Backstage with Crew Nation: Roadies of Color United

The last few months we’ve been highlighting the unsung heroes of the music industry—the crews who are hands on, hearts in, for all the tours and shows you know and love. Crews who are effectively sidelined as we deal with a global pandemic. But that’s not the only conversation happening on a global scale—Black Lives Matter and diversity are at the forefront as well.
In this episode of Backstage with Crew Nation, we meet the Roadies of Color United, founded by Bill Reeves, a tour production manager for Anthony Hamilton, and Lance K.C. Jackson, a production stage manager for Earth, Wind and Fire. We’ll hear from them about how the organization got started, as well as how tour director and accountant David "5-1" Norman and production manager Tony Bulluck got involved, and a bit about their visions for the very near future. Watch:
Backstage with Crew Nation: Roadies of Color United

How ROCU started

Lance K.C. Jackson: Roadies of Color United is a social network Bill and I created back in March, 2009, due to the lack of diversity in the social networks that were current at the time. For about every 100 members, there were hardly any people of color.
Bill Reeves: That's when we came up with the idea that perhaps we should start something of our own. Be a voice and a presence in the space that everybody else was occupied.
David “5-1” Norman: When I got hired by Earth, Wind & Fire a few years ago, that's where I first met K.C. and then during the tour K.C. started talking about it and talking about it and talking about it some more. And then he asked me, would I want to be involved? And I said sure.
Tony Bulluck: I looked it up online one day and I did sign up years ago, but recently K.C and I have been working together on the Earth, Wind & Fire project is when I kind of picked up interest again and drifted back over again.
Bill: So that's how Roadies of Color started. And then last year we decided to put on our own conference. I want to say we were wildly successful. And we ended up with about 120, 130 people attending, which is exactly the number that we wanted to reach and begin to build a community and an ecosystem of people of diversity to advocate for more inclusion and to make ourselves known to the larger world. 

Resources for the future

Bill: It's been a very fulfilling career, but we just feel that there could be a wider range of opportunity.
Tony: If you're competent, you should be able to work in many different genres.
Bill: A lot of people say, "I would love to hire someone of color, but I can't find anybody who's qualified.” Our response was, “Well clearly there's plenty of qualified crew members out there who have years and years of experience and all the things you’re looking for in a crew member.
You just don't know them because the common way that we all operate in this space is we hire who we know.” This is true in the R & B world, as well as the rock, pop, country world.
K.C.: The database we're gonna actually create and launch in the very near future is going to be a database of people of color.
Bill: The primary purpose of this database that we're putting together is to present all of these other people that they may not currently know for hiring. And by this, we hope to sort of even the playing field. 

Addressing racism in the music industry

Bill: Specifically in this industry, I think most of the people are well intentioned and well meaning, and don't really think of themselves as racist. So I think what's happening now, the whole country is having to confront this issue. And a lot of people, for the first time, are really thinking about their own particular situation.
The issue is going to be when we all get back to work, will we sink back into our comfort zones of hiring who we know and moving on, or do we take some of these lessons and conversations that we've been having now and apply them later?
David: And I just think that we just need to kind of keep talking because certain things that we know about, you know, other organizations don’t know about and vice versa. So it's a great way of educating all of us together. So we do have a quiet voice, but we're gonna have a loud voice when we come out of this.

How the pandemic is hurting crews

Bill: None of us expected to be out of work for a year. I don't know about the rest of y’all. I was good for six months and maybe seven or eight months, but I certainly didn't plan on having no income for a year.
David: We're all hurting right now. And, you know, outside of like Crew Nation, or outside of the other various avenues that are available to us, if you didn't save money while you were out touring for years and years, you're really hurting now because some people might start getting evicted.
Bill: I think Crew Nation is an integral part of this conversation, particularly because of the reach of Live Nation. If there was more entities that put together relief efforts, then there would be more relief. At Roadies of Color we're actually funding a relief fund right now. 

Labor of love

Bill: Rather than talking about how we all came into this industry, we can talk about why we stay in it.
Tony: And you get to do it all in a day's work. You go in in the morning, you get it up, you put it back into the truck that evening and you move on to another place 3-400 miles down the road. So to me, it's a matter of a great feeling of success.
Bill:
You get an immediate payoff for your work. In this job, you could see the fruits of your efforts at eight o'clock that night, and you can see it, you could feel it, you've said, "Okay, this is the result of the work I did today.” The energy is flowing and we all feed off of that.
Learn more about Roadies of Color United at their official website.


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Last updated: 28 Mar 2024, 19:32 Etc/UTC