A Brief Chronicle of the most amassing experience of my life: The Newsboys Tour.
Well, the tour was torture and a living hell. No human being should ever endure it, yet day to day people go through real torture and persecution far worse than what the Aussie's dealt us. It was also the best experience of my life. You work around 20 hours, sleep for 2, drive for 10, work for 20, ect. for two months. And I only attended the "easy" part. We were Doogie's Dome Crew. Each day we assembled a huge 4,000 capacity airdome to house the Newsboys live concerts. The dome had it's fair share of pain. We spit and pissed on it on a regular basis (sorry volunteers!) and swore at it all day long and to the deepest pits of hell. In Indiana it threw Mike 30 feet away and 10 feet in the air. It shattered a young mans hip. It damn near got Doog impaled during the last show (He's a trooper though...). It was very similar to the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The movie and tour were both about a bunch of stuffin' Aussies who build a giant dome in which to kill and torture people. We got our revenge though. During the very last show of the tour (Boise, Idaho) Hal and I were at the hotel trying to sleep before the show. We got a phone call... "THE DOME IS COMING DOWN!!!" We heard those words so often it was a joke. We figured there was a pre-show party and they wanted to surprize us. So we got dressed and went to the lobby to meet our ride. He was calm, so we were sure it was not COMING DOWN! As we drove up to the bastard we noticed a 10' long hole on one of the roof panels and the back walls were flapping. The dome actually was coming down! In the next hour our crew (the other guys returned from a local record store midway through our ordeal), the stage crew, the sound crew, the lighting crew, all the sound techs, and some band members and members of the management staff (who had never lifted a muscle to help us before this...) were on the punkerslut like whore on a teen-pop star. In an hour or so the dome was destroyed. We cut every cable we could find and took as much of it apart as possible as it collapsed. The dome was about four stories tall and really heavy so we were getting tossed all over the place in the process. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. I still have a piece of that mother whore on my wall. With all that said, I would do it all over if given the chance. |
