I have always loved live music.

A friend from high school called and asked if I wanted to take her boyfriend's spot as a runner for concerts in Little Rock. The venue: Barton Coliseum. Ten thousand seats, in a part of town you did not want your car to break down in. What's a runner you ask? Think Red from Shawshank Redemption. I was just supposed to get stuff.

I said yes before she finished asking.

For the next five years I was there for every show that rolled through. I was in awe of the sheer size of the operation, the coordination, the precision it took to build a whole world out of a parking lot and have it gone by sunrise.

But the real education wasn't in the trucks. It was in the people. The artists didn't have to think about their gear getting stolen or a flat tire eating the per diem — that was on me and the crew. They just had to walk out and be larger than life for two hours. We made sure “larger than life” didn't fall apart backstage. Along the way I met every kind of weirdo, oddball, genius, and burnout the music business produces, and got a real feel for how that art actually gets to an audience. I did and saw some weird stuff over those five years. I got to experience, albeit for a short time, what that life is like.

The 10,000 people out front had no clue.

I'd been in a corporate job since college, and none of it ever stuck the way music did. So I decided to start promoting music on the side — small shows, in my little town in South Carolina. Coffee shops, mid-sized rooms, anywhere a band could plug in. I think, subliminally, I just wanted a little of that '80s feeling back. I wanted to be around musicians.

As I booked more independent artists, my wife and I would put them up at the house, make sure they got a decent meal, and over dinner they'd tell us what life on the road actually looked like. While the scope was much smaller than my coliseum days, it was essentially the same: there's a lot of work that goes into that show you love.

We heard it over and over — sleeping in the van in some sketchy lot, or sometimes sleeping in the gear trailer itself, because somebody had to make sure nothing walked off overnight. These were touring artists, the ones putting on the show you paid to see, coming home broke and worn down, and nobody in the crowd had any idea.

That's the disconnect that never left me. The audience thinks the life on the stage is the life the artist is living. It isn't. Fans get the show. Artists eat the cost of getting there. Every time we fed someone or gave up the guest room, I kept thinking the same thing: How does this story get told?

Fast forward another 18 years.

It's time to tell it.