Postponing the inevitable

While the rest of the prairie dog readership is having fun at the Regina Folk Festival (only quibble so far: wouldn't Mihrangi (her website) rate her own main stage show, not just a Saturday night teaser? She did a couple of years ago), the aging metalheads are mourning that tonight at Mosaic Stadium … nothing will happen. (CBC Sask)

This fan-shot video illustrates what happened. (YouTube, at the 4:40 mark) Tyler fell from an eight-foot-wide catwalk into the audience while entertaining the people when a fuse blew and most of the amps went dead. The fall doesn't look like it's going to cause serious damage, but Steven Tyler is 61 years old and had spent the biggest part of the first half century of life ingesting every chemical into his body short of industrial-strength bleach, so it's probably still recovering from all those toxins.

Aerosmith fans should note, however, that the show is not cancelled, at least not yet. It's postponed. But Tyler is going to need a couple of months to recover, (HuffPo) which means the tour will come back, if at all, sometime around Thanksgiving. That time of year, you're playing Russian roulette with the weather – during the Rolling Stones' second show in Regina in 2006, the temperatures and wind ganged up for such an uncomfortable night that the band played in winter jackets. To be fair to Regina's weather, however, it snowed during the tour's next stop, at Chicago's Soldier Field.

Playing outdoors – especially in colder weather – is no fun. Guitar strings contract in the cold weather, and guitars go out of tune halfway though the show. The colder it gets, the more likely things are going to break – from guitar strings to electrical equipment. And it's no fun for the audience members who are gradually suffering from hypothermia – unless, of course, they're bringing in their own anti-freeze.

Given that now it's a lose-lose situation, why not just shut the tour down? Give everybody back their money, and say, we'll see you next year when Tyler doesn't have as many broken bones? One reason, and I'm just going by what I know about the music business – insurance.

When I was nine year old, I had tickets for the Stampeders show at Buffalo Days. But it was the days of the outdoor gandstand, and it rained that night. I got my money back. But the touring scale of the Stampeders in 1974 and Aerosmith in 2009 is a bit different.

You don't take out a tour where you're spending a quarter million a day – salaries, trucks, equipment, stadium rentals – out on a whim. Modern stadium tours are done with all the logistical planning of the D-Day invasion. There's too much money at risk to leave anything up to chance – even the health of the band members.

The best example I can think of is The Who's 2002 North American tour. The band was primarily touring because lead singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle needed the money, and convinced Pete Townshend that it would be a good idea to tour again. In fairness, they toured as The Who and Friends in 1996 doing Quadrophenia from beginning to end, and toured again in 1999, and they sounded better than their 1982 'farewell' or 1989 'reunion' tour.

The band members had to pass a medical physical in order to get insurance for the tour. If the band had to cancel any shows because one of the band members got ill, the insurance would be the only thing keeping them from financial ruin. Entwistle apparently failed his physical – he had a heart condition. Behind the scenes, the band and its management made a decision: if anything happened to John on the tour, they would have to get a replacement. So they crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.

The best didn't happen. On June 26, 2002, just before the first show of the tour, Entwistle went to bed with a prostitute at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Café, after ingesting a small amount of cocaine. The next morning, the woman woke up – John didn't. He had died of a heart attack. The band postponed the Vegas show, and continued on with the tour, with highly-regarded session musician Pino Palladino in John's place. (Wikipedia)

If The Who without The Ox (John's nickname) was hard to take, now imagine Aerosmith touring with someone else as lead singer. They've already undergone a tour from hell – Brad Whitford missed some shows due to surgery, and other shows were postponed when Tyler pulled a muscle in his leg. It's doubtful, in my opinion, that they're pulling in the coin they thought they were going to when this tour started. What the heck. At least they're not going to play Stonehenge on this tour – yet. (YouTube) And I'd tell anyone who had tickets for Aerosmith that they would be better off at the Regina Folk Festival. Except it's sold out. And the show is going on.