How Bands Travel

This morning, I woke up in self-isolation wondering how I’d spend my day. While scrolling through Twitter, seconds away from deciding to drown myself in Animal Crossing, I noticed a lot of my friends were tweeting about a “sprinter.” So I scrolled on, figuring I’d missed some weird joke last night, but then I found it. The most tone deaf article about life on tour I’d ever come across.

Now I want to start this off by saying I have nothing against Electric Guest. It’s cool that they get to tour, even cooler that they get the comfort of the vehicle they have, but let’s not pretend they’re roughing it or that this is even a newsworthy feat.

I also don’t want to make this a contest of “who had it worse,” but now that we’re all talking about our experiences, I want to share mine. It doesn’t get talked about too much and really should get more of a spotlight, especially the smaller bands that don’t get to spend their nights in a hotel or get enough free bottles of water in a green room they very likely don’t have to steal and bring back to said hotel room.

Plenty of my friends have their own stories to speak to, including splitting the band between two vehicles and stuffing themselves in a van with too many people plus gear, but I can only really talk about what I know and my experiences. So here we go.

Before Touring

When I first started traveling with bands, we did runs in one of the members’ old Explorer with the back seats down, a beat-up old mattress in its’ place, and a Uhaul trailer clanging behind us. No air conditioning, by the way, but what else do you expect in a “first out-of-state run” experience? There were six of us, there usually were, the five band members and me documenting the whole thing. Luckily, we played shows with friends on this run and crashed on their floors and couches. There was no way we were sleeping comfortably in that vehicle. We were learning as we went, it was evident, and it got us ready for our first real tour.

Fall 2017 was the first time I’d done a tour with a band in a van that wasn’t a trip a state or two over, and it was an experience. It’s probably the one I learned the most from, so it’s the one I’ll talk the most about.

Fall 2017

For just about three weeks, I quite literally lived in a 12(?) passenger Ford van with 6 guys. We still had the trailer, though we’d graduated from Uhaul, we still didn’t really have air conditioning, and didn’t think we’d need it up north in the Fall, and we hadn’t made set rules like we did the next tour I had with them.

Besides the driver and co-pilot (also band members, by the way, we had to split driving duties), the seats behind them were a bench for one person each, then the two left over had to share the back. Though we tried a system for who goes where and when, it ended up turning into “well my backpack is already here, so this is my spot for the next few weeks.” And it worked as well as it could for seven people living in such close quarters.

For this tour, we were lucky enough to make friends with some of the bands we played with and would often sleep in their living rooms and basements. We made the mistake of thinking we could afford a hotel way more than we realistically could, and after a few nights of comfort, we decided to lean into tour life and awkwardly positioned ourselves in the van to try to get some sleep. I often pushed the poor merch guy onto the floor. We’d wake up and hang out in whatever Walmart’s parking lot we used the night before and even spent an entire off day in a Wendy’s skateboarding and playing Yu-Gi-Oh with our tour-mates because we couldn’t afford to do anything else.

Our eating habits were also horrible, but because we stuck to saving fast food receipts and getting 2-for-1 deals every chance we got. All of our money was tied into us getting to our next date, and we were living off of whatever we’d saved before we left. To this day, I can find the best fast food deals, a skill that I never thought I’d hone.

While we all love each other, it still took a toll on us. I know it did on me. I overworked myself that first tour. I didn’t realize that being overworked and tired and away from home for that long would cause my anxiety to flare up as badly as it did, but yeah. It did. So look after yourself out there. Back off of you need to, get some space, take a day off if you can.

Don’t get me wrong, we did make the most of our experience. We stopped at a nature trail in Erie, visited Niagara Falls on one of the guys’ birthday, and that Wendy’s experience is actually one of my favorite memories.

I couldn’t quite express how I felt about this tour correctly way back when, but here is an old post I made that’s a watered down version of what I just talked about.

Spring 2019 Part 1

This experience was much, much better than my first. This tour was with a different band, but don’t worry. I’d be back with the first one soon enough.

For this tour, I was only going to be on half of it so I could make essentially the same route again a week after being dropped off while the rest of the band carried on. We lived in a converted church bus, a huge step up from the van, and it was much more comfortable to sleep in, and I don’t remember us ever staying with friends. We had bunk beds on one side, a bench on the other, and a king sized bed in the back. We had places to plug in our phones and laptops, we had extra space under the beds and benches to keep our bags, and we had spaces to keep coolers full of snacks and sandwich materials so we didn’t eat garbage the entire tour.

There were six of us this time, but we had more space to move around and stretch, and we had a much better schedule than the first tour I’d been on. Staying on somewhat of a schedule actually helped me manage my anxiety a lot better than the last time. Three of us had Planet Fitness memberships, so we’d wake up in the morning, get some gym time in, shower, change, brush our teeth, and pack into the van to get the day started. Most of the time, we’d already be in the city we needed to be in, so we could have time to hang out and explore like we did in Los Angeles. Other times, we’d be on the road, stopping at the occasional fruit stand for some giant strawberries or getting stuck in snow in Las Vegas.

The biggest road bump happened after I’d already been dropped off. The bus broke down, and the part was a hard one to find because it’s an old bus. The band had to split, half of them taking care of the van while the other went ahead to the next city, and from the phone calls I got, it sounded like a stressful experience I’m glad I wasn’t there for.

Spring 2019 Part 2

This tour was with the same bad from the first story and happened a week after I’d been dropped off. There were six of us again, sometimes seven. There was another band from my city joining us for half the tour where our seventh person would ride, then they swapped over to the next band’s van that joined us for the second half, but there were seven of us on the 20+ hour drive home.

This time, we’d learned from the first tour and rearranged the van. The first big change, downsizing gear. Smaller cabs were essential for this because we were going without a trailer to save gas. So we shoved all gear, merch, and anything bigger than a backpack or blanket into the back of the van, took out a couple rows of seats, and lived on the floor.

We still stayed with friends when we could, but we mostly stuck to sleeping in the van, minus a stint of a few days where a couple shows got cancelled. We stayed with some friends of ours and had a makeshift Super Smash Bros tournament to pass the time.

There’s not too much to note here, we were more comfortable roughing it so it seemed like less of a chore. Even though this time, we would have to rearrange everything in the back and make a nest for at least two of us to sleep in. Though it clearly wasn’t glamorous, we made the most of what we had.

Response of Business Insider

I simply can’t see why anyone on this staff thought this story was newsworthy. Not to say Electric Guest doesn’t work hard, but I, and other, think it’d be a better story if you’d cover any of the thousands of bands camping out in their vans scrambling for gas money to get to their next location. Maybe even a story on how this current virus is affecting these bands now that all tours have been cancelled or the string of break-ins that have taken place just before.

I just wish a bit more research had been done or a different angle was chosen because frankly, it’s a bit insulting to anyone who doesn’t have the luxury of splitting a 15 passenger vehicle between five people, even more so when they don’t even sleep in it, to say “wow, how difficult it must be to live hotel to hotel and ride in comfort to your next location.” And I get it, tour is still taxing, even in comfort, but this is just a tone deaf take when there are plenty of other bands out there that are miraculously still on the road with vehicles that only run half the time or that have to figure out how to bring all of their members between two vehicles.

To anyone who has experienced touring, this article just seems a lot more like an ad for Mercedes and Electric Guest than an actual celebration of the hardships touring bands go through after they get offstage. I’m glad that the band can tour in comfort, but for a newsworthy “omg how do they do it” article, this ain’t it.

To see some packing masters, check out the Twitter account @goodloads. I still don’t know how they fit so much gear into small spaces.