Putting Socks On The Octopus: The True Story of a Tour Manager's Nightmare.

By C.F. Davinki and Warren Rockwell

In the summer of l996, I was contracted to manage the European Tour for Coolio, a popular Rap artist who had just won a Grammy and an Oscar nomination. It turned out to be perhaps the most exigent and bizarre assignment of my 32 year career to date.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483549811

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

When do you say Uncle.

I pulled up my pants upon arrival at the airport in Helsinki for the second time that day. My ass self-conscious and my dignity crushed, I considered the offending instrument, a rubber-gloved hand I was certain could easily palm a basketball that belonged to a humanoid dressed in navy blue slacks and a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck: the standard attire of a customs agent. As tour manager for Coolio and his gang I had just been strip-searched for drugs twice in the same morning in two different countries, at each end of a one hour flight. Just another day in the life and a highlight of Coolio's 1996 European Tour. Shit could things get any better than this! I’m in heaven and I’m on top of the fucking world?

One disagreeable incident after another had taken me from dumbfounded irritation to stress, and now to abject humiliation. I tried to shield myself from the debasement of the experience thinking – at least no one here fucking knows me. But the effort required not to walk like a duck with a wedgie was too real for such pretending. Thirty years in show business had come to this: a relentless official finger stuck up my ass in a foreign country. All because of the now famous pseudo thug from South Central Los Angeles with corn rowed hair and little pigtails sticking out in all directions, ‘Gangstas Paradise’ Coolio. He and his crew of degenerate baggy-ass dwarfs who for the past three weeks had been drunk, stoned, seducing underage girls and brawling all over Europe.

You might ask, why wouldn’t I just leave in the dark of night and abandon them in an eastern-block country to find their own way home. Well, this was a now well-known artist in the states due to an Oscar winning movie and Grammy. He was booked by The William Morris Agency and I couldn’t let them down. They had a very high profile till now and who the fuck was going to believe the shit they had pulled out here. The other reason was I had to prove to them that I could take anything they threw at me. OK, I was stubborn and so far I had managed to keep them out of jail, but just barely.

Coolio, an idol of MTV, a so-called kid's rapper who had become a mega-star off the soundtrack of the movie Dangerous Minds with his hit recording of the rap song, Gangster's Paradise. The Gangsters Tour was an apt name for this stupidity, I thought, reflecting on Coolio and company's misadventures since their arrival in da muthaland. My face twitched into a wicked grin: South Central LA meets Central Europe, a grim cross-cultural exchange if there ever was one.

The room was stark and cold with bare walls painted off-white, and a blue cement floor. There was a long table apparently used for inspecting luggage, a few gray metal chairs, and a section at one end of the room was curtained off to offer a measure of privacy for the more intimate personal inspections. I had been marched in there first: I supposed they'd assumed that I was the head dude because I was the only white guy in the entourage, thus the most likely one to bust first. Bust the white guy and shut down this cage fighting extravaganza. Not that I cared one way or the other: it didn't much matter whether you were degraded first or last. My late friend Roger Trinder said it best, trying to cheer me up, They should have just put you in the middle, to know when to change the gloves. God I miss Roger.

As Coolio and his minions were searched one by one I vaguely wondered if the long finger of the law would find anything up those rapping assholes' assholes other than their brains. But I really didn't much care about that either. All that concerned me now was trying not to laugh out loud, and to concentrate on the single pleasant prospect in my immediate future: this tour would be fucking over in 3 days. In three days time they would be at Heathrow where those ‘Ringling Brother’s’ felons would transfer to a flight home; they would go straight to flight transfers and I would exit stage left to arrivals without their noticing, and would remain for a few days, to celebrate my survival; should that actually turn out to be the case.

But three more days with this bunch was a long time, indeed. The entire tour had so far been a disastrous bomb on many levels, for a variety of reasons, and that fact was likely to remain constant until the very end. Coolio had continued to anger, irritate, and alienate everyone of prominence and importance connected with the tour: the promoters, the media, Tommy Boy Records which helped financed the tour and even the small crowds that were somehow attracted to Coolio's performances. I couldn't recall a Grammy winning recording act whose personal appearances had been such a complete failure since the ‘Boxtops’ of the late sixties, but that’s a story for another time. Coolio thought he was a major star and so did his simple-minded entourage of sinister dwarfs. Coolio and his slugs had been provoking both citizens and police from Dover to the Ukraine and all over Europe: they had attempted grand theft, ravaged hotels, started fights, attacked unsuspecting people on city streets, openly used and solicited drugs from their hotel windows, and had used the foulest language imaginable in public without restraint. Not to mention their sexual capers with starry-eyed young girls – way too young girls. Three fucking days was a long time, alright. It shouldn't seem so with more than four weeks behind me, but I knew they'd pushed their luck far beyond reason already. And now I'd needed drugs and a miracle to get through it. Next stop Helsinki, Finland then Gothenburg, Sweden (again); Aarhus, Denmark; and finally London Heathrow, which at present seemed terribly distant.

The unhappy searchers in blue on blue didn't find anything. Coolio's incredible luck was still holding. There was little doubt that customs had been tipped off by the Stockholm coach driver as a result of Coolio’s flaunting his weed and suffocating everyone on the bus in a fog of hemp. We would get off the bus smelling like a Cheech and Chong movie, in spite of my repeated warnings about the possession of drugs in Europe. I had sensed that the bus driver wasn't too pleased, and correctly surmised that it was he who had notified airport authorities, who in turn figured they would catch this infamous band of brothers red-handed. As things turned out Coolio had been carrying the whole supply of weed in his baggy-ass pants, but had quickly stuffed it in a potted plant in the waiting area of the concourse when he'd caught a glimpse of the first customs agent approaching me. Evidently long experience had sharpened Coolio's ‘I ain’t gonna get busted’ senses.

I was momentarily desolate, benumbed by an overpowering sense of futility: three decades in the music touring business where things had inexorably deteriorated to the point where I dreaded taking this show on the road. I was sure I hit rock bottom with Compton's Top of the Pops, with that I thought I'd seen celebrity at its unbearable limits. But with Coolio, I realized there were no fucking limits. Now all my powers of concentration were directed at not walking like I just had a finger up my ass: My dignity was still hurting mightily, but I couldn't abide the idea of what seemed like the whole world knowing that I had just been buggered by the long whatever of the law.

The abortive body-searches didn't bother Coolio and his crew in the least: they were much taken with the notion that they were too slick for ‘The Man’. I absently herded them through the airport, giggling and smirking as they went, to catch their flight to Helsinki. Coolio: short and wiry with his corn rowed hair and little pigtails. Shorty: even smaller with an ever-present Band-Aid across his nose, like a nasal strip. Leek-Rat: skinny with a tiny head in a baseball cap that was too big, that reminded me of Paul Anka. P.S.: Leek-Rat’s brother, a routinely nasty little prick with hair corn-rowed into ponytails. And Fat Box: 250 pounds of ignoramus, but somewhat likable. And of course Baby Killer: a nasty little fuck who hated my authority.

As I followed them along, my spirits lifted a little when I saw that they were all walking differently than before. Then, a slight flapping sound which kept cadence with Fat Box and his duck-walk caught my attention and I actually laughed out loud. He had a soiled rubber glove stuck to the bottom of his two-hundred dollar Air Jordan tennis shoes. To me the rhythmic flopping became, quack, quack, quack. Shit happens, I thought, and sometimes it sticks too.

Waiting in line at the airline counter to check the group in for their flight to Helsinki, I reflected on past tours when I 'd had as many as twenty or thirty people to look after as well as tons of baggage and equipment. Ah…those were the days. The logistics were often dizzying, yet never as stressful as managing this little flock of murderous misfits who were now standing behind me in single file with Fat Box at the rear. At the precise moment I reached the counter, just as I was about to speak to the ticket agent and show her my handful of tickets and passports, Fat Box jumped out of line to yell at me,

Hey Cuz, where the fuck are we in this mutherfuckin’ Europe anyway?

Heads turned, people shuddered, and I cringed and it seemed as if the Muzak froze in the terminal as did time. I didn't respond, just flashed Fat Box a look of hopeless disgust and thought it’s somehow fitting that he still had that shitty rubber glove stuck to his shoe.

On the plane I closed my eyes, and muttering to myself like an old man I repeated over and over again, Only three more days…only three more days to go. For at least the hundredth time I thought about simply going home, just leaving them on foreign soil to get lost, thrown in jail, possibly even killed; what a great thought. With luck they'd never be seen again, or not for awhile anyway. But I had yet to abandon a tour no matter how bad it was. I was a tour manager and I depended on the major booking agencies and management companies who handled entertainers for these often lucrative assignments. I needed them. And they depended solely on me to organize and manage a tour, to see it all the way through once I accepted the job, whatever difficulties were involved; and I had made a steady living at it for thirty years. A tour manager could not leave a show high and dry before the tour was over. Not if he wanted to work again. Sometimes, a line has to be drawn. That line was nearing on this tour.

Although it was still early in the day, I tried to sleep. I wasn't sure how long it had been since I'd had any rest, other than passing out for an hour or so from sheer exhaustion. Outraged promoters, angry members of the media, hysterical hotel managers banging on my door in the late hours of night, and hostile police had made every minute of every day a wakeful nightmare: I'd now gladly settle for the kind one gets while sleeping.

But sleep wouldn't come though I kept my eyes closed tightly. I pondered my job description, complex yet clearly defined on paper: the tour itinerary, oversight of production, if needed, coordinating with the promoters at various venues, media relations, lodging, transportation and mediation if needed. On any given day I could have buses and trucks converging on a single location at an appointed time carrying people and equipment to put on a show the same night. That was more or less the gist of what could be listed as a tour/production manager's responsibilities were supposed to be, but I had never been able to find the words to aptly describe what I actually did. And Coolio was stretching the description beyond my imagination.

The question coming from casual acquaintances, and their friends, so many times over the years that I wished I could come up with one sentence that would serve as a simple answer: You're a tour manager for musical groups? That must be fun! Have you worked for anyone famous? Exactly what is it that a tour manager does?

My explanations became confusing. How could I explain having to arrange for drugs and other rather quaint perversions to satisfy the appetites of my male and female celebrities? How does one put a label on baby-sitting celebrities who were drunk, stoned, or throwing fits just prior to their scheduled public appearances? It would make me sound more like a pimp than a road manager. Being a first-rate organizer wasn't enough to sum it all up, nor was being a good survivalist, though both skills were essential to the job. It was a damn good question because I didn't know what the hell I really did either some of the time. Every time I was hired, my duties were clearly defined by the personal manager, or business manager; but as soon as the airplane left the ground, I found out that the star and the entourage had other ideas about what my job description was.

I never finished college, nor did I possess the extraordinary skills that some of the great tour managers did. I knew my capabilities and I knew the level of concert acts that I could handle and do a good job for. I am a down to earth no-nonsense fair person. That didn’t always fly with a lot of upper echelon manager and artists. I wasn’t good at stroking egos or swimming with sharks. When you eagerly climb the entertainment ladder, you find a lot more educated and wickedly smart people with sharp teeth. People said of me that I was a guy who got the job done. That was what kept me working for 32 years.

The flight attendant thought about calling the captain, then decided to ignore the feral noises coming from Coolio and his scrubs. They were jabbering away loudly in an unknown idiom, interspersing their dialogue with 'mutherfucka this, and nigger that', and some of the passengers were obviously becoming unsettled. It