Aaaand we’re OFF! As is typical after almost a decade of touring, the stress of packing compared to the pack itself is completely anticlimactic. We’re trying to compress a bit as we’re camping with four people, in addition to having to bring a sound system and all our usual accoutrements. Heather, Kristen and I are packed into the Saturn with a 4 human tent, the small Behringer rig (+ monitor now!), all of our gear and clothes and stuff for the next 10 days. Rowan will meet us at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival next week with a couple of our less-needed camping bits, himself and all his percussion pieces and a guitar to boot.
I think I gave up on the idea of the full band touring years ago – it’s simply not practical with the kind of money we make – but it makes these kind of journeys all the more wonderful. I’m really looking forward to sharing Rowan with the people who congregate at Falcon Ridge, and I’m really excited to share the festival with Rowan. Wrapped up like a gift. A big, muddy, hot and crowded gift.
Eyeballing the weather, it may well be VERY muddy as the latest weather report shows non-stop rain next weekend. I can probably get away with sealing up my electronics and my guitar will be pretty close to waterproof. Rough luck for everyone else. It might change up what we’re thinking of having with us for the last portion of the trip. Might have to purchase cheap umbrellas or maybe some tarps or something.
Recently I read an article about touring that really just pissed me off. It’s unreasonable that it made me as angry as it did – the article started off with this and I had high hopes:
“Hi, my name is ____________, and I’ve toured so often that I want to grab all of you by the necks and scream, “Are you sure you really want to do this?!?!” But since this is just an online article, and I’d probably get arrested if I did that, I’m just going to be really sarcastic instead. I’m also going to ask the same kinds of questions of you that your mother would ask (You know she’s right.)
As someone who spent the better half of the past two years on tour, I’m personally very tired of reading articles about touring that:
Are deliberately vague
Make it seem easy
Make it sound like the right choice for every band
Are full of inaccurate or outdated details
Are not specific for genres of music/solo performers/etc“
She goes on to almost totally fail to address all of the above points, all while telling anecdotes that show her making exactly the same mistakes, and not really seeming to learn from them effectively. Now, admittedly this is a woman who’s currently touring through Europe, but since she makes a big point of how “make sure you take more money than you think you’ll need” and to make sure you have a bundle of savings to come home to so that you can eat till you get your next paycheck, she’s clearly not doing it right!
We arrive at our gazebo about half an hour before we were planning to load in and take the time to explore the “coolest small town in America” – i.e. Hammondsport, NY. We spent some time just wandering around – the buildings here are kind of exquisite and the weather is amazing. Back home the feels-like temperature is still close to a hundred. Here it’s right around 70 degrees! You can’t go to a finger lake without poking a finger in it! Keuka Lake, you done been poked. Yeah – ilyAIMY on the lake in Hammondsport, NY. We had a great turn out and played to about a hundred people or so in the middle of a small town.
I look at this article and wonder how I’D write it. I feel like plenty of people ask us about touring advice and those people come away kind of disappointed. They want the SECRET that’ll make it easy – and it’s NEVER easy – but this article angered me SO much because she focused on SURVIVING a tour rather than the BUSINESS of making a tour an effective part of your income mosaic. Too many already don’t understand how to treat this as a business – to have a big long article pop up on musicclout.com that seems to be more about how to not get lost or embarrassed during your musical-centric hipster road trip – to have the author get so much press and to have this disseminated as anything approaching sage advice just really riled me.
Now that I know that the town’s population is about a thousand it’s kind of cool to realize we played to just about 10% of the entire town’s population.
The bad news I generally have for people who want to go on tour is that Heather and I prepped and planned for two years before setting out on September 2nd, 2003. And you don’t get to have everything you want (perhaps a home? We spent from 2003 – 2008 sans permanent address), and you’ll probably need some things you don’t want (I’ve maintained my health insurance the whole time). And it’s BRUTAL work. And sometimes you’ll feel like giving up. And then you reach a point almost ten years later when you realize you simply don’t know how to do anything else.
After our Music in the Park performance, we walked down to the local Irish Pub (owned by the person who books the gazebo series) and played their open mic. We also had an absolutely delicious gyro. You know… at the Irish bar. PJ hosts the Thursday night open mic at Maloney’s Pub in Hammondsport, NY. And he does a pretty awesome job, too. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and performs accompanying himself with pre-recorded drum and bass tracks. He also has one of the most-precise distorted acoustic guitar tones I’ve ever heard and is a killer player. Our friend Andrew Zaruba. We’d met him as a jewlery shop owner in Frederick, MD but he has since moved home to Hammondsport. His aunt is the booking person for the Music in the Park series.
Shh. I’m not really that angry about it all. Perhaps part of it is jealousy. Of course every time I meet someone who seems to be on the next tier or two of our profession always turns out to be not doing as well as I thought, or to actually NOT be “doing it” at all – often supported entirely by a husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or even a trust fund. And I’m jealous of THAT too.
Anywho – enough of THAT rant… I can’t complain too much. I’m on the road, and in two performances I’ll make more than I’d make at HMT in a week… because this is my job. And the weather tonight at our outdoor gazebo show looks to be 72 degrees and sunny. It doesn’t get much more idyllic than that.
