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Tag: Labor and Jobs

  • India’s Economy Slows Down Just When It Was Supposed to Speed Up

    India’s Economy Slows Down Just When It Was Supposed to Speed Up


    A year ago, India was bouncing back from a recession caused by Covid-19 with a spring in its step. The country had overtaken China as the most populous country, and its leaders were declaring India the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

    This was music to the ears of foreign investors, and to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who at every opportunity boasted about his country’s inevitable rise. Home to 1.4 billion people, an invigorated India could become an economic workhorse to power the rest of the world, which is stumbling through the fog of trade wars, China’s troubles and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    India displaced Britain in 2022 as the world’s fifth-biggest economy, and by next year it is expected to push aside Germany in the fourth spot. But India has lost a step, revealing its vulnerabilities even as it moves up the global rankings.

    The stock market, which soared for years, has just erased the past six months of gains. The currency, the rupee, is falling fast against the dollar, making homegrown earnings look smaller on the global stage. India’s new middle class, whose wealth surged like never before after the pandemic, is wondering where it went wrong. Mr. Modi will have to adjust his promises.

    November brought the first nasty shock, when national statistics revealed that the economy’s annual growth had slowed to 5.4 percent over the summer. Last fiscal year, which ran from April through March, was clocked at 8.2 percent growth, enough to double the economy’s size in a decade. The revised outlook for the current fiscal year is 6.4 percent.

    “It’s a reversion to trend,” according to Rathin Roy, a professor at the Kautilya School of Public Policy in Hyderabad. There was a brief period, 20 years ago, when India seemed poised to break into double-digit growth. But, Mr. Roy argued, that growth depended on banks pumping out loans to businesses at an unsustainable rate.

    Ever since the government withdrew vast amounts of cash from circulation in 2016 in a vain effort to rein in underground commerce, Mr. Roy said, the economy has never recovered even its 8 percent pace. It only looked better, he said, because “you had the Covid dip, as happened in many economies. India’s economy didn’t get back in absolute size until last year,” later than most other countries.

    The reasons behind the slowdown are up for debate. One effect is undeniable: Overseas investors have been heading for the exits.

    “Foreign investment has taken the call that the Indian stock market is overvalued,” Mr. Roy said. “It’s quite logical that they would get out of pesky emerging economies and put their money where they can make more,” like on Wall Street, he added.

    Investors who bought a broad mix of Indian stocks early in 2020 watched their worth triple by last September, as major market indexes hit record highs.

    The number of Indians buying stocks grew even more rapidly, which helped drive up prices. Ahead of the Parliamentary election in June, Mr. Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, predicted that India’s new investor class would help sweep their party to victory. During Mr. Modi’s first two terms, the number of Indians holding investment accounts went from 22 million to 150 million, according to a study by Motilal Oswal, a brokerage house.

    “These 130,000,000 people will be earning something, no?” Mr. Shah reasoned to The Indian Express, a newspaper. The new investors were clearly spending. In particular, the luxury and other high-end sectors were doing well: cars more than motorcycles, high-end electronics more than household basics.

    But that prosperity, concentrated among the top 10 percent, left the other 90 percent wanting more. Mr. Modi’s party lost its majority in Parliament, though it retained control of the government. Expanded welfare payments, like the free wheat and rice the government distributed to 800 million people, helped.

    Despite such programs, the Modi government has been fiscally conservative and keeps a watchful eye on inflation. It has focused spending on big-ticket infrastructure items, such as bridges and highways, that are supposed to entice private enterprise into making investments of their own.

    Indian businesses still have to contend with excessive red tape, political interference and other familiar difficulties. The Modi government has tried to reduce those burdens, but in recent years it has focused on increasing economic supply.

    India’s government bet big on building new airports, for example. But the airlines that were set to serve them are pulling out. Vacationers who would have flown to beachy places like Sindhudurg, between Mumbai and Goa, are not buying enough tickets to keep a terminal there open.

    Arvind Subramanian, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, traces the lack of demand back to the broader state of employment.

    “Jobs are not being created, so people don’t have incomes and wages are depressed,” he said. There aren’t enough stockholders to make up the difference. The national minimum wage, which many workers in the informal economy are never paid, is just $2 a day.

    Mr. Subramanian, who was the country’s chief economic adviser during Mr. Modi’s first term, said the government has gone “stale, and bereft” of ideas for tackling such problems. “Ideas for long-term growth and boosting employment — that is what we’re missing now,” he said.

    He thinks the rupee’s fall is only natural, and should have happened sooner. Until recently, the central bank was spending billions of dollars to prop up the value of the national currency.

    The psychological effect of a weakening rupee can be painful, but the cost of keeping it at a fixed rate of exchange to the dollar was “extremely damaging for the national economy,” he said.

    No one is happy to see growth slowing. The government’s current chief economic adviser, V. Anantha Nageswaran, told a news briefing in November that the bad news could be a blip. “The global environment remains challenging,” he said, with a strong dollar and suspense over the possibility of sudden policy moves in the United States and China.

    A year ago, the hope was that India’s own economic engine could push it through the global headwinds. The missing ingredients, then as now, start with too many people having too little money in hand.

    “There simply isn’t enough demand,” said Mr. Roy, the professor in Hyderabad. “The idea that you can expect supply to create its own demand has its limits,” he said.

    “Regular people,” Mr. Roy said, those between the top 10 percent seeing big stock market gains and the bottom 50 percent struggling to get by, still “don’t earn enough to buy the basics.” About 100 million of these regular people qualify for free grain.

    The government is expected to release a budget for the new fiscal year on Feb. 1. Mr. Nageswaran, the current economic adviser, has stirred hope that it may include tax cuts, putting more money in the hands of consumers.

    “This idea that India needs tax cuts, it has the causation exactly wrong and reversed,” said the former economic adviser, Mr. Subramanian. “Consumption is weak because incomes are weak.”

    Last month, Mr. Nageswaran told Assocham, a group of business leaders, that employers need to pay their workers more, noting that wages were stagnant. “Not paying workers enough will end up being self-destructive or harmful for the corporate sector itself,” he warned.



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  • Against All Odds, a Vegas Theater Scene With a ‘Sense of the Wild West’

    Against All Odds, a Vegas Theater Scene With a ‘Sense of the Wild West’


    If there is anything most entertainers master, it’s how to juggle gigs. In New York City, they may have sidelines in real estate or hospitality. In Las Vegas, their day jobs are, well, also in entertainment.

    “That’s the beautiful thing about Vegas — you’re going to find people who do everything,” said Katie Marie Jones, a busy local actress who also works as a magician’s assistant on the Vegas Strip and an on-ice host at the home games of the Golden Knights hockey team. “If you have multiple wants and talents, or if you’re open to learning new things, it’s easy building a career here because there’s so much.”

    This town has been world-famous as an entertainment destination for decades, and it keeps evolving. These days the Strip hosts Cirque du Soleil spectacles and comedians, razzmatazz magicians and pop residencies. Visitors can also attend Spiegelworld’s immersive “Discoshow” and an interactive installation by the art-tainment group Meow Wolf at Area15, which is dedicated to immersive projects. Major touring musicals stop off at the Smith Center, and three major-league professional sports teams have moved in relatively recently.

    What’s a lot harder to find is theater on a smaller scale, an assembly of midsize institutions that would add up to the equivalent of Off Broadway.

    A homegrown professional scene does in fact exist in Las Vegas, except visitors tend not to know it because the Strip sucks up all the attention. It’s scrappy, sure, with its rock ’n’ roll energy but the theater makers here are especially resourceful and don’t fit in boxes. Over a long weekend late last fall, a few things became clear: there’s a palpable hunger to make theater against the odds, the locals who can keep it viable are ready for it and the artists enjoy the freedom of straddling aesthetic and artistic worlds.

    To find those shows, you could go, for example, just over a mile west of Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip’s drag, to the suite of office and rehearsal spaces where I saw a performance of A Public Fit’s terrific production of “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s pitch-black comedy. Or you can head roughly a mile north of the Strip to Majestic Repertory Theater, where Jones is currently in “Cabaret” playing that wily hustler Sally Bowles — “she would kill in Vegas,” Jones said appreciatively.

    And that’s two-thirds of the scene. Another outfit, Vegas Theater Company, sits a seven-minute walk from Majestic in the 18b Las Vegas Arts District (so-called because it originally encompassed 18 blocks), and feels like a compact version of Austin, Texas, before its tech boom.

    Any way you look at it, three is not very much company for a metropolitan area of about three million people.

    “Growing up here, watching the city grow and evolve, I kind of assumed that the culture would evolve in a way similar to other big cities that I had known — Los Angeles and Chicago and New York,” said Joseph D. Kucan, 59, the producing director at A Public Fit. “And it just didn’t.”

    Maggie Plaster, a Nevada Ballet Theater board member and director of parks, recreation and cultural affairs for the city of Las Vegas, said in a phone interview that she “didn’t really know that we had local theater until I became part of the cultural affairs team three years ago.” (The Arts District falls under the city’s purview. The Strip is in an unincorporated part of Clark County, which has jurisdiction over it.)

    When asked why local theater has struggled to take off, Plaster mentioned rising rents, the marketing “noise” of big shows obscuring smaller companies’ efforts, and the lack of deep-pocketed donors.

    “We’ve been doing this for 12 years, and it’s been incredibly hard,” said Ann-Marie Pereth, 54, A Public Fit’s artistic director. “Philanthropy in this city is not the same as it is in other cities.”

    She and Kucan have become masters at working out partnerships with other companies (they did a production of Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” at Vegas Theater Company last year) and local governments (like semi-staged readings at the Clark County library).

    Another missing element is an institution that could act as a magnet. The city lacks a local member of the nationwide League of Resident Theaters — which includes nonprofits like Actors Theater of Louisville, the Alley Theater in Houston, the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. A Las Vegas institution in that network could forge closer relations with peers, create bonds for potential commissions and co-productions, and generally have a better chance at national exposure.

    But two ambitious projects could drastically change things in the near future: The Vegas Theater Company executive artistic director, Daz Weller, 46, is working on a new performing-arts complex in the Arts District that would house his own company, Vegas City Opera, and possibly other groups. Then there’s the Huntridge Theater, an imposing building that started as a movie palace in 1944, shuttered in 2004 and is scheduled to reopen, after an extensive renovation, in the second quarter of 2026. It could fill the middle ground between the Smith Center and the Strip on one hand and the Off Off Strip companies on the other.

    The project is led by the Nevada developer J Dapper, of Dapper Companies, who bought the Huntridge in 2021, and Darren Lee Cole, the producing artistic director of New York City’s SoHo Playhouse, who will operate its multiple stages. The idea, Cole explained in a phone interview, is that the complex will play a role similar to that of Off Broadway in New York, and host both imports and Las Vegas-grown productions, major playwrights and newcomers, along with pop and rock concerts.

    Of the need for such a place, he said: “People are coming from New York, from Chicago, from St. Louis, from Los Angeles in particular, San Francisco, and all of these new residents have a foundation of culture that is more inclusive than seeing the shows on the Strip and maybe going to a Broadway show at the Smith Center.”

    Cole is in talks with an array of potential partners, including the three main pro Vegas companies. Troy Heard, Majestic’s artistic director, is especially optimistic. “Not only for its historic significance in our city, but it’s a rebirth for our area — a new anchor facility.”

    Until the deck is reshuffled one way or another, the hardy locals continue to make theater with can-do ingenuity and resourcefulness. “You don’t have culture vultures overlooking everything you do,” Heard, 49, said approvingly. “There is a sense of the Wild West here, a sense of experimentation.”

    He is behind his own homegrown success story: “Scream’d: An Unauthorized Musical Parody.”

    When the post-pandemic doldrums befell Majestic, Heard threw what he described as a Hail Mary pass to save the company, which he had founded in 2016. He wrote a spoof of the 1996 horror-comedy movie “Scream” that featured a jukebox full of 1990s hits and staged it with a rambunctious, goofy spirit in a cabaret setting. (The versatile Jones took on the Drew Barrymore and Rose McGowan roles.)

    It opened in September 2023 and when a clip went viral on TikTok, the house filled to overflowing with both locals and traveling fans — the night I caught “Scream’d,” I met a couple of 20-something sisters who had just driven eight hours from Monterey, Calif., to see it. The Majestic plans to run the show in a residency this year, and a Los Angeles production at the Whitley is slated for May.

    A gamble that paid off sounds like a happy Vegas ending, a simile Heard is probably fine with — this Georgia transplant admires the city and its idiosyncratic culture. “The Strip is a cruise ship right in the middle of the desert, and there’s this interesting community of creatives and artists and visionaries who do come to work on the Strip but then have this life outside of it,” he said. Of course, Heard picks up freelance jobs as well: He’s piloting the forthcoming “John Wick Experience” at Area15.

    Weller is just as ecumenical. By necessity but also, one senses, by inclination.

    After working as an actor in his native Australia, Weller moved to Las Vegas in 2010 to reunite with his boyfriend (now husband), Toby Allen, whose vocal group, Human Nature, appeared on the Strip. Once in town, Weller continued to act but also built up his directing résumé, which included a stint as associate director on Spiegelworld’s “Vegas Nocturne” in 2013.

    Since 2018, Weller has been the artistic director of Vegas Theater Company (né Cockroach Theater). Last year’s productions included a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” as well as the premieres of the saucy “CLUElesque” (now “ClueX”) and the coming-of-age musical “The House on Watch Hill,” which will return this year.

    That one was conceived by Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor (whose “Bandstand” had a Broadway run in 2017), and typically they, too, are busy on the Strip — Oberacker is the longtime conductor for Cirque du Soleil’s flagship show, “Kà,” while Taylor played the violin in Adele’s band during her residency. Both men enjoy going back and forth between giant and tiny productions.

    Oberacker pointed out that the creative opportunities are also bolstered by a formidable calendar of trade shows, product launches and corporate happenings. “If you are an improv artist, if you are a clown, you can find your way to having employment in really cool, weird avenues because of the nature of the industry out here in events,” he said. After the performance of “Scream’d” I attended, the live band’s mono-named drummer, Anisa, told me she could make “10 times more a night” playing a corporate gig or a trade show.

    Adaptability extends to the way the theater companies organize themselves. After losing its big downtown space, A Public Fit, which focuses largely on contemporary plays (it’s presenting Sam Shepard’s “True West” this spring), became semi-itinerant. At Vegas Theater Company, Weller — who is paid on a project basis — is particularly skillful at juggling new and old material, rentals and house-generated projects, regular runs and weekly events.

    Among the latter is “The Marquis de Sade Presents: Abandon,” Robert Bullwinkel, Abel Horwitz and Jana Wimer’s wordless after-hours show proudly flying the adult flag that is very much part of the more sulfurous Vegas tradition. The inventive production stars agile performers with Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil credits, and benefits from stunning audio work by Joseph Bishara, the “Conjuring” and “Insidious” composer, and the sound designer Katie Halliday, an Emmy Award winner for “Stranger Things.”

    While perpetually scrounging is hard, as Pereth said, the Vegas theater scene also has access to a wild pool of talent and displays an indisputable D.I.Y. energy, even in a more traditional production like A Public Fit’s “The Minutes,” which she directed with Kucan.

    Back at “Scream’d” at Majestic, my attention drifted toward a young audience member decked out in steampunk-goth finery who seemed to intensely live the show’s every second. It was a repeat visit for Julia Osier, 17, a Las Vegan who wants to study lighting design and had come with her best friend, who was herself interested in pursuing stage management. “We go everywhere but we tend to like the storytelling theater, anything from this to Shakespeare,” Osier said. “We’ll see anything.”

    Ideally, the Las Vegas theater scene can give them not just the chance to see anything, but also the chance to create anything.





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  • U.S. Employers Add 256,000 Jobs in December

    U.S. Employers Add 256,000 Jobs in December


    Employers stuck the landing in 2024, finishing the year with a bounce of hiring after a quarter filled with disruption.

    The economy added 256,000 jobs in December, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. It was a better-than-expected number amid a labor market that has been slowly cooling for two years. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.1 percent.

    Although it’s too early to call it a trend, the strong result — unclouded by the strikes and storms of previous months — may signal renewed vigor after months of caution among both workers and businesses.

    • Wages still strong: Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent over the month, in line with expectations, amounting to a 3.9 percent gain since last year.

    • Growth powered by the usual suspects: Health care, government, social assistance, and leisure and hospitality were the main drivers of the strong showing. But retail returned from what had been a largely flat year in the sector, adding 43,000 jobs.

    • Labor force participation recedes: The share of people between the ages of 25 and 54 who were either working or looking for work edged down to 83.4 percent, and is now half a point lower than the 83.9 percent it reached earlier last year. The drop was led entirely by men; the participation rate for prime-age women rose.

    • Analysts blown away: “American exceptionalism is the primary takeaway from one of the more remarkable years in labor market dynamics over the past half a century,” wrote Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting and consulting firm RSM. “It is hard to say anything negative about the details of this report,” added Thomas Simons, chief U.S. economist at the investment banking firm Jefferies.



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  • These Roadies Help Stars Rock ’n’ Roll All Night. They’re in Their 70s.

    These Roadies Help Stars Rock ’n’ Roll All Night. They’re in Their 70s.


    Funny place, the music business — it devours the young and ignores the old. Or at least that’s how it may appear. Aside from a handful of entrenched executives and a circuit of legacy acts, employment opportunities in the industry for those of AARP age might seem slim. But there’s a fascinating exception: Many of the industry’s most respected and consistently employed roadies, instrument techs and live sound people are well into their 60s and even 70s.

    They’re the sound checkers who puff and count into microphones; the runners in black who bring guitars out between songs; the daredevils who climb into the rafters to adjust lights; the spelunkers who burrow under stages to tweak cables. Their job is to create a seamless experience for the music fan and a painless experience for the musician. They keep the live music industry humming, and their ranks might contain more Medicare-eligible employees than any other segment of the music business.

    Kevin Dugan, 70, has been working with the onetime Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony since Jimmy Carter was president. Dallas Schoo, 71, has been in the business for 52 years and has served as the Edge’s guitar tech since U2 was playing clubs and ballrooms (he’s been moonlighting with Bruce Springsteen). Betty Cantor-Jackson, 76, first worked a soundboard for the Grateful Dead in 1968, and she’s still doing plenty of local gigs in the Bay Area. “We don’t always have to fade away, you know,” Cantor-Jackson said. “I’ll do this until I can’t crawl in there.”

    To the musicians who hire them, these seniors are often preferable to younger and less road-tested techs and sound people. “I haven’t filled out a job application in 50 years,” said Frank Gallagher, 77, who is still working on a Las Vegas residency for the B-52’s, which continues in April. (When he started live mixing the Talking Heads in 1977, he had already been in the business for 11 years.) “Somebody asked me for a résumé the other day,” he said. “I said, just ask anybody I’ve worked with, you know?”

    Danny Goldberg, the veteran music manager and label executive, said these roles entail a remarkably personal relationship with the artist. “It’s like having a doctor — you want somebody who knows you intimately. It’s a huge advantage to the artist to have continuity, and you don’t want to start with somebody new if you don’t have to,” he said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right?”

    Anthony, the bassist, agreed: “Kevin Dugan has been working with me for 43 years,” he said. “With that kind of experience, I can go up onstage every night and feel totally relaxed and confident that he has everything handled.”

    AFTER 10:30 A.M. on a Saturday morning in mid-October, Bob Czaykowski, known as Nitebob, exited a Quality Inn in Seekonk, Mass., and climbed into the shotgun seat of the 12-passenger Sprinter van that took him and the band Lez Zeppelin to their next gig. He had a full day of stair climbing, road-case lifting, line checking, microphone placing, outlet testing, drum-carpet laying and sound checking ahead of him.

    Czaykowski, 74, was delighted at finally feeling nearly 100 percent after two knee joint replacements. He would be doing the same things he has been doing for the last half-century that day: making strange, wondrous, louche and loud bands sound as brilliantly strange, wondrous, louche and loud as they possibly can.

    Czaykowski is perhaps one of the most famous people on his side of the business. Virtually every working tech reacts to his name with awe, as do many musicians, young and old. Czaykowski did “front of house” — that’s the formal name for the person behind the knobs at the soundboard — in the early and mid-1970s for the New York Dolls, the Stooges, Aerosmith and others; more recently he was the close associate and guitar tech for Steely Dan’s co-leader Walter Becker. For the last 13 years, Czaykowski has primarily manned the board for Lez Zeppelin, the all-women Led Zeppelin cover band.

    “He just wants to be on the road and mixing a band and hanging out with the band,” said Lez Zeppelin’s guitarist, Steph Payne. “That’s what a road warrior is, when you’re excited to get on the road, no matter what. You either dig it or you don’t,” she added. “Bob can get into a van, a Sprinter, a bus, whatever it is, sit there with the rest of us for six hours. There’s never any kind of cranky, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t sleep.’ He never complains about that. He’s just built for the road.”

    A good tech’s work is mostly invisible to the audience. “People go, ‘Wow, what an awesome show, man. They played 90 minutes!’ But you have no idea what it takes to make these 90 minutes,” said Ingo Marte, who has worked with hard rock bands like Danzig, Saxon and Armored Saint for 41 years. (He’s a relatively young 65.) “I had actually a really bad heart attack like eight years ago,” he added, “and that’s when I thought, OK, I am done. No more touring. But I picked myself up and I’m still at it.”

    Schoo’s work with the Edge involves maintaining and tuning as many as 27 guitars a night, as well as precisely finessing the mind-boggling array of effects the musician uses, in real time, to build his sound. Schoo said that U2’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023 was particularly arduous.

    “There are 17 steps from the floor — where my guitar world is — up to that stage. So, I was 70 years old at the time, and I am running up and down and up and down those steps with an eight-pound guitar, for 40 shows. I get paid handsomely for that, but I’m always thinking, when will I trip? Is tonight the night I fall down those stairs?”

    He added: “I say a prayer every night, I really do. I ask, please help all these machines. Please let my command of them work, not for me and not even for the Edge, but for these 30,000 fans. Let it work for them. They deserve that, they want to hear this great act and these great songs.”

    Like Schoo, Lorne Wheaton, known as Gump, has been closely associated with one musician: Neil Peart of Rush, who died in 2020. After 50 years in the industry, Schoo recently retired, at 69; his last big drum tech gig was the long Kiss farewell tour. But it’s a “loose” retirement; he retains his membership in IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), and still does local theater and corporate gigs in his native Toronto.

    Could he have ever imagined he’d work as a tech for half a century? “No, never,” Wheaton said. “I didn’t think I’d live to 69. Let’s be honest here. You’d never really think that you’re going to hit 70 and actually retire out of this business, because it does take quite a bit of savings to do that.” He said that working freelance is a constant hustle, and the wear and tear of aging sometimes leads to unexpected consequences: “You do not want to pass away in your bus bunk or in a hotel room.”

    Knee and hip issues seem especially endemic in the tech industry, because of the constant need to lift heavy equipment and climb up and down endless stairs. And road workers also have to deal with a schedule that occupies them from midmorning until after midnight. Recently, Dugan, who has been working with Anthony since the early days of Van Halen, informed his boss (who now tours regularly with Sammy Hagar and Joe Satriani) that he was thinking of slowing down.

    “When I first told Michael that I wanted to get off the road, he said, ‘I’m not going to do that, why should you? I’m still going to be out there,’” Dugan said. “And I said, ‘Michael, are you trying to compare your day to my day?’” He explained how his work begins at 8:30 a.m. and wraps at 2 a.m. “‘You come out and do the show,’” he recalled saying. “‘You leave in a limo, go back to the five-star hotel, or go back to a private jet way and fly home. Your day and my day are worlds apart.’”

    A road warrior of a certain age working 14-hour days has to make certain adjustments. “I’ve pulled way back on drinking on the road,” Dugan said. “I cannot fathom working with a hangover. I did that for a lot of years. And when you’re middle-aged, you can bounce back from a hangover, but now it takes too long.”

    There are relatively fewer senior women working on the road because it was extremely rare for women to get work as techs before the late 1980s. (There were, however, many female studio engineers and producers, and many venues are managed by women.)

    One notable exception is Betty Cantor-Jackson, who began working with the Grateful Dead in 1968, and the Family Dog two years earlier. She is a legend in the Dead community, and recorded the band multiple times in since-released performances that have come to be known as “The Betty Boards.” She continues to work gigs in the San Francisco area, and went on the road with Chris Robinson in the last decade.

    “The road is kind of a normal. I spent so much of my life on the road, you already know how to deal with it,” she said. “I’m the old woman on the bus with all the boys. I got my bunk, I’m good.”

    With the exception of Wheaton, not one of these road techs has any plans to retire. “I may be 74, but the funny thing is, there’s always someone older,” Czaykowski said. “That’s because the more experience you have, the better shows you can get. When people have confidence and they trust you, that’s like one less thing that they have to cloud their brain. I know this guy will do the job, ’cause he’s done that same job for me 700 times before.”



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