Advanced Placement
On the fixations of a musician/tour planner 🧊 📐
Well, we’re about two weeks out from the start of our EU/UK tour, and frankly the preparatory work is non-STOP. Apart from learning the new songs and generally setting up for the release of Qualifying Miles and doing shitloads of sit-ups for shirtless photo ops, I’ve also been spending an outsized portion of my time advancing the tour.
“Advancing?” I can just hear you asking, your eyes unfocused, your tongue thick and heavy. “What on earth is adavantazing.”
It’s advancing; you just said it correctly, like a second ago.
Advancing the tour is pretty much just the process of getting in touch with the local promoters — the folks who are financing and arranging the shows on the ground — and the venue reps, making sure everything is in place and the evening’s timings have been figured out and that there will be enough ice on site. The ice thing is our main concern, frankly. “We don’t care if there isn’t a PA or if we only get six minutes for soundcheck or if the walls occasionally do the thing from Resident Evil where slicing lasers zip around and cut transverse planes out of the audience, who then blink uncomprehendingly for a second before their freshly-divided segments slide apart. Just make sure there is plenty of ice!”
But, yeah, it’s a lot of emailing and having the same conversation with several different strangers, debating load-in times (we like our European load-in to be late enough to allow for a leisurely, Riesling-drenched lunch at a Rhine-side cafe, but not so late that we’re still onstage trying to trouble-shoot gear issues in a Reisling-drenched haze when the venue doors open — it’s a delicate balance) or making sure there’s adequate parking for a vehicle 7m long and 2.7m high.
Man, you would not believe what a pain in the ass parking a vehicle that’s 7m long and 2.7m high is, in Europe. Look, Europeans are not wrong when they boast about the beauty of their cities, the history that’s on display at every turn, the sheer volume of stained-glass, whatever. But, boy oh boy, if I had to trade all of the stained glass in Vienna for a single parking garage with a vertical clearance of 2.7m, I would do it. I just would. I am glad — make no mistake, I’m THRILLED — that Paris’s gorgeous Notre-Dame cathedral survived the 2019 fire that almost burned it to the ground, but you’d better believe that the first thought that went through the mind of every tour manager upon hearing the news of the inferno was, “Well, shit, that wouldn’t be a bad spot for a parking garage with a vertical clearance of 2.7m.”
I spend a lot of my tour management time worrying about parking. When you’ve got a van full of precious musical equipment, you’re willing to sleep in the worst possible hotels, so long as they have parking secure enough to convince you that your gear might not be stolen while you sleep. “Sure,” we’ll say, “the place has roaches and pillow-pubes and the shower has those Resident Evil lasers for some reason, but just look at that well-lit, gated parking situation!”
On our last European tour, we purposefully went out of our way to travel in a smaller vehicle (the magnificent Volkswagen Vito, a marvel of engineering at 1.8m x 4.9m) in the hopes that the reduced dimensions would offer us the opportunity to spend more time in European city centers, with their accursed, Lilliputian parking structures. And it kind of did. I think we stayed in like three cities on that tour, one of them being Vienna, where it actually turned out that we had to park on the street in front of our Airbnb-ed apartment, anyway, which is simply a recipe for waking up every 90 minutes in a sweat, imagining that you’ve just heard the shattering of a Vito window and the distinct scraping of a Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier across Viennese cobblestone.
On the off-chance that we have subscribers to Slow Descent Into Radness who subsidize their subscription costs by stealing band equipment from touring vans and who are now salivating at the description of our Vito-full of gear, first of all: let me thank you for your patronage. But second, let me just assure that our gear is bad. It’s just worthless. We once had it assessed for insurance reasons or whatever and the insurance guy told us he’d never seen a less-valuable collection of items, and he had once done an assessment on a laboratory that specialized in fecal analysis, so what he was saying was that our gear is worth less than a bunch of probably-diseased stool samples. So if you see our van out there on the road, don’t waste your time on theft-attempts.
But anyway the Vito’s smaller size meant deeply cramped conditions, and we couldn’t carry very much merch, so we quickly ran out of our more popular items and had to rush-ship restocks all over Europe and also Chris couldn’t fit his acoustic bass in the back of the Vito, which if you’ve heard acoustic basses you’ll know this was actually maybe a little bit of a blessing. So, in the interest of comfort and merch quantities and acoustic bass-having, we’ve decided to forgo our dreams of laying our heads in the great European capitals and have gone back to a much larger van situation. Yes, this means that instead of Dūsseldorf, for example, we’ll be spending the night in Dorsten, which I’m sure is charming in its own right and has an admirable spire of some sort and a cafe with great strüdel or whatever. And, actually, now I’m looking at Google Maps and I’m seeing that there’s a place outside of Dorsten called “Movie Park Germany,” so this turns out to be a total win. Catch you later, Düsseldorf.
But, yeah, that’s kind of exactly the point of tour-managing ourselves. We love our usual tour managers, and the work they do is profoundly appreciated. On the UK run in May/June, we’ll have our phenomenal longtime TM, Johnny Haskett, a paragon of efficiency and order. He also does our front-of-house sound, so if you come out to a UK show next month and see a tall, stylish, bearded fellow manning the works, please say hello and pay him a compliment and maybe also just ask him to double-check that we’ve got plenty of ice backstage. That kind of crap is pretty much all we think about, when we tour manage ourselves. Is there a shit-ton of ice? Will the rider be fulfilled with a bottle of that brutal tequila with a plastic sombrero as a cap? Can we stay near a Movie Park?
We’re also just all about securing the sweet hotels. We know a modest spot off the highway outside of Hamburg that overlooks a ludicrously beautiful lake. We’ve got a hotel in Prague with the world’s most profoundly satisfying buffet breakfast, when you can punch through all of the little Dutch or Italian kids milling around the waffle iron. We got burned really hard on the last tour by a French hotel that claimed to be open 24 hours but which, upon our arrival, revealed itself to have an entry gate (great for van security!) that used to open with the password we’d been advanced by the now-closed front desk. But we did land upon a great spot as our 3:00am fallback, that night, so we’re all set for this run. An ordinary tour manager would just be factoring in drive-times and budgets when choosing a hotel. I’m just like, “Does it have this bar in the basement?”
Speaking of which, we’ll be taking your bar recommendations for each of the cities on our tour, in the comments. Don’t be a bunch of dirty gatekeepers, now!
🧑✈️,
Keith
Oddly, I was going to post a question in the chat about tour logistics so you've saved me a job with this post. Not all questions answered but I'll refrain from asking the outstanding ones for fear of triggering you over parking spaces and sending repetitive emails.
I'm getting really excited about the 6 dates that I've booked in but I do feel that I'll now spend some time thinking "did WAS find suitable parking, I hope so."
Have you considered installing your own Resident Evil style lasers in the van as an anti-thief precaution?