Early in 2003, I got an e-mail from a tour bus driver in Europe. I was surprised to hear that European promoters were holding off on booking concerts, not knowing what was going to happen as a result of the fear – and now, the reality – of war in Iraq. I worked briefly for Lisa Marie Presley earlier this year, and now I hear that she is cancelling her European tour. There goes two sound jobs, down the toilet, for her house and monitor mixers.

Most of us recall how so many gigs tanked right after 9/11, sending sound companies into crisis, particularly if they had not diversified into install and corporate work. What has been happening over the last year is not quite that dramatic, but it still affects people’s livelihoods. King Sunny Adé just cancelled a tour, saying he did not want to get stuck in the States, as happened to him immediately after 9/11. Youssou N’Dour has made statements regarding his own tour cancellation being based on a strong personal wish to not seem as though the U.S.’s Iraq policy was okay with him.

I don’t want to get into anyone’s debate about the rightness or wrongness of the war, what I would like to focus on is our country’s increasingly restrictive policies towards performers from other countries. I am all for preventing terrorists attacking us, that is not the point.

What is really unfortunate now is that people who have travelled here to play before, in many cases more than once, are having their visas delayed to the point where their U.S. promoters cannot confidently book a date, since they are not sure whether the person or group will definitely be admitted, x number of months from now. I have been particularly hearing this about the cultural world, the people who play folkloric and classical music, rather than rock or jazz.

I went to see Jonathan Richman a couple months ago. A duo who opened the show seemed kind of disorganized, which made sense when they explained they had only gotten the call from the promoter that very afternoon. Someone explained to me that the opening act originally scheduled to play also appeared with him the night before, in San Diego.

After that show, the band - Dengue Fever – decided to make a late-night celebratory trip into Tijuana. They were shocked a few hours later, when their Cambodian singer, Cchom Nimol, was detained and put in a cell by American border police, and not allowed to re-enter the U.S.. I haven’t been able to find out what happened thereafter, but this young woman had been living peacefully with her family, and making music, in Long Beach for quite a while.

9/11 embarassed a lot of government agencies. Hey, they were so freaked out they made a whole new one, the Office of Homeland Security! Now, it seems to me that they are overcompensating. Because they failed to catch the hijackers in 2001, they are making honest touring people from other countries sweat, and wait, and in general have a much harder time making a living, than they did for the last decade.

I remember what it was like to land at Charles deGaulle airport in Paris and see soldiers with submachine guns walking around, back in 1997. People who are currently making fun of the French do not seem to know that France has been getting hit by terrorism, in a very significant way, for quite a while, long before 9/11/2001.

I appreciate the increasing freedom brought by the EU, because I know what it used to be like, to be stopped and boarded at each national border over there. It is great to be able to blithely motor into Germany from the Netherlands and not have to wake up and show your passport to some cop in the middle of the night. Now it is like driving from California into Nevada, or Pennsylvania into Ohio. And you can spend Euros in so many places, instead of changing currencies all the time.

When I was dramatically proclaiming my noble bohemianism, after I dropped out of college around 1974, I told one of my uncles that if consistent income was what mattered most to me, I would get into either the drugs or armament industries. Well, they’re still selling a lot of guns and dope, are they not? My arms are so tired, I just flew in from Berlin …

What bothers me most, I think, is that there does not seem to be any basic street cop or good concert security guard type of intuitiveness in many law enforcement situations anymore – do you know what I mean? Everything is formalized and automated.

In a sense, we sound people – and, of course, other off-topic show techs - are like the canaries in the coal mine that Sting sang of, or perhaps more like the chickens that our troops in Iraq are keeping in cages, to be an early warning system, if they are ever gassed. When people are depressed, and scared about spending money, they don’t go out to clubs and concerts. And corporations scale back on the size of conventions, and maybe go with a less expensive oldies act, who doesn’t mind foldback monitors from FOH, instead of someone younger, who is more expensive to hire, and wants two desks as a matter of course.

The newly added personnel at most airports do not make me feel safer. No offense, but most of them do not seem to be as alert and ready to take action as the soldiers are at the airport in Paris. I do not protest when I am asked to take off my steel-shanked shoes. But I do not think the terrorists are going to try the same trick twice.

If an average U.S. citizen says they do not care about whether some musicians and technicians get inconvenienced, that says something about how dispensable our work is considered. During his talk at NSCA, John Meyer even commented that the calculations he does for speaker building do not have the same type of urgency as calculations regarding an incoming missile hurtling towards some soldiers somewhere. If those do not come out right, the consequences are far more disastrous than if a speaker doesn’t sound so great.

It’s just that, to me, travelling is one of the greatest hopes for humanity’s future. I believe it is important to see people of other lands as people, instead of two-dimensional caricatures, or statistics. I would hope that people of all political persuasions can agree that when anyone’s freedom to travel and make a living is limited, that is sad, whatever the reason.