(Title inspired by the Frank Zappa piece of the same name)
If your band has gotten big enough, the next step will be to tour. It could be on a local or regional level if you build a following in the area, or a national or international level if you hit the Billboard charts or become a successful tribute band or a social media sensation or get featured in Alternative Press.
While it may seem glamorous to live the life of a traveling troubadour, in reality it’s hard. Some people just aren’t cut out for it. Like me. The closest I ever got to touring was a five-day stint in upstate New York when I was in college, and I felt like I was going nuts and couldn’t wait to get back to the dorm. Your mileage, pun intended, may vary. Of course you know I’m going to mention Willie Nelson here. While I don’t have a lot of personal experience with touring, I know a lot of people who do. Their experiences will be part of this series, here and in future installments.
Like anything else in playing in a rock band or in life, being prepared is essential, including knowing to expect the unexpected.
First I’ll talk about some practical considerations, and then delve into the physical and more importantly psychological aspects of going on the road.
Planning is essential. I am assuming that everyone in the band has a shared calendar with days and nights indicating when they are and aren’t available. (Many musicians play in more than one band, and you don’t want to book a gig in Weehauken if your son or daughter is getting married that day.) You will be booking months in advance, even for bars, let alone clubs and live music venues. Of course, it helps to have a manager and/or booking agent, and at a certain point it will become a necessity.
Plan a touring route that makes sense: the Guns N’ Roses early 1990s Use Your Illusion tour is legendary for having the band crisscrossing countries and continents with little rhyme or reason. Create a route that minimizes travel times and focuses on cities or areas where your band is popular. (If you get really big, some promoters and venues will have restrictions on where you can play within a certain time frame and area, known as a radius clause.)
Travel light. This is especially important if you’re a band in a van. These days, you don’t need stacks of Marshall amps and when you’re on a regional touring level most if not all of the venues you’ll play will have a house PA and backline (house amps and drums). If you do need to carry a PA, technological advancements have made speakers, mixers and amplifiers much smaller, lighter and more powerful. Our band has done outdoor gigs with a pair of PA speakers and a powered mixer and a monitor or two and it was more than enough. If you’re on a tour with multiple bands, you can often share gear.
Make sure your van or vehicles are in roadworthy condition! You don’t want to break down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
Promote, promote, promote, in any way possible, on social media, at the venue, in local publications (sometimes the venue or promoter will take care of this), with mailing lists, and on your website. (You do have a website, don’t you?). If you’re doing a local gig, call and contact everyone you know. Don’t just do a single e-mail blast or Instagram post and expect the world to come to your gig. Be relentless in posting multiple times across social media including the day of the show. Having music videos online is a must.
Unless you’re a name act, assume you’re going to be on a very tight budget. You may need your personal credit cards to finance a tour or get you through times of slim or nonexistent cash flow. Have electronic payment methods set up.
You must have merchandise for sale – this can make or break the profitability of a tour. T-shirts, CDs, and – be creative. At a Shonen Knife show I recently attended, one of singer/guitarist Naoko Yamano’s older amp/pedals was for sale – for $300! I had no way of carrying it back with me on the train, or I would have snapped it up. (I bought a T-shirt and a bandana.) Fans really like it when they can meet you and working the merch table during or after the show is a great way to build your fan base. When you're just starting out, this is huge. As Tony De Stefano of the Blackstrap Yardspinners once quipped, “When you're playing out of town, they don't know you're not famous!"
Merch sales are essential when you're on the road. (Here's illustrator Matt Snow at a New York Comic Con.) Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Exmeredith.
While all this is essential, the real key to touring successfully is, as I mentioned, dealing with the physical and psychological challenges.
You will encounter long periods of driving, waiting for sound checks, and other downtime. Logistics can be a nightmare. If you’re on the level of traveling by air, I don’t have to mention how torturous flying has become. If you want to know just how tough even a big-time a tour can be, read this article in Mix magazine by my friend and tour manager/front of house person Steve La Cerra about their summer 2025 European tour with Blue Öyster Cult. It’s a serious reality check.
You will be in close quarters with your fellow band members. As pro guitarist Gabe Cummins told me – he’s toured the world and is currently with Blood, Sweat, and Tears – “Being on the road is like being in a marriage with however many people are in the band. Fundamentally, one has to enjoy the travel and the music and such.” He adds, “Any young, aspiring touring musician should know that it’s as important if not more important to work on being a good human as it is to work on being a good musician.”
If you’re a band just starting out, you won’t be getting paid a lot, and will need to look for fill-in dates in between major shows. Some bands even book for private gigs or parties at friends’ houses. About 15 years ago when they were getting started, the alternative rock band Set it Off played a sweet 16 party in a fan’s back yard at a price the mom could afford. Since then they’ve had a successful career and their latest album, Set it Off, was released in November 2024. It ain’t all bleak in touring world – sometimes hard work does pay off. And when everything clicks, those moments on stage are magic. Gabe told me, “There is something special about that experience. You really have to love it and really have to believe in what it is you're doing. And if you have that combination of things happening, special things happen.”
Don’t be an a-hole. You will be constantly expanding your network of club owners, sound mixers, the people who work the venues, promoters, radio station people and many others. Success builds on success, not bad attitude. I can't tell you how many pro musicians have told me, as Gabe notes, that your ability to hang and get along with people is just as important if not more important than your musical ability. Be on time and be prepared. (If you have to deal with bus or lobby calls, this is not optional.) Work with the other bands. If you’re not the headliner, and even if you are, you and your roadies (if any) must be prepared to do a lot if not all of the work of setting up and breaking down.
This is an iron-clad rule: never do Number 2 on the tour bus! Seriously. It's common sense and common courtesy, and do I really need to list some gross examples of why this rule is non-debatable? My nephew Zac Del Vecchio, who has toured with Nashville artists in 20,000 seat arenas, told me that someone he knows got fired from a tour for doing Number 2 in a bus. Ask the driver to find a place to stop. This is not hyperbole.
Try to eat right, and get enough rest. These can be the toughest things you’ll encounter. The adrenaline will be flowing after a show and it will be hard to get to sleep. You may be limited as to when and where and what you can eat – see my installment on eating properly in Issue 219.
Songwriter/musician extraordinaire James Lee Stanley offers advice: “[Once touring] shifted to all one-nighters, which is what it is now for everybody, it is exhausting. When I have a tour and I'm playing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I make sure that those gigs are close together, no more than a hundred miles apart, and I get plenty of rest. Even since my twenties, I always take a 20-minute power nap in the afternoon before the show because it seems to bring your energy together. Because what you're doing is, you're entering a room, and now you are the battery. You are the one that's bringing the energy to the room, and if you bring it to the stage, they will give it back to you and you'll get this reciprocity of energy and it's wonderful. But if you don't have the energy, then the show just lays there.”
This is also a really tough one, but try to get some exercise. More than one professional musician I know has tipped me off that a Planet Fitness Black Card will not only get you access to any location in the US, it will also allow you to use their shower facilities. I know, this sounds crazy in today’s world, but I’ve heard of even major bands not being able to get to a shower for a few days. In the summer, that ain’t fun for anyone.
Make sure you have enough clothes, especially socks and underwear! Sounds silly – until you run out, or your band members complain about your personal, um, aura. You can sweat through stage clothes in minutes under hot lights. One pro says that if you have enough socks and underwear you can do laundry every two weeks, but figuring out where to do it isn’t always easy.
When you're touring, sometimes you have to shower wherever you can. Courtesy of Shopify AI.
In past installments I’ve talked about encountering substandard venues and conditions; anything from small stages to cramped (or no) dressing rooms to bad sound and unfriendly or no audiences. Things will go wrong. The expression “road warrior” didn’t come from thin air. But as I've emphasized, when everything is working right and the band is on, there’s nothing like it. It’s an artistic and emotional high both for you and the audience. James Lee Stanley says, “It's about audiences. It doesn't matter whether you play for 10,000 people or you play for six people. It doesn't matter because you're on stage. That's what matters. Every gig is Carnegie Hall. You’ve got to take that mindset into the gig.”
Header image created by Shopify AI.
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