Traveling Performers Quotes

I grew up in a really rural town, Stratford, Ontario, with 30,000 people. There's a big festival thrown in the town. A lot of people travel from all over the world to see it, and growing up, I actually used to busk on the street. I'd play my guitar, sing, and people would throw money in the case.

I feel like I grew up in the circus. I know planes, trains and automobiles. And really talented, weird people.

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

I went out on the road when I was 12 years old, playing with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers. That was the summer of 1972. We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, George Wallace campaign rallies and bluegrass festivals. As a kid, I had grown up watching quartets that were very entertaining.

Having secured my Indian actors, I started for Baltimore, where I organized my combination, and which was the largest troupe I had yet had on the road.

Word gets around when the circus comes to town, don't it?

Wherever there are rock 'n' rollers, we'll play. That's what we've been doing for more than 30 years - rock 'n' roll. It's made me everything from an honorary mayor to honorary member of a motorcycle gang.

Essentially, the popular musician in America must learn that his basic job is to entertain people, to make them forget their sorrows for a moment or two; in the same sense that any popular art form must aim at the same distraction value. Any such job as that is basically a young man's business. It takes a young man's energy to go traveling around the country, night after night in a different place, prancing and cavorting around in front of mobs of people all out to try to forget their problems for an evening. And for a young man it can be a good enough way of life, if he happens to like it.

My grandma did opera singing for the better part of her life; she used to sing all over the place. My grandpa was a sax player, and he used to travel all over the place, too.

Actors are supposed to be these runaways that get in a covered wagon filled with hats and tambourines and go from town to town making people smile.

To be able to tour different countries and see our fans is always a valuable moment and we try our best to return the love!

Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.

I did three television shows in Poughkeepsie in one day, with Adrian Adonis and The Iron Sheik. They gave us no food.

I was in a two-person show [with Oliver Ralli] called the Midwesterners where we wrote all of our own stuff and we traveled the country with it. That's what eventually led me to L.A.

I love standup, but not the grind of traveling and dealing with club owners.

Being on the road with rock, it's pretty much 90 percent guys.

Willie Nelson, out there 200 days a year, calls his band family. And it is.

In a way, all actors are gypsies, or much like a traveling circus.

Why the hell shouldn't I run away with the circus?

My father was a man of the theater. I grew up in a theater family. As a young man, as a boy, I gypsied around with my siblings and my parents to, like, eight different towns, went to eight different schools. All those things were extremely formative, and I think that's what happens.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through.

There are only so many hours you can sit on the bus and watch TV or play basketball or whatever we do to pass the time before we go out onstage.

The touring comic is a lonely soul, sometimes dabbling into conversation with a colleague in the green room, but on the whole, we just stand around and try to cope with the random diversity that comes with the 'job.'

You get so brainwashed. You're on the road 300 days a year, and that's why guys get so messed up. This life becomes a part of them. It's not real, but some guys who are still in the business think it is.

I've done stand-up at airport Holiday Inns and that's where you feel like you're doing comedy for people that hate it.