Bob "Bobzilla" Davis lives in Raleigh, but it can be easy to forget that because he's gone so much criss-crossing the globe with some band or other. Davis has worked in various capacities on tours for a ton of acts over the past quarter-century, everybody from Clay Aiken to Coldplay. And he picked up some pretty cool recognition over the weekend at the Tour Link Conference: Tour Accountant of the Year, beating out finalists from the U2 and Bruce Springsteen tours, among others.
"I thought I had no chance, as it seemed that the U2 tour staff were sweeping all
the personnel award categories," he reports by e-mail. "It's true - it's not what you know, it's who you know."
For more on Davis and the tour-accounting gig, see below -- a feature on him from his run with System of a Down and Ozzfest several years back
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Accounts playable: On the road with Ozzfest, Raleigh man keeps a lot more than books
By David Menconi, News & Observer
Sept. 5, 2002
In 10 years of working for bands, Bob Davis has seen it all. He has witnessed Britney Spears smoke a cigarette, seen Christina Aguilera throw an off-camera fit and confronted gun-wielding security guards to keep his band from getting ripped off.
This summer, though, has been one for the books. Davis is tour accountant for System of a Down, the politically inclined whiplash-rock band from Los Angeles. System of a Down is second-billed band on Ozzfest, the heavy-metal extravaganza featuring two dozen bands plus Ozzy Osbourne (cartoonish star of the MTV real-life sitcom "The Osbournes").
Being a tour accountant is pretty easy work, mostly settling up fees and expenses with promoters and cutting checks to pay bills on the road. But Ozzfest, which ends after Sunday's show in Dallas, turned out to be the most drama-filled tour of 2002 -- one with an actual death toll. Raleigh resident Davis had a front-row seat for all the behind-the-scenes fireworks.
"Ozzfest has actually been pretty mellow, other than massive cancer and a couple of deaths," Davis sighs, calling by cell phone from a highway in the Nevada desert en route to Washington state. "It's at that stage where everybody's just ready for it to be over."
Trouble started before Ozzfest even began. Sharon Osbourne, who manages her husband, Ozzy, and is widely credited with engineering his career renaissance, was diagnosed with cancer in June. When she started chemotherapy, Ozzy announced he would bow out of his Ozzfest headlining role to be by her side. He lasted through exactly one treatment before Sharon sent him back on the road.
"He damn near fainted, and Sharon was completely stressed out by him being stressed out," Davis says. "So she told him to get the [expletive] out and go back to the tour."
After Osbourne's cancer was announced, a number of Ozzfest dates had to be canceled. Raleigh lost its July 24 date to Pittsburgh -- where one of the tour's truck drivers died of a heart attack. Then on Aug. 14, Drowning Pool singer Dave Williams was found dead on his band's tour bus in Manassas, Va.
A furor erupted when Drowning Pool's tour bus turned up for sale on the auction site eBay less than 24 hours after Williams' death. It was quickly withdrawn and the person responsible fired (thanks in part to Davis' efforts at identifying the culprit).
The ironic part of all this is that Davis went into tour accounting to cut down on the stress of tour managing.
Davis' list of past clients includes Chapel Hill's platinum-selling jazz combo the Squirrel Nut Zippers, new-metal band Powerman 5000 and even the British pop trio BBMak. But Davis earned his stripes with Cry of Love, the Raleigh rock band that had big rock-radio hits with "Peace Pipe" and "Bad Thing" in 1993-94. Davis was Cry of Love's road manager, learning the finer points on the job as the band played everything from stadiums to dive bars.
"Bob is the consummate pro," says Cry of Love alumnus Audley Freed. "Even when he was having to learn as he went, he always appeared to know exactly what he was doing. God knows, I wouldn't want to be a tour manager. Not only is a lot of baby-sitting involved, you've got to answer to a lot of people -- the band, factions within the band, management, label. The nobility factor is not as high as being a schoolteacher, but it's like that."
On most tours, road managers also do tour accounting. Only the biggest tours and bands have a separate person to handle the money.
"The accounting part of this is easy," Davis says. "An 8-year-old can run Excel to handle that. But the people skills, either you've got that or you don't and it can't be taught. If you just come in being a jerk from the get-go, before they give you a reason, promoters will clamp you down and take you for every cent."
Of course, once he's given a reason, Davis can be as jerky as any given situation requires. It's a skill he says he perfected while working for the Squirrel Nut Zippers and their manager, Erik Selz.
"Erik Selz is a complete bulldog, and so was I," Davis says. "Working for him is what turned me into a really aggressive show settler, because he wanted me to get every cent possible. So he gave me the leverage to be a complete [expletive], which I was expected to be."
Davis' tenacity and tour-manager experience gave him just the edge that System of a Down manager David "Beno" Benveniste was looking for.
"I am extremely detail-oriented and picky about the people I put around System of a Down," says Benveniste. "Bob is fantastic, extremely sharp, wonderful with numbers, very diplomatic and a very accessible person on the road. He's like the patrolman, he lays it down. I look at him as the Michael Jordan of tour accountants."
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Loot points:
Settling a show involves going over itemized statements of revenue versus expenses, negotiating various points and looking for red flags. Davis says that promoters routinely try to sneak questionable items into the "expense" column, such as charging for rental of equipment they already own.
Whatever money Davis can save is important, given how expensive touring is. For Ozzfest, System of a Down has a 20-person team on the road. There are touring and production managers, roadies to handle instruments and lights and sound, security, assistants and bus drivers in addition to the four bandmembers. The entourage travels in three buses, each of which costs $6,000 to $8,000 a week to keep on the road.
The other side of Davis' job is cutting down on theft -- policing venues for parasites like ticket scalpers and bootleggers selling unauthorized T-shirts. Promoters can be just as shady, whether it's overcharging for tickets or overselling the venue (illegally selling extra tickets to soldout shows). Davis frequently has to "click" venues, stationing people with clickers at the gates to count how many people enter a building.
Davis' tenure with System of a Down got off to an eventful start this spring, when he caught promoters overselling soldout venues in Europe. One show in Milan, Italy, sounds like a scene out of the movie "Pulp Fiction." Davis and band bodyguard "Herman the German" (a German wrestler named Ulf Nadrowski) had to contend with Uzi-toting security guards to get inside a box office and break up an oversell.
"We went into the box office, and there were six or eight guys in there who all looked like Uncle Junior from 'The Sopranos,'" Davis says. "We're grabbing everything, they're trying to stop us, Herman is pushing them out of the way and I'm wondering, 'Is this the part where the guys with the machine guns come in?'"
Fortunately, no shots were fired. As proof of that promoter's chicanery, Davis found a ticket numbered 10,000 -- for an 8,500-seat venue.
"We charged that promoter an extra $25,000 for that," says System of a Down manager Benveniste. "Bob gave me that number-10,000 ticket and I'm having it framed with the inscription, 'Show me the loot, Bob Davis.' That's what I always say to him, because he's the loot man."
