Backstage is OK for Nanaimo man who tends guitars for rock gods

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Backstage is OK for Nanaimo man who tends guitars for rock gods
Jim Survis returns to Protection Island when he’s not on tour with Van Halen
By Julie Chadwick, The Daily News June 16, 2012

There aren’t many people in Nanaimo who can lay claim to being casually referenced on Twitter by Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, but for local guitar technician Jim Survis, it’s just another day on the job.

It’s a job that these days has taken him on the road with Van Halen’s “Different Kind of Truth” tour. It was from the tour’s Los Angeles stop that I talked to him on the phone.

It’s safe to say that techs like Survis are not only the mechanics who keep the cogs of the great entertainment machine running at top speed, but they’re also the grease that keep it ticking along smoothly. As such, I wonder if Survis ever wishes it were him up there on stage, thrusting his hips and getting panties thrown at him.

Um, no. Survis says though he’s a “big music enthusiast” and a hobby guitar player, he never really had aspirations to be a professional musician. It always seemed clear to him that his expertise was in being on the sidelines, in the technical side of things, where he is always ready to help with whatever a performer may need concerning the tools of his trade. He likens his job to “what a caddy is to a pro golfer.”

On Van Halen’s tour he serves as bass guitar tech for guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s son Wolfgang, who he affectionately calls “Wolfie” and is featured on the band’s latest album, their first in 14 years.

Jobs don’t come much sweeter than his and being at the top of his game Survis has toured with some of the biggest names in the business. He spent 18 years in the studio and on the road with Aerosmith, earning several platinum records for his work on their albums. He’s also done three Super Bowl halftime shows and various television awards shows, including the Grammys and the Academy Awards.

Then there are the jam sessions with the crew band, joined at various times by Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, or the members of Kiss, or Mick Mars from Motley Crüe, or Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top.

This level of success didn’t come easily, however. After a “turbulent” childhood, Survis ended up finding stability as a teen after moving to Nanaimo to live with his sister.

At 16 he found his start in the business when a friend with a top-40s bar band needed help with a gig and he never looked back. In his 20s he made the jump to working for bands that already had records out, and from there he moved up the ladder to bigger Canadian bands like Trooper, The Headpins, Loverboy and Bryan Adams.

“It didn’t happen overnight,” acknowledges Survis. “It took years of touring and scratching my way up, but I had a lot of drive and I could see that light at the end of the tunnel.”

His advice for other aspiring technicians is to live by a “code”: you get what you give, and what you put out comes back to you. He also believes that to be a winner you have to surround yourself with other winners and that the people you surround yourself with are a reflection of and a part of who you are.

Overall, he says he figures if you just wake up in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, do a good job and do the right thing, the rest will usually take care of itself.

As we wrap up so he can ready for the next tour date in San Diego, I ask him offhand if there’s any guitar he’s worked on that stands out for him as a favourite.

“I would say working on Jimmy Page’s double-necked Gibson SG guitar. The Stairway to Heaven guitar,” recall Survis, who worked with Page on a record in 1991.

He says he enjoyed working on all of Page’s guitars because they are so “iconic,” but that one held particular significance “because that was the guitar that he was playing in the poster that I had up in my room when I was a kid.”

Working on the road is always great, says Survis, but nothing quite compares to the feeling of finishing the job and making his way back to the “best place in the world” – his home on Protection Island.

It’s like “the cherry” on the whole thing, he says.