You’re on stage.  This show is great.  The crowd is eating it up.  This will be the defining moment of your musical career.

Hey, what was that popping sound?

Where did the vocals go?

Oh…oh, hell.

It’s an inveitability.  Play enough gigs and something catastrophic will happen.  Laptops will crash, mics will short out, cables will die, the monitors will explode, the guitarist will have a  strobe-light-induced seizure…something is going to go wrong eventually. 

In these cases you have two choices: stop the show and get offstage, or deploy a backup plan.  I’ve always preferred the latter, although there are cases where the former is really your only option.

What constitutes an onstage backup plan?  In an ideal world, like the world that a lot of larger bands live in, you just have identical gear you can just swap in when something goes wrong.   Open up any of the big touring band interviews in SoundOnSound and you’ll see rigs that have two of everything, and there are copanies that make gear specifically for the purpose of sycnhronizing for seamless failover.  Unfortunately, most of us don’t have that luxury.  I certainly can’t afford to keep a second cloned laptop at the ready if mine goes out.   However, I do keep an iPod with all the backing tracks and the appropriate patch cables at the ready.  It’s not optimal, but it’s to my mind better than not performing.   I also keep things like backup mics, backup DI’s, extra batteries, and spare cables in a bag just offstage.  While the soundman may have a bunch of these things, he may also not.  I prefer not to take chances, and these are reasonably cheap investments.

I also keep needle-nosed pliers, electrical tape, a small screwdriver, and a soldering iron in the bag.  This is obviously not something one can use onstage – “hang on, let me resolder this broken adapter…” – but quite often technical problems manifest during setup or soundcheck, and you have some extra time to rectify them.  Not everything can be fixed, of course, but it never hurts to have some tools ready.  A screwdriver can be the difference between a great show and not performing at all.

For the electronic artist, it is good to remember that hard drives are cheap.   Stuff happens on the road that is generally not conducive to the proper functioning of a laptop.  Keeping a cheap backup drive with all your important stuff on it handy is a Good Thing.  Again, not something you can do on the fly (“GOOD EVENING CLEVELAND!  Are you READY TO give me a few hours to RESTORE from this BACKUP!?!  WOOOOO!”) but it can at least mean the difference between cancelling a gig and cancelling a tour.

So what about the band members?  You can’t keep a spare singer handy.  You can, however, keep throat lozenges, decongestants, ibuprofen/asprin, pepto, imodium, and other such OTC rememdies around.  They don’t take up much room.  And when you need them, you’re really, really glad they’re there.  While it’s not the greatest thing in the world to perform with a band stuffed with indigestion meds, the alternative is far worse.

I’ve also learned – the hard way, mind you – that all this preparedness does you no good whatsoever if you can’t get at it in a hurry.  If you’re in the club about to go onstage and something breaks, or you suddenly feel that imodium is necessary (ahem), it won’t do you any good if those things are locked in the van in a parking garage behind the venue.    This also raises the issue that every band member on the road should have extra underwear packed.  Just sayin’.

In some ways, I’m kind of crowing a bit about the fact that we came out in the black.  It means I managed to keep expenses down and luck out with some reasonable promotion.

In other ways, I’m am abjectly terrified of what this implies.  $16.81.  For 9 shows.  That’s not counting food.  And lodging was primarily couches and futons of sympathetic friends and promoters along the way.  We’re looking at an average hourly wage of somewhere in the vicinity of a nickel, and only then because of the good graces of many, many people.

Convicts make better money than this.  If there’s anything that will quickly kill the notion of the rich and famous rockstar life, this is it, right here.  A nickel an hour.

Sure, yeah, we’re a tiny band that doesn’t devote all their waking time to relentlessly touring and promoting and building a reputation,  and we’re in a tiny subgenre.  There are a lot of ways we could do a lot better, I’m sure, to bring people out and move merch.   Still – there are lots of bands who do this for a living, and even if they’re doing 100 times better, that’s still less than minimum wage.   That’s no margin for error, right there.  That’s “if your van blows a tire, you’re basically screwed” territory.  That’s “the drummer is delirious from eating nothing but ramen for two weeks” land.

It also hammers home the notion that every night really needs to be a good night.  We had maybe two shows where the door take wasn’t enough to cover the gas to get there, and thankfully one of those shows well made up for it with merch sales.    I admit I was entirely unprepared for such a quick reversal of fortune.  I’m not sure what exactly I expected, but damn, that’s a razor-edge.

I’m glad I’m doing this because I love the music, not because I’m trying to make a living at it.

Still, for me, this was a pretty Big Deal.  It’s the culmination of years of work, numerous hours of self-doubt, musical re-evaluation, crazy changes at inopportune moments, technical twiddling, and the like.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for, well, my whole life, but for one reason or another have never quite gotten to, until now.

There are some people I couldn’t’ve done this without.  Not in a million years.

Jill Sheridan – I’ve been told, and I’ve often said myself, that bringing Jill into the band was one of the smartest moves I’ve made.  The girl can sing, she’s enthusiastic about the music, she manages to take all the crazy changes I make with grace and aplomb, she handles all the exceptionally nerdy tech stuff I set up, she’s funnier than hell, she’s easygoing, always great to talk to,  and has always, always been a good friend to me.  She’s probably the closest thing I’ve got to a sister.  I always feel like I’m criminally underutilizing her skills onstage, and I think I need to do something about that.  We work great together.   And I think I simply could not do this whole “band” thing without her.

Elizabeth Scheef – she’s awesome.  She’s hardcore.  She knows everybody.  She’s calm, cool, and collected under pressure (like, say, driving through 4th-of-july Traffic in the DC metro area).  Her packing skills are legendary.  She’s clever, funny, patient beyond any reasonable expectation, can drive like a formula1 racer, friendly, outgoing, and damn professional.  AND she did this entire tour while 3 months pregnant, with nary a complaint.  She’d earned the right to sit out a drive, or to pass on load-in, or to lobby for more comfortable quarters, but never once did she.   I’ve never met anyone with such resolve.  She’s going to be a fantastic mom, too.

Raya Wolfsun – Adding Raya to the lineup at pretty much the last minute was a risk.  We had two whopping days to practice, she’d never done anything resembling this before.  I basically threw her into the deep end and said “swim!”  And swim she did.  The crowd loved her, she’s got a capital-V Voice, great stage presence, and she’s deeply entertaining and sweet.  So, as she would say, it was full of win.

Dan Clark – the dude nudged me, poked me, and eventually shoved me into committing to this.  My own self-doubt had kept me from trying it.  Dan finally was the guy who said “dude, you MUST DO THIS.”  So I did.  And it was great.  And I can’t thank him enough.  He’s managing his own band – which was excellent every single night – and doing a fine job of keeping me informed about what’s happening when, where, and putting me in contact with all the people I need to contact.  A great, hairy guy with talent to spare and a level of professionalism I can’t even touch.

Thanks to all these people for making this tour happen, and for making it great.

• 9 days
• 9 shows
• 2700 miles
• 7 states
• $16.31 in PURE PROFIT
• The 3 best band members I could ask for
• The 4 best band members in another band I could ask to be travelling with
• 5 homes opened to us for post-show flopping
• 1 hotel room that smelled vaguely like a handi-wipe
• 15 hours of solid driving home
• 20 harrowing minutes in western Baltimore
• 5 hours average sleep per night.
• 21 tshirts moved
• 51 CDs moved
• 13 tanks of gas
• $411 in fuel
• 3 hairs in Jill’s Waffle House lunch
• 1 Bob Evans breakfast
• 27 new dents to our keyboard stand
• 2 new 9v batteries for the violin
• 72 bottles of water
• 2lbs of beef jerky
• 1 purchase of a Naseer Shamma album, which due to spotty data connections in rural PA, took me 5 hours to download
• 5 demonstrations of how to work CheetahDave’s coffeemaker
• 3 overtakings from behind of the TDC van
• 8oz of organic baba ganoush, randomly found in central Maryland
• Approximately six million juvenile sexual innuendo, scatological jokes and “That’s what she said”s
• 24oz of awful 7-11 coffee
• 10 pancakes hand-made by Jim Semonik
• 3 incidents where my snoring kept Jill awake
• 24 chaal beats
• 1 Strawberry pie from Eat-n-Park

It’s getting surprisingly easy.

Dan made the comment, though, that the tour lifestyle quickly recalibrates your concept of traveling luxury.  Jim Semonik offered me a glass of water with ice and I thought it was the best thing ever.

I have to say, we’re being treated remarkably well by, well, everyone.  I keep wondering what exactly I’ve done to deserve this.  Jim, Roy, Ada, Dave, Kristy, JSun, Don…I mean, everybody is helping us out in ways I couldn’t really expect.  I was expecting, I dunno, a floor to sleep on and that’s about it.  Instead we’re getting homemade pancakes at Castle Semonik and pizza from the Retrofits and Dave’s fabulous breakfasts and so forth.

I mean, this is pretty great.

We’ve had some glitches.  Violin battery died midway through a song.  We had a ludicrously cranky soundguy.  I clammed a few notes in a horrible manner (D natural!  Natural!  AAAAGGGGHHH!).  A bathroom that screams “it puts the lotion in the basket.”  The GPS took us on a little “detour” through some…interesting…neighborhoods of Baltimore.  But these are basically minor things.  We are in good hands along the way, with good people, and we’re having a LOT of fun.

And right now, sleepiness is taking care of the rest.  I just wrote “henche” by accident – typing a full blog entry would take hours at this rate.

So for now, just going to say that the past few shows have been kind of amazing.  Not necessarily huge crowds, but damn good crowds.  Crowds that were made entirely of fans, and in many cases people who now number as friends.

Also, huge, huge HUGE thanks to Uncle Jimmy Semonik, Ada and Roy Retrofit, CheetahDave and Kristy V for putting us up, putting up with us, and getting these shows set up.  We seriously owe all you guys.

MOre once I’m awake again.

It’s been a long day.  Yesterday was a long day.  We rolled out of the Chicagoland area at a reasonable time, and caught up with TDC at Dekalb.  From there it was a straight-ish shot to Davenport/QuadCities.   We took a brief detour to get gas, and it turned out to be one of those kinds of “turn here for gas” signs that really means “turn here then drive 5 miles to some tiny cluster of buildings with a Conoco that sells gas, pizza, ice cream, and is the social hub of some rural burg.”  A little out of the way.  But we got back on track and had plenty of time to spare getting into IA.  Kari was there to meet us, and took us to where she and her friend Ed were barbequing kabobs for us.

Oh, man.  Home-cooked food, even after a mere few days on the road, is such a luxurious item.

We got to Lumpy’s, deeply deeply amused at both the fact that the sign over the door read “Lumpy’s Rear Entrance”, and it was across the street from a bar called “McButt’s.”  Naturally we had to take pictures.

The sound guys, Gordon and Leif, were consummate pros.  Really good.  REALLY good.  Turnout was unfortunately light, but the few people that did show up were probably more enthusiastic than any crowd we’d had in years.  Whooping it up, dancing vigorously, and most importantly buying a LOT of merch.  Everyone was really exuberant, glad to talk to us, wanting to know what on earth we were doing in Iowa, etc.  I get the impression that shows like ND/TDC don’t roll through often, so when they do, the kind of people that like them make sure to show support.  It was pretty great in that respect.

After teardown we headed back to Kari’s, arranged all manner of camp beds and mattresses on the floor, and slept.  I snored again, causing Mercy to think somebody was dragging something heavy through the parking lot.

Way, way, way too freaking early we were up again.  In order to get to Columbus in a reasonable amount of time, we were on the road by 7:30, which is pretty butt-early especially when you didn’t get in until after 1.

It was a long drive.  Elizabeth and I handled it, chatting vigorously about random subjects.  In Indianapolis we decided we were starving, and wanting to have the Total Band Experience™ we stopped at a Waffle House.  Oh the food was kind of lousy, as expected, but dammit, we’re a band and we’re eating at Waffle House.  The manager on duty was a haggard woman with a low, rough voice named “Norma”, and our server was a vivacious older guy named “Bruce”, who wanted to talk about all manner of things once he sussed out that we were a band.  He informed us that he didn’t think Carrie Underwood and her hockey-player husband were going to last.

Awesome.

Some coffee, and back on the road.  Our next stop was for some restroom relief at a Stucky’s outside of Centerville IN.  This was notable not merely for the attached Dairy Queen, but for the remarkably well-designed “Rock star” tshirts that were in actuality christian fundamentalist swag.  Which were quite inappropriately set up next to a stand of “pull my finger farting pens.”

We’ve been in Columbus since about 5:30 local time.  We play in maybe an hour or so.   Smaller stage than we normally are used to, but we’ve played smaller, and the soundguy seems competent.  I could use a nap.

That, and it was quickly becoming clear that anything else that needed to be done before I left simply wasn’t going to get done.

Wendy calmed me down a lot, reminding me that I was doing this for fun, and to promote the album I love, doing this with good friends that I adore, and playing venues hosted by people who really want me to be there.  That helped a lot.

I packed my duffel and Raya’s clothing into the car with the gear.  Good, a reasonable amount of space left.  Then off to get Elizabeth!  Adding Elizabeth’s stuff, though, triggered a few small moments of concern.  We loaded her bags and still had plenty of room.  Then Nick, her husband, said “Oh, I’ll go get the drums.”  Oh right.  Gear that I didn’t pack.  I suddenly had no idea how we would fit Jill’s stuff in.

Thankfully, Elizabeth is also a master of spatial thinking and started quickly pointing at things and rearranging and suddenly had this absolutely brilliant, spatially efficient setup, with room to spare.  Consider my jaw dropped.

Off we went!  Drive down to Chicago was surprisingly uneventful, given all the craziness going on in the area that day.  We hit some nasty traffic towards the end there but luckily we’d had enough lead-time that it didn’t bother me.

Loadin at the darkroom was, as always, easy and efficient.  I got to chat with a newly-pregnant Teh Jeaner for a bit.  She’s so adorable.

We had a soundcheck, an actual soundcheck! with Pat, their very, very patient soundguy.  I finally figured out why the drums kept feeding back.  Gosh, I wish I’d noticed what an idiot I was about 2 days ago.  Man, though, that guy is great.  We sounded great through those monitors.

Dinner was a the the Old Oak, which I’d never been to before, but came highly rec’ed by the locals.  It was indeed damn tasty.  I mowed my way through an overstuffed BLT with avocado, a nice spicy remoulade, and a somewhat redundant andouille sausage.  It was sort of a BLTARAS.

Am.psych killed it.  I dunno what they were doing specifically but they were pretty much on fire during their set.

I briefly had a chance to talk to Bones/Freddy, who I haven’t seen in over a decade.  Aw, man, that was awesome.

We ran a new set tonight.  A few rough spots – we tried our new version of Footfalls, which sounded for the most part good but since we’d only actually practiced that, uh, twice, we kind of stumbled through some of the new harmonies.  Raya was well-caffeinated by the time we went on, and was a dance-splosion onstage.  All I saw was a blur of jingly jewelry punctuated with the occasional pause to sing.  It was kinda of awesome.  I need to step up my game to compete with that sort of energy.  We went out, as always, with Triangular and I discovered that a chunk of the audience had developed a dance to go with it.  Heh.

The crowd was clearly enthused about the Dark Clan.  And they rocked it out, as usual.  Lane, despite her claim of severe sleep-deprivation, was amazing on “Daily War” and “Aged and Evil.”  I got onstage to do ILYWAY, and actually didn’t massacre the lyrics this time.

Caustic didn’t disappoint, either.  I played bongoes, briefly.

After some post-gig socializing, and some badgering to party late into the night in a way that my aging frame simply cannot tolerate, we piled back into the Forester and headed out to a nice little burbclave where Elizabeth has some friends with a house.  A house of a million comfy couches.  And an iguana!  And dogs!  I crashed out on what might be the world’s squeakiest futon.  Jill crashed on a nearby couch, and based on the fact that she’s currently wearing earplugs and has a pillow over her head, my snoring must’ve been epic.

Today!  Onward to the Quad Cities!

Another semi-local gig. This time at the recently revamped Club Anything in Milwaukee. Gary and John have done a fantastic job remodeling and updating that space. It was nice. The only downside is that MIlwaukee is not yet smoke-free, so the main room was a bit smoky and that’s always hell on my voice.

Great crowd. Like, really great crowd. I even saw a guy who I haven’t seen since high school, which was pretty great.

We were plagued with feedback problems during the night. I’m not sure why, we’ve not had this particular problem before. My guess is that it’s the mic we’re using with Raya, since it’s the only part of the rig that hasn’t been thoroughly battle-tested. Which, I guess, is something I can work around, although it changes a little of our MO. Not much, but a little.

I’d been checking the radar for Madison rather neurotically, after hearing about what had happened to TDC on their drive back from Madison (wind, thunder, lightning, etc). Seeing that there was a “chance of severe thunderstorms” I made SMS puppydog eyes at Dan and asked him, since this was a hometown gig for them, if they could handle the closeout at the end of the night and let us bug early. He was gracious enough to do so. So after our set, we bugged out of town.

We made it about halfway home before this happened.

Accompanied by torrential rain, zero vis and heavy winds.  Our trip home slowed significantly.  We made it, a bit later than expected, in one piece.  And unlike TDC the other night, our power was on and nobody got blown into oncoming lanes.  Whew.

Today!  Onward to Chicago!

Good turnout, really enthusiastic crowd. It’d be great if they were all like that. Of course, not every show can have Wendy’s dad, Eric Goedken, and Jill/Eric’s parents in the audience. Home court advantage, and all that.

The Dark Clan ripped it up, as always. I can’t write a whole lot about them because I’ve already used up my superlatives.

Our set went pretty well, although the oppressive heat and humidity onstage began to take its toll on my violin-ing hands, in the form of sweaty fingers. Our newest addition, Ms. Raya, was awesome, especially given it was her first performance of this type, ever, and we’d had exactly one day to prepare.

There was the usual ridiculousness of me forgetting lyrics or missing a cue or whatever. These things happen (well, they happen with me, anyway).

I was supposed to play as part of Caustic, and I did. Although I was supposed to mostly play theremin, but I couldn’t because on my way to set up, the power adapter to the beastie snapped off. So I need to replace the power cable. That was disappointing. It also meant I was improvising keyboard parts for about 75% of Caustic’s show.

Oh, and there was rain. And wind. This was probably more of a problem for the Milwaukee-bound Dark Clan than it was for us.

Today we play a Milwaukee gig. Tomorrow, things start in earnest as we hit Chicago and then points beyond. No driving back home to pick up the stuff we forgot after that. I’m spending my last few hours before the road frantically trying to cross i’s and dot t’s and all that. Buying some food for the road (do other indie bands worry about whether their road snacks are locally-sourced?), making sure I’ve got enough clothing packed, wondering if I’ve got room for a spare pair of shoes, hoping I’ve got enough febreeze to keep my performance shirts from stinking up the venues, hoping that a week of sleeping on couches and floors and being hunched over audio gear won’t destroy my back.

Fingers crossed!