Tales from the Trails of a Rock ’n’ Roll Bus Driver

by Jerry Fitzpatrick

  Staging is hard work, maybe the hardest part of the entertainment business. Staging is first to arrive and the last to leave. And the hours are the longest in the entertainment industry... with the exception of driving. But it hadn’t seemed hard to me at all. With people telling me several times a day what a good job I was doing it lifted my spirits even more to give more energy to the job. When it was pay time and the accolades came with the check, I knew I wanted to do it again.

  It was time to get another drummer for Lightfoot to fill in for me on the weekend. After going off several more times to work the stage, my band mates cornered me at a practice with a “You going to be the drummer for Lightfoot or be a stagehand?” With a gig in the near future pending with the stage work, I politely handed in my sticks and suggested a couple of replacements. Lightfoot continued on for several years after that with the lineup changing and eventually replacing all the original band members and the style of music played by the band.

  The staging company started to grow, doing regional shows in the Midsouth. While working a show at Stephen F. Austin College in Nacogdoches, Texas, I met a roadie, who was touring with the main act, Chris Cross. Chris had a hit song at the time called “Sailing” that was climbing the charts and increasing his album sales. The roadie I was working with that day had a break, so we headed out behind the arena to relax before the next duties had to be fulfilled. In our conversations, he explained he had worked with numerous acts practicing his trade. He was a guitar tech, someone who keeps the guitars in tune and maintained. He was an experienced roadie who could easily see my inexperience in the business. He said entertainers, mainly bands, would come and go but there would always be a need for the people behind the scenes to work. Become a professional at what you do, and you can make a career out of it. An entertainer may be hot for a few years, but they almost always fade away at some point or they cut your pay. Get a gig with the next one coming along and you’ll be able to make a career out of being a roadie. This was a new view to me. I had always thought everyone worked for the same act forever, never considering that one could change bands.

  In 1980, a local Little Rock promoter plugged The Wild Hog Boogie in War Memorial Football Stadium. The concert featured The Doobie Brothers as the main act with Molly Hatchet and 38 Special as opening acts along with a local band. The stadium is owned by the city and was managed by a tough old guy everyone referred to as “Coach.” He’s a great guy and a legendary figure in Little Rock. He complained about putting a concert on in the stadium telling everyone in city government it would destroy the stadium. It is mainly a shrine in the state’s biggest city for the University of Arkansas Razorback football team and where central Arkansas supporters of the program have a chance to see the team several times a year. The stadium had never had a concert performed in it. Billy Graham had crusaded there but no rock concerts. Coach wasn’t fully convinced that a rock concert could be held in his stadium without some kind of permanent damage to the facility.

  Loads of plywood had to be laid out for the tractors moving the gear in and out on the grass field. Dozens of precautions had to be taken to prevent any damage whatsoever. Everything went well for the facility and The Wild Hog Boogie turned out to be one of the biggest concerts Little Rock had ever had. Several other gigs came my way and every one of them was a lot of work, and for me, a lot of fun. But generally, outdoor staging is a seasonal profession and in the winter months there was rarely any work.

  Chapter 29 A Driver Is Born

  In my driving career, I haven’t always been behind the wheel of a bus. I started out in trucks trekking across America long enough to learn what this great country is about, learning the highways and how to find various locations, an important part of the job now.

  Following my staging stint, I needed a steady paying job, and by the time I was 21, I had already driven various sizes of commercial and military trucks. I thought, “Why not give trucking a try?” When the staging company I had been working for gave me a reference at a large trucking company, they hired me right away.

  ACB Trucking was a company owned by the Bruno family. I was told they were a wealthy family from the Chicago area and had many types of businesses. ACB Trucking was based out of North Little Rock, Arkansas, and when I joined was running a fleet of over 100 trucks. Their fleet of trucks was made up of cab-over International and Peterbilt trucks.

  After going through the paperwork maze, which included some of my entertainment contacts giving me high recommendations, I was accepted as a driver. The regulations to drive a semi truck in 1979 were not as strict as by today’s standards. Arkansas driver’s licenses in those years were just a small piece of cardboard-like paper and didn’t even have photos. ACB had more than 25 employees in their office and shop, which was located next door to a truck stop, and a 100-plus drivers. Once clearance was given for me to drive, they assigned me to a 1975 cab-over International Tran Star II. It had red stripes on it that wrapped around the back of the sleeper. It had a short wheelbase so it road like crap. But it was the first truck I was assigned to, and I was excited to have it.

  I was then assigned a tractor and given a trailer and a dry load going to California. I spent a couple of hours getting my stuff situated just right in the truck just right. It was filthy and had the remains of the 20 or more drivers who’d driven the truck before me so cleaning it up was on my list of things to do. Once the bed was made and the unit cleaned and washed, I headed out going west on I-40.

  By the time I had reached Conway, a distance of about 30 miles or so, I was hungry and stopped for food. I was feeling good, driving the truck and having a new job with a company. After eating, I drove on to the Russellville area, just 40 miles away and stopped again. Just hung around, admiring my vehicle, then I got back into the truck and drove 80 miles to Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was early evening by the time I reached Fort Smith, so I stopped again and had some dinner. Milling around not really doing anything, I finally traveled west to Sallisaw for another 25 miles.

  Sallisaw is a small eastern Oklahoma town that didn’t have many amenities. There is a truck stop there that is a regular stop for a lot of the “Bull Haulers” that travel from the cattle sale barns in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama headed to the Amarillo, Texas area where many of the large beef operations are. With the Oklahoma scales closing at night, once the truckers reach Sallisaw they are able to take on extra fuel. It’s been a meeting place for years where truckers meet other truckers and head west.

  Bull Haulers have to drive long and hard to reach their destinations or they have to stop mid-way and get the cows out of the trailers for a period of time per government regulations. Sometimes at night, across Oklahoma and Texas, these trucks top a hundred miles per hour with five, seven or more in a convoy. It takes a steady hand to drive 80,000 pounds at 100 or more miles per hour. They talk on the CB radio watching for police and dangers on the road. Many of the “Large Cars,” as they’re referred to, sometimes have hundreds of lights, and when many of them convoy it’s a neat sight to witness. All these custom trucks are in a line working with each other. Hauling ass. Teamwork.

  I woke up the next morning sometime after nine and went into the truck stop for breakfast. After I ordered, I called in to ACB Trucking to let them know my location, let them know all was well and so on, as required by company policy. I sat down, ordered some breakfast and then went over to the row of phones on the wall and called the 800 number on the paperwork the company gave me.

  “ACB Trucking,” the lady said when she answered the phone. I ask for dispatch and was transferred to the person in charge of me. There were several dispatchers in the offices and each one had a group of truckers they dealt with.

  My guy finally answered the phone, and I could see the waitress delivering my breakfast to my table.

  The dispatcher was a little gruff when he said, “Hello.”

  I identified myself, name and truck number and said I was the new guy. He laughed
and said there was probably a newer guy than me by now considering the company’s high turnover rate.

  We banter normal details a minute then he asks, “OK where are you at this morning?”

  I’m sure I had this air of accomplishment in my voice when I said, “Sallisaw, Oklahoma.” I had walked across the lot to the restaurant thinking how grand life was about to become. It was a beautiful sunny day; I had a new job, new career, seeing new things and no trouble with the law.

  The phone was silent long enough for me to say “HELL-LOW.”

  The dispatcher was shuffling paper and said, “When did you leave?”

  “Two o’clock yesterday.” Twenty hours had passed.

  Today, with more than 25 years’ experience, I can get behind the wheel and drive a thousand miles in less than 24 hours if it is required. On my first day on the job for “Al Capone Brothers,” as they were called on the CB radio, I had driven less than 200 miles. And was so proud of my accomplishment.

  The dispatcher started screaming at me and calling me names. Suddenly, I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Shit. What if he fired me?” I thought to myself. But I kept my mouth shut and tried to listen as he bashed me with criticism. I assumed he had been a Marine Corps drill sergeant the way he was digging into me.

  He had me get my pen and paper and told me never come to a phone to do trucking business without a pen and paper. He called me the slowest trucker on the earth, and that offended me greatly. Not sure why, I started to talk back, and he told me to “shut-up.”

  He told me to get a CB radio, hook it up and “FUCKING LISTEN TO IT.” He told me I’d better be in Los Angels, 1,500 miles, by the next night. After a few more minutes of chewing my ass out, he hung up on me.

  I was so frazzled from the call I didn’t know what to do for a second. I wasn’t hungry anymore. That’s for sure. Now that he had hung up, I wanted to kick his ass. I was angry, then got to thinking about being “the slowest trucker on the earth,” and my anger started to subside. It became more of an attitude thing. So I got busy.

  When I reached Amarillo, I got a CB radio from a CB shop by a truck stop and paid them to put it in and tune it to the truck. Suddenly, there was a whole new world before me. A world I had never known about. Underground sub-cultures in our culture of cultures.

  Truckers have long used CBs to communicate about speed traps, accidents, bad road conditions and their location. On long rides, truckers convoy with one another talking on their CBs watching out for each other helping to keep each other alert. It has long been a tool for good and bad. Prostitutes use the CB in the truck stops and rest areas, drug dealers sell their wares on the CB and thieves sell their loot at or near the truck stops. You can hear social commentary about any subject in the world, and you can join anytime you want, all you have to do is speak into the microphone, hold the button and ask it a question or make a comment. There is almost always an answer.

  So I’m back in the truck in Amarillo with my new CB, and I started trying to make this deadline I had been given. I drove the rest of the day and all night into the morning and made it to Flagstaff, Arizona, before I called the office. I got another ass chewing and drove on west toward L.A. Going west out of Flagstaff, there are several mountain ranges that have to be crossed. They can be dangerous, especially to the inexperienced driver or while driving a truck that’s not equipped accordingly. ACB trucks weren’t equipped with jake brakes or retarders, devices that help slow a truck. Some of the downgrades are five, seven or more miles long. Brakes can heat up fast on a downgrade and become useless if not used properly. Learning to drive in the mountains using gears to keep at safe speed was a big help in learning to drive altogether.

  When the delivery was made, I called and got another ass chewing and then dispatched to pick up a load going east. And so it went for months. No matter how far and fast I drove, I got an ass chewing every time I called that dispatcher at ACB. At first it inspired me to do better, to learn more and more, but after a few months it became ridiculous.

  After many loads learning the trucking business with ACB, I happened onto another driver who helped me move to a company that had long-nose trucks, generally referred to as “conventionals” by truck manufacturing companies. Conventional trucks ride differently and are smoother than the cab-over models. With a longer wheelbase and with the driver not sitting directly over the front wheel, the ride is much better. The longer wheelbase trucks aren’t as easy to back up in tight situations, and during the ’70s and ’80s, length laws were very strict in states like Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas and others. One just learned what to do when those situations arose.

  The more I learned about the trucking industry, the more of a benefit I became to my production friends at home in Little Rock.

  Several local guys in my hometown had entered the production business, and, with Bean’s help, I was able to start doing some production work for them. The Calhoun Brothers had started a sound company, CalBro Sound Company, and Byl, founded Bylites. Bean assisted with getting my foot in the door with those guys. They always needed gofers to load and unload equipment from the trailers – pull cables, stacking speakers and whatever needed to be done at shows. I went on several runs with them doing gigs with Air Supply, Mickey Gilley, Johnnie Lee and the Urban Cowboy Band, and quite a few R&B and funk acts.

  One night on an off day, Todd and I and some others were all staying in the Houston area between some shows we were working with Mickey Gilley. We were invited over to Gilley’s Club in Pasadena. I was standing at the bar in front of the dance floor with Todd and several other guys on our crew when David Allen Coe walked up. Just about everyone into country music in Texas can identify him. Our band Lightfoot had covered several of his songs that I liked. His ball cap said “DAC Himself” on it so that helped recognize him, too. DAC is a big man and had a bit of the biker look to him with long braided hair.

  He spoke to one of the guys I was with, and he turned to the rest of us and said, “Let’s go out back and burn one.”

  DAC took off across the dance floor and stepped right up on the stage where a local band was playing. He stepped up onto the stage beside the lead singer while he was singing, walked around him and between the guitar amps and went out a back door that led off the stage. All four of us followed him step for step and when out back, several joints were lit and passed around. When everyone was done, we followed DAC back through the door across the stage and back to the bar to order drinks. DAC had spent a lot of time around Gilley’s and the local band playing knew who he was and never said a word to any of us.

  It was nice to be working on the road with people from my hometown. Today, as a driver switching from group to group, it is rare that you work with anyone from home. If you work on a sound crew or lighting crew the chances are you can work with people from your hometown, but drivers rarely get that chance.

  Between entertainment gigs, I would drive semi trucks to various points in America. Grab a load of processed chickens and take them to San Francisco from Arkansas. Drop them at a warehouse somewhere in the Bay area and drive empty to Salinas, California, the vegetable basket of our country and get a load of produce going to Hunts Point Market located in the Bronx area in New York City. Unload in the Bronx and head south to Delaware and pick up liquid fiberglass from a factory located beside the Delaware Memorial Bridge and head for Houston, Texas. Depending on the time of year, after unloading in Houston you might make the long drive empty to the Texas Valley and pick up more fruits or vegetables from the McAllen and Pharr area. Take that load to Ohio and pick up some newsprint to return to the Arkansas area. Take a break and do another turn starting with rice from Stuttgart, Arkansas, headed to a distributor in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown area. It’s not that easy to drive a 65-foot or longer semi truck in lower Manhattan, but I took many loads into the city and did my best each time, never having any real problems. Traffic in New York City is very predictable.

  Driving a semi in NYC can
be a real pain. After driving across the country one of the few ways for an 18-wheeler to reach lower Manhattan is to cross the George Washington Bridge, the GWB as locals refer to it, exit at 178th Street and go south down Broadway. It is a slow process stopping at every fourth or fifth stop light, pulling away and shifting the transmission half a dozen or more times, stopping again and starting over. After going through more than 250 stop lights, you reach your unloading point, only to figure a way to park close to the customer’s door. The best times to get into the city is in the middle of the night so the entire trip across country has to be timed for that. Boston’s Chelsea produce markets can be just as demanding to get to as are many of the northeast markets and customers accepting fresh produce from the California farms.

  The small streets in the French Quarter of New Orleans are as tight as anywhere in America as you try to get to the produce markets along the river. Once on a trip to Pittsburgh’s Consumers Market in the Strip District, the trailer I was pulling had a thermometer problem with the refrigerated unit on the trailer. When I arrived the front half of the load had frozen. Frozen lettuce was unacceptable so the receiver of the shipment refused it. After sitting for two days figuring out what to do with a load of bad lettuce, the trucking company, very angry with me, sent me to Hunts Point Market where I sat for four more days while the load was auctioned off in small amounts to various venders. Hunts Point is an area of the Bronx with hookers and drug dealers walking the streets just outside the market area. No place to eat other than the roach coaches that work the area and the few services inside of the market. I was really glad when all that mess came to an end.