On The Road Again

A 1940’s style, Big-Band bus tour, turned deadly

Our latest album had just gone Double Platinum, and I decided on an old-fashioned cross-country bus tour. No fancy ballroom until our final stop on Santa Catalina Island. We would be playing in small-town high school gymnasiums at a buck a pop for tickets. I’m underwriting this gig, and want the public to have access and pay the same price as a ticket in the 1940’s. At the first stop the equipment bus engine exploded, and Doogie, the driver, was killed. It was wrongly ruled an accident, though we didn’t know it at the time.

       The Gym Jam – Sock Hop, as Delilah had named the tour, was designed to play only small towns in the heartland. Twelve stops, over four weeks, no major cities, at a buck a ticket. The thirteenth stop was to be the Grand Finale Ball, held on Santa Catalina Island in the historic Catalina Casino Ballroom. Not a gambling casino, but from the Italian definition, "A public room for music or dancing.”

Motive

 After my paying the band, the dancers, the crew, leasing the buses, plus all expenses, the total cost for the tour would be somewhere in the neighborhood of two-million bucks. I saw it as four million worth of publicity. So did my record label, and they agreed to underwrite the promotional expenses. But some of the music-biz crowd, performers and agents alike, saw it as a threat to the norm of concert touring. Since the tour would cost money rather than turn a profit, I was accused of promoting a tour simply to feed my vanity.

Murder, Mayhem, and Kidnapping

Logistics is a four-letter word. Since leaving New Orleans, we’ve loaded, unloaded, set up, performed, and torn down seven times. And we’d logged over twenty-four-hundred of the five-thousand-plus miles on our route. Our convoy was a hundred miles from Cedar Rapids when Captain Earl Delacroix of the New Orleans PD rang me up. Earl is a friend, "Let the Gendarmes handle it," he said. "Fat chance," I thought to myself.

 

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