Touring is an increasingly important element to a successful music career, but getting on the road too early has inevitably lead many promising talents awry.
There are few things more exciting or fulfilling than being on tour. Not only are you afforded the opportunity to perform your music for people who want to hear it, but you can see the world as well. Being on the road allows musicians at every level to see how the rest of the human race lives, and through doing so, many find the inspiration to create their best work.
There is a catch, however, and it’s a big one. Artists who attempt to tour before they have the right elements of their career in place are destined for hardships and failure. You may be able to string together a tour, and you may be able to make a little money doing so, but unless you have plans in place you will, eventually, burn out before your dreams of success in the music business come to fruition. It has happened a million times already, and it will no doubt happen a million more in the future.
In this episode of Music Biz 101, host James Shotwell breaks down the five (5) things every artist and group needs to do before they consider getting on the road.
Hello and welcome to the final Advice column of the week. The following article is something akin to a sequel, pairing Haulix with a few old friends for a second adventure with a similar theme: Tour problems. I’m not sure this pair of columns will become a trilogy, but I suppose anything is possible in a world where Think Like A Man Too exists. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Back in December, we partnered with our dear friends in The Venetia Fair to teach bands and solo artists touring the icy roads a few things that may help them survive their winter tour efforts. The column was a surprising hit, and so it is with great pleasure that we welcome them back to our site a second time to share their summer tour survival tips. Take it away, guys…
“Here Comes the Sun and I Say It’s Alright” – The Beatles. Errrheard?
Good day everyone, Mike Abiuso of The Venetia Fair, SwitchBitch (Records/Studio/Magazine) and Behind The Curtains Media. I feel like I practically live here at Haulix, which is a good thing, so thanks for having me back team!
I don’t know if you’ve read my last “Winter Tour Survival”, but if you haven’t, let me just reiterate the essentials that go for both seasons: (If you have, you’re going to be very bored, so just follow these ZZZZZZZZZZZZ’s)
Vehicle and Paperwork must be up to date:
-Driver’s licenses are legit
-Vehicle registered
-Vehicle insured
-Vehicle inspected
-Oil change (up to date and kept up to date on the road)
-Someone should have AAA for roadside assistance
If you have a van and trailer:
-Be sure the separate breaking system is functioning
-Under stand the low and high gears for up and downgrades
-Get a ball lock for your hitch incase you need to drop the trailer to park in heavily populated cities
Touring in general:
-Try to keep the tank above ¼ tank or have and to be safe have an extra reserve gas tank
-Get reflective cones and/or flares to put out incase you breakdown
(ZZZZZZZZzzzzzz hey wake up, you still there?)
Ok, moving on to “Part ll – Summer Tour Survival”…Now that we don’t have to worry about actually freezing to death, we mainly need to focus on keeping a good amount of food and water for survival and the rest is mostly comfort or “luxury”. Water is a given…get it in bulk and go, but food is way different this season. Can’t buy frozen food and keep it in the trailer any more unless you like eating a “mushy mold, fly graveyard sandwich” which I’ve heard has recently been labeled “exclusively for vegans” as of today. It’s all about those sealed cracker snacks and canned goods, which unfortunately, the ones that taste decent are awful for you. Click here to take a look at a year round specialty of mine that I like to call “tour-derves” (judge me? – dead to me)
So what we have here is a base coat of seared (aka canned) tuna, topped with peanut butter and/or cheese filled crackers with a light glaze of Sriracha to take away from the food portion of the meal. All served on the finest store brand paper plates. You get the idea, moving on.
When speaking in terms of water, this is where luxury comes in. Now I hate drinking water, but knowing it’s an essential I found a luxurious way to get around slamming that bull-shit of a drink. Umm SodaStream! Wootwoot, sound the alarm and flash the lights cause that jam keeps me alive. We (The Venetia Fair) usually get a case of water for the van, a back up case in the trailer and I also get a gallon jug of water to pour into a sodastream container, pull the sodastream from my drawer and just BLAST it w/ CO2. (Don’t know what a sodastream is? Know what google is?). Yeah, so seltzer for days.
Continuing on the topic of drinks. Alcohol always seems to find it’s way into a musicians life. It might have to do with having 6 hours to kill at a bar after load-in, but what do I know? Well, I do know that in the summer, if you’re 15 drinks in and feel amazing passing out in the van, that in a mere few hours that same van will transform into a human incinerator, so particularly after consuming alcohol, a few things you may want to keep near your van bed (or the place you sleep when touring) is A) water (seltzer) B) a battery operated fan and C) a $.99 spray bottle of water. These things I haven’t had lately on tour, but when The Venetia Fair did Warped Tour, I definitely had that jones going on.
While on the topic of sleeping situations, it’s a great idea to keep the van doors and windows open at night to keep air flowing. While that’s a great idea it also provides a free buffet for bugs and mosquitos, so you’re going to want to grab a few cheap bud nets to throw over all openings.
Being that this is beginning to get quite lengthily and I don’t want to bore the readers that made it thus far, I’m going to close out with showering. Every musician smells like the thickest festering shit syrup all the time. To reduce this in attempts to be a part or real civilization I would suggest three things. 1) pick up a sunshower which is a bag you can fill with a spigot, set on the roof of your trailer to warm up and shower with the power of gravity. 2) pick up a camping shower which is a bit more expensive, but basically it’s a pump version of the sunshower similar to the way your grandmother fertilizes her tomatoes, but with water instead. 3) Get a planet fitness membership and shower there.
Ok folks, as always, don’t do anything anyone in The Venetia Fair would do, and hope to see you this summer!
Hello and welcome to the seventh installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band. This column offers advice to up and coming artists from the perspective of a professional musician who has thrived with and without label support over the last decade. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
An Introduction:
I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How To Kill Your Band.
Part 7 – Down With The Sickness
On the road you’re going to roll the dice quite frequently. Sleeping in sketchy parking lots, never washing your hands, loading gear while simultaneously resisting knife wielding St. Louisans trying to rob the 50” plasma TV you just won the night before in a raffle while watching the Super Bowl in a Tulsa, OK Hooters because the show snowed out. It’s tour and it’s a kind of a weird thing to want to do and taking risks is sort of a necessity. Our modus operandi was always to find ways to limit the downsides i.e. putting new locks on our trailer, depositing cash every couple days, leaving way too early for the next venue etc. But sometimes probability catches up with you and things get shitty. Sometimes you decide to eat at a DQ Grill.
On a beautiful spring day in 2010 we were heading eastbound on I-90 from Buffalo on our way to Holyoke, MA and I suddenly felt a slight urge to use the bathroom. Per usual, I made a request to our rod hog Patrick Jeffers to stop at the next exit. Driving along in our dependable Chevy things started to feel unevenly heavy. Then just completely wrong. I’m now in a deep sweat yelling at Jeffers that we need to find an exit or pull off into the woods. Fortunately we opted for the 6.0L V8 that helps him channel his inner Dale and we top 90 mph before spotting the dirty gas station oasis in the distance – I’ve never been more relieved in my life.
That ordeal concluded, it was smooth sailing to Massachusetts. Except 15 minutes later I get a very familiar feeling in my stomach. How could this be?! Immediately we rush to a rest area and this time I’m not just feeling heavy down low, I’m now upchucking at the same time. For the next 100 miles I repeat a pattern of vomit and diarrhea at the same time every 15 minutes like clockwork.
By the time we get to the venue in Holyoake, I’m very worried about my health. I’ve spent hours expelling liquids from every orifice to the point that I’m just a dripping bag of bile. Jeffers made the decision to drop the trailer and have our vocalist, Justin Brown, rush me to the closest hospital while they loaded in the equipment. We roll into the emergency room and explain the situation to the receptionist before sitting down in the seats closest to the restroom. It doesn’t seem too busy, only a few other people waiting, so I’m fairly confident I’ll get in and out with some type of medicine before we are scheduled to go on that night. A couple hours go by and my condition is getting worse. I’m still puking and pooping every couple minutes and I’m getting very weak and dehydrated while slightly starting to worry for my life. It’s getting closer to the show start and I’m realizing there’s no way I could possibly play a show in this condition. I’ve never missed or canceled a show due to sickness but it’s just not possible. I’d literally be pooping my pants on stage.
A half hour before our set time I still haven’t been able to see a doctor so Justin decides they’re going to try and play as a four piece so we’ll at least earn our guarantee. I was super bummed that I had to miss a show due to illness but I’ve never been more proud of the other guys for stepping up and going through with the show as a four piece. Just for perspective, we had always been and recorded as a three guitarist band. Literally two weeks before we had to let one of our guitarist go in the middle of the previous tour. Jeffers and I had just crammed three intense guitar tracks down to two and now it was just going to be one. But he got up on stage, without a chance to even think the parts over, and straight killed it.
After twelve hours of wilting away in the waiting room I finally get called back to see a doctor. After 20 minutes I was told I had viral gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the stomach and both upper and lower intestines. That’s pretty much all he did because he didn’t prescribe medication or put me on an IV to deal with the severe dehydration. I stumble out of the ER with a new word for the describing the worst I’ve ever felt and a $700 bill. The band decides to meet up with Attila at a nearby motel and get a room with the night’s guarantee so I can have a bed to sleep in.
What I didn’t know was that during the set Justin announced deadpan to the crowd that I had died. So after another night of horrific amounts of expulsion we meet up with the other bands in the morning who are all shocked to see that I am infact alive. We also learn from a local that there’s another ER nearby that has a policy of no wait times over two hours. Great. With the help of a little dopamine I was able to hold down enough fluids to play the next nights show and started recovering after a couple days. It was without a doubt the worst I’ve ever felt in my life.
Hello and welcome to the sixth installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band. This column offers advice to up and coming artists from the perspective of a professional musician who has thrived with and without label support over the last decade. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
An Introduction:
I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How To Kill Your Band.
Part 6 – Nightmares
I’m 27 years old and there are two recurring nightmares that haunt my unconscious hours:
#1 – I’m back on my high school baseball team. It’s a tie game in the 9th and I’m up to bat with a man on third. The pitcher checks his signal as the runner edges off third then throws a pitch that seems to spin in slow motion as it tumbles towards me. I turn to square sliding my right hand down towards the center of the bat executing the most beautiful suicide squeeze down the first base line. The ball hugs the crease between the infield grass and the dirt base path, staying undeniably fair as I exit the batter’s box starting my sprint. I pass the untouched ball halfway to first when I hear the crowd erupt in a deafening roar reacting to the runner from third crossing home plate and knowing I’m just a few steps away from beating an uncontested play at first. Except at that exact moment, my legs freeze. I can’t move. What was a certain walk-off bunt has turned into a tragic disaster. The pitcher looks up in surprise after fielding the ball to see my stalled husk and chuckles lightly at my struggle before his tag ends the game and my slumber.
#2 – In this dream I always start by crawling out of the tour van and realizing the opening band before us has been finished for dozens of minutes and I’m late to setup. Time drips away as does attendance in the frantic struggle to get the gear on stage. There’s always something strange that defies logic i.e. the stage is 300 ft deep, it’s raining inside the venue, my guitar has no strap buttons. Even when we finally get started with our set, this becomes a Murphy’s Law nightmare where one by one, every piece of equipment in my rig goes wrong. On stage in front of people completely helpless I am left to the pit in my stomach and the mortifying embarrassment, that even after waking, will ruin my next several hours.
While I haven’t stepped foot on the diamond in nearly a decade, I do frequent the stage and the anxiety to get everything perfect is palpable. Any of our old tour friends will attest to my resolute dedication to arriving before the scheduled load-in just to make sure nothing interferes with a proper soundcheck.
Unfortunately, my nightmare came true last weekend during BORNSTELLAR’s second ever show. it was the kind of venue where there wasn’t a true soundcheck, the stage didn’t allow for backlining gear, and you loaded in as soon as the band in front was done. No problem though, I’ve toured enough that I know how to set things up quickly in a disorganized rush. So we load out of the trailer onto the stage and by the time we get everything powered it’s time to start the set. We begin with a little ring out to get everyone’s attention before going into the uptempo riffing that intros our first song, “Wake the World”. Then nothing. I make no sound. Everyone is chugging through the song but not me. Nope, I have nothing. Actually, I have worse than nothing. I have some type of alien noise endemic to nothing on this planet inundating the few moments of otherwise silent rests in the song. Things happen, I’m used to fixing little things that tend to go wrong during a set. I start the mental checklist: wireless? batteries? speaker cable? loose connections? After the song I scamper back to my amp and check everything in order. None of the usual suspects are showing. I am, however, getting an oddly low input signal to my amp, like there’s a pad being applied. Wireless can be finicky in some venues, and in the absence of any other clues, I decide to ditch it. The first instrument cable I try seems to have a short. My other guitarist throws me his backup cable. It seems to be working. I signal to our drummer that we can start the next song and I climb back to the front of the stage. Thirty seconds into the song, aliens. This is my nightmare. I don’t really remember the rest of the set other than I spent it back near my amp trying to coerce a usable sound out of my guitar. Or hide. Mostly the latter.
I was in such a disheartened mood on the drive home that I swore off thinking about music for the rest of the week. It didn’t last, I was in my guitar shop the next morning almost daring the technician to figure out what the hell went wrong. After three hours of isolating every single electronic and mechanical component, we found the issue: the three-way pickup switch had one shorted wire causing the pickups to cut in and out with the slightest nudge. After I had the switch replaced, the lingering frustration had me on Amazon ordering backups of any part that could potentially fail in the future. Five days later, I’m still going over the disaster in my head. Usually the HTKYB series gives some sort of lesson or advice about navigating your music career discerned from my experiences in the industry. Not here. This week’s post shows that no matter how long you’ve been grinding, new shit happens that can knock you around. Sometimes you have to accept the bad luck with the good, take your lumps, and figure out how to move on.
This column was contributed by Eric Morgan. Eric spent a number of years touring the world as part of the Victory Records band A Hero A Fake. He’s currently developing a new project,Bornstellar, which plans to release its first EP later this year. Click here to learn more about Eric’s time in music.
Hello and welcome to the fifth installment of Eric Morgan’s How To Kill Your Band. This column offers advice to up and coming artists from the perspective of a professional musician who has thrived with and without label support over the last decade. If you have any questions regarding the content of this blog, or if you would like to learn more information about the services offered by Haulix, please email james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
An Introduction:
I’ve been in the music industry as an artist for nearly 10 years now. In that decade I’ve achieved nearly all of my childhood music dreams, but I’ve also made just as many mistakes that run over my mind before I fall asleep each night. A wonderment of how a few different decisions, rerunning in hindsight, would work out in some alternate universe. This ever creeping determinism is a fallacy I’m quite aware of but one that I will never completely shake, though it’s these experiences I’ve learned the most valuable lessons. These are the things I’d like to share in a series of mini-blogs I call How To Kill Your Band.
Part 5 – DIY Touring
So you’ve made it through last week’s post and countered the bluntness of why anyone would even consider booking your band – well then you must have something special or you’ve got Apple level marketing genius. Either way, it works. The next step in the heroic quest to get your music on the road is to figure out how to book your own tours. Like I mentioned last week, learning to book tours independently is one of the few skills learned during bandlife that can eventually turn itself into a legitimate job so it’s worth diving into if you want to stay in the industry postmortem. Luckily for you, five years ago I took my just-graduated-college naivety and dove headfirst into booking AHAF’s first tour making just about every mistake you could possibly make. We’ll gloss over the embarrassing stuff and get right into a few tips and resources I’ve discovered that can help get you started.
Indie On The Move
Back in 2009, an “agent” had booked us our first tour that we’d been promoting for months along with our record label. Three weeks before it was to start, the agent vanished and we came to find out only half the dates were actually booked. We should of just canceled the tour, but being young and dumb I decided to finish it myself. After several tedious days of Googling/MySpacing venues in different cities I ended up coming across IndieOnTheMove.com. At the time, it was an oasis of venue information conveniently sorted by location and provided just enough hope to keep me going. To this day it continues to be a valuable resource for diy touring bands and has a great community providing not just venue information but it’s own tips for new bands on the road. However, I learned fairly quickly that having venue information is only valuable if they have in-house talent buyers specific to your genre. In most cases, promoters separate from the venue are responsible for putting on shows and this needs to be under consideration when contacting venues directly. Nevertheless, it’s a superb starting point when searching possible venues to go after on your initial routing.
Local Metal
One feature of MySpace that I still miss to this day is the ability to search for bands by location. Sure you can use ReverbNation* or Bandcamp but it’s not nearly as comprehensive as the service Tom built. Further, finding bands only lets you creep their show flyers in hopes of finding a mention of the promoter. Fortunately, the Local Metal Facebook network has become a directory of venues, promoters, and even current local bands in each state. As you’ll see in the main page’s info, each state has it’s own separate FB page and that page contains the directory of local contacts. Even more than being categorized by state, each state’s page has gone another step and conveniently listed contacts by city. This is by far my favorite diy find for collecting promoter contacts and has been invaluable on tours I’ve booked in new territories and contrary to the name, it provides worthy contacts across multiple genres.
*Quick note on Reverbnation, don’t use it. Or at least don’t show it to people. I live just a couple blocks away from the RN headquarters so it pains me to advise against a local startup but recently an A/R for a large record label mentioned to me that part of his daily email triage is to automatically delete anyone who sends a Reverbnation link with their submission. Seems harsh right? But it’s similar to applying for a job with an aol.com email address – it projects that you’re somewhat out of touch with the modern trends and realities within the industry.
Learn how to write an email
Now that you have a list of names to contact it’s time to, well, contact them. Here’s where you need to explain why someone should book your band and do so in a way that provides the breadth of necessary information in an organized, easy to read message. The importance of brevity here cannot be understated. Writing a 10 line deep first paragraph describing the virtues of your band’s dietary decisions is the quickest way to get passed over. Understand the volume of emails a promoter receives and try to not make their life any harder. The subject line should contain the bands on the package along with the specific date requested while the body needs only to list the bands’ most pertinent marketable information and links to Facebook and notable YouTube videos. Think of what a promoter might use to promote your band and give them the tools to do so right off the bat.
Above all else, the best advice I can give is to stay organized. Carefully maintain your contact and routing spreadsheets, respond to every email, and learn to love Google Docs. Booking, like anything, takes practice and you’ll make a fair share of dumb moves but it rewards those that are obsessive in their determination. Treat everything you book as if it’s going on your resume because as I’ve mentioned, it’s a skill that can turn itself into a job in an industry where experience is valued over degrees.
