Roadie's Nickname FAQ:
It came from three separate paths, and all were good, so they stuck.
At college (1969-73) I was in the lighting and film projection crew
(before computers, geeks were always running the AV equipment. I was
licensed in Massachusetts by the Public Safety Commission to run
carbon arc movie projectors.). Worked on lights and sound for Harry Chapin on his
first college tour, J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, and a few others.
Much later, I was the volunteer sound engineer and roadie, for the
world's only Moody Blues cover band, called Odyssey, from Portland,
Oregon. Only together for three years (1996-8), Odyssey had a few
dozen gigs around the northwest, and opened for the Kingsmen once. But
half the band had day jobs, so it was only a few nights a month and
local weekend gigs that everybody could play.
Separately, in my day job, when we were a startup with no money in
1984, we needed three systems to get to a trade show in Washington DC
from Boston in 18 hours, and no air freight connection was affordable
or even available. So I rented a Ryder truck and drove all night to
get them there, after engineering made them work at 9PM, saving the
show and our early reputation.
Now I run customer support for a small semiconductor test system
company, started by some friends I've worked with over the last 38 years,
and I fly about 100-120K miles a year (over 3.7 million miles in 35 years),
so I'm still the Roadie.
roadie.com and roadie.net were taken, so I own the vanity domain roadie.org.