Well, after over a year of anticipation and months of preparation, the fall segment of our Midwest tour has come to an end. It's great to be home for a while; to sleep in my own bed; to spend time with my wife and my son when he comes home from college; to have all the comforts of home but after being on the road for 43 days, it seems odd not to be packing and unpacking, hopping onto a bus, checking out a new venue, doing a sound check and show.
From any standpoint, the tour was a great success: we had an excellent band, comprised of talented musicians from 9 different states, great charts, full venues, great crowds who gave us standing ovations every night, a very happy promoter and community concert associations who were thrilled they brought our show to their community.
Ross, our sound man did a great job in making sure we sounded the best we could at each venue, as challenging a task as it was with varied acoustics, equipment issues, etc. You know your sound man is doing a good job when you begin to take it for granted - when sound issues aren't in the forefront of your consciousness...because he has, in effect, removed that concern from each gig. That takes a good ear, a lot of knowledge, understanding each venue's acoustics and being sensitive to what we need to hear.
If you don't spend much time in the heartland of America, it is easy to forget that hunting is a major leisure activity for Midwestern Americans. Our tour coincided with hunting season so the hotels were filled with guys in flak jackets, camouflage clothing and hunting hats. We regularly saw them walking around with their shotguns and hunting dogs and we saw lots of trailers, muddy SUVs, etc.
In many of the hotels we saw signs that said "Do not clean your bird in your room". Is this a common problem? Apparently, it was pheasant and turkey hunting season. We even got one, ourselves....unintentionally. While our bus was cruising east on Rt. 90 at 72 mph a pheasant crashed into our bus windshield, scaring the hell out of us because it seemed to come out of nowhere. By the end of our trip, there were four new cracks/chips in the windshield from flying birds and stones flipped by passing trucks.
During our tour we racked up over 9,000 miles on the bus and we traveled through 11 different states. Probably, the best destination for many of us was Rapid City, South Dakota because we had a full day off and took advantage of our free time by visiting Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument. Mount Rushmore was particularly stunning!
In very short order we all settled into a kind of "road rhythm" of packing, getting onto the bus in the mornings, stopping for lunch, continuing the drive to our destination, checking in, unpacking, walking to nearby shops to restock or find a good meal, then the load-in bus call, then the band bus call, doing the sound check, then the gig, then the load-out, heading back to the hotel, looking for a restaurant that would still serve food after 10:00 pm....then going to sleep and starting over the next day.
Everybody seemed to find some kind of diversion to make the driving time pass more gracefully: sleeping, laughing, watching DVDs on the bus' multi-screen system (mostly violent mob movies or comedies), playing cards, checking email on our laptops, calling home, watching the world go by through the large bus windows.
Man, did we see corn fields. Endless corn fields. Mind numbingly flat as far as the eye could see, corn fields. Occasionally they were punctuated by some silos, grain elevators, a big white farm house, cows grazing in the vast fenced fields.
We found the Midwestern folks to be very nice, very polite and warm. At times, the audiences were very "subdued" during the early part of the show...but they always came to life by the end of the show. At times, their reserve was a little unnerving but we grew to realize that they loved the show and became more demonstrative in the end.
I think all of us got along, extremely well - not an easy thing to do when you're living and traveling in close proximity, living the rigors of a road tour and away from your loved ones.
In fact, I think the experience brought us together and we all agreed we'd like to do more touring (although perhaps not quite so long, next time - 5 weeks is tough).
This spring we will be finishing the tour with a two-week run in the Midwest. We're hoping to assemble the same musicians for this tour...barring any booking conflicts, we should be able to put the same band together.
My office is also looking into booking some "routings" of five or more dates, in clusters, so we can basically do one-week or two-week "mini-tours" so we can hire a bus and use the same great band.
Well, today I'm going to decompress. I have to get my hair cut, catch up on office stuff, greet my son who is due back home for Thanksgiving, pet the dog, kiss my wife and go shopping for food for our big Thanksgiving dinner we are hosting.
No comments:
Post a Comment