That's exactly how I was after that last tour I told you about. You don't comprehend how tired and exhausted you actually are until you arrive home. And believe me, tour fatigue is like nothing else. You want to just sleep for days, and sometimes you really do.
So after sleeping for God knows how long, I went to Jenny's to learn about what happened. The production manager had written her a long mail about how he didn't want to be a part of this crew anymore, how dysfunctional the whole system was, how the tour turned into a nightmare as the Queen did not direct her questions or concerns about the whole production to one single person (himself), but instead, she held "meetings" aftershow, and crushed the whole team, one crew member at a time. When Jenny forwarded this email to the Queen (later I found out that this was never the plan, that he had sent this mail as a report to Jenny, and the Queen was not supposed to read it), she got even more angry and told Jenny all these were happening because she couldn't do her job and manage everything better. That's when Jenny decided to leave. But before she could take a step, the Queen went to LA as usual, so everything was put on hold once again.
In the middle of all this drama, I got a job offer from the promotion company that I had worked earlier as the venue backstage manager. They were promoting a national tour of a great popstar, who was Justin Timberlake of here (but 12 years older than JT). They asked me to work as the tour coordinator. I would be in charge of all the transportation, accommodation, itineraries and backstage.
The artist crew consisted of 38 people!
They had assistants of assistants, stylists, hair dressers, and even one person in charge of printing the setlist! 5 people were doing the job that I did by myself at the Queens' gigs.
Everyone except the technical crew stayed at single rooms, they had crazy last-minute flight requests, their backstage rider included 1 bottle of Jack Daniel's per musician for each show, and they also requested the latest PS and also games in all the tour busses and in some of the hotel rooms.
I was also in charge of all the travel arrangements of the sponsor company team. This proved to be a lucrative task as I got to meet many people from upper management of this huge company. One of them was a very charismatic woman who left her job in the corporate world a few months after this tour, went backpacking through South America for 6 months, came back and became the manager of one of the biggest rock bands, and offered me a job just because she had seen how I worked at this tour. But I will tell about this later.
I designed a great backstage area for this tour. I had all the trailers perfectly prepared as per the rider, and created a large open-air area for all the teams to connect and have a good time before, during and after the show. The backstage looked like this:
As always, I kept comparing this Popstar to my Queen. Especially following our horrible tour, I was fascinated by the attitudes of every single person in this Popstar's crew. Starting with the artist himself, everyone was constantly having fun, and spreading joy. Yes, they had exaggerated requests, and the promotion company was not happy with my budget breakdowns at the end of each show, but I felt that they deserved absolutely the best, and I wanted to keep them happy. Despite having such a crowded crew, they had many problems about the planning and schedules, so I stepped in and actually worked as their tour manager, got closer to the crew, and started getting invited to their after parties in the hotel rooms. I joined them a few times, but most of the time I was busy doing the accounting in my hotel room while they were holding drunk dance contests.
In the middle of the tour, we had a problem with one of the hotels. The king suite the artist always stayed was not available, and they offered a different suite. I had notified the artist party about that, and they said they would try to fix this directly with the hotel. Then I found out that they couldn't.
When the artist arrived, I reminded his assistant that a different suite was prepared for him. It was clearly the first time the artist heard about it.
He was not happy with this, but he said "It's OK, I'm absolutely sure that if this could have been fixed, my manager would fix it. If he couldn't, no one could." I had never witnessed this kind of gratitude and trust by an artist towards his manager.
I remember thinking "That's the spirit! That's how it should be!"
It was a wonderful tour, and another valuable experience for me.
And when it was over, I was like this, one more time:
