The errand completed, Stickells soon became part of rock ’n’ roll history as the roadie, and then tour manager, for Hendrix, the transcendent electric guitarist who was about to release his first single, “Hey Joe,” in Britain.
It became a four-year assignment: Stickells handled the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s gear, drove the band to gigs, fixed the van when it broke down and organized its tours. Some shows were more memorable than others: At the Denver Pop Festival in 1969, he brought Hendrix and his bandmates, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, to safety in a U-Haul truck at Mile High Stadium after tear gas had enveloped them onstage during a riot.
After the Experience dissolved in 1969, Stickells stayed with Hendrix, accompanying him most notably to Woodstock, where Hendrix played a jarring, feedback-heavy version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” When Hendrix died the next year in London, Stickells identified his body at a hospital and accompanied it to Seattle for burial.
What Stickells learned on the road with Hendrix laid the foundation for the business he developed over more than 30 years: He became a top road and production manager for musicians at a time when the logistics of touring and performing were growing increasingly elaborate and concerts were turning into ever more lavish extravaganzas.
He was best known for his years on the road with Queen, but he also worked with a star-studded cadre of other artists, including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Abba, Fleetwood Mac, Bette Midler and Madonna.
Stickells died March 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76. His wife, Sylvia (Reed) Stickells, said the cause was complications of a skull base meningioma, a brain tumor that grows in the bones that form the bottom of the skull. It was discovered in 2003 and could not be fully removed, she said.
Gerald Richard Stickells was born on July 22, 1942, in Lydd, a town in Kent, England. He was one of 10 children of Thomas and Doris (Coleman) Stickells, farm laborers in a wetland area called the Romney Marsh.
At 15, Gerry quit school to become an apprentice mechanic in a garage in nearby New Romney, riding 8 miles each way on his bicycle. It would be nearly a decade before he left to join Hendrix.
“His parents couldn’t understand why he’d leave this good job, with jobs hard to come by down on the marsh,” Sylvia Stickles said in an email. “They never really got the music thing.”
Stickells had no musical background, but he appreciated Hendrix’s musicianship and his skill as a performer.
“When you’re close to the audience, they become more involved in some way; it all feels more alive,” he said in an interview in the 1990s that is posted on Crosstown Torrents, a website devoted to Hendrix. He recalled the “voltage” of a Hendrix show at a “sweaty pub gig.”
After Hendrix died, Stickells managed his Manhattan recording studio, Electric Lady, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he turned the roles of tour and production manager into a global business. He teamed with Chris Lamb to form GLS Productions, which handled every aspect of live music touring and production, including staffing, travel, trucking, ticketing, lighting and stage rigging.
“We met on an Elton John tour, and he was the most experienced guy I had ever encountered,” Lamb said in an interview with Projection Lights and Staging News, an industry publication, in 2015, when it gave him its life achievement award. (Stickells had received the same honor eight years earlier.) “He knew how to handle every situation.”
Through Elton John’s manager, John Reid, Stickells and Lamb found another client in Queen, in the 1970s. They helped fulfill the group’s ambitions for the lavish stage spectacles it became known for.
“The hardest thing is dealing with the personalities involved, but once you become used to artists’ moods, you can usually stay a step ahead,” Stickells said in 1980 in an interview with the Philadelphia newspaper The Bulletin. “And I don’t spend too much time listening to the music. I’m too wrapped up in the practical matters.”
In a statement posted on Queen’s website after Stickells’s death, Roger Taylor, the band’s drummer, called him “father figure, great friend and teacher, and an island of calm in the midst of chaos.”
Peter Hince, who worked on Queen’s road crew from 1975 to 1986 and wrote the book “Queen Unseen” (2011), said Stickells had a productive relationship with the band’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury. “He was probably the only person able to get Freddie to change his mind, or convince him otherwise, when Fred chose to be difficult and play the diva,” Hince said in an email.
Stickells was also credited with helping to crack the market for rock concerts in South America in the early 1980s; Queen proved to be an early success in Argentina and Brazil in 1981.
His organizational and diplomatic skills were particularly helpful in dealing with military regimes. In 1985, he and Lamb built the infrastructure for the first Rock in Rio festival in Rio de Janeiro, where the lineup included Queen, James Taylor, AC/DC, George Benson, Yes, Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden.
“Rod Stewart showed up with his personal armed mini-military,” Stickells told Projection Lights and Staging News in 2007. “Death squads were the norm, and it was pretty intense, but Queen got along OK down there because they were able to just get with the local flavor.”
Just before the Rio festival, Stickells reflected on how much the concert business had changed since the 1960s.
Recalling the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, he told United Press International: “I was traveling with Hendrix, and we got all our sound equipment and the drum kit into one station wagon. Now I’m dealing with millions and tractor-trailer rigs and helicopters.”
Stickells continued to work until 2003, when he had a seizure while on tour with Paul McCartney in Moscow. He learned he had a brain tumor when he returned to Los Angeles. He last worked in 2006, as a production consultant for a Rolling Stones concert in Rio.
In addition to his wife, Stickells is survived by his sisters, Kathleen Evenden, Lilian Else and Muriel Green.
Stickells recently watched “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), the film about Queen that won four Oscars, including one for Rami Malek for his portrayal of Mercury. Stickells was fragile and could barely speak.
“The part that really caught his attention was the Live Aid performance,” Sylvia Stickells said, referring to the re-enactment of the 1985 benefit concert that featured a memorable performance by Queen. “That was a huge highlight of his career, and he definitely recognized it, suddenly pointing and smiling, ‘It’s Fred.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.