I leave in six days on what promises to be one of the stupidest things I've ever done: a yearlong tour of the country without any support from a label, publicist, booking agent, shit, hardly anyone except my mom and my loyal and long-suffering girlfriend. I'm excited, and needless to say, more than a little apprehensive. It's already not unfolding how I'd imagined. I figured I'd get everything together, call in every favor imaginable from my time in clubland, book shows for myself two months in advance and then head out with my laptop and cellphone and continue to book shows as I went. I've envisioned my own failure, of course (almost nothing but). All of the best laid plans have to have a fatal flaw built into 'em, and with the horror stories I've heard about tour vans imploding, I was sure it would be my ride.
And I was right, the van crapped out, but I overestimated how far I'd get before it happened. After a month and a half of educating myself about the reliability and price of mini-vans, searching local print ads and national online databases and nearly falling into buying a couple of different lemons out of desperation, I found the perfect van, a '92 Toyota Previa, lauded by soccer moms everywhere for the length and reliability of its ride (insert joke here about soccer moms always wanting a long, reliable ride, or maybe something about the brevity and unreliability of my ride) for a thousand bucks, about $1700 less than what they normally go for. It had a couple of quirks, but when I picked it up in Rochester, the mechanic I had check it out told me I got a hell of a deal and it drove back to NYC like a champ. About a week later, I started having trouble starting it. I'd saved so much money buying it that I figured I'd get whatever repairs it needed done right and brought it to a Toyota dealership in Brooklyn. I got the call in the middle of recording: I was in need of a vanectomy, a very expensive and painful procedure where they go in through your asshole and extract part of your heart and all of your wallet. When the smoke finally cleared about two weeks later, I'd gotten ripped off by two separate Toyota dealerships and I had shelled out nearly three times what I paid for my "reliable" van.
Worst thing is that if they had told me at the outset all the problems it had, I would have turned around and sold it for a profit and bought a different one, but they just bled it out of me, $500 here, $700 there. Crooked auto mechanics fucking rot in hell. And the van still doesn't run great, but fuck, it's going to have to be good enough because I'm not putting another penny into it. It gurgles a little at stoplights, and doesn't accelerate smoothly. Worse, half way through the repairs, the sliding door fell off and I got it back on with help from the only boss I've ever loved, Eben, but now you can't open the door or it'll fall off again. And now that the van is loaded with nearly everything I own, it doesn't ride the way it used to. It used to drive like a car, now it rides like a boat, and it's actually pretty scary at high speeds. If I wreck it or it dies, the tour's over, because I'm already out of money.
But my raggedy-ass van may still outlast me. Overachiever that I am, I may have written an abundance of fatal flaws into my plan. This tour has already been harder than I'd imagined, and I'm still sitting on my girlfriend's couch. As of this writing, I have zero confirmed shows outside of my ten day tour with The Giraffes and The Means, and one of those shows a Saturday night, of course has just fallen through. I think my failure to secure shows is a multi-barbed problem:
1) I fucking hate promoting myself, and it shows. I'm timid when I talk to / e-mail people about booking me, that is, when I can bring myself to do it. I've heard the crap that's submitted to a rock club, and I know my shit is good, better than at least eighty percent of what comes in (I sound like an egotist here, but know that it's not that I hold a particularly high opinion of myself, just that most of the demos submitted at Luxx were painfully suck-tacular yet none of those people seemed to have any problem with confidence when it came to stalking me) but hey, if I didn't feel like I sucked, well, I just wouldn't be me.
2) I'm hideously disorganized. For proof, look at the structure of this rant.
3) As fucking brilliant as I'm convinced I am, I'm competing for shows with a legion of bands with labels, publicists, booking agents, not to mention fans, bass players and drummers. This is best illustrated by Joseph Plunkett, a band from GA who was so good that I spun their record in the club and even took it home with me (sorry Eben!) but I didn't book them because I knew they wouldn't bring as many people as some awful band from New York who was good at getting out their friends. Without confirmed shows, I'm looking at a lot of downtime and a lot of just hanging out, playing Johnny Cash covers on the corner with my guitar case open in front of me. I mean, hey, it ain't telemarketing, and it could be fun but I've never done it before, I'm a lousy guitar player, I don't know a lot of songs other than my own (which I can still only barely play), and virtually all of my songs are about being too fucked up on cough syrup to sodomize the 38 year old divorcee with two kids and that might not go over too well at the street mall in Richmond, VA. It's kind of shifty to dodge the one thing that really has the potential to derail this whole foolish venture, especially when so many people I care about and whose opinions I value have expressed concern about it, so here it is: at 26 years old, I've spent nearly half my life as what is known, in some circles, as a "problem drinker." I also suffer from depression, anxiety, insomnia and panic attacks, which are all exacerbated by drinking. And after a year and a half of sobriety, I've just fallen off the wagon (I didn't fall, I was pushed!!). My alcohol consumption in the last month has been limited to mostly just drinking beer with my family and friends, and I did an incredible amount of work on repairing my health, letting some shit go and even growing up a little while I was at Luxx, so we'll see, this may just be the beginning of me leveling out, becoming stable, adult and boring. I'm hoping that it's like when you turn on the TV and they're playing Ghostbusters, only about ten minutes into it and it's good enough that you're willing to sit down and watch it all the way through, instead of when you find your roommate's porno tape in the VCR and you immediately fast forward to the frenzy at the end, the debauchery, the humiliation, the guilt, the shame, the filth, etc., etc. Tour Diary from the "RIDE THE MOUSTACHE" tour w/ The Giraffes and The Means. Brought to you by Burger King's "Three Meals for Under Three Bucks, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Alka-Seltzer, Rite-Aid Brand Ibuprofen, Dexatrim, Ephedrine, Stacker Plus, Immodium AD, Pepto-Bismol, you get the fucking idea.
Posted by Mishka at September 3, 2003 12:37 AM