RALEIGH - Outside, all is cacophony and madness. Drums pound in the distance over muffled chants and shouts, and a steady stream of foot traffic runs, trots and walks by.

But inside Michele Cochrane's massage studio, a room in a backstage trailer at Alltel Pavilion at Walnut Creek, all is calm, quiet and dark. Candles burn, soothing New Age waterfall music plays, and heavy red curtains block out the harsh late-afternoon sunlight.

Cochrane appraises her next client, Kevin Lyman, producer of the Vans Warped Tour raging outside. He is the man in charge of keeping this circus together, a job with off-the-chart stress levels.

"How long do you want, 45 minutes?" she asks.

"An hour, if I can get it," Lyman groans. "I'm dyin', from stress and this pain behind the knee. You'll feel that. It's been bad for a while."

As "masseuse to the stars," Cochrane provides an oasis for the performers and crews who work at the amphitheater -- from center-stage divas such as country star Gretchen Wilson down to the roadies who lug monitors around.

She sets to work on Lyman.

Lyman lies face-down on the massage table, and Cochrane starts on his feet. She works her way up to his shoulders, neck and back, leaning in with an elbow and applying hot stones and peppermint oil. Lyman's fingers twitch and relax as Cochrane manipulates pressure points in the neck.

Then she rolls Lyman over and starts pulling on each leg. He is soon asleep -- snoring, in fact.

Suddenly, the door flies open without a knock, revealing a young man with bright yellow hair in a tattered Sex Pistols T-shirt.

"When do you close?" he asks.

"There's a sign-up board on the door," Cochrane says, visibly irritated at the interruption. "I'll stay until I'm not busy."

"Oh," the young man says, eyes widening as he realizes he is disturbing someone else's massage.

But Lyman snores on, oblivious. By the end of the hour, he is without a doubt the most relaxed person on site -- even though it won't last.

'Like a rock doc'

"An hour when you're exhausted, that will do it," Cochrane says later over a plate of enchiladas from the catered backstage spread. "Lee Ann Womack was another one who fell asleep. I'll see Trey [Anastasio] tomorrow, and he always gets a massage, always falls asleep. Tom [DeLonge] from blink-182 ... slept for the first 45 minutes and then asked a million questions about massage the last 15."

Cochrane, 32, has been in-house massage therapist at Alltel Pavilion for four years. It's an amenity that more and more large venues offer.

"It's like a rock doc," says Wilson Rogers, who runs Alltel Pavilion. "Nowadays, you've gotta have one."

Getting a massage offers a respite from the all-night drives and back-breaking labor of the touring grind. People sign up for a block of time, from 10 minutes up to an hour. Cochrane will stay as long as there's work to do. It's not unusual for her to work past midnight on a big show.

She charges $1 a minute for her concert work, which is less than the rate at her studio on Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh. But the venue doesn't charge her rent, and with tips she can make $500 on a good night. As a bonus, she gets to see performers behind the backstage curtain.

"Annie Lennox was fun," Cochrane says. "And she paid me double, $2 a minute, so I got $120 for the hour with her. I've done Matchbox 20, A Perfect Circle, Sara Evans. And Toby Keith, he's my buddy."

Toby Keith?

"Yeah, he's very cute and witty. He always gets a massage and pays $100 for the hour. He likes to listen to soft rock, so I always put the radio on 93.9 FM. He sings along when he's awake. It's funny.

"Michael McDonald was the coolest," she continues. "So down to Earth. When I told him my father loved the Doobie Brothers, he sent his tour manager to the bus for a CD, and he autographed it. That was right before Father's Day, so it was a great present for my dad."

Sometimes Cochrane and her customers hit it off and strike up a friendship. She got on well enough with Blue Man Group to accompany the performance-art troupe to its next show in Virginia. They kept in touch, and Blue Man Group subsequently took Cochrane and her fiance to Charleston, S.C., for a show.

"Such nice guys," she says of Blue Man Group. "We went out Jet Ski riding with them, and they still had little dabs of blue makeup behind their ears."

A different energy

Today's Vans Warped show is a bit unusual for Cochrane, who prefers to work in a more controlled environment. Warped has 94 acts on 10 stages, with hundreds of musicians and crew members roaming the venue. A lot of them opt for the tour's traveling shiatsu specialist instead of Cochrane's deep-tissue massage.

Still, Cochrane has a steady stream of customers, and she deals with the vibe as best she can. When it comes to coping with bedlam, her pre-massage career as an elementary school teaching assistant comes in handy.

"I'm very sensitive to energy in a place, which is hard to explain," Cochrane says during a break. "It's real different tonight than most shows out here. It's really chaotic, and that affects me. I like to be back in my safe haven where it's quiet, away from everything."

In that safe haven, massages occasionally turn into private performances. R&B singer Mario, who opened for 50 Cent in 2003, crooned to Cochrane the whole time about what she was doing: "She's rubbin' my back now ... She's usin' h-o-o-o-ot sto-o-o-o-ones."

Then there was the production manager who got a massage and asked Cochrane if she had "met Jess." Cochrane didn't realize he was talking about Jessica Simpson until she suddenly appeared, wanting a backrub of her own.

"She was shorter than me, and a little stinky," Cochrane says. "And she'd washed off all her makeup, looked just like anybody else. She was really nice. I did deep-tissue with her upper traps. That's a pretty common problem spot. There's a lot of movement with the neck there, and tightness happens a lot."

Cochrane's concert clients come to her with the same stresses and maladies as her regular clients. But working here is harder because she has never seen most of her customers before, and never will again. It's the massage equivalent of triage.

"In my office, my philosophy is to listen to your body and what it's telling me to do to fix it," she says. "Out here, I'll get some bus driver who's never had a massage before telling me, 'I've got 20 minutes. Can you fix me?' So I do the best I can to get the blood and oxygen flowing, and folks are usually happy.

"I did this one guy, 'Big Mike,' Aerosmith's production manager. He was so huge, there was no way my hands were going to be big enough. So I had to use my elbow on his shoulder. I stood on a chair and just wailed on him with my elbow.

"At one point," she concludes, "he actually called somebody and told them how much he liked what I was doing."