Ever been belly-bumped off a bus?

The Derek Trucks Band had just finished at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, California, the last stop on their 2003 cross-country tour. Like most nights, the band – bassist Todd Smallie, drummer Yonrico Scott, keyboardist and flutist Kofi Burbridge and lead vocalist Mike Mattison – went back to the bus with road manager Adam Rosenberg and guitar tech Joe Main. Unlike most nights, guitarist and founding member Derek Trucks was not with them. If he had been, the incident might never have happened.

“Joe [Main] is a big beastly bear of a man,” Rosenberg says of the 40-something roadie. “He’s normally a sweetheart. But everyone knew not to cross him because he had such a wicked temper.”

Trucks had a "special relationship" with him, Rosenberg says, acting as a mediator with the band whenever necessary. Main was a longtime friend of Trucks’ father, and Trucks hired him after alcoholism had nearly consumed him. Everyone else had to be careful to stay on Main’s good side.

That night, the band was hanging out on the bus, now parked in the hotel lot. And just like every other night, Rosenberg was distributing the band’s pay in cash – when he realized that he did not have enough to pay the driver, who had gone back to his hotel room. The road manager is always in charge of the money, and the money is always distributed in cash. He had paid the band, he had paid Main, but now there was not enough to pay their driver on the last night of a long tour.

“In hindsight,” Rosenberg says, “I should have paid the driver first, because he gets you place to place.” And because Main was technically the lowest man on the chain, Rosenberg knew he had to ask him for the money back.

“Joe was smoking a joint in the [bus] bathroom, so I went in there and I said, ‘Joe, we have to talk. I didn’t plan ahead. I need to pay the driver, so I need that money back.’ And at first he just laughed at me. But then I said I was serious. And all of a sudden he went from a calm guy smoking a joint to a gorilla wielding an acoustic guitar.”

Main chased Rosenberg out of the closet-sized bathroom, all the way to the front of the bus, grabbing a guitar along the way and “wielding it like a sword,” Rosenberg says. But there was not nearly enough space for Main to effectively swing a guitar on the cramped bus, so he used his girth to “belly-bump” Rosenberg out of the open door of the bus.
“He literally chased me off the bus and then around the bus, waving this guitar above his head,” Rosenberg says.

The band soon noticed the commotion outside. The tension had apparently escalated so quickly that no one knew what was happening until they saw Main chasing Rosenberg in circles around the nearly empty parking lot. Burbridge and Smallie leapt off the bus and grabbed Main, trying to restrain and calm him, while Rosenberg ran to the bus driver’s room. (“The driver and I got along well by the end of the tour,” he says.) After Rosenberg had explained the situation, the driver offered him some of his Chivas Crown Regal whiskey, feeling sympathetic because the whole episode had been an effort to get him paid.

“Everyone gets paid,” Rosenberg says. “Joe was overreacting. I even said, ‘Sorry, but it’s not like you’re not gonna get paid’ – that wasn’t good enough. But he eventually gave me the money back. Derek wouldn’t have stood for it. But without Derek, it was a bad scene.”