Ed. – I got this rogue email from Dan one night. I’m not convinced it was borne entirely out of sobriety. It was prefaced with the following exposition: (This is the) first in a series I plan on continuing called “van conversations” where I relay actual conversations that happened in the van while on tour. The bands may change, but the dialogue is all true. Roll on, Dan. Roll on.

Van Conversations, vol. 1:

SCENE: It is late morning. Four musicians are in a 15-passenger van, on tour. They just played a show in Ohio the previous night and are winding their way toward Pittsburgh for the next gig. By coincidence three of the four are computer programmers of some sort or another. Eventually conversation turns towards day job-related activities…

Musician 1: So what’ve you been working on lately?
Musician 2: Ohhh, I’m working on refactoring part of this codebase I’m responsible for now, just a library that needs tweaking.
M1: Yeah?
M2: Yeah, it’s this big matching algorithm -
Musician 3: What language is it in?
M1: Python, there’s this —
M3: I’m surprised something that big isn’t in Java.
M1 and M2: What?
M3: Yeah, see, the thing I like about Java is –
M2: NO! Stop, okay, just stop. Nothing good can possibly come out of any conversation that starts with those words.
M3: But I…
M2: No! Stop. Let’s talk about anything else.
Musician 4: …My cat’s breath smells like cat food…

ED. — In The Trenches is a regular column exclusive to DTC and hosted by Dan Clark of Stromkern, Null Device and The Dark Clan focusing on music from the perspective of a recording/touring artist. Our hope is that through this and other guest blogs music fans and admirers might gain a new perspective on what it’s like from the musician’s side of the table – or stage, as the case may be.

People sometimes ask me what touring’s like. Well, to find out, try this simple exercise. Stare at this photo for 10 hours. Then take all your furniture outside. Then sit down for three hours. Then eat a take-out meal. Then sit down for a couple more hours. Then do vigorous calisthenics for an hour. Get drunk. Then bring all your furniture back inside. Then get six hours of sleep. Repeat this every day for a month and you have a fair idea of what touring is like. You can see why some people aren’t cut out for it. For another perspective on basically the same thing, Cellist Zoe Keating (Rasputina, Amanda Palmer, John Vanderslice, Halou) recently did a great talk for O’Reilly Ignite where she covered the same ground:

I really can’t put it better than that. I can, however, add some details — anecdotal and opinionated — from my own personal experience.

Waiting

Huge swaths of time are spent driving, or sitting around waiting until you’re needed, and you can’t go anywhere because when you’re needed, you’re always needed RIGHT FUCKING NOW! There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, than unstructured and unspecified amounts of dead time while on tour, but that’s what touring inevitably involves. Having said that, I’ve been on a couple tours where the waiting wasn’t bad because there was a reliable window of time every day where I could go wander around and find a place to hang out, or go sightseeing or whatever and have a fair idea of when I needed to be back by, but I think out of the couple dozen actual big tours I’ve been on, that’s happened on two of ‘em, so it’s definitely not something I count on, let’s just say.

Food

One thing Zoe doesn’t mention in her video is that the food isn’t always bad; it just depends how much attention a show promoter pays to the rider(s) the band sends along before the show. Often, on U.S. tours, the promoter will just give the bands access to food without even reading the rider. Sometimes that means you get a six-pack and a bag of chips, sometimes it means someone gives you a home-cooked meal, and sometimes it means they say “well there’s a Wendy’s up the road…” and walk away. It should be noted, of course, that all this is on tours where you can actually have a rider. Most touring is done by the seat of one’s pants, and if you get anything at all — water, a sandwich, whatever — in the way hospitality it’s a godsend and you’re super grateful. On bus tours, however, where you’re less able to go somewhere and get your own meal, you’re more dependent on people filling the rider to a reasonable degree of accuracy. I’ve found this to be much less of an issue in Europe than the states, which brings me to my next observation…

U.S. vs. Europe

Another thing that should be noted is that touring in Europe, in general, is a whole different world than touring the States. I’ve only done a couple European tours so I can’t speak definitively, here, but having done both the U.S. and Euro legs of the same bus tour, I can say that the European leg went much more smoothly in terms of quality of food, venue, and other comforts like, oh I dunno; showers. Basically, where you’re touring makes a huge difference, whether it’s what region of the U.S. you’re in (you learn that Bob Evans in the midwest is the place for breakfast, Waffle house is it in the south, and Eat ‘n’ Park is the best option out east), or what country, it impacts things significantly. There are lots of reasons for this, I reckon, but whatever they may be, it’s definitely the case that touring is nicer in some places in terms of comforts than others.

Entertainment

The only time I’ve ever met and hung out with friends/fans while on tour is either at the merch booth or, on the rare occasions when they happen someplace we can attend, at afterparties, so always somewhere generally pretty fun is I guess my point. This, in conjunction with the typical media portrayal of what living the touring musician/”rock star” life is like that everyone gets exposed to, I think sometimes gives folks a slightly skewed view of what all 24 hours of our day are like. Granted I may have 2 or 3 hours to party, but that leaves at least 21 more hours to fill. That’s a lot of driving and waiting. Remember Zoe’s pie chart from the video? For the waiting part, which generally occurs at the venue, there’s always instrument repair or cleanup to keep you occupied, and even though that doesn’t need to be done every day, it does need to be done rather a lot.

Photo from Stromkern European tour 2008, taken backstage at the Blackfield Festival in Gelsenkirchen. My trem had pulled sharp so I had to do a retune and make a couple adjustments to its springs.

On North American tours, however, the problem isn’t so much when you’re at the venue, it’s all the driving. You can only take so many photos like this one:

…before you’re bored out of your skull. Obviously you can get a lot of reading done, listen to music, or — my personal favorite — catch up on movie watching. I tend to get carsick if I try to read in a moving vehicle, but for whatever reason I can watch DVDs on a little laptop screen with no difficulty. I got through the entire Platinum Extended Director’s Cut You-Are-A-Huge-Nerd-For-Owning-This Edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on a tour where the routing took us from Denver to Chicago to Austin over the course of like five days. But so anyway my point here is that you have to remember to bring all this shit with you or you’re hosed. Also, good noise-cancelling headphones are a must for when people start arguing about shit during the trip. Believe me, it’ll happen. It’s not like there’s much else to do.

The People
I, personally, fucking love playing shows. The only times in life I’m truly comfortable and at peace are the times I’m on stage doing a show, and touring lets me do this in great quantity, so it ranks pretty highly on my list of favorite activities because of this. I get to meet so many cool people and see places I might not otherwise, even if it’s just a piece of them. I get to spend quality time with great musicians, and I get to hang out at the merch booth and talk to folks after the show. These are all huge pluses for me in terms of why I love touring. Granted not every show can have an audience like this:

The crowd for Stromkern when we played Infest in 2006. Fucking amazing. Mindblowing.

…but that doesn’t matter. There’s always (well, usually) someone, and it’s always great to meet them, play music for them, and hang out. That’s another perk. As long as you love that part of it, you’ll at least like touring.

So yeah, like I always say; one is either cut out for touring, or not. It’s one of those things you just won’t know until you’re doing it. Like getting seasick on a cruise. You find out whether or not you’re prone to really wicked projectile-vomiting style seasickness right after it’s too late to bail out.