These Roadies Help Stars Rock ’n’ Roll All Night. They’re in Their 70s.-OxBig News Network

Funny place, the music business — it devours the young and ignores the old. Or at least that’s how it may appear. Aside from a handful of entrenched executives and a circuit of legacy acts, employment opportunities in the industry for those of AARP age might seem slim. But there’s a fascinating exception: Many of the industry’s most respected and consistently employed roadies, instrument techs and live sound people are well into their 60s and even 70s.

They’re the sound checkers who puff and count into microphones; the runners in black who bring guitars out between songs; the daredevils who climb into the rafters to adjust lights; the spelunkers who burrow under stages to tweak cables. Their job is to create a seamless experience for the music fan and a painless experience for the musician. They keep the live music industry humming, and their ranks might contain more Medicare-eligible employees than any other segment of the music business.

Kevin Dugan, 70, has been working with the onetime Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony since Jimmy Carter was president. Dallas Schoo, 71, has been in the business for 52 years and has served as the Edge’s guitar tech since U2 was playing clubs and ballrooms (he’s been moonlighting with Bruce Springsteen). Betty Cantor-Jackson, 76, first worked a soundboard for the Grateful Dead in 1968, and she’s still doing plenty of local gigs in the Bay Area. “We don’t always have to fade away, you know,” Cantor-Jackson said. “I’ll do this until I can’t crawl in there.”

To the musicians who hire them, these seniors are often preferable to younger and less road-tested techs and sound people. “I haven’t filled out a job application in 50 years,” said Frank Gallagher, 77, who is still working on a Las Vegas residency for the B-52’s, which continues in April. (When he started live mixing the Talking Heads in 1977, he had already been in the business for 11 years.) “Somebody asked me for a résumé the other day,” he said. “I said, just ask anybody I’ve worked with, you know?”

Danny Goldberg, the veteran music manager and label executive, said these roles entail a remarkably personal relationship with the artist. “It’s like having a doctor — you want somebody who knows you intimately. It’s a huge advantage to the artist to have continuity, and you don’t want to start with somebody new if you don’t have to,” he said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right?”

Anthony, the bassist, agreed: “Kevin Dugan has been working with me for 43 years,” he said. “With that kind of experience, I can go up onstage every night and feel totally relaxed and confident that he has everything handled.”

AFTER 10:30 A.M. on a Saturday morning in mid-October, Bob Czaykowski, known as Nitebob, exited a Quality Inn in Seekonk, Mass., and climbed into the shotgun seat of the 12-passenger Sprinter van that took him and the band Lez Zeppelin to their next gig. He had a full day of stair climbing, road-case lifting, line checking, microphone placing, outlet testing, drum-carpet laying and sound checking ahead of him.

Czaykowski, 74, was delighted at finally feeling nearly 100 percent after two knee joint replacements. He would be doing the same things he has been doing for the last half-century that day: making strange, wondrous, louche and loud bands sound as brilliantly strange, wondrous, louche and loud as they possibly can.

Czaykowski is perhaps one of the most famous people on his side of the business. Virtually every working tech reacts to his name with awe, as do many musicians, young and old. Czaykowski did “front of house” — that’s the formal name for the person behind the knobs at the soundboard — in the early and mid-1970s for the New York Dolls, the Stooges, Aerosmith and others; more recently he was the close associate and guitar tech for Steely Dan’s co-leader Walter Becker. For the last 13 years, Czaykowski has primarily manned the board for Lez Zeppelin, the all-women Led Zeppelin cover band.

“He just wants to be on the road and mixing a band and hanging out with the band,” said Lez Zeppelin’s guitarist, Steph Payne. “That’s what a road warrior is, when you’re excited to get on the road, no matter what. You either dig it or you don’t,” she added. “Bob can get into a van, a Sprinter, a bus, whatever it is, sit there with the rest of us for six hours. There’s never any kind of cranky, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t sleep.’ He never complains about that. He’s just built for the road.”

A good tech’s work is mostly invisible to the audience. “People go, ‘Wow, what an awesome show, man. They played 90 minutes!’ But you have no idea what it takes to make these 90 minutes,” said Ingo Marte, who has worked with hard rock bands like Danzig, Saxon and Armored Saint for 41 years. (He’s a relatively young 65.) “I had actually a really bad heart attack like eight years ago,” he added, “and that’s when I thought, OK, I am done. No more touring. But I picked myself up and I’m still at it.”

Schoo’s work with the Edge involves maintaining and tuning as many as 27 guitars a night, as well as precisely finessing the mind-boggling array of effects the musician uses, in real time, to build his sound. Schoo said that U2’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023 was particularly arduous.

“There are 17 steps from the floor — where my guitar world is — up to that stage. So, I was 70 years old at the time, and I am running up and down and up and down those steps with an eight-pound guitar, for 40 shows. I get paid handsomely for that, but I’m always thinking, when will I trip? Is tonight the night I fall down those stairs?”

He added: “I say a prayer every night, I really do. I ask, please help all these machines. Please let my command of them work, not for me and not even for the Edge, but for these 30,000 fans. Let it work for them. They deserve that, they want to hear this great act and these great songs.”

Like Schoo, Lorne Wheaton, known as Gump, has been closely associated with one musician: Neil Peart of Rush, who died in 2020. After 50 years in the industry, Schoo recently retired, at 69; his last big drum tech gig was the long Kiss farewell tour. But it’s a “loose” retirement; he retains his membership in IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), and still does local theater and corporate gigs in his native Toronto.

Could he have ever imagined he’d work as a tech for half a century? “No, never,” Wheaton said. “I didn’t think I’d live to 69. Let’s be honest here. You’d never really think that you’re going to hit 70 and actually retire out of this business, because it does take quite a bit of savings to do that.” He said that working freelance is a constant hustle, and the wear and tear of aging sometimes leads to unexpected consequences: “You do not want to pass away in your bus bunk or in a hotel room.”

Knee and hip issues seem especially endemic in the tech industry, because of the constant need to lift heavy equipment and climb up and down endless stairs. And road workers also have to deal with a schedule that occupies them from midmorning until after midnight. Recently, Dugan, who has been working with Anthony since the early days of Van Halen, informed his boss (who now tours regularly with Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani) that he was thinking of slowing down.

“When I first told Michael that I wanted to get off the road, he said, ‘I’m not going to do that, why should you? I’m still going to be out there,’” Dugan said. “And I said, ‘Michael, are you trying to compare your day to my day?’” He explained how his work begins at 8:30 a.m. and wraps at 2 a.m. “‘You come out and do the show,’” he recalled saying. “‘You leave in a limo, go back to the five-star hotel, or go back to a private jet way and fly home. Your day and my day are worlds apart.’”

A road warrior of a certain age working 14-hour days has to make certain adjustments. “I’ve pulled way back on drinking on the road,” Dugan said. “I cannot fathom working with a hangover. I did that for a lot of years. And when you’re middle-aged, you can bounce back from a hangover, but now it takes too long.”

There are relatively fewer senior women working on the road because it was extremely rare for women to get work as techs before the late 1980s. (There were, however, many female studio engineers and producers, and many venues are managed by women.)

One notable exception is Betty Cantor-Jackson, who began working with the Grateful Dead in 1968, and the Family Dog two years earlier. She is a legend in the Dead community, and recorded the band multiple times in since-released performances that have come to be known as “The Betty Boards.” She continues to work gigs in the San Francisco area, and went on the road with Chris Robinson in the last decade.

“The road is kind of a normal. I spent so much of my life on the road, you already know how to deal with it,” she said. “I’m the old woman on the bus with all the boys. I got my bunk, I’m good.”

With the exception of Wheaton, not one of these road techs has any plans to retire. “I may be 74, but the funny thing is, there’s always someone older,” Czaykowski said. “That’s because the more experience you have, the better shows you can get. When people have confidence and they trust you, that’s like one less thing that they have to cloud their brain. I know this guy will do the job, ’cause he’s done that same job for me 700 times before.”