[Roger “Hurricane” Wilson first discovered the blues while attending school in the late ‘60s in Atlanta where the Allman Brothers Band gave concerts in a downtown park. He eventually set up shop as a guitar instructor and worked in radio and TV, but his true calling was the road. That’s where you’re most likely to find Wilson these days: at one of the more than 250 gigs he plays each year. When he’s not performing or recording, Wilson works the booking end of the blues business, making the connections he needs to get on the road again. ]

            Funny thing, this blues business. And, ah yes… the road. It seems to be what you make it. You either like it or you don’t. I happen to love it. That’s not to say I don’t love being home, because I do. Sometimes I have to pry myself away, but once I pull the motor home out of the driveway and turn the corner, I’m OK. Maintaining a career on the road is an ongoing endeavor. The work is never done. But it is a business, and I have to run my business just like any other service industry professional. The attitude of “where do I plug in?” is purely mythical and has no place in the real world. I have to promote the business, book the work, and then show up and do the job to the best of my ability. Playing the music is the easy part.

            The biggest concern I have is not to let the work I have to do at home to keep me on the road consume my whole existence. Also, trying to book the tours and keep the 500 mile drives to a minimum is quite a challenge. I try to group my activities by type so as to not get overloaded with information. One day, I might spend a couple of hours calling new venues and entering raw data that I’ve compiled over time. From a list of30 to 50 venues, such as clubs or festivals, I will shotgun a list in as short a period of time as possible. This may involve playing phone tag with club owners, prying information from lazy or rude bartenders who don’t care to give me the time of day, or listening to club owners recite a “long no” of why there business sucks, in addition to listing all the reasons why I can’t play their joint.

            We should, however, consider the club owners point of view. They are inundated weekly, if not daily, with phone calls, CD’s, and promotional materials. Screening and listening to all of that is a fulltime job. Many times, club owners receive CD’s with nothing more than a scribbled note saying, “Please book my band.” No wonder club owners are hard to reach and don’t return calls. Your material has to stand out. It doesn’t have to be super-slick, but it has to be legible! It has to look professional. Even then, there is no guarantee of a positive result, much less a return phone call.

            On a good day, I jump for joy if I reach the owner or booking person in a good mood who expresses a slight interest in hiring my band. I really do cherish the situations where the club owner has become my friend and a type of partnership has ensued. Ideally, it should be a win-win situation, but it doesn’t always work out perfectly. The club needs to do its part in promoting, and the artist needs to do the same. E-mail has made the job easier for the touring artist, but the artist can’t do the club owner’s job. One time I showed up to a gig and the club owner said, “Man, I’m really sorry. I was so busy that I forgot to advertise.” I was absolutely dumbfounded! When you arrive and the bartender says, “Wow, I didn’t know there was a band booked tonight,” that’s usually a good indicator of things to come. Fortunately, for me, these situations are growing fewer.

            Another day, I will make follow-up calls to venues that have received material from me in the past couple of weeks. Basically, I look to where I want to be during a certain time of year, book some repeat anchor dates in those areas, and then spend some time trying to fill the holes in between. An interesting analogy I heard recently

compared this business to throwing out a fishnet and then pulling it in, even if you only snag one or two usable catches on any given day. Somewhere in here, I have to find time to actually work on the music.

            One rule I have lived by is “Don’t work for jerks.” I can sometimes determine what I’m in for during the first phone call when my built-in “chump meter” pegs to red. If I feel as though I have just reached Ebenezer Scrooge or Don Rickles, I usually place that venue on my cold prospect list, if not my dead list. One day, I was fortunate to get a club owner on the phone – while he was in the kitchen cooking. His cook had gotten thrown in jail and didn’t show up for work. Obviously, the last thing on this guy’s mind was booking a blues band. I told him that I understood and would call him back some other time. Then there was the time a club owner called me to ask if I could move my existing date to the next weekend. It seemed the city was having its big “Whatever” Festival the same weekend I was booked at the club, and the fest where “everybody in town was going to be”. As it stood, the gig was 1,000 miles away from my home, and it was an anchor date contracted months in advance. Now, I’m a very easy guy to work with, but had I moved that date, my whole tour would have crumbled. It was holding on by a wing and a prayer as it was. I played the gig, the turnout was thin, and I was made out to be the bad guy. (Fortunately, I do still play that venue.) Every touring musician has stories like this, because we’re always competing with something: conventions, fairs, festivals, concerts, races, circuses, carnivals, sporting events, rain, blizzards, power outages, fires – and if that’s not enough, there’s always the gig where the club owner gets more drunk that the customers.  The reward in all this, however, is finding the good people out there, and I must say, I believe there are more good people than there are bad. The secret seems to be finding the venue owners and operators who are in this business because they love the music. You might think that if you’re out there a long time, success will be a given. It’s not. In this day and age,

The distractions are endless. DVD, the Internet, satellite and pay-per-view TV, and MTV, to name but a few. The crowd that once partied freely, frequenting live music clubs, is now-gray haired, nearing AARP age, and fused to the couch with two more remote controls and a pizza ordered online. The guys in the beer trucks complain that keg sales are down, but bottled beer sales are up, suggesting that more people are staying home. Clubs can’t afford to pay out like they used to. Weeknight gigs that pay blues minimum wage are at a premium, and there are fewer than there used to be. Venues have come to depend on local acts, undercutting many of the opportunities for road guys who need the work. Lest we forget, every town these days has its own SRV wannabe.

            When I was 26 in 1979, I had the pleasure to open a show and to jam with Albert Collins. The crowd was 1,000 strong, and the drinking age at that time was 18. (That could explain why the crowd was so large o a Thursday night. What I remember most about our two-hour head cutting session at Atlanta’s Agora Ballroom was how honored I was to be there. I also remember thinking, “There’s an awful lot I don’t know here.”

            One thin I know now is there are a lot of good people out there. I’m seeing some younger faces at my gigs. People who weren’t even born that night I played with Albert Collins are just now turning 21, and the positive response I get from thee folks seems to be increasing. It could be the next generation really is our last hope. It’s a matter of breaking through the alternative rock and rap to get in front of them.

            As I approach my half-century mark, I’m fortunate to feel better and healthier than I did 25 years ago. While people my age and younger in the corporate world are being handed pink slips, I still think  am at the threshold of better things to come, and that my 30 years of professional music experience have just been a precursor to what lies ahead.