Sam Osland
Credit: Ehud Lazin
Stage Manager
Counting Crows
CHANGEOVER: Talk a bit about who you are and what you do?
Sam Osland: I'm currently the stage manager of Counting Crows. I've been with them for about nine years. It would be nine years if we were actually touring. I started out as the drum and keyboard technician. We had some stuff happen in our road family over the last couple of years so I got promoted to stage manager. I call it a demotion since I used to be the last one in and the first one out when I was a drum and keyboard tech. Now I'm the first one in and the last one out. Every day is a different challenge. Over the last 11 years or so that I've been working, I've gotten a good grasp on the different venues as the market's come up on the schedule. I've been in most of them so I have a good idea of my day going in. I'm not getting railroaded too bad anymore, which is good after a couple of years.
How did you how did you originally get into the music industry?
Credit: Ehud Lazin
I was unceremoniously born into it. My father was a musician but he's not a professional musician anymore. Growing up, my father was a professional drummer. He was the singing drummer, which is a deadly combo in the world of rock and roll. If you can sing falsetto, play drums and keep time, you're going to be working. He was the real deal here in town and played on about 350 records, when everybody made records back in the day.
I grew up around that whole industry and went to school to become a recording engineer in my early 20’s. If you go to school for recording, some of the teachers tell you, “get ready to make coffee for a couple of years and run around being the busboy and assistant to everybody.” I was really turned off by that because I thought I was so much better than that. They actually offered a live music course, mixing live music at the school I was going to in Vancouver in the early 90s. It was a really good component and I realized that I had a step up on a lot of the people that were in the course with me because I'd grown up around music. I ended up helping a lot of the other kids that were just lost in the woods, per se. I helped tutor a lot of them outside of the classroom setting. It was a really great experience to get that technical side together.
At the same time, while I was going to school, I was still playing. I've been a musician myself, in a professional sense, but where you don't make any money and you live in a van with your best friends and tour around the world for 10 years. Then you wake up one day and think, “how the hell did I get a mortgage? That was weird.” I've just been around music my whole life. It’s a rewarding career when everything's going and there's no global pandemic happening.
I understand you also work in the film industry alongside with working in the music industry. Talk about that side of your career.
We have a really healthy film community here in Winnipeg. It’s been growing like gangbusters, as far as the projects coming through. We used to do maybe one or two big features here a year but now it's become like five or six big pictures or TV shows being filmed. We're sort of the catch-all for the overflow from the Toronto and Vancouver film scenes. Again, because of my upbringing with my dad in the music industry, he realized that he couldn't be working in the bars all the time so he got a daytime gig and helped create the first children's festival here in Winnipeg. I got involved working with IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees] through that doing day calls and show calls. When the big rock and roll festivals would come through I would help build and work the stage.
Then the film festivals started happening about 20 years ago and I picked away at it and then found myself in between tours. Through the late 90s, I was sort of picking away on day calls on film here in town. Then my step brother actually called me and said, “I'm putting a new crew together for the grip's, which is basically the do everything guy in film.” With my history of working and playing in rock and roll, I have a weird sort of skills that work really well in film. You have to be able to jump into work and ultimately know when to stop and wait for 20 minutes while the takes are being done, only to jump back into it at 100 miles an hour. I work a bit more in the electric department now, rather than in the grips, because I have a little bit more of a technical skill. Every day isn’t the same. Also, the last couple of years Counting Crows have scaled back their touring so having another career in film has allowed me to keep my bills paid.
How did COVID-19 affect your job in the music industry?
Credit: Abbey Wright
It put the nail in the coffin and shut it down. We had a bunch of work last spring at the beginning of 2020. We didn't have a lot of stuff on the calendar right at the beginning. With COVID, we started our year in 2020 with a really light calendar doing a lot of corporate stuff. Then all of a sudden I was able to live in both worlds, with music and film. I'm lucky sometimes where I can be in film and rock and roll at the same time. I sort lucked out as we were doing “The Ice Road” movie with Liam Neeson at the same time we were doing the corporate events. Then, in the middle of filming the movie, we shut down. We were worried that we were going to get shot down by the government because, in Canada, our government is very proactive about protecting its citizens from this kind of situation. We have been very fortunate with the support that we've gotten in film and in rock and roll. We've also been very fortunate that we've been able to get some sort of monetary payout to help pay bills. Without that assistance, I would have been really screwed because we just moved into a new house.
It's hard to see how this is going to get any better. I really feel for all my family and friends that are involved in the arts. I know a lot of people are hanging on by a thread, waiting for something to happen, but I just don't see anything happening until next year. I could be wrong but how do you have people come into your venues and keep them safe?
Now that COVID has pretty much put a stop to the music industry, what have you been doing in the meantime?
I've been very fortunate that with the purchase of our new home last year I took over the garage, much to my wife’s chagrin, and turned it into a studio. We have a really great drum room and I'm putting my original training back to work. I've been tracking drums and I’ve got about four projects going on right now because there's a lot of people with nothing to do. In the province of Manitoba, where I live, we’re in a code red and everything is limited. You can go to the grocery store, and other places like that, but you can't get a haircut, can't go to a restaurant, can't go to concerts or the movie theater. You basically stay at home and isolate. I've put that negative spin on what's happening and turned it into positivity by being with my family and getting back into playing shape. As a drum tech, you get to play for a couple of minutes every day when you're doing line checks but you don't actually get hours to do that. Having a studio here at home, tracking drums, I'm having friends send files over and we're piecing stuff together to see if anything could be something for the future. It doesn't have to be a money making venture either. My career stopped in 2010, with being on the road and living in a van with my friends, but we're still writing music and having fun doing it. I've been really fortunate that almost every band that I’ve put a lot of effort into, I've kept in good company with everyone. With every project, we’ve left on good terms so we can hang out and talk. That's the thing that's keeping me sane right now.
What sounds do you miss the most from tour?
There's a moment that happens, if I'm lucky enough to be anywhere near the stage, when doors open. There's that sense of excitement. That sense of what's going to happen. It’s something my dad showed us early on with the kids festivals. There would be like 35 buses showing up at 8:30 in the morning with kids from kindergarten to grade 11. We would be sitting up in the middle of this field and there would be a moment when the buses showed up and doors opened and it would be a peaceful moment in the park. I can attribute that to the venue as well. There’s this moment that’s really short - maybe ten seconds - where there’s that last little moment of bliss and then it’s full of laughter and chatter. That’s what I really miss.