Tales From The Tour Bus : The Weird, Wild Side Of Music History
Animator Mike Judge's Brilliant Take On The Musicians, The Drugs, and The Mayhem That Fueled The Careers of The Music Stars Of The 1960s, 70s, and 80s
The stories are incredible.
There was the time George Clinton’s tour bus, rambling through the backroads of Indiana, with Clinton peaking on LSD, took a shortcut to get to a gig, and unknowingly intersected with the actors playing zombies on the outdoor set of George Romero’s classic horror film, “Night Of The Living Dead”
Or the time Jerry Lee Lewis, (accompanied by his loyal bandmate and associate Morris “Tarp” Tarrant ) on an amphetamine-fueled party binge, after staying up all night at the Malco Theater watching Lon Chaney play The Wolfman, was driving around downtown Memphis (or was it Nashville?) and as fate would have it, intersected with “rival piano player” Liberace walking across the street, all while contemplating running him over. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
Who knew that while Waylon Jennings was recording vocals in New York City he was saved from arrest and major prison time when his recording engineer and loyal employee warned him, through discretely pressing the studio talkback intercom system, that the DEA had arrived to arrest him for felony cocaine possession?
I certainly didn’t, and I kind of pride myself on being familiar with the musicians and personalities in popular music from those decades.
I’m a bit late to the party, but in “Tales From The Tour Bus” Director, Writer, and Animator Mike Judge has delivered a one-of-a-kind, unapologetic look at the ugly side of music History.
It’s often times shocking, yet completely fascinating and entertaining. It’s the unfiltered, uncensored stories of the music stars, bands, and supporting personnel that went through the war zone of musicians touring life and lived to tell the tale.
Each series of videos spotlighting a particular artist is introduced by an animated Mike Judge, obviously, a fan and deep-diving musicologist himself, giving critical background information on the influence of each artist. It’s sometimes, at my age, hard to believe that artists as impactful as James Brown need a backgrounder, but that is the nature of the passage of time. True greatness can be relegated to forgotten history.
In each segment, Judge has wisely chosen to let the lesser-known, but essential supporting personnel tell their stories unedited. This isn’t cartoon entertainment for kids. The stories are jolting, even for the most jaded, and working as a stagehand for touring acts in the late 80s I thought I had heard it all.
The mid-1970s to the early 1980s were not years where I had my most shining moments. I had my own “outlaw” experiences. I was largely disengaged in High School, enveloped in a marijuana haze, my highest ambition was to find the best keg party on weekends. It was, in hindsight, part of the times.
Besides my Rock band, formed out of a common interest in music among my counter-culture, outsider friends in High School, I had no time for education or school activities. I lived a Roger Waters anti-indoctrination attitude years before Waters expressed it so brilliantly in his Pink Floyd anthem “Another Brick In The Wall”
(Performance at a block party as reluctant lead vocalist with bandmates and College friends, Virginia Beach, Va. Late 1970s)
My neighborhood peers weren’t exactly choirboys either.
One of the neighborhood kids I hung out with had a genius-level IQ and was literally dealing LSD, Hashish, and high-grade Marijuana out of the boy’s bathroom adjacent to my Senior English class. This was a kid who could be tripping on LSD and still do Calculus homework. Customers (fellow students) lined up at the classroom door asking if he could be excused. He would leave his school desk, head into the bathroom with his “customer,” and return within two minutes to the class in progress.
This cycle would repeat numerous times during one class period.
Our English teacher, observant, perceptive, and highly intellectual, inexplicably, never said a word, despite the obvious, highly suspicious behavior. Maybe Mr. G, as a semi-closeted gay man, likely under the microscope of scrutiny from his peers in the school administration, didn’t want to rock the boat. Perhaps he knew that drug culture was hopelessly integrated into the times. It’s a behavioral anomaly I ponder to this day.
My parents did their best to push me in the right direction. After High School, I quit my band and “compromised” by attending College to pursue a Communications degree, but still kept a rebellious attitude alive. More often than not, I didn’t make the best choices. Youthful rebellion was stupid but felt cool.
On Summer breaks, I hung out on Saturday nights with my working-class friends, firmly ensconced in the “real world,” in the Chic’s Beach section of Virginia Beach at a legendary, sketchy bar called “The Casino”.
There, the patrons, including myself, in a once-a-week ritual, flirted with dangerous outlaw behavior, drinking too much and becoming over-inebriated. To be honest, that was the point. It was not a bar that hosted upscale, polite patrons. I distinctly remember one night when the huge old barn doors in the back of the building parted, and an outlaw biker and two cohorts roared into the building on their Harleys, parking the bikes next to the dance floor.
The crowd cheered and resumed drinking beer and dancing while listening to a repeating cycle of the new genre (before “genre” was even a term used in the music industry) of music called “Outlaw Country,” anthems made famous by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Jenning’s wife Jessie Colter.
As a visceral memory, I can almost hear the sound of pool balls clacking, and smell the roasted peanuts and beer, all against the background of phased-shifted guitar that coils through and permeates the Jennings-penned two-step anthem “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.” The Casino patrons LOVED Waylon and Willie and played these songs nonstop.
I’m not comparing myself in any way, shape, or form to being an outlaw, but there was always the inner thought that the sketchy characters I felt compelled to hang out with, sometimes to my detriment, were more true to what was real about life than the people who inhabited College Campuses.
The point is that it wasn’t until watching this brilliant series that I realized that the entire music industry at that time would not have existed, if not for the drugs and outlaw behavior. That extended to their audience. Touring life would have been impossible without the “help” of amphetamines and Cocaine propelling these talented, but hapless “stars” from gig to gig. As a bandmate of Waylon and Willie, Tom Bourke, candidly revealed, “How do you think you do 200 dates a year? You can’t unless you’re on something!”
The revelations of “Tales From The Tour Bus”, at least for me, was that the degree of crazed behavior FAR exceeded anything I have condemned myself for over the years. I now see, as I have told friends and relatives, apologizing for my youthful indiscretions, that it was truly part of the times.
Waylon And Willie.
I was never a huge fan of Country music, yet, something about these two now legendary personalities always stood out and kept my attention for all these years. In hindsight, I hear the greatness and embrace it. The amazing thing is that it took TFTTB to cement an understanding of what these very talented artists went through. Poverty, as I have learned, is a key motivator for success in the music “industry”.
Nelson and Jennings were bound together not only by fate but also by being outsiders. I completely get that now. Nashville, in the 1960s and 1970s, was the ONLY path to success for any songwriter with talent and ambition. Nelson was successful as a writer of hits for well-known Country artists like Faron Young, and notably Patsy Cline, but Nashville was also the death knell for originality.
To be specific, Jennings and Nelson wrote and performed slickly produced ballads within the confines of the parameters of the “acceptable sound.” Steel guitars were acceptable, distortion, wah-wah, and phase-shifted effects were not. Country singers were also about image as well and were supposed to follow the unspoken standards established by major talents like Chet Atkins, which implied class and “gentleman’s behavior” for men, and dresses in optional fringe and glitter for the ladies. Drugs and alcohol fueling the careers of mainstream Country artists from Johnny Cash to Jerry Lee Lewis were, until now, Nashville’s dirty secret.
As I learned through TFTTB, it was only when Waylon and Willie had become tired of grinding out the standard fare, even when their efforts yielded hit records, and left Nashville to be true to themselves lyrically and musically, embracing an unlikely hybrid audience of bikers, hippies, and general outcasts in Texas, that their greatest success occurred.
Outlaw Country was literally born out of finally saying “No” to conformity.
It was also fueled, unfortunately, by multiple incidents where Jennings and his bandmates and associates overindulged in drugs, yet somehow cheated death itself.
Personally, the most fascinating and revelatory series was the one featuring the story of the origins and career of George Clinton/ Parliament Funkadelic.
First, I had no idea that Judge was such a fan of the Funk, and kudos to him for revealing so much about George, the incredible bassist Bootsy Collins, and the music of Parliament/Funkadelic and its various mutations.
Specifically, Clinton, like James Brown, a fellow talent who literally invented the genre, rose above similar backgrounds of the deepest, hardscrabble poverty to become immensely successful through discipline, willpower, and hard work.
The paths followed by Clinton and Brown, however, could not have been more disparate, Clinton’s aligning more with fate, and Brown’s aligning more with planning. James Brown, at least at the beginning of his career, eschewed indulging in drugs, unlike Clinton, who had a fateful intersection with the Harvard LSD experiments of Dr. Timothy Leary. It was, in fact, white Harvard intellectuals and students who first supported George Clinton and his band at their early shows.
This revelation stopped me in my tracks.
Clinton, and the first incarnation of Parliament, were legal, psychological test subjects for the behavioral effects of LSD on humans. It began a decades-long love affair with acid, where Clinton and his bands liberally consumed LSD practically non-stop. The Grateful Dead had nothing on George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, apparently.
A humorous, terrifying, and uncanny incident, featured in the George Clinton episode of TFTTB, is when Clinton’s bandmate, seeking a shortcut to a gig while traveling Indiana’s backroads, Clinton peaking on LSD, came upon a sudden roadblock. Clinton literally screamed and pissed his pants on seeing the bus surrounded by the living dead. They were, of course, actors on the outdoor shoot for George Romero’s horror classic “Night Of The Living Dead” but in those days, without social media and GPS, who would have known? Clinton acknowledges the psychic scar left behind.
The strange, unseen, but papable outside forces that moved people and events in the 60s at play again. The late writer Robert Anton Wilson has left theories to ponder. After viewing the Clinton episode I thought it, again, uncanny, that major cultural events and artists were pushed together, as Wilson theorizes, either through “Coincidence Or Cosmic Conspiracy” That just made the TFTTB videos all the more fascinating to me. But I digress. The Clinton and James Brown episodes are must-see for musicologists and Funk Fans.
If you live long enough, you may have the good fortune to have an opportunity to see History continually revised, so your understanding of not only your life but the events outside of it reframe your understanding entirely.
Kudos to Mike Judge for his entertaining and invaluable deep dive into the good, bad, and ugly of music history.