow crew. You all worked hard together and no one was finished until everyone was finished….until the last door on the last truck was closed. I have spoken before about this feeling of being in a special ‘club’. We were proud of how difficult our job was and how we always got the show up no matter what. It was a tough work life. Tough but rewarding

So if we remove the old questionable habits and practices and see what’s left, we have this pride, and this positive energy that the camaraderie creates. Good things. Things we want to keep, right? I would argue that we have in the main managed to keep them, but this also brings me to today and the reason for this post.

The days might be gone where we all just mucked in. As an industry we are bigger and more complicated now and we need people to specialize. We have bigger crews, more gear, more trucks, pretty much just more. We also have rules about what we can and cannot do, some of which grate on us old hands. But we have them and we stick to them. One thing we need to make sure we hang on to is the feeling of being in a special club. I would say that we are roadies first and specialists second. But being in a club also means we have to pay our dues right? So whilst we cannot all just start mucking in across departments (There is only one Fumi), we can make sure that in our departments we are all pro roadies….no one is finished until everyone is finished.

Now I am finally back to the conversation with my friend. A good crew chief should run his or her department with positive energy that inspires the hard work the production needs rather than demands it. Good leadership is not just telling people what to do; often it is exactly not that. Understand that all your team have skills and it is your job to enable them to present their best selves at each gig so that these skills are brought to bear in the right way. You show them what needs to be done and give them the resources to do it…simple. Watch the morale closely and remember negative energy is just that. There is no place for shouting or aggressive behavior but there is a place for the old rock stories (in small doses). The whole team should work together all the time. This is how the younger crew learn. Your stage manager will love you for this, and by extension your client….

Then you are really doing your job.