Thinking on Their Feet: How Three Members of the Touring Community Created Unique Solutions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Carena Liptak 

Like many others employed in the live music industry, Jerome Crooks, Chris Lisle and the Rev. Moose all began March 2020 hard at work and gearing up for a busy summer. 

Crooks, a tour manager, was in the middle of a run of West Coast dates with rock band Tool when he first got wind of a new disease that was rapidly spreading around the world. Over the course of just a few days, COVID-19 went from being a faraway threat to shutting down their show in Colorado, and the rest of the tour soon after.  

“For me, March 13 will forever be D-Day,” recounts Lisle, a Nashville-based production designer, who watched his very full calendar — complete with the 2020 NFL Draft and festivals such as Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza — evaporate seemingly overnight. “I poured a whiskey that night and just kinda dealt with it,” he adds. “Within 48 hours, a full schedule became nothing.”  

For Moose, that “D-Day” came about a week earlier, on March 6, when the South by Southwest Conference and Festival (SXSW), an annual cornerstone event for his marketing firm, Marauder, became one of the first large-scale events to be axed by COVID-19. He sent out an email to his clients: “Hey, SXSW’s officially cancelled. I don’t know what that means yet. Enjoy the weekend — we’ll talk on Monday and figure this out,” he remembers writing.  

In those early days of the outbreak, all three felt the shellshock that was coursing throughout the industry and the world. But as the pandemic progressed and they witnessed the needs emerging among their co-workers and colleagues, they each developed organizations and movements specific to the tumultuous and rapidly changing times. Recently, they sat down with CMA Close Up over Zoom to share the stories of how they’ve adapted to the unprecedented 15 months that followed.  

Just days after sending out that first email to his clients about SXSW’s cancellation, Moose was putting together the foundation of what would become the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), an organization that grew out of Independent Venue Week’s national network of venues and promoters and a corresponding call for action to protect independently owned venues. At warp speed, they established their mission statement and created the organization’s three pillars: governance, marketing and advocacy. They also locked in their #SaveOurStages hashtag and started collaborating with people across the industry. Moose says that in some ways, the unique circumstances posed by COVID-19 allowed them to move faster: “It was — still is, but certainly was, at the time — like all of us falling off a cliff.”  

A few months later, Lisle and Crooks began mobilizing in response to the burgeoning needs of their communities. For his part, Crooks reached out to his fellow tour managers, eventually teaming with Matt Doherty, a three-decade veteran of the industry. They formed the Touring Professionals Alliance (TPA), wanting to collect information and resources all in one place. 

“We were trying to find information to share. That was our biggest goal,” Crooks recalls. “We wanted to build day sheets and share resources, share information on mental health.”  

Lisle was in a unique position, as his organization, the Touring Career Workshop, (TCW), existed pre-pandemic. He co-founded TCW with Erik Parker in 2011 as a free annual event to teach contractors life skills, such as managing their health insurance and retirement plans. But as the pandemic wore on, he too noticed a need to prioritize mental health. 

“People were hurting bad,” he says. Since 2014, TCW has offered its All Access Program, which provides two free sessions with a counselor from its list of designated life coaches or therapists. “So, the thing we really started doing at that point was reminding people of that service,” Lisle explains. 

From there, TCW got involved with other initiatives that highlighted the financial needs within the industry, such as the Keep the Show Rolling caravan and Red Alert RESTART. They also launched Crafty Roadies, a platform for promoting the physical crafts and artwork that roadies had pivoted to making as a means of supplementing income while they were off the road.  

“It was nothing more than a promotional avenue to get everybody’s homemade goods on a webpage and promoted. Some people were even able to get through the holidays by sales from that,” Lisle marvels. “I’m very thankful for that.”  

Moose, Lisle and Crooks have all leaned on the power of collaboration — including with each other. Lisle’s organization provided promotion for an initiative Crooks and the TPA spearheaded called the TPA Kitchen, which provides meals for industry personnel in Austin, Nashville, the San Francisco Bay Area and other cities populated with music and live event professionals. By Crooks’ approximation, the TPA Kitchen has provided nearly 15,000 meals served over the past five months, and with donations continuing to roll in, they’re looking at expanding the program to even more cities.  

“We were talking about Las Vegas, Denver, Minneapolis and Atlanta, seeing how far the dollars can stretch. See how many people are interested,” Crooks says, before jokingly pivoting toward Moose. “We’re trying to take a different approach now, and I may need NIVA’s database in those cities. … Just saying, if I can borrow some data, we’d like to feed some people.” 

Moose laughs in response. “What’s a database between friends?”  

The three industry professionals are all quick to point out that their projects are limited to a niche aspect of the COVID-19 crisis. 

“It’s been a terrible year,” Moose says, point blank. “Hundreds of thousands of people have died …. really terrible things have been happening that are far more important than what we’ve been talking about on this call.” 

Still, he sees reason to be hopeful for the future, especially for a post-pandemic music industry with a more robust network of organizations and resources available to protect its people. “It came from a different place than most other benevolent organizations that were started because someone had a vision. These were started out of necessity,” Moose says reflectively. 

“I just think the future, where we have so many organizations that are designed to help, is really something I’m looking forward to.”  

To learn more about the Touring Professionals Alliance (TPA), National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), Touring Career Workshop (TCW) and other organizations aligned with CMA’s Music Industry COVID Support (MICS) initiative, visit CMAmics.com.