A Life on the Road
For decades, Meg MacRae ’88 has found joy and camaraderie as a rock tour manager.
BY JANA F. BROWN
If the life of Meg MacRae ’88 had a soundtrack, the lead song might be “Seven Bridges Road,” a song covered by the Eagles in 1980. The tune expresses the emotions of a singer on tour, traveling the open road.
In a career filled with travels by bus, train, and plane, MacRae has spent the better part of the last three decades on the road with many notable performers, the Eagles among them, traversing the country and the world as a rock tour manager.
“The best thing is there’s never a dull moment,” MacRae says. “The worst part is you’re on the road all the time. You’re always in a hotel, a venue, or a tour bus. I’m not playing the violin when I say this, but I’m 52. I don’t have kids. I’ve never been married because I pretty much married the road.”
Before embarking on a career that has included tours with Neil Young and Bon Jovi, among others, MacRae grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a teenager, she invited punk rock bands to stage concerts in a small outbuilding on a property her parents owned, collecting ticket fees so she could pay the bands. The clandestine shows were all about the music. (“We weren’t having alcohol or anything, we were just having a good time.”) Still, when MacRae’s parents found out about it, they shut the operation down.
Even when I was at St. Paul’s, I would have the shows when I was home on a break. That’s kind of how I got my start. I always loved music, and I probably had no idea that was taking me in the direction of a career.”
After graduating from SPS, MacRae attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied theater and psychology. An internship with Relativity Records in Queens led to a full-time offer as a publicist and also to weekends traveling with smaller bands to drive the van, sell T-shirts, and help arrange food and travel. MacRae’s first job out of college was with Relativity Records’ subsidiary Earache Records, working in the familiar genre of punk rock and heavy metal and arranging everything from press interviews to hotel reservations.
“One day somebody said, ‘You know, you can make just as much money or more going on the road and being a tour manager as you can sitting in this office,’” MacRae recalls.
Her first stint on the road was as a label representative. In the days before streaming music, that included taking the bands to local music stores to do record signings and to radio stations for interviews and other promotional duties. MacRae began building a network of radio station managers and record store owners that has served her well. She also built a reputation for her patience, intelligence, reliability, and overall good work in the business, which led to her first management gig on a European tour with the Brooklyn-based gothic metal band Type O Negative.
She credits the band — her close friends to this day — with launching a career that has put her in the orbits of Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Joe Walsh, and Phish. She is known on some tours as the “mom,” a caretaker label that is welcome to some artists who need extra attention. Often managing a budget in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, MacRae arranges travel, catering, transportation, security, and everything in between in multiple cities on multiple dates.
“I make sure that the crew, the band, the trucks and the tour buses are where they’re supposed to be,” she says, noting that sometimes she serves as tour manager and others as production coordinator. “I check that the charter flights are on time, that the hotels are advanced properly, and that I am on top of the budget for all the moving parts on the tour.”
Sleep can be hard to come by on tour, with MacRae sometimes stealing only four hours before waking up to do it all over again. She has seen the world in the process — the best and worst of it. She once dealt with a female fan who locked herself in the tour bus bathroom undetected until the charter had traveled too far for a simple return. She has witnessed the obsessive nature of fans on her tour with Phish. She’s been to Iceland with Neil Young (and always stopped what she was doing to go out to the soundboard and watch when he sang “Cortez”). MacRae once lost the lead singer of a band on a ferry in Estonia, forcing her to travel back and forth across a channel to retrieve him. On a 2013 holiday stop in Sydney, Australia, Jon Bon Jovi enlisted MacRae and some of the other women working on the tour to form a female choir to sing backup on the John Lennon/Yoko Ono version of “Happy Xmas.”
I sang and played sleigh bells on stage with Bon Jovi on this cover song. That was kind of fun, because the first time I ever sang live on stage was in front of 20,000 people.”
MacRae is currently at her home base in Nashville, where she has dabbled in the world of TV and music video production and recently returned to her own musical roots by releasing an original song, a Ganesha mantra, called “Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.” The pivot to being in one place for a long stretch was forced by the arrival of COVID-19. For now, MacRae is enjoying the comforts of home, though she’s likely to end up back on the road when the right opportunity presents itself.
“It’s like running away with the circus; you’re all in it together,” she says. “You’re in this little bubble that goes from city to city. Whatever happens, you do whatever it takes to make the show happen. I love being a part of something that’s bringing joy, celebration, and entertainment to people.”