Touring prepared me for fatherhood. Being in a situation that you have to constantly attend to and can’t turn off while trying to function on very little sleep is a skill that applies to both. For many years of traveling with Grandchildren, I did the majority of the driving, and sometimes we had to drive late into the night and even overnight after playing a show. One memorable night we played in New Orleans and then drove straight to Austin after the show for a 10 a.m. South by Southwest set.
We played our last show as a five-piece in 2019, and after not being able to experience live music throughout the pandemic, I was the most pent up for it that I’d ever been. Throughout my time in Rad Racket and Grandchildren, I rarely felt the desire to go out to see a live show. For some of that time, I saw pretty much every show at the Danger Danger House (where I lived) and the Danger Danger Gallery (where I did not live) and played so many shows that live music became something from which I needed respite. I still loved playing and watching live music, but I was so constantly exposed to it that my need for it felt overfulfilled.
As my feelings about playing and seeing shows lightened in the past year, I’ve been trying to go out to and play as many shows as I can muster the energy and money for. Which is still not many, with having a family and being stable but not affluent. But it’s more than I would have at any point before the pandemic, and it’s the first time in a long time that I resumed my high school habit of searching all the live music listings for shows I might want to see.
I also missed the long-distance driving, weirdly enough. Some of my favorite driving occurred while the rest of the band slept, and I always wondered what it would be like to tour by myself. In March and August 2023, I did a couple of practice rounds trying to book strings of shows out of town. Even though everything was on a very small scale, I had a blast going out both times. And after playing a piece that emphasized the difficulty of touring, I came back thinking, Parenting’s harder.
Check out the Weird Music album on Bandcamp, iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, and all other places where you can find music. For transcripts to these episodes, visit my personal Substack.
In the following clips, both Jamey Robinson and Martin Schmidt bring up some phrases they hear from fans about touring: “Oh, cool, you go on tour” and “Well, you make your money on touring, right?” I remember at one of our shows, one of my closest friends from childhood said to me, “Going on tour seems like a lot of fun. Must be nice.” My verbal response was, “It’s a lot of physical labor.” My unverbalized response was, “You wouldn’t last a day.”
Before we go further, I do want to express that I personally love touring. Even with the exhaustion and physical labor, I find it fulfilling, validating, and cathartic. It can be fun, but it’s also a lot of work.
As Billy Dufala points out, audience members see only the hour or so of your day when you’re performing, and they don’t see what the rest of your day looks like. I worked at the School of Rock Cherry Hill (New Jersey) for a short period of time, and I used to joke that if we really wanted to teach kids what it’s like to be in a band, we should have them put all their gear in a van, drive eight hours to an empty room, set up all their gear and play a set in an empty room, pack all your gear back into the van, and then meet up with a strange dude and sleep on his floor. Have them get about five hours of sleep and then get back on the road and repeat. And for those who don’t know, if you’re a gear-heavy band, breaking down and packing up your gear can be basically like packing up an entire living room.
I also have never experienced tour as a well-paying endeavor. I’ve generally had to have remote work to do on the road to maintain some income. And now that I have a child, the logistics of touring have become much more difficult to figure out, and it’s impossible to do it the way I used to.
When I started this project, I was 28, and as I write and record this intro, I’m 42. A lot has changed, but I believe this project is important, and I want to get it into the world and perform it for people. In the following discussion, there’s a lot about the connection between music and youth, and I think one reason that it’s easier to sustain a scene when you’re younger is that you and your friends all have much more energy to go out, attend shows, and socialize. That gets harder as you get older, but part of the goal of this project is to try to make sure my musical life is not something that’s limited by the time spent in my early twenties, when my social circle was energetic enough to do it.
For more information about these interviews and the people in them, please visit this post from my personal Substack.
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