Wikipedia
Road manager
In the music industry, a road manager is a person who works with small to mid-sized tours (in terms of personnel involved, based on size of the production). Job responsibilities include (but are not limited to):
- advancing show dates
- making travel & hotel arrangements (for all group members)
- hiring backline techs or recommending techs to be hired (depending on authority given by artist management)
- coordinating artist media obligations (normally while on tour, but could be anytime)
- ensuring artist rider requirements are met
- collecting payments due to the artist at show time (or signing off on amount due to be sent via wire, depending on arrangements made by artist management)
- making vendor payments (or submission of amounts due to vendors to artist management)
- handling personnel issues
- distributing per diem (depending on per diem schedule approved by artist management)
Road managers can be confused with tour managers. Generally speaking, though, tour managers work with upper-mid to large scale tours and are often granted a much greater degree of authority in tour operations.
Usage examples of "road manager".
Al was talking about an old road manager he'd run off the midway twenty years before.
Little Steven's road manager wasn't terribly happy about being awakened in his hotel room at a little past four in the morning.
Tough, aggressive, hard-bitten, handling their husbands like a road manager with a new pop-singer.