A Note from Roger Glover
Scott F.
www.rogerglover.com
Here's what he wrote about being on the road...
ROAD LIFE 1
A few years ago, I had descended from my hotel room a trifle early
before a concert. I was sitting in the bar having a swift half when
someone recognized me. “Aren’t you excited?” he inquired excitedly,
quivering with his own. I politely asked him what about. He stared
at me incredulously, “Tonight, the concert is tonight.” “Oh that, no,
not particularly excited,” I replied, rather too nonchalantly. That’s
when it struck me – how accustomed had I become to the world of
industrial-strength touring that what to many would be a high point of
the week, month or year was to me merely a date on the calendar –
another city along the way? There was a time when the thought of
getting a gig at a local pub sent me into spasms of exhilaration and
the anticipation had my blood thumping. Have I become so inured by the
sheer volume of years on the road that I have lost that simple
pleasure? What happened to the boy that worked so hard at the paper
round, patiently saving his precious cash so that one day, maybe, he’d
have enough for a down payment on that red Hofner bass guitar that
shined so alluringly through the dirty window of the local music
shop?
Well, he grew up, with no conception of the decades ahead when guitars
seemingly grew on trees. Youth wanes but that feeling of excitement
has not departed. The bolt of lightning that hit me when I first
heard Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Elvis, Little Richard,
Chuck, Eddie, Duane Eddy, Buddy, The Shads, Fats, and later on The
Beatles, Stones, the summer of 68, Hendrix, Cream, etc. is in my bones
like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock. Even so, you’d
be surprised to sense that excitement in the Purple dressing room
before a show. It is calm personified, with banter about sports,
food, or anything. You might even be forgiven for thinking that
there was no show. But the moment I step on that darkened stage and
sense expectation in the air – from both the crowd and myself – that
original impetus comes roaring back into my system, I become fifteen
again and go from neutral to overdrive instantly.
That is why I can’t get excited before the show; exhaustion would set
in after a week. Every night is a thrill, even the uncomfortable
ones, and mercifully these days, there are very few of those. The
really good ones I can only describe as if I was effortlessly surfing
a giant wave – a wave created by the audience. When you get back in
the dressing room and the rest of the band feels the same way, it
makes all the other stuff – constant travel, endless waiting,
questionable food, incompetent hotels, etc. – go away, for a while
anyway.
A-A
> Roger recently posted a piece titled Road Life 1 on his site;
> www.rogerglover.com
>
> Here's what he wrote about being on the road...
>
> ROAD LIFE 1
>
> A few years ago, I had descended from my hotel room a trifle early
> before a concert. I was sitting in the bar having a swift half when
> someone recognized me.
It was not me :-)
Time come to go back home and become a grand-father Roger.
Stay and appreciate simple things in your garden: a blue sky, birds
which migrate, children who play, your wife right by you. Simple things
for just a little well deserved rest.