Quik-eeze - Ani Difranco and the Little Girls of California

Quik-eeze will be a new recurring feature in Growing Old With Rock & Roll:

short, fast, tight stories without (hopefully) the usual belaboring of points

normally conducted by your humble auteur, Ricki C.

My first experience on a big-time rock & roll tour was with Hamell On Trial when he opened ten shows for Ani Difranco and her band all up & down the California coast in April, 2000.  I learned a TON of stuff on that tour - how to conduct myself as a professional road manager (or, more to the point, how to fake and/or bluff my way through conducting myself as a professional road manager); how to travel quick & light and present shows in a lot of different venue configurations (theaters, college gyms, outdoor auditoriums); and, most of all, learning from Heidi - Ani's merchandise girl - how to display & sell merch and how to maximize sales, an education I'm thankful for to this day.  (As are Watershed, The Whiles, and a coupla other bands I've done merch for.) 

My road manager duties on that tour entailed selling merch before the shows, then popping backstage for Hamell's set to keep things up & running: tuning guitars, changing broken strings, setting knocked-over microphones back upright, etc., then clearing Ed's gear off the stage before Ani went on.  There were VERY short breaks between Ed's and Ani's sets - never more than 15 minutes - so I'd often wind up packing  amps, power cables, guitars & such right in the wings of the stage as Ani waited to go on.

A little audience practice peculiar to that tour started happening the first or second night.  Hamell and I toured with Ani numerous times over the next ten years, all over the country, and this never took place again: the little girls (by which I mean teenagers & early twenty-somethings) in the front row would lift their shirts and display their breasts to Ani before the show began.  I guess it was supposed to be flattering, a little gift or offering to Difranco from her fans, but it was really throwing Ani, who strove to deliver a musical message of  self-respect & empowerment to her fans, and she really could have done without the nightly nudity.

The second or third night the rock & roll peepshow took place Ani was standing next to me, waiting to be introduced.  (From the wings, we could see the little flasher girls of California getting prepared down front; talking excitedly among themselves, grasping their shirt & blouse-fronts, waiting, waiting, waiting.)  I was just finishing putting Hamell's guitar in its case when Ani turned to me and said wearily, "You know, I didn't get into music to look at little girls' tits."  I looked at her for a quick second, then heard myself saying, "See, that's where we're different, Ani, that's EXACTLY why I got into music."

For one LOOOONG moment Ani just looked at me blankly, and I could envision a future where I got Hamell kicked off his first tour opening for a national act with my decidedly non-PC behavior.  Then - to my ENORMOUS relief - Ani cracked up laughing, and said, "Okay," when she caught her breath, "you meet me here every night for the rest of the tour and at least one of us will get something out of this little display process."  So I did.  It was fun, a nice little Fringe Benefit of my first road manager gig of my first California tour. 

© 2013 Ricki C.