It's to become a very eventful tour. We first headline small venues, getting bigger and bigger crowds as the videos become popular on the new TV station.....MTV
Then after crossing the whole country, Andy decides to get married before we go back across the country again, this time as the support act for Blondie.
Miss Mandy Berrow, baby sister to the managing partners, the Berrow brothers Paul and Michael. At this stage Mandy was in charge of wardrobe but girl friday too. When she decided to stop touring we had to hire two people to take her place. Still to this day a good friend xxx
Rox aka Paul Neate, looked after Nick and his keyboards. He was with them from the beginning and as long as I knew him, loved those studs. A more dedicated punk I can't think existed xxx
Mr Simon Cook, the bands 'boy friday' Simon looked after the band members from morning till night and further. I really loved working with Simon, he had an aura of calm and security that made the band very comfortable and nothing phased him and nothing was a problem. Sometimes with his brother Viv, his twin, it was difficult to figure out who's who !!! Where ever you are Simon please contact me xxx
This video of DD at TOTP is in the middle of May just before going to the States. The band then flew off to Antiqua to film Rio on their way to NYC.
Click title or image to play
This tour presented quite a few problems for our crew. We were playing some fairly small venues really but we were carrying quite a lot of equipment, including a large monitor desk. It was in Pittsburgh that the crew asked me to cancel the show and I was in two minds. But the show must go on, and after a little discussion we forged ahead and got over the fact that we were going to come across some venues that did not fit the bill so to speak. Fortunatly this issue did not persist because the band rose on to another venue level very quickly and it did not become a major issue again.
Keith Morris to the right, our trusty stage manager and monitor engineer. It was around this time that I persuaded Keith to change from sound engineer to monitors as we needed someone on stage that the band trusted implicitly. We hadn't ever had someone the band were comfortable with and Keith worked perfectly with them. Still to this day a good friend xxx
The job of getting visas was a lot easier back in the days of 1982. I could walk over to Grosvenor Square with a handful of passports and some photos and money and wait until I was given back the passports, all stamped up with visas that allowed us to go to America and work there too. If you look at the letter I used for this tour, I am not even mentioned, and that was because I already had a 3 year multiple entry working visa. I think the most difficult part of the whole process was getting the band into and out of a passport booth!!!
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
I discussed the hotel booking for this tour before I left for NYC with the band, and I suggested we stay at older, grander hotels on this tour. The band loved the idea so I got together when I arrived in NYC with my travel agent there, Brooks Ogden and she came up with some absolutely brilliant hotels to stay in on our travels. I was staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel, a really rock 'n' roll hotel in downtown NYC. It had a reputation for not being completely safe so I locked up everything valuable in the hotel safety deposit box, so I was not concerned. As soon as the band arrived though we moved to the St Moritz in mid town.
We always stayed at cool hotels wherever we went, and the St Moritz was one. The band had come from Antiqua where they had been filming the video for Rio. I had been in NYC for two weeks setting up and organising everything for the up and coming tour.
As well as selecting some classic old style hotels we booked into a few classic Rock and Roll hotels as well. In Cleveland the famous 'Swingos' Hotel I had stayed there a couple of times before but it always was a buzz. In Seattle on the west coast, another great place on the sea, the Edgewater Inn
As we travelled further south to Los Angeles we stayed on Sunset Boulevard at the Chateau Marmont a famous hotel for film stars and rock stars, and it is to be where I organise my first wedding for Andy!!
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Click title or image to play
It was a bit of a shock really when Andy asked me to set up his wedding. He said he'd like to get married to Tracy in the gardens of one of the bungalows that were sited in the backyard of the Chateau Marmont hotel. There were secluded, and we thought we could be very private and just have a nice quiet wedding. It wasn't until later that we found out the bungalow we used was the one John Belushi died in earlier in the year on March 5th 1982.
Well, I contacted a couple of locals and got the lowdown on the law as it stood in Los Angeles, and we had to organise a couple of blood tests for bride and groom before a licence could be issued for them to have the event at the hotel. I also had to find a preacher to perform the ceremony and of course, some nice catering and a cake.
We had hired some cars for our stay in LA and I'd gone to 'rent-a-wreck' and got two or three really ancient convertable Lincoln Cadillacs. They were huge, really long too, and we drove ourselves to the Greek Theatre to do the last two shows of our tour, before settling into the Chateau for some R and R.
You see it was because we were going to stay in the US and do the Blondie tour that Andy decided to fly Tracey over to marry her, he just could not wait any longer .......... ahh nice
5 days is all we had between the last Greek Theatre show and the first shed show with Blondie. It was such a rush and I had no time for typed itineraries. You can see the first page of the Blondie tour, August 2nd and I've handwritten the details in from a template page. I ended up doing the rest of the tour like this because I had no time and being in America, no office or back up. You can see the full Blondie tour itinerary in the gallery at the top of the page. So my 5 days were definitely full on with the wedding to set up as well.
On the phone I sat in my cabana calling Brooks my travel agent, the truck company, the bus company, the rental equipment company and of course, Wayne at ITG our agent.
You can see on this first page I've noted the key people in the Blondie entourage that me and our crew would be coming in contact with now on a daily basis until the end of the tour.
Oh, and the YouTube clip is from the very last show we did with Blondie, in Toronto at the CNE Grandstand venue, outdoors. A huge concert and a venue I would be revisiting for a multiple concert series next year with Supertramp, not that I knew that at the time.
Here's a copy of the very first show we did in the US in 1982, The Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. The place was a 1000 capacity club and we played a fair few of these types of venues on this tour.
You can see in detail how the contracts were written up in these times. I've created a gallery for you to take a more detailed look at some of the paperwork that I had to carry, digest and deal with on tour. I was the person responsible for all the finance on tour, the cashflow, paying everyone their allowances (PD's) the hotel bills, and getting paid, quite often in cash as I needed cash to pay everyone else.
The Blondie tour offer came to be at the very last moment of our original touring plans. The Greek Theatre shows were supposed to be the last ones before flying back home. But the offer came through to Wayne Forte, our New York agent and he pasted it onto the Berrow Brothers with his opinion that it would be perfect for the band at this moment in time. MTV were playing their songs to death and their profile was rising by the day. The problem for the management was that the Blondie tour payments did not cover the bills on the road, the band basically could not afford to stay out in the US without more finance. So Michael Berrow asked EMI to loan them the money. I was asked to telex the costs to EMI and below is the budget I wrote down and sent over to London. Done by the side of the pool at the Chateau. I've also put this in the gallery above to show it in more detail.
