Advertisement
Watch a video New York band Edison made on their trip to Iraq: Ethan Isaac returned from his first tour in Iraq in 2005. The twenty-nine-year-old, from Madison, Wisconsin, traveled to far-flung posts in Balad, Tikrit and Ramadi, and faced enemy fire almost every day. Last year, he left for a second deployment, this time to Afghanistan. Isaac isn't a soldier. He's the frontman for New York hard-rock band Edison, who were recruited by the military to play for American troops stationed in some of the world's most dangerous places. "I remember doing a combat landing going into a base outside Tall Afar [in northwest Iraq]," says Isaac. "The plane is shaking, you can't see anything - there are no windows - we've got Kevlar on, helmets on our heads, and we are strapped in wearing jumpsuits. Our guitarist turns to me and says, 'What the hell did you get me involved in?' "
In past wars, the USO has famously shipped American entertainers like Bob Hope and Wayne Newton overseas to give the troops a taste of home. But while the civilian-led USO still does send celebs abroad - Kid Rock and Toby Keith have both played in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone - it's had trouble getting A-listers to soldiers in the remote outposts where more of them are now serving. Armed Forces Entertainment, a division of the Air Force that has planned smaller-scale events for the military since its creation in 1951, has increasingly picked up the slack. "There's more operating bases, and now troops are staying out much longer than they used to," says AFE director Lt. Col. Tamara Moes. "We have to work at recruiting the right entertainers, because it's kind of scary. You're not in the city, you're out in the dust."
About a dozen bands have toured Iraq with AFE in the last few years, including rockers like Edison and Baltimore's Niki Barr Band, country acts including Carly Goodwin and even the occasional R&B act such as the Fuzz Band. AFE scours local clubs, solicits demo CDs, scans MySpace and, this year, for the second time, set up a booth at the music industry's biggest conference, South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. "We had fifty scouts hitting the streets, and it was incredible," Moes says of SXSW, noting that the recruiters wore civilian clothes this year, after their uniforms seemed to scare people off in 2006. She says dozens of bands expressed interest during the conference and suggests that the effort might yield ten to twelve tours.
Bands recruited by AFE receive no pay, only travel expenses and a modest per diem. In exchange, they travel from base to base in Black Hawk helicopters and C-130 cargo planes, playing shows almost every night, in tents, mess halls and outside, in the sand, to crowds ranging from 20 to 2,000. The reward, they say, is the incredible response they get from the troops, some of whom haven't been home in more than a year. "You get a very immediate personal reaction, sometimes tearful and emotional," says Edison guitarist Jonathan Svec, who had strong doubts about the Bush administration's war policy - and an even stronger fear of flying - but says he's glad his bandmates pushed him to do it. "It was probably the best experience I've had in my life," adds Isaac.
Charlie Robison, a touring musician who's married to the Dixie Chicks' Emily Robison, recently did an Iraq tour with AFE and says his shows there were unlike any others he's ever played. "There's medevac helicopters coming in, you're seeing explosions happen a couple of miles away all the time, and lots of mortars," says Robison, who played six shows at six different bases over ten days, tailoring his sets to appeal to the troops (a cover of Jackson Browne's ode to masturbation, "Rosie," went over well). He wasn't sure what kind of reception he would get as a result of his association with the Dixie Chicks. "There was a certain amount of anxiety," says the forty-two-year-old singer, who has also been critical of the war. "The first base I went to, somebody came up and said, 'Hey, who's married to a Dixie Chick?' I thought, 'Aw, shit.' He said, 'Man, I love them - tell them I love 'em,' and that's how it was."
Like several of the musicians who visited troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Robison says his feelings about the war changed while he was there. "I spent from six o'clock in the morning until two o'clock in the morning hanging out with guys that have been on patrol all day and all night, who lost guys that day," he says. "It definitely has given me a lot to think about, that it's not as simple as I thought it was." Niki Barr, who fronts the Niki Barr Band and has relatives in the military, said she was also deeply affected by the group's recent twenty-five-day tour of U.S. bases in the Middle East. "It has definitely made me more patriotic to go over there and see these guys," she says. "Politics aside, they're just serving."