M Paz Photo

Daniel Ramirez serves as tour manager and front-of-house sound mixer for The Wood Brothers. Ramirez, who is also a musician, briefly departed from that path after he graduated from college with a geology degree but, when he found himself working on hydrofracturing for oil and gas companies, he reset his compass.

“It became a drag, so I decided to try to get back into the live-music business,” he admits. “I put some calls out to the folks that had mentioned that they would love to bring me on the road. The first guy to take me up on it was my good friend Marco Benevento, and I can’t thank him enough. He hired me as an audio mixer, but opportunities started coming in that involved acting as his tour manager as well, so I had to learn what it meant to do that job on the road. There isn’t much info out there on tour managing, so you kind of have to figure it out on your own.”

What interested you the most about the venues you frequented growing up?

I grew up in Lancaster, Pa., and The Chameleon Club was the center of the touring music scene, but there were also several colleges and smaller bars that always had great live music coming through. It wasn’t until I got to see everything that was happening behind the scenes that I understood how things worked—first as a young musician recording in studios and then, having friends that got us backstage passes to H.O.R.D.E. tour. In high school, a friend’s older brother was also the production manager at The Chameleon Club, and that’s where I really learned how much more there was to live music than the folks holding guitars onstage.

What was your first job in the music business, and what led you to that job?

My first official job was working as an ADAT playback tech for The Butterfly Effect when they supported Marilyn Manson at The Chameleon Club in 1995. The mayor showed up at the back door with an official decree stating all the things they were not allowed to do, and the band tried to do as many of those things as they could. It was hysteria. I also remember trying really hard to look cool while sitting at a folding table hitting play and stop, and, in doing so, kicking a power strip out of the wall that killed not only the playback, but also the lighting package. I was mortified.

Describe an early influence in your career.

I could mention a lot of names from early on, but Phish was the most influential from a behind-the-scenes perspective. I was very impressed as a teenager by how they did things their own way and slowly cultivated their own scene, rather than just taking all the money and trying to fit into the industry. Looking back, you can see the ways that it eventually backfired and led to some tough decisions, but I was very impressed by the way they marched to their own drummer, invested back into their project and always made sure that things were done their way.

What was an early lesson you learned?

I came up on the venue side of things, and that gave me a great perspective on how your entrance into the room sets the vibe for the night—you need to say hello to everyone and let them know you appreciate their service. I also thought a lot about how people dealt with the little conflicts that are bound to happen. You can be the person that always wants to throw your weight around and win an argument, or you can be the person who recognizes that, even though different parties might have different interests, everyone’s goal is to put on a great show that the venue, audience, touring crew and artist enjoys. Or you can recognize that and try to negotiate a scenario where everyone feels that they brought their best out. I always wanted to be the latter.

What was your best day like and what was your most stressful day like?

I tiptoed around it when I first got this gig with The Wood Brothers, but Medeski Martin & Wood was my favorite band growing up; I would travel hours to see them. So mixing MMW at Red Rocks last year was a definite “15-year-old me would be so proud” moment.

I don’t like to dwell on my worst days, but there were some rough ones early on when we were on GPS units instead of our phones and I was driving. I put a city name into the GPS and forgot that I never put the venue address in for my first gig with an artist, and found myself in the middle of Boston at rush hour at load-in time. Another time when the GPS wasn’t updated, we were rushing to get to the Indianapolis airport, and there was about a mile and a half of exposed dirt construction between the end of the road and the airport. I assessed the situation and just said, “Hold on to your hats,” and off-roaded it to the airport.

What’s the best and worst part of your job?

The best part of my job is getting to work with all the great people I’ve found myself entangled with. Currently, that’s my lighting designer Alan Peterson and my tour assistant Madalyn Stefanak, along with The Wood Brothers band. But I’m so lucky to have worked with, and learned from, hundreds of people over the years. The hardest part, for me, is balancing my home life with my road life. I recently listened to the Marc Maron podcast with Jenna Fischer, and I was really struck by the part where she talked about how John C. Reilly took her aside when they wrapped a film and said, “You know this isn’t real life, right?” And her reaction was, “What do you mean? These are my best friends now—everyone is cute and smart and funny.”

It’s a really incredible thing to have a beautiful home life and a beautiful family on the road, but there’s also a learning curve to figuring out how much energy you need to devote to each of those parts of your life. I’m learning that it is very rare to meet people that have completely integrated the two aspects of life that folks like us have, and perhaps even rarer to meet people that are able to compartmentalize them in a healthy way.

This article originally appears in the April/May 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.