In this 45-year career retrospective, we try to answer how a self-proclaimed hyper-intelligent nerd named Tommy with thick glasses went from hustling guitars at the stage door of Chicago’s venues to stage managing top artists on tour and finally playing as the opening act for the biggest rock band in the world.
Stage Manager Rocko Reedy has trodden across countless stages, tarmacs and stadiums around the world in his 45-year career. His first 15 years from the mid-70s were spent working for a Who’s Who of multiplatinum artists. Ask Reedy who he’s toured with and he quickly answers with a general “three or four dozen different artists.” He explains, “Every time I attempt to name them, I always forget somebody, so as not to offend, I shall be a bit vague.” The last 30 years were devoted to directing the flow for U2 concerts around the world.
In the early 1970s, Reedy was still known by his birth name, Tommy. He began his career in music buying and selling guitars, eventually hanging out at the back gate “with a bunch of cool vintage guitars.” This led him to eventually become known as “the guy in Chicago for cool gear.” He noticed that “the English guys would buy more guitars than some suburban kid.” So he found his new customer base. One of his earliest clients was the late Geoff “Bison” Banks, guitar tech for Genesis and AC/DC’s Malcolm Young. “Geoff was well known and just a sweetheart of a guy; he would buy everything I had and take it back to England to resell at a better profit,” Reedy notes. “He told me he loved the way I set up the guitars I sold him. Geoff was the guy that planted the idea in my head that I should go on the road as a guitar tech.”
Following that advice, he conned his way backstage flashing his business card—as the self-titled “The Rock and Roll Doctor”—at a 1974 festival in Sedalia, MO. He met dozens of guitarists who took note of his skills, and even early promoter legend Ron Stern used to wonder how this kid got passes to every big show that came to town.
Hometown heroes, Styx, whom he had met while in high school and worked with locally, gave him his first road gig in support of their The Grand Illusion album, which made Styx an international act. It was to be the band’s seventh tour, their seventh album, and it started on 7/7/77. He was hired as the seventh road crew member.
This would also be the tour on which he was dubbed with the moniker Rocko. “I was Tommy Shaw’s guitar tech. The tour manager Jim Vose thought it was confusing having two people with the same name, so he decided I needed a nickname. Vose wanted to call me Rock, after my ‘Rock and Roll Doctor’ guitar repair business. I told him no f’ing way. He drew an ‘O’ on my business card and said, ‘Now you’re Rocko,’ to which I said the one word that forever changed my life: ‘whatever.’” And it stuck. “Even my mom called me Rocko till the day she died,” laments Reedy. Because many of his clients would write paychecks made out to this nickname, he legally became Rocko.
The old saying of necessity is the mother of invention played its hand on several pieces of tech Reedy built for his bands. On Styx’s Kilroy Was Here tour (fun fact: Reedy played Mr. Roboto in the video) he created one of the first wireless headset microphones. It was made out of a coat hanger wire and duct tape, Super Glue, and some Audio-Technica miniature lavalier microphones. “I just wanted to make stuff work,” he says. He would field test early Nady Systems wireless products developing this further, but never made a dime off his ideas.
Following his run with Styx, Reedy did stints as a production manager for Survivor, and The Kinks. “My duties as a PM often involved being a stage manager, because I’ve never been one to just sit in the office. If you are going to manage a production, you need to be involved on the stage with what’s going on in the production. In my world I don’t believe in ‘white glove crew.’ Get off your lazy fat arse and be part of the team!”
In 1987 he went out as guitar tech with John Mellencamp’s Lonesome Jubilee tour. With 27 guitars to restring every day, Reedy put them on the rigging truck, so he could get his hands on them first thing each day. Setting up at FOH, he got a front row lesson observing how a big rock show hit the arena floor at each venue. He also picked up on the fact that riggers were righteously well paid, and despite an initial fear of heights, Reedy decided to climb the beams, adding that skill to his growing resume. “I was doing anything that came my way. It wasn’t a question of ‘Can you do it?’ so much as ‘How much does it pay?’”
By now Reedy had racked up a solid reputation as a good hard worker. His first time working as a designated stage manager was for the two-day Moscow Music Peace Festival in August 1989, an event put together by legendary manager Doc McGhee. Reedy had been the rigger on tour with Bon Jovi, a McGhee-managed act. “Doc needed someone to direct traffic in Moscow. Since he managed most of the acts on the bill, he needed someone to be a neutral party,” says Reedy. This event was the turning point in his life and career. “I determined I was going to concentrate on being the best stage manager in the business,” he notes, “and I was through with blow and booze.”
Upon returning to America, he joined Aerosmith’s Pump tour, his third outing with the band. This was the tour in which the band went clean and sober, insisting their crew do likewise, monitored by their infamous Aerocops. Reedy walked the line into sobriety. “Up to that point I had been a complete f’ing knucklehead, drinking and drugging,” he admits. A momentous time in his life, he also met his future wife, Hollie. Fourteen years younger, she is now a lawyer and the two have been together for 30 years.
In 1992, Reedy embarked on his first tour with U2 as their stage manager for the Zoo TV tour. Though he and Production Manager Jake Berry had become friends over the years, the two would not join forces on U2 for another 10 years. “We had talked about doing tours together, but something always came up. We have always been friends and badgered each other in friendly competition. I would call him up and he would ask me where I was, then proceed to tell some record setting epic tale of how fast he got a show out of there. I’d be like ‘oh yeah, well.’ He sets the bar really high.”
Reedy shares, “Jake always has been the inspiration for me because he’s the best there is. The reason I’ve worked with him longer than most of his crew is [because] we are very like-minded. We both have an incredibly strong work ethic. He knows he could leave me with the keys to the production and I wouldn’t wreck it.”
Lessons for Success
“Being goofy and memorable” is what he attributes to his success. “One thing has always perplexed me,” he says. “I have never met anyone else in the business named Rocko, so I have never been mistaken for someone else. I think I made and created my own breaks. I get work because I’m one of the best at what I do and I worked really hard to get there. However, there is a fine line between being an ‘icon’ and being an ‘eyesore.’ Possibly the worst part of working with me is that I expect everyone to work as hard as I do.”
Communication is another important part of success. “When you go around the world, you have to remember that Americans are the only ones who only speak one language. Everywhere else in the world, everybody at least understands English because of television. If you speak slowly and clearly, you will be understood.”
Wherever he’s traveled, Reedy learned to say a few basics in the local language such as please, thank you, over here, and over there. “It literally takes less than half a second to say ‘please’ in any language. It makes a difference, and most importantly, when you show respect, you get respect back.” But one phrase that everyone took note of was his own special declaration, again, spoken in the native tongue: “Get your hands off me or you will be wiping your ass with a hook.” Reedy would get with the crew chief before the load in to explain this phrase to him. “Everybody would bust out laughing,” Reedy explains, “then they’d go around saying: ‘wipe your ass with hook, wipe your ass with hook.’”
His advice to the next generation of road scholars? “Multitask. The top productions carrying 20-plus trucks of gear and six buses full of crew ‘specialists’ are going to dwindle,” he notes. “Everything is going leaner. If you can perform two or more job functions, you broaden your prospects to get hired. It makes you more attractive financially to productions that need to save on overhead. And honestly, I do not think we are ever going to fully get back to those sizes of events.”
Managing the Next Stage
“So now let’s undress the elephant in the room…” Rocko says with an air of seriousness divided by a smile that suggests mischievousness. “I play guitar and sing. The artists I work for hear me play as I dial their sound in with the crew as the artists arrive for sound check. Once they see I can actually perform, and they hear how good their equipment sounds once their backline crew dials it in with me playing, it is surprisingly easy to get them to let me be the opening act. It’s a novelty, with us playing cover songs mostly, but the audience seems to place themselves in our shoes—just having fun pretending to be a rock star.”
Reedy’s musical moments during work started with him playing off-stage keyboards for Survivor and Scorpions in the days before MIDI and sequencers. “It was so we could make the live sound as close as possible to the studio recording.” When asking if he could be the opening act, a few said ‘yeah, why not’ and Reedy warmed up the stage for Styx, Survivor, Scorpions, Bon Jovi, Journey, Def Leppard, and the biggest show of all, for Pearl Jam and U2 at Hawaii’s Aloha Stadium in 2006.
In the meantime, Reedy has not let the Covid lockdown slow him down. His Covid Hiatus in Westerville, OH has him producing videos for other bands, and himself as well, recording and releasing cover songs. He has also made himself available as a consultant for touring productions as well. His Facebook page has become a video archive of all his wacky road antics for which he has become known. Plans to start a “Rocko Band” playing venues near home are on the table. “Maybe it’ll be just me on stage with a split screen behind me like a Zoom call, of me playing all the instruments in the song,” he muses. “I think I’ll call the new band Gramps with Amps.”
For a taste of where that might lead, visit Reedy’s YouTube channel
