Tour Prep
“Close your eyes. You’re playing a show. The stage lights are shining right in your eyes, but if you squint a little you can make out some faces in the crowd. Now open your eyes. What do those faces look like? Okay wait, close your eyes again. What are they wearing? How old are they? What tax bracket? Do they recycle? What’s their mom’s maiden name? How many moms do they have? How many dads?”
Al opened one eye and pursed his lips impatiently. “You lost me, Pete.”
I felt like those were pretty straightforward questions. I looked to Alex for validation, but he was on his phone - he had never closed his eyes. He started to tilt his head up like he was going to look away from it, but never drew his eyes off the screen. “…what’s up?” He wouldn’t have heard my response if I had answered, so I turned my attention to Ray, my star pupil.
“Okay, let’s get the basics down. We’re trying to figure out what cities to book, right? So let’s think about who comes to our shows. Are they…college kids? Mostly dudes? What do they look like, what kind of people are they?”
With his eyes still closed, Ray scrunched his eyebrows like he was thinking really hard before knitting them quizzically, slitting his eyes open.
“I don’t know…Blacks?”
I was only putting so much pressure on it because our last tour was trash. I probably shouldn’t have booked a 10 city tour on my very first stab at it, but hindsight is 20/20, and this was 2014: the world hadn’t completely melted down yet, so there was room for optimism in my life. After talking with a few reluctant tour managers and getting lost in a couple exhaustive hours-long Reddit rabbit holes, I said, “Fuck it, how hard can it be,” and I booked our first national tour, kicking things off in beautiful Fresno, California at Strummers Bar & Grill. Maybe you’ve heard of it. I hadn’t, but a lot of my research said that booking shows in “up and coming” cities and venues was the secret sauce to a really unique tour with great content. Whatever that means.
Google told me that people in these cities would be dying to see live music because national acts rarely come through. It said people would be friendlier in smaller cities, so finding places to stay would be easy and affordable. It said the art and music scenes were vibrant and accepting. It said smaller cities had healthy local economies, so people would be more likely to buy merch.
Google lied right to my face: we slept in Walmart parking lots and highway rest areas, we had slurs and threats shouted at us as we arrived at and left venues, and we didn’t sell a single t-shirt. We sold a ton of keychains, but only after we lowered to price to 50 cents, which is what each one cost to make, and probably only because they were bottle openers. And honestly, all of that was par for the course, and would have been totally fine if it weren’t for the fact that, with the exception of Bismarck, North Dakota, we played to crowds of 8-10 people (mostly the other bands that were playing after us (because we never headlined). City after city, venue after venue: Oakland, Salt Lake City, Carson City, Eugene, Bozeman, Grand Junction, Flagstaff, Santa Fe, Wichita - trash. If there was any silver lining, it’s that by the end of the tour, our set was unbelievably tight. We had our sound dialed in; not a sour note to be heard. It was like listening to a recording. Even though the recordings didn’t exist yet. This tour was supposed to help raise the funds for the studio time we booked, but since we didn’t even break even, we all had to pick up extra hours at our jobs when we got back, which cut into our practice time, which made our studio performance sloppier than our live performance. So really, we sounded better live than we did on the album. Just like The Beatles.
The tour sucked.
Cooped up in my parents basement, after months of deep, dark diary entries that I tried to counteract by rewatching the first season of Breaking Bad 6 times, I eventually came around to hashing out a blueprint for a second swing at touring. We didn’t have a practice space since we were all poor and either living with our parents or in small apartments, but I knew the band had been practicing over video calls a la The Rocker starring Rainn Wilson. That was hardest for Al - being a drummer makes it hard to hear the rest of the band in any practice setting, but him not having bluetooth headphones meant he had to put his earbuds in from the back with his computer behind him so his sticks didn’t catch on the headphone cord. Alex rarely joined the calls, he would just watch the recording by himself when he felt inspired enough to write lyrics. Ray wrote basically everything, so he would screen share the guitar and bass tabs he wrote and lead the call. I never got invited to practices but I would watch the recordings between episodes of Gilmore Girls sometimes.
By the time spring 2015 hit, they had written enough new songs for a set plus a few extras in the unlikely event of an encore, and started playing outdoor gigs to shake off the rust, grease up the fingers, gas up the tanks, and do whatever else musicians do to overcome the anxiety of performing after a long hiatus. At my personal bequest, we all did what we could to sock away extra money, knowing damn well that even if our next tour had actual fans at every show, we’d be lucky to break even. Venues don’t pay well, if they even pay anything at all, and a couple t-shirt sales won’t buy you enough gas to get to the next show. Learned that lesson the hard way.
My uncle had promoted me to manager at the pizza window he owned across the street from the community college. I was the only employee, so it was title change only, but it did allow me to set my own schedule, which made it way easier to dip out early on days we played shows to do a little networking. I also was given access to the laminator he used for menus.
In addition to working more, I booked us up some shows to sharpen our performance and bring in a little extra cash:
A birthday party for a friend of a friend’s brother. We didn’t know until the day of the show/party that he was in high school. And it was a family party. And we were opening for a DJ his parents hired. And there was an above ground pool. And it started at 11 A.M. And they forgot to get a noise permit so we had to keep it down. $50.
A block party organized by a Jewish youth group. $75.
The summer fest in our home town. We were the first band of the day - the noon slot. On a Thursday. The carnies were the only ones in attendance. Al ate a funnel cake then rode the tilt-a-whirl right before our set and threw up on stage. $100.
An acoustic show at a Panera Bread. We had to go through our set 6 times because they booked us from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. and insisted we play all 4 hours. $50.
A fundraiser at a library. Didn’t realize it was a fundraiser when I booked it, my bad. $0.
A puzzle making company’s employee picnic. They thought we were a Cranberries cover band so they shouted requests at us the whole time. $150.
A car dealership’s Memorial Day Weekend Sale event. $50.
After summer full of absolute bangers, we had $475 plus the two thousand bucks we were able to pool together from our own savings. Twenty-five hundred dollars and a set tighter than the battery door on a TI-83 calculator. Tighter than Bret Michael’s bandana. Tighter than a fist in a Pringles can.
Not only that, but while the band had been playing all these shows, I was emailing every contact I could possibly find putting together a tour schedule. I finally had it:
September 18th: Dekalb, IL
September 19th: Milwaukee, WI
September 20th: Champaign, IL
September 23rd: St. Louis, MO
September 24th: Nashville, TN
September 25th: Atlanta, GA
September 26th: Louisville, KY
September 27th: Cincinatti, OH
September 30th: Indianapolis, IN
October 3rd: Minneapolis, MN
TBD: Winnipeg, ON
It was going to be cities we’d been to, or knew people in, or felt like maybe we could draw a crowd there. We’d start with a couple college towns - those should be easy wins. Shitty beer and party rock is how Alien Ant Farm and Vampire Weekend did it, why wouldn’t it work for us? After that, we planned to make a big loop through the eastern Midwest - the Middle East, so to speak - and some of the southeast, then try to squeeze in a Canada show to finish out the tour. That was a little bit of wishful thinking, but a lot of bands end up being more popular overseas than in their own country, and we couldn’t afford a flight to Europe if we pooled all our money, so Canada would have to do. Plus, people ask me if I’m Canadian all the time because I’m deathly pale, pronounce the A’s in “master” and “pasta” the same way, and I’m a slut for maple syrup.
And just like that, we were on tour.
Except actually it took way more prep than that.
Next it was time to prepare physically for the endurance necessary to successfully complete a tour that could last several days, maybe tens of days, even. I told them all where to meet me one Sunday, grabbed my whistle and my American flag sweatband set and a dozen eggs, took my shirt off, decided it would be better if I kept my shirt on, put it back on, and jogged down to the park to meet them.
The band had been there a while by the time I got there (slow runner), so they were already a little restless. I piped my whistle three or four times to get their attention as I strode up. They had no idea the physical test I was about the put them through. Poor souls.
We started with pushups. A thousand pushups. Or at least 20, I stopped counting when I got a phone call from my mom and had to walk her through how to buy shoes online. By the time I got through explaining why she couldn’t try them on first, she just needed to know her size, I think the boys had probably pounded out enough earth-movers to have a good pump going, so we moved on to the 40-yard dash.
Listen, my only frame of reference for physical training is gym class and Pumping Iron. The list in my pocket had our itinerary:
Pushups x 1,000
40-yard dash x 3 (or run in place if limited space)
Pull-ups x 10 (or until failure)
2 raw eggs
Repeat twice a day for 5 days
Those may sound like the ramblings of a madman, but tell that to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s email newsletter. I took the 4 things that sounded the coolest from his June workout, and tour started in a week so 5 days was perfect because we needed a couple days to take inventory of our stuff and pack.
Anyway, we were three days into this regiment when Ray got sick from the eggs, so we pivoted and just started playing pickup basketball games instead.
In retrospect, we should have spent more time actually preparing for playing live. Birthdays and house shows were great, but they never really gave us the opportunity to practice with our makeshift light show. We bought 3 strobe lights that were triggered by sound, so they automatically synced up with music as we played, and we had a projector that we put stock Windows Media Player visualizations. We didn’t get the chance to figure out if one was going to wash the other out, so it was going to be a “trial by fire” kind of experience.
And just like that, we were on tour.