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FROM THE ARCHIVE: I understand "How To" articles are desirable. I don't know How To do much, but after several thousand miles, I believe I know How To tour with a rock band. |
ROAD RULES: As readers of the Alicubi weblog will know, I recently toured England with Lach and the Secrets. This was by no means my first tour, but it was in many ways my most successful: I did not return physically damaged, filled with hatred toward my bandmates, or any more broke than I already was. These are not small accomplishments. Over several previous tours I had suffered all manner of physical and emotional trauma. I have been punched, kicked, reviled, disgraced, and emaciated. Most of this was my own fault, brought on by a mixture of misdirected high spirits and innate stupidity. But I came back this time mostly happy and only slightly tired. It seems I may have actually learned something about touring over the years. And it occurs to me that the fruits of my hard-won knowledge may be useful to you brave young men and women embarking for the first time on the route of the wandering minstrel. So here in summary form are my chief recommendations for road warriors. Be prepared. Do you hate lists? Make one anyway, at least two days before the tour, of everything you could possibly need. Obtain and pack it all, even if it means a narrower variety of classic rock t-shirts in your suitcase. The vital items in your kit will be:
Never assume that you can pick up what you need on the road. Murphy's law goes double for musicians, and everything's more expensive, or hard to find, out of town. (A 9-volt battery costs six bucks in Picadilly Circus). This time out, even your road-hardened correspondent forgot to take along a voltage converter for his compressor. (220 volts! Who knew?) Thank God we had a wonderful road manager once known in the trade as "Pockets," who happened to have a massive yellow alternate that weighed thirty pounds but was in no danger of shorting out. You may not be so lucky. In fact, you probably won't. Have an itinerary. Know where you're going, and when you're due, for every location on the tour. Use Mapquest to figure approximate driving times between destinations. Being late is a drag. Getting lost is a double drag. Professional itineraries include parking instructions, schedule with opening/headline acts, key names (club owner, booking agent, sound man) with addresses and phone numbers, dressing room, backline, and catering accomodations, and sometimes club capacity and brief notes based on the tour manager's previous experience of the venue ("Bottles are sometimes thrown -- this is a sign of respect"). Be early. Have a one-hour cushion at least for every ETA. Traffic is always fungible, even in Montana. A semi could turn over on US-12, and there you'll be, sitting stock still in the middle of wide-open, but regrettably unpaved, spaces. Worse, something could happen to your own transport. Point A to Point B is much more fun when you've worked in enough time for emergencies (which, in lieu of these, can be spent in unhurried bathroom breaks) than when you're breaking speed limits while the shotgun passenger manipulates a sponge-mop across the windshield because the wipers broke between Baxendale and Blue Cloud. Do head counts. We pulled into a rest stop late one night, relieved ourselves and rummaged through the Quik-Mart, got back in the van and headed west. Ninety minutes later a toll-booth employee asked us if we were in a band. We replied affirmatively, expecting requests for autographs or a quick rendition of "Blue Moon of Kentucky." She instead asked us if we had left anyone behind at a rest stop. The second guitarist was always a retiring fellow, but thank God he had the sense to demand the rest stop people put out an APB when we pulled onto the highway without him. This happens more frequently than you might think. Road life can divide as well as unite. During long stretches, you will sometimes sink into a private funk, with only limited awareness of the rest of the company. This self-protective mechanism is fortunate, so long as everyone is verfiably in the van or the club. Do head counts after rest stops, meals, parties, etc. For large ensembles, I recommend electronic bracelets. Grab sleep. The excitement of one's first tour can be almost excruciating. You are seeing new places, unfamiliar architecture, and people who are not yet bored with you. Now is the time to get some sleep. Yes, sleep. Resist the temptation to engage in ten-mile hikes, five-mile pub crawls, or extended tours of historic cathedrals and hash-bars. Do not stay up to watch the dawn come up like thunder out of Columbus, Ohio. You will want to, because you are juiced. This juice is adrenal in origin. Excitement causes those little glands to overproduce generously. In times of extended excitement -- foreign travel plus multiple shows -- adrenal spurts will carry you for a couple of days. But when you crash you will crash big. Worse, you will not know you have crashed until you step out on stage, attempt an exuberant flying leap, and find that you have not left the ground. Whenever you arrive at a venue, attempt a nap before sound check. Don't worry, you'll have time. Your bandleader or manager will spend an hour or so yapping with the people from the club, and there will always be problems with the sound system. Take advantage. Find a spot that's almost quiet -- a dressing room if you're lucky; closet or cranny if you're not -- and claim a spot where you are not likely to be stepped on or kicked. Put on the sleep mask you've thoughtfully tucked in your pocket, and snooze. If your body suddenly feels twice as heavy as you know it to be, you have need of sleep. If it doesn't, you still have need of sleep. So think about all the driving, playing, and wasted time yet to come -- in other words, count opportunities for boredom instead of sheep. Morpheus will come soon enough. Nap in the van, on the club owner's couch, in a toilet stall. After a few days you'll be amazed at the conditions under which incremental sleep can be obtained. You may not feel daisy-fresh when you unravel yourself after a 45-minute kip in a cubbyhole, but your sleep bank will be a few dollars richer and your muscles will thank you once the leg-cramps pass. But ALWAYS tell a responsible adult where you are napping. One manager told me of a terrible incident in which a bass player, starved for sleep on an England-to-France ferry trip, crawled unannounced into a cupboard and curled up for a snooze. An ingenious use of available space, but by the time he woke up, he had made three crossings, and the band, unable to find him, had gone on to the next gig. He was stranded in Calais without his passport. So traumatized was he that, after settling matters with his consulate, he quit the music business. A sound choice in all events, but one better made at home. Shut up. Tour conversations tend to be excited and full of playfully caustic badinage. You will razz your bandmates; it's human nature and part of the fun. Can a price be put upon such collegial hijinks? Yes; yes, it can. The satirical value of your drummer's smelly socks is approximately 1.5 days. After that, shut up about them. Find a new topic of conversation -- like your drummer's snoring. The reason is simple. Bands are like families. Imagine yourself trapped in a van with your family for five to thirty days. Not a pleasant thought, is it? You are forced into painfully close quarters with your band for days at a time. You have to work with them. You are obliged to hang out with them before and after shows. The smallest point of irritation can escalate to open savagery in seconds. I have seen a player so overcome with anger at his drunken, unquiet bandmate that he put him in a sleeper hold and locked him, unconscious, in their van. The similarly inspired fistfights, head-butts, and cold, week-long silences I have seen, or been party to, are too numerous to recall. Worse, you may lose a player. Remember how Ringo ducked out on the Beatles after they'd ridden him mercilessly in "A Hard Day's Night"? That's a best-case scenario. In reality, Ringo (or Brian or Squiggy or whomever) is likely not to make it back in time, or at all. The pay sucks and the hours are wearing; musicians are sensitive, and usually not great at expressing themselves verbally. Sometimes they emote with their feet. Or their fists. If you find yourself disliking one of your bandmates during a tour, be nice to him anyway. Make a point of showing him kindnesses. Buy him a round. Lend him your toothpaste. You will like him better in a day or two. If you don't, remind yourself how thin the big set-ending rave-up will sound if your guitar tech is sitting in on the drums. Take care of yourself. Younger readers, this goes for you too. I thought myself in the peak of condition the first time I toured Europe. I lost my voice by the third date. How? Blind hubris and booze. On the flight to Amsterdam, I got a bottle of Jack Daniels from the duty-free. I drank half of it on the plane. I drank the other half onstage in Berlin the following night, and chased it with more Jack from the bar. Pouring hard liquor over frazzled vocal chords is the stupidest thing a lead singer can do, but the Krauts were eating up my snarling rendition of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," and I imagined myself invulnerable. Within 24 hours my vocal chords had blown up like a life-jacket. I'll never forget the stunned look on the crowd's faces in Nijmegen two nights later, when, as the band roared, I pulled the mike close, opened my mouth, and emitted nothing but saliva and a soft, peculiar noise rather like wind whistling through a damaged tent flap. Players will encase their gear in expensive metal flight cases, then fling their by-far-more-vulnerable bodies, protected only by t-shirts, jeans, and shitty attitude, into a whirlpool of nutritional, physical, and mental abuse. (And let's not even get into that teeming petrie-dish known as road sex.) Take care of yourself. Eat good food and take your vitamins. Do yoga if you can find the space. (Tired muscles get tense, and kink and snap easily.) Take it easy on the alcohol and drugs. If your knee feels a little shaky, forego the customary cross-stage knee-slide -- Morgantown, West Virginia will understand. Bring a book. This is Lach's advice, and it's sound. Touring is waiting -- waiting in the van, in the club, at the hotel, in the Denny's. TV is not always available and last Wednesday's Post is not going to get you through the tour. If video games are your thing, keep a console handy. Touring, like bedrest illnesses, is a great opportunity to finish that 500-page novel you've been meaning to read (or a dozen Louis L'Amour books, if that's what you go for). For a taste of what can happen when you don't have something to occupy yourself, see "Shut Up." Spend wisely. I recall taking a phone call from our booking agent in Amsterdam. We had finished the first leg of the tour and were taking a few days of R-and-R before heading to Germany for a dozen big gigs with big guarantees. With our early pay-outs we were buying rounds for each other, and for an alarming number of strangers; we ate in swell bistros; some of us went in for expensive souvenirs and trips to the Red Light District. The agent then informed me that the dozen big gigs with big guarantees had, in the interim, been downgraded to a couple of small shows for beer money. Nothing cuts post-tour buzz like coming home early, broke, and briefly homeless (my sublettor did not want a roommate). Try not to spend overmuch, and work the freebies. Avail every drink ticket, rider-mandated meal, and crash-pad offer that you get. Most tours lose money, and many lose more than planned. You can always do Paris like a tourist when you are an actual tourist, or when you've ditched music for corporate life and have an expense account. Be nice. Bad boys, rapscallions, hell-raisers, and Gn'R fans, take note: obnoxious behavior is counterproductive. You may want do business with these clubs, technicians, bouncers, and other bands again -- even if you don't like them. That highly annoying folksinger on the bill in Albany may be a big deal someday (stupider things have happened), and his manager may consider inviting you onto a prestige gig with him. If, back in 2002, you had sex with his girlfriend in a broom closet, or peed in his guitar case, your chances will have been diminished. Leave the hellacious behaviors and creative vandalism for the big-money days, when they will forgiven or hushed-up and paid-off. You know those days are coming, baby. Don't shoot your load on the Motel 6. Have fun. Yes, you can, despite these prescriptions. And you'd better. You are living one of modern life's great romantic dreams. You are following in the footsteps of Hank Williams and Hanoi Rocks, and you don't have to lose your life, or an arm, to enjoy it. All of life, the sweet and the bitter, is blissfully compacted on the road. Every time you open your eyes, something will have changed -- the scenery, the sound of a song you thought had no more secrets left to yield, and perhaps even the life of someone you played for, at least in a small way. Touring musicians endure a lot of abuse (and that's part of the fun, too, because it gives you stories to tell), but they also get to show the world (or the Northeast Corridor, anyway) what they're made of, and even the weakest players get a little appreciation -- a kind word, an autograph request (don't laugh -- even your humble correspondent has had these), and the occasional, deliciously full-throated roar of approval. Rock hard, get home safe, and see you down the road, down the road, down the road apiece. |
