The Dreaming

When a god’s believers die or lose belief, a god dies. New gods and goddesses continually rise as old ones die due to neglect.

Gaiman centers his novel on Shadow, a man released from prison after serving three years for assault. On the plane ride home, Shadow’s coach seat is taken, and he is moved to first class, where he sits next to a man calling himself Wednesday. Wednesday mysteriously knows several of the details of Shadow’s life, and offers him a job, much to Shadow’s consternation. Shadow, after trying to escape from Wednesday, eventually takes the job, and finds out that this ability to know details about a person’s life is only the beginning of Wednesday’s talents.

Gaiman, an expatriate Englishman living in Minneapolis, has great fun playing with American concepts of the sacred. Christianity is a majority religion in America, but Jacquel, aka Anubis of the Egyptian pantheon, observes to Shadow, ‘Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.’ Later, Shadow meets Eostre, the goddess of the dawn, who is unhappy because although the Easter day celebration continues, most people have forgotten that the ceremony was an old pagan rite in her honor that predates Christianity.

In addition, if one accepts the premise that belief is what gives a god or goddess power, then there are going to be some strange deities wandering the American landscape. In the course of his journeys with Wednesday, Shadow meets some of the new gods of America, like the goddess Media, the god Technology and the gods Credit and Television.

In Gaiman’s world, there is a limited amount of belief to go around, and the gods and goddesses end up fighting each other for it, much as people might fight over food during a famine. The new gods are afraid of the capricious shifts in belief that greatly diminished prior gods in the American landscape, such as the gods of Railroad. The modern gods ally themselves to try to wipe out the older pantheon and free up more belief for them to feed on.

The Automobile gods in particular are frightening. Gaiman writes of them, ‘They were a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.’ A gruesome, yet accurate way to portray America’s love affair with the automobile.

As the potential war looms closer, Shadow finds himself increasingly a target. There is a highly amusing sequence when the god of Television tries to get Shadow to come to the other side and betray Wednesday, whom the TV god explains ‘isn’t even yesterday anymore.’ Shadow eventually is moved to a small town to hide until Wednesday needs him, but even his dreams are loud enough to be heard by the immortals and attract their attention, much to Wednesday’s annoyance. No one can figure out exactly why Shadow is so important, but he becomes a focal point for all the immortals.

Gaiman keeps throwing surprises at the reader throughout the book. Just when you think you’ve figured out what’s going on, he twists everything around. If you are familiar with some of the different worldwide mythological traditions, it is great fun to try to figure out who the different gods and goddesses are as Wednesday travels around with Shadow, trying to enlist their help in the war against the new pantheon.

The proof is in the instant bestseller status of some recent releases, including Doug Stanton’s In Harm’s Way (currently in its 14th week on the NYT hardcover nonfiction list) and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (which hit the hardcover fiction list on July 8), as well as the by-now familiar success stories of Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus and Lip Service by e-publishing guru M.J. Rose.

Despite developing a more cautious attitude toward all things Internet, publishers continue to bank on the power of the digital word of mouth. Gaiman’s publisher, William Morrow, for example, has only placed one major trade ad for his book, said Gaiman’s agent, Merrilee Heifetz of Writers House. And that ad, in the NYT Book Review, came out after the book became a bestseller.

“Web sites have closed,” allowed Fauzia Burke, president and founder of the Internet marketing firm FSB Associates, which managed the campaign for In Harm’s Way. “But traffic is actually higher. People are still online; it’s just a matter of figuring out where they are.”

But Internet marketing won’t work for just any book. And it’s more complicated than simply papering, so to speak, Web sites with ads. A successful online marketing campaign generally follows a few simple rules:

Rule 1. Choose an Author or Book Likely to Appeal to a Niche Audience

“Fiction can be incredibly difficult to pitch online,” Burke said. “But nonfiction works incredibly well since you can tap into the specific communities.” With In Harm’s Way, for example, “I knew that the history community would be really supportive of this book,” she said.

When Burke left her job at Holt to start her own company in 1995, she saw the potential for harnessing the effects of a grassroots campaign. “I started looking at what was possible online and seeing the amazing communities online and how supportive they are of certain books. I thought this was a really great way for authors to take their message to the communities they’re writing for.”

Though American Gods is fiction, it hasn’t been hard to establish an audience online. It probably helps that Gaiman, as Heifetz put it, “is a media chameleon.” The author of The Sandman, a popular comic book for DC Comics, as well as a collaborative novel with British author Terry Pratchett, and the man behind Neverwhere, a popular BBC series, Gaiman came equipped with a built-in fan base for his first novel. His publisher, Morrow, must have had faith that it could translate into readers; it paid Gaiman a $1 million advance for two novels and a short story collection.

Rule 2. Start Early to Build Buzz

For Stanton’s book, FSB started promoting four months ahead of time. They sent galleys to history buffs, and while building anticipation for the book they also got insight into how best to serve potential readers online. Word of the book spread through newsgroups and enthusiast sites like historychannel.com and historyhouse.com.

Morrow took a similar approach with Gaiman. “They built excitement with americangods.com,” said Heifetz. Features on the site included a journal about the writing of the book and a countdown to publication. “It was the perfect way to grow his audience. Comic book readers are Internet kind of people. We not only found new fans, but got the old ones to go out there and buy the book.”

Rule 3. Know Your Audience; Target Your Audience

One of the reasons it’s difficult to promote general fiction online is that it’s not easy to market directly to a general reader. But niche fiction and nonfiction often have a loyal readership or information-hungry audience. Heifetz said she is trying to get foreign publishers to use the americangods.com Web site in the same way that Morrow has, because she knows Gaiman’s audience will respond. “I’m trying to coordinate that now because in each of these countries, he already has a comic book audience.”

For Stanton’s book, it was simply a matter of tapping into the audience of history and World War II enthusiasts. “The history community sort of flies under the radar of the mainstream media,” said Burke, “but they support each other and are well connected and wired. It’s not easy, because they know their books. You can’t just give them a bad book. But they trust our judgment.”

Rule 4. Provide a Useful Web Site with Information That’s Easy to Find

The one-day laydown and twelve-city tour for Gaiman may have been costly, but spreading information about the book and the tour was not. Gaiman drew crowds of 250 to 300 people at his signings. “It was mostly the Web site that got people out there,” Heifetz said.

Burke said even a campaign that relies heavily on print can benefit from the Web. “If you advertise but don’t have a Web site, there’s no place to go for more information.” Her team created ussindianapolisinharmsway.com and loaded it with book tour information and content related to the book.

Rule 5. Be Prepared and Enjoy the Success.

Morrow has gone back to press with American Gods six times since June 19. In its first week, the novel sold 2,613 copies at BN.com and Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton stores across the nation (this number is thought to represent approximately 20% of sales of nationwide) and has sold 7,909 copies as of the week ending July 15. It spent two weeks on the NYT hardcover fiction list, and is still hanging in at No. 19 on the expanded bestsellers list for July 22.

They make an eye-catching mixture, like a coming together of modern-day tribes. There are Goths, all in black, with top hats and studded collars around their necks. There are big bearded bikers; boys in skirts; skinny Japanese teenagers. And there are people you wouldn’t look at twice: ordinary people, mainstream people.

The only thing they have in common – a writer named Neil Gaiman – is sitting inside a cordoned-off area of the shop, signing books at a frantic rate. He is here to promote his new novel, American Gods (Hodder Headline). He is best known, though, for The Sandman – a 2,000-page story in comic book form that counts Norse and Egyptian mythology, African and English folklore among its references.

Although it started as a cult item, the cult has spread. Norman Mailer, Tori Amos and Stephen King are admirers; the latest literary sensation, Zadie Smith, recently wrote him a fan letter. For The Sandman stands as a key text of the Nineties. In it, Gaiman drew together many of the currents that bubbled below the surface of the times: a millennial preoccupation with alternative spiritualities, a New Age interest in dreams and archetypes, a postmodern fascination with mythologies and storytelling.

A decade later, these currents are no longer below the surface. Indeed, it looks very much as though The Sandman presaged our present pop cultural landscape, for today’s biggest stories – from Harry Potter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer – exist in spaces it charted first.

“It’s all moved centre stage,” observes Gaiman. “There’s definitely the feeling that what was really marginal 15 years ago – what was me going off and indulging myself in weird stuff that nobody else was particularly interested in – has now moved front and centre.”

Gaiman has continued to pursue his preoccupations, and it’s a measure of how far the mainstream has moved that American Gods has gone straight into The New York Times’s top 10 bestseller list. The novel is set in an America much like the one we know, except that it is teeming with gods brought over by immigrants, and then forgotten.

“There were things I wanted to say about America,” says Gaiman, who moved there from Britain in 1992. “It’s a country built of people coming from elsewhere, and rapidly throwing away everything they brought with them. I imagine if I were John Grisham and I wanted to tackle that, I’d find some way of doing it as a legal story – but for me, it was gods and myths.”

While Grisham may still be better known than Gaiman, in today’s world, gods and myths far outsell courtroom drama, or indeed almost anything else. Where not so long ago the fantastic, the supernatural, the mystical existed on the cultural fringes, they seem to be everywhere today. They are central to so many of television’s top programmes – Buffy, The X-Files, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Roswell.

The same is true of the biggest publishing phenomenon of our era, Harry Potter, with its magic and wizardry. Close behind comes Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, populated by shamans, witches and angels. Noting the phenomenal sales of such works, HarperCollins, publishers of CS Lewis’s Narnia series, are reportedly contemplating removing its Christian slant to allow it to compete in the 21st-century marketplace.

Even Hollywood, notoriously slow on the uptake, has been riding the wave. The biggest films of recent years include The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, the latest Star Wars film and The Matrix – all built around supernatural premises – while the most eagerly awaited movie of the year is the adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings.

In the right place at the right time is Neil Gaiman, who now finds himself commanding $750,000 a script as a Hollywood screenwriter. So what is going on? How has a cultish English fantasy writer got into this position? One possible answer is that Gaiman’s move from margins to mainstream reflects deep social changes that have been building up in recent decades. Surveys in Britain have found that while half of us find it hard to believe in God, more than three-quarters have faith in some aspect of the occult. The result is a nation vastly more likely to consult horoscopes than the Bible, to consume supernatural stories than go to church.

“It’s a time when established religion has lost the allegiance of the general reader, and people are open to work with that sort of background,” says Philip Pullman. “This has been going on for 20 years – Stephen King, Clive Barker – that sort of popular literature which takes the supernatural as being self-evidently there, part of everyday life.” What is different today is the scale. While writers such as King and Barker have sold in great numbers, they always worked in genre ghettos. Harry Potter and Buffy cut across genres. Their narrative values are those of the commercial mainstream.

Some are worried by these shifts. In America, religious leaders fear that they represent the beginning of a nation of pagans. There have been calls to ban the likes of Harry Potter as a consequence. But while their rise may be linked to broad social and spiritual trends, it most likely reflects another, perhaps more basic need: our insatiable hunger for stories.

“I think it’s all connected to how we perceive narratives now,” suggests David Fickling, Pullman’s publisher. “From the Twenties onwards, a modernist disposition threw narrative out of the window. But what has been discovered by the commercial forces is that story power puts bums on seats, sells books, sells anything. Narrative is the most powerful thing we have, and fantasy is an aspect of reflective narrative. It’s an exploration of reality at one remove – and that’s how we think, that’s how human beings develop our understanding.”

Fantastical narratives satisfy something deep within us. They have survived because they do what all stories do spectacularly well: they allow us to imagine possibilities, to reflect creatively on our own lives.

“These stories are a reaction to everything that’s going on, a way of making sense of it all,” says Gaiman. “In Harry Potter time, people make Harry Potters.”

Gaiman, who lives in Minneapolis, hopes this will be the book that propels him out of the fantasy and comics genres and into mainstream success. His previous books include “Neverwhere” and “Stardust.”

“American Gods” is about Gaiman’s two biggest obsessions, love and death.

In it, a war is brewing between the Old World gods and new gods worshipped today.

“People believe in television,” Gaiman said. “People believe in the future, the Internet, the media and Wall Street and ‘Monday Night Football.’ ”

In “American Gods,” the character Shadow is released from prison early when his wife dies in an accident.

Shadow gets a job working for Mr. Wednesday, a grifter, crook, liar and charmer; he is also the Viking god Odin.

Wednesday and Shadow travel the country, asking other gods to join Wednesday’s side in the coming battle.

Gaiman spent five years researching mythology and American folklore and visiting the weird tourist attractions that figure into the book.

“American Gods” works on two levels.

On one, it’s a thriller/murder mystery, elements Gaiman thinks will appeal to nonfantasy readers. On another, deeper level, it’s the British writer’s take on American culture as a polyglot of influences and beliefs from Europe, Africa and Asia.

“I was trying to explain (America) to myself” using myth and fantasy, he said.

He acknowledged that most readers are what he called “mythologically challenged.” But he says they’ll enjoy the novel even if they can’t pinpoint who the disguised god-characters are.

“You don’t have to know anything at all about West African spider gods to know (the character) Mr. Nancy is a funny old man,” Gaiman said. “If you recognize them, it’s brownie points.”

Gaiman first earned prominence with his Sandman horror novels.

Currently. he is working on a screenplay for a movie adaptation of the three-part novel series “Death: The High Cost of Living,” published in 1993. He also plans to direct the script, something he never has done before. “I’m pretty confident,” he said.

Gaiman sees good things happening in the fantasy genre and is heartened by the legions of children reading the Harry Potter books.

“It’s a place (young readers) can go that is unlike any other place, and it’s welcoming, and it’s a book place,” he said.

Neil Gaiman know his place in the fantasy fiction pecking order.

‘I would say I’m probably a second division British treasure.

‘Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling are the two most special cases on the planet and if you add in Helen Fielding and Richard Curtis you would have a complete set of the British (writers) who are treasured.

‘They are the ones that everybody knows about and loves. I have always been a specialised taste, though things are changing with this novel.’

This novel is American Gods, a surreal road trip that seems to be part Jack Kerouac, part Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

It follows the modern odyssey of Shadow, a man freshly released from prison to find his wife is dead, his job is gone and everything he had been certain about in his life is now untrue.

He finds himself employed by an enigmatic man called Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a former god and the king of America.

They take the tourist road less travelled across the States, meeting other myths and deities who are now living humdrum lives, pumping gas(in the case of Odin) or becoming streetwalkers (Babylonian love goddesses).

‘I don’t think I could have set this anywhere other than America,’ said Neil who moved there nine years ago.

‘America is a culture where everyone who arrives gives up everything and embraces the future.

‘The British do not embrace the future. We sidle towards it with one eye on the past. We feel that in order to go into the future you have to give up many good things as well. Like you can have giant superstores but you have to lose cornershops which are nice.

‘It’s like the old joke that America is a country that thinks 100 years is a long time and Britain is a country which thinks 100 miles is a long way.’

Neil who looks like a retired rock star with his unruly mop of black hair and uniform of black jeans black T-shirt and black leather bikers jacket, began his writing life as a journalist, doing interviews for national magazines including Penthouse.

He turned his back on hack-dom after penning a quick cash-in biography of Birmingham supergroup Duran Duran.

It went straight to the top of the book charts and a week later the publisher’s bust.

‘I told myself that was the last time I was going to do anything for the money because when I try it always goes wrong.’

Instead he switched to the more financially unpredictable genre of fiction and swiftly became one of the world’s most successful graphic novelists as the author of the cult Sandman series.

It sold over a million copies every year and was described by Norman Mailer as ‘a comic strip for intellectuals’.

‘Out of all the things I have written, novels, short stories, films, novels, the comics are probably the hardest because there is a terrifying economy of words,’ says Neil.

‘You probably have 30 words to a panel, six or seven panels to a page – nine would be pushing it – and 24 pages to a comic.’

His award winning three part series Death: The High Cost of Living became a best seller while his novel Neverwhere was made into a television series.

Collaborators include Terry Pratchett, with whom he wrote Good Omens which is now being made into a film by Terry Gilliam, and Alice Cooper, who named his album after his and Neil’s comicThe Last Temptation.

‘Working with Terry was like being an apprentice to a master craftsman,’ recalls Neil, ‘I would give him stuff and he would say ‘if you change this word it will be two per cent funnier’.’

Not that Neil needs to be unduly modest. He has already won ‘all the awards you can and a few you can’t for comics, and a couple they decided you couldn’t win for comics anymore once they had given to me, which caused great embarrassment.’

His laid-back humour, which borders on glibness, is one of the things he misses about Britain along with ‘irony, good radio, real money, trains and adverts that don’t treat you as if you are an idiot.’

Neil lives with his wife and children in a turreted Addams Family style house near Minneapolis, where they moved to be close to his wife’s relatives.

‘If they had really explained to me about the winters there before I went over I don’t think we would ever have moved.

‘When you get there you notice all these giant hamster tunnels linking the buildings and you realise that is so people don’t have to go outside.

‘And then one day the temperature drops to minus 40 and you are down in science fiction country where the physical properties of matter change.’

As part of his research for new book Neil took to the road to explore the interior of America, discovering cultural curiosities and ‘the places you don’t normally reach in fiction’.

‘There are parts of Wisconsin where you can still buy Cornish pasties, which dates back to the time when the Cornish people emigrated there to work the tin mines.

‘During the summer all over America they hold these Renaissance Festivals where for four to six weeks people get dressed up every weekend and walk around talking in these odd Shakespearean accents.

‘Another time I was driving in the middle of nowhere when I came across these barns with the words ‘See Rock City, The World’s Wonder’ or ‘See Seven States from Rock City’ painted on the roof.

‘I assumed it was just around the corner but this being America it was another day and a half’s driving. Once I saw it I knew I had to set the climax of the book there.’

Although the book is about gods it is not really about religion. It is about the superstitions and beliefs that the immigrants brought with them to the new world, then replaced them with other objects of worship like hamburger bars and television.

The strange attitude the Americans have towards what little past they have, re-writing the bits they don’t like, was brought home to Neil when his son Mike returned from school one day and told him his teacher had said that Neil was a liar.

‘I asked him why and he said ‘because I told him what you told me about how people were transported to America for stealing instead of being hanged in England and that was where a lot of people in the Virginias and Carolinas had come from. My teacher said that wasn’t true and the only people who came to America were pilgrims seeking freedom of religion.’

‘And I thought there you go, a history teacher who knows nothing about history. They know this nice, clean, sterile Disney version they have been taught and they aren’t interested in anything else.

‘So I thought I would put a little real history in the book just for them.’

AMERICA IS a country of the mind as well as the political entity known as the United States. It has no border posts, but incomers have to make their own accommodation to the ways they do things there. The sly wit and erudition of every other sentence of American Gods reminds us that Neil Gaiman is a very English writer, but this story of how various gods and other entities came to America also implies the story of his loving being there.

This is a fantastic novel, as obsessed with the minutiae of life on the road as it is with a catalogue of doomed and half-forgotten deities. In the course of the protagonist Shadow’s adventures as the bodyguard and fixer of the one-eyed Mr Wednesday, he visits a famous museum of junk and the motel at the centre of the US, as well as eating more sorts of good and bad diner food than one wants especially to think about.

Shadow is out of jail a day early because his wife and his best friend died in a car crash – in circumstances that make it ironically clear how little he understood his life. His relationship with his wife Laurel is one of the strongest things in the book; undead, she haunts him, insisting on working on their flawed, loving relationship and exhibiting a fatal callousness towards those of the living she sees as a threat to him. Perceived by everyone as the race they are not, endlessly manipulating coins to keep himself from thinking too deeply, Shadow is an attractive hero, all the more so because he finds himself a loyalty and sticks to it beyond death.

Wednesday, as the moderately informed reader works out several pages before we are explicitly told, Odin, the gallows-god; reduced to the status of a petty con artist and determined to be pushed no further. America is full of old gods, brought there by their worshippers – and the new gods of technology are jealous even of the space they occupy in poverty and retirement. There is a war on, a war of menace and casual assassination. Shadow takes the first job he is offered after leaving jail, and it becomes a crusade.

Many of the incidental pleasures here come from the casual portraits of gods down on their luck. This is a wistful book rather than a comical one, but there is a lot of wit in Gaiman’s sense of how the once-worshipped cope. What we see of the new gods is equally intelligent; the murderous Russian god of evil Czernobog meets the cliche-obsessed Media and asks his companions: “`Isn’t she the one who killed her children?’ `Different woman,’ said Mr Nancy. `Same deal.’”

This patness sometimes risks everything – but there is illumination as well as snappy one-liners. Gaiman’s jokes have the same metaphysical bite as those of unfashionable writers he admires, like GK Chesterton and James Branch Cabell.

American Gods has an attractive complexity. We have Shadow’s adventures on the road, but also his weeks in a small snow-bound town which would be perfect were it not for the yearly disappearance of adolescents, and the happy days he spends with two Egyptian deities who have bowed to the necessity of their condition and gone into the funeral business. It is Mr Ibis, the courtly old man who is also the bird-headed Thoth, who narrates many of the inset tales: Vikings sacrifice the first American they see and come to no good end; a transported Cornishwoman leaves out milk for the pixies; mammoth-worshipping hunters bring their skull-idol with them across the straits.

One of Gaiman’s early scripts for a graphic novel featured a man cursed with too many good ideas; the joke was that, in order to convince us, he had to give his character a wealth of story fragments that were good enough to convince us.

I suspect that a lot of the people who come to me and say they wish they had my imagination really do have my imagination, they just think it’s slight and trivial. I tend to follow a train of thought and walk it a little further down than anyone’s gone before. Or I put two things together that have never lived together before. You may start out thinking, “Okay, anyone who gets bitten by a werewolf becomes one when the moon is full.”

But then you say, “What happens if a werewolf bites a chair? Does the chair turn into a wolf when the moon is full?” All of a sudden, you’ve got a story on your hands.

I have a lot of people come to me and ask what I do for writer’s block.

Well, I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a universal writer’s block. I have never come to the point where I’ve said, “Oh my God, I’ve got writer’s block!” There have been many times when I’ve come to the point where I’ve thought, “I don’t know what happens next,” but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost the ability to write. That just means I’m stuck on it.

In American Gods,I got the protagonist Shadow to the end of Cairo, Illinois, and I didn’t know what happened next, so I went away and finished a kids novel I started many years earlier. I could still write, I just didn’t know what happened next. I needed some processing time. And once it was processed, I knew what happened next and I kept going. I have two pieces of advice for people who want to write books.

I can tell those who are going to be writers apart from the ones who would love to be writers but never will be by the way they react to this advice. First piece of advice: You have to write. You can’t just want to write. To be a writer, you have to write. The second piece of advice: You have to finish things, then write some more and finish those. You can send things out to places that may or may not publish them, but write and finish things.

People who are going to be writers look at that and say, “Oh yeah, you’re right.”

The ones who are never going to be writers — the ones who just want the secret — look incredibly disappointed, as if you’re trying to cheat them. Because they know that if you sit on your left hand while you’re writing; they know that if you wear the lucky green hat; they know that if you go down to the cellar at midnight and cast the goat bones while doing a little naked dance — the magic will happen.

They don’t want to be told: You put one word in front of the other until it’s done. The ones who are going to be writers look shamefaced and say, “You know, I have five unfinished novels, 10 unfinished short stories. I’ve got to finish them.” That’s the best advice any writer can give, the rest of it is detail.

If you don’t do these things, you never progress, you never learn. You also never realize that it’s work. What tends to happen is that people have a lovely spurt of inspiration and they start to write, but that spurt will probably take you about seven pages. By page eight it turns into work.

Writing American Gods,there were some days when I revelled in the joy of magical inspiration, and there were many, many, many days where the process of writing was as enjoyable as ditch digging. Looking back on the book, I have no idea if what I was writing was written during a moment of magical inspiration or during a moment of ditch digging. But you keep going because you’re a professional.

In my case, I’d look up at the book cover — they had designed the cover to the book before I even began it, and I had it pinned up — and I’d think, “You’re never going to be the cover of anything unless I finish.” You do it on days you don’t feel like doing it, because you’re a professional and that’s what you do. It’s like a rock band moving from town to town — there may be nights when they’re really on form and they just want to play music, and there are nights when they’ve all got hangovers, the drummer has contracted an embarrassing social disease and the singer’s wife just broke up with him on the bus, and now they’ve got to go out there and perform. They’re going to perform and give you a great show because they’re professionals.”