Much like any other job, people tend to settle into routines
on the road.

Sleeping, eating, working.

All of those things tend to fall into some sort of pattern
out here, and with any pattern comes a degree of repetition and redundancy.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before (redundancy!), Mike
likes to insult me.

Name calling and pointing at me with the naughty finger are
pretty much a daily occurrence out here, but to his credit, that’s not enough
for Mike.

Mike Inez likes to keep things fresh.

And last night in Toronto he actually came up with something
new.

It was later in the show, and I popped into the area behind
the monitor board to check things out for a bit.

We have a new monitor engineer on this tour.

He’s a really nice guy and is doing a great job so far, but
we don’t know each other very well yet, and even if we did, I know to stay back
out of his way during the show.

So when he turned around during Would? with a big smile on
his face and flipped me off, I was a little taken aback.

I wasn’t sure how to react until he pointed behind him.

There stood Mike, on the opposite side of the stage,
laughing his ass off, all without missing a note.

What had just happened?

Well, each band member has a little button on a pedal that
they can click, which allows them to speak into the microphone and only their
tech and the monitor engineer can hear.

So if you’re ever at a show and see one of the guys talking
into the mic, but you don’t hear anything, that just means they’re relaying a
message to someone off stage.

This time that someone was me.

And the message was very evident.

In the middle of performing one of the band’s biggest hits
to a sold out crowd, Mike managed to spot me in the wings and relay an R rated
sign language message to me.

After 25 years of friendship and touring the world together,
Mike has flipped me off thousands of times.

And I’ve returned the message just as often.

But history was made in Toronto when Mike used modern
electronic technology to engage a third party proxy to convey to me via a
specific hand gesture that I should go engage myself in a physically impossible act.

Innovation!