Steve Dikun The "Roc and Roll Doctor"

A behind the scenes look at what it’s like to be a guitar tech on the road with some of Rock N’ Rolls biggest names.

Steve Dikun is known in Hollywood as the Rock ‘N Roll Doctor. He’s the go-to-guy for countless big names in music when it comes to amp and guitar repairs and service. But what some people don’t know; is that Steve honed his skills from spending close to 20 years on the road. He’s toured with bands like ZZ Top, Fleetwood Mac, Warren Zevon, Aerosmith and Little Feat; just to name a few.

And in that time, between changing strings, rigging amps, and solving problems on the fly, he’s had an opportunity to travel the world. He’s seen babies born on the road, as well as dealt with parents or close friends dying. He’s become best friends and worst enemies with every singe guy on the tour bus, all within a single tour. And through all this, he’s had an opportunity to witness some of the most magical concerts in music history.

After talking with Steve, it became clear to me that after years on the road, there are certain things you learn from being a “roadie.” So, if you’re thinking about a life on the road as a tech to a rock band, here are a few life lessons, from a man that’s learned them all the hard way.

LESSON #1:
“It’s not the equipment – it’s the artist.”

Steve Dikun: I was on tour with Little Feat, back in the late 80’s, when Eric Clapton showed up one night. We were playing a smaller venue, the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, and I was getting nervous thinking we didn’t have enough gear, or the right gear, for Eric to sit in. So I kept asking my Production Manager, “Is Eric going to play? I need to know. Because if he is, I’ve got to make something happen here.” So the Production Manager walks over to Eric, who was chatting with Little Feat’s Manager, and he asked, “Is Eric going to play?” “No,” the Manager said, “He’s not going to play.”

‘Okay, great,’ I thought, he’s not going to play. That takes a load off my mind. But I kept periodically glancing over, and sure enough, Eric was still standing there, bopping his head, talking to the Manager. And I’m thinking – ‘man, this feels fishy, it’s like he’s going to play.’ So I ask the Production Manager again, “Are you sure he’s not going to play?” The Production Manager walked over and double-checked, came back and said, “Nope, Eric’s not going to play.” So Little Feat finishes its last song, walks off stage. Goes over to Eric, and the first thing out of their mouth is, “Hey, man. You wanna play?” And he goes, “Yeah, sure. I’d love to play.”

So, great… Eric Clapton is going to play now.

And I’m thinking, god-damn-it, the reason I kept asking was because we don’t have the gear for him. What we had was a weenie little Mesa Boogie, sounds like crap amp, and one of Fred Tackett’s old strat’s that was really a “B” guitar for when people broke strings. It was rarely, if ever, used.

So I had nothing to work with. And when I tell you that Mesa Boogie amp sounded terrible – I mean it. I can’t say enough bad things about it. We had it because Craig Fuller used to strum along to some songs. Y’know, there’s really two guitar players in Little Feat, and the third guy would just strum along, playing nonsense to fill the gaps. So we never cared what it sounded like because it was never really turned up.

On top of that, Craig had asked me to take the speaker and the head out of this Mesa Boogie cabinet -- and mount it on his rack! So the speaker wasn’t even in a cabinet. It was just mounted on a piece of wood with a hole cut in it because Craig wanted it all in one self-contained unit. So this rig was theoretically not supposed to sound like anything anyway. But now, Eric Clapton comes along, and it’s going to be turned up and used in front of lots of people.

I’m sweating bullets thinking, there go my chances of ever working for Eric Clapton, because I’m going to be the big asshole that made him sound shitty in front of all these people right here. This is going to suck. This is really, really, going to suck.

But I did my best to smile as I tuned up the guitar and handed it over to Clapton. He walked up to the rack mounted Mesa Boogie, twisted the knobs how he thought they should be set, then turned around, and walked out on stage. He didn’t even do so much as ‘plink’ a note to make sure the amp was even turned on.

So the band breaks into their first song with Clapton, and I’m ready to run out there, bail him out. Do some emergency action to make something work.

He hits his first note…

And he sounds exactly like Eric Clapton. Dead on. He winds up playing the whole set with Little Feat, incorporating all these blues leads and everything. And he sounds phenomenal!

And when the set was done, I’m thinking, ‘holy shit, I dodged a major bullet.’ But besides that, I’m wondering what happened. Because that amp sounded like crap every single time I’d heard it before.

Craig Fuller comes walking off the side of the stage and he says, “So Steve, I guess my rig doesn’t sound so bad after all. Does it?” And I said, “You think it had anything to do with the guy who played it?” Because it never sounded like that before and it never sounded like that again.

We had Robert Cray come and sit in, and he sounded exactly like Robert Cray. Billy Gibbons will play with his JCM 800’s out on the stage, with his full rig. But he’ll play with a little Lead 12 transistor amp in the dressing room, and sound exactly the same as he does out on the stage.

Over the years I’ve found the key has much more to do with touch and feel, and the guy, than the rig. You can give those guys (as long as its functioning properly) a wide range of stuff and they’re going to be relatively similar if not exactly the same in sound because its what they themselves create that makes it happen. And that’s true across the board.

LESSON #2:
“Never work for someone you’re not allowed to talk to.”

I was hired to work for Prince a number of years back. He was between tours and he needed a guitar tech. He wanted someone that could build him a new hot rig, and someone mentioned my name. So they fly me out to the Purple Palace, that’s his studio in Minneapolis. They set me up with a rental car, great wages, and a suite in this beautiful hotel. And I’m thinking, ‘this is pretty preferential treatment for a guitar tech.’

I soon found out why.

Because if you looked out the back window of your suite, there’s a patch of woods, then you can see this purple square cube sticking up. That cube is the Purple Palace. And the reason I was so generously given a rental car and a pimp suite, was that I had to stay right there in that room, 24/7 and be ready to answer the phone, whether it was 10am, 10pm, or 3am – and it was my responsibility to hop in that rental car, and get down to the Purple Palace before Prince got there.

The rule was to get there before he got there, and leave after he left.

So I get my first phone call. I race to get dressed, fly through the halls of the hotel. Leap into my rental car, and burn rubber the entire half-mile stretch to the Purple Palace. I go running in, sweating, and as I’m meeting the rest of the crew, one of the guys pulls me aside and says, “Now remember Steve, no matter what happens, you are not allowed to talk directly to Prince, ever.” Like, you’re in deep shit if you talk to Prince. And I was amazed. Here I am, his personal guitar tech, building a rig to his specifications, and I’m not allowed to talk to the guy.

I’m wondering, ‘how the hell is this going to work?’ And it was a bit intimidating. He would come in, and he would have his personal bodyguards with him. And no-one would dare speak to the guy. It was really strange.

So I kept trying to get rigs going for him. And everyday I would ask the Production Manager – “What does Prince think of this?” Or “What does Prince think of that?” And the Production Manager would say, “Well, if Prince is in the right mood, I’ll ask him.” I’d see the Production Manager the next morning and say, “Well, what’d he say?” And he’d respond, “Prince wasn’t in the right mood, so I didn’t ask him.”

Okay – well how am I supposed to do this, I try this and I try that and I don’t get any reaction on his face, and he doesn’t say anything to me, and I’m not allowed to ask him – how do I know if I’m doing the job he hired me for?

It was around this point I’d learned that I was the sixth guitar tech in as many months to work for Prince. And you could see why. It’s no wonder he never got his rig working properly.

I didn’t last very long at that job.

LESSON #3:
“Pranking the opening act”

I don’t know if they still carry it on today, but pranking the opening act is a true roadie tradition. I learned it from the ZZ guys. And it had been going on for years before that. What happens is that on the last day of your tour, you find some way of screwing with the opening act.

And since we were the main bands crew, in the order of hierarchy, we were actually considered one step above the opening act. So we could screw with them, and they couldn’t do a thing about it. In fact, it wasn’t proper for them to even get mad about it.

I’ll give you an example. There was one tour where The Uninvited was opening for ZZ Top. These guys had the look of old west cowboys with long coats and hats. And our final show was in Louisiana, or some southern state. So, we let these guys play their entire 45-minute set. And then they left the stage. Waiting for the audience to applaud loud enough for them to go back out there to do their big encore song. Which was their big hit.

So, the lights are out, the audience is shouting. They run back out there, lights come up. And they quickly realized – they had no drum set. We had run out there in the dark, and removed the entire drum set. All we left was the snare. Not even a seat. So the drummer had to play the whole song on nothing but a snare.

The other part of that prank, which unfortunately didn’t get pulled off, was to lure the lead singer to the side of the stage where the sound crew guys were prepared to handcuff a fat chick to him. Unfortunately, after the drum kit maneuver, he was too cautious.

Another time, Ivan Neville was opening for Little Feat. And he did this thing in his show where the rest of the band would leave for a song, and he would sit out there and play keyboards, alone, with just one spotlight coming down on him. And in the middle of that song, he’d take a cigarette, flip it up into the air, and catch it in his mouth.

Well, this night, he gets to that point in his song, flips the cigarette in the air... and about 200 pummeled down on him. We had guys lining the sides of the stage with handfuls of cigarettes.

Neville just threw his hands in the air and laughed.

We actually had a band once that was disappointed we didn’t prank them. They thought we didn’t like them. It was Aerosmith. And Steven was bummed we didn’t come up with anything cool to screw with them.

So, if you’re going on the road, you better have a sense of humor. Because you’re either going to get screwed with, or be expected to deliver on some creative pranking.

LESSON #4:
“Never piss off the sound guy.”

One summer, years back, ZZ Top was on tour, and Loverboy was opening for them. Well, Mike Reno, the lead singer of Loverboy, had a bad habit of complaining over the microphone during the shows. They’d be in the middle of a set, and he’d ramble on about how bad their monitors sounded. Well, to everyone else present, this was an inexperienced, insecure bands way of saying, “We might not sound so good, but that’s not our fault -- it’s the sound guy.”

And as the tour went on, Reno became known for saying, “These monitors sound like shit.” That exact phrase, again and again, at every single show. So, of course, the sound company wasn’t happy about that. And ZZ Top didn’t have a problem with the same exact monitors. So it’s like, “Well maybe it’s your band.”

Well, on the last day of the tour, Loverboy goes out to do their forty-minute set, and instead of his own voice, all that comes out of Mike Reno’s monitor are shit sounds. Turns out, one of the sound guys went out and made a cassette tape with nothing on it but various fart and shit noises. So Reno had to play the whole set with nothing in his ears but the glorious sounds of crapping.

These monitors sound like shit, well there’s your shit for you pal.

LESSON #5:
“When you’ve got a gimmick that works – don’t kill yourself trying to outdo it.”

I was with Fleetwood Mac when they were on their Behind the Mask tour. And Mick Fleetwood was always trying to take the show to the next level, technologically. The first thing he came up with, which they used for a number of years, was the drum vest. It was this electronically rigged vest that had all these sound samples in it. He would come out on stage while the rest of the band took a break, and he would stand there beating on himself. And all these crazy sounds and rhythms would come out of the thing. He had a head-set mic, and he could cough, or say a word, or make a noise – and that noise would get sampled into his vest.

Well, for this tour, he decided the gimmick of the drum vest had worn out, and he wanted to take it up a notch. He wanted a new piece of gear. So he hooked up with this inventor named Jimmy Hotz. And Hotz was this six-foot tall guy with a shag haircut, dyed jet-black. He’d show up in balloon pants, the type that MC Hammer used to wear. And not just the pants, he’d have on this whole colorful flowing silk suit, like a jumpsuit. We called it the clown suit. Now Jimmy Hotz, as far as the crew was concerned, was just a joker. But he pulled some kind of Svengali on Mick. And Jimmy Hotz became for Fleetwood Mac what the equivalent of Magic Alex was to the Beatles. He would hang around with the band, had all these fantastical ideas for magic boxes and things they could do – but for the most part, he was a fraud.

He pitched Mick an idea for what he called the Hotz Box. This futuristic looking control surface that lit up in the dark. Basically, it was a smart midi-controller. You could hit a key, say A#, and then everything you play from then on would be synced to the key of A#. So, theoretically, it was one step further than the vest because it would allow Mick to be kind of musical with his rhythms. It would do chords, arpeggio’s, little kids singing, dogs barking, pitch bending, all that kind of stuff. Which in the early 90’s, was pretty cutting edge.

And Mick bought into it, literally. Hotz convinced him that when this thing came out, every man, woman, and child would have to have one for their household. So Mick funded the project though Atari. Which, if you remember in the early 90’s, was a company on the edge of ruin. In fact, I think Mick single handedly kept Atari afloat for a few of those years just with the money that went into the Hotz box.

So Hotz would have Mick over to his house, which was decorated like this mystical parachute cave. And after months of developing this thing, the Hotz Box was ready to be brought out on tour.

So we retired the drum vest, and when the point in the show came where Mick usually walked out with the vest, two of us ran out in the dark and set-up the Hotz Box in the center of the stage. The lights are down low. The fog is rolling off the front of the stage. They light it up with purple lights. So there’s this magical mystical quality to the whole thing.

Then Mick comes out. He’s got a black robe on, with a hood over his head, cape flowing out behind him. And he’s got this wooden mask on, as it was the Behind the Mask tour. And inside the mask, he’s got a wireless mic. Because when he used to do the vest, he would roar and yell and make all these primal sounds.

So he walks out real slow in the fog, this big dramatic entrance. The crowd is hushed, wondering what’s going to happen. He steps up to the Hotz Box, and starts doing his thing. And from the sidelines, we can see him banging away at the thing – but we don’t hear any sound coming out. And after a moment, the audience starts getting restless. They’ve gotta be wondering what this black robed, cape wearing fool in the mask is doing out there on the stage.

And then, through his mask mic, you could hear this little tiny voice like a child cut through the silence. And it said, “It’s a catastrophe.” And it echoed around the house because he had the mic turned on.

For the rest of that tour, he fiddled with that Hotz Box, but the thing never worked. Mick would constantly complain, “Get Jimmy Hotz out here. Fly him out.” We ended up flying that guy all over the place. He’d come out, mess around with the thing, get it to work once, and go home. And the next show – the thing wouldn’t work again. And when it worked, it would do this thing like BLEEP, BLOOP, BLOP – it just made a bunch of bloopy sounds.

I don’t know the technical reason why it didn’t work, but it never did. Finally, the rest of the band said, “Mick, you’re an equal member of the group, you can do what you like, but this one here, we’re gonna have to pull the plug on it. Because you’re making us all look stupid.”

And that was the end of it. I don’t know how he and Jimmy Hotz resolved it but that thing was a huge flop. I’m sure if they go on tour now, he’s probably back to the drum vest…

Steve Dikun has his own repair shop now and just released his own high-end line of custom amps. He can be contacted through his website: www.rockandrolldoctor.com.

WAR STORIES FROM THE ROAD / by David Jung 10/6/06