The Last Tour

Four seasons on the road in the underground punk scene.

1. SUMMER 

Summer tour is a coming-of-age story. The willing sunburn. The steady buzz of a billion bugs hidden in tan fields, and the buzz from sneaky beers in the backseats and beds of rusted trucks. Clumsy tip-toes to late night swimming holes with rope swings and rocks tall enough that you can suicide-dive off of them. My favorite dive is still the pelican, though. I’ll have to show you it sometime. 

Summer tour reads like secret recipes: a pinch of weed tincture, a waft of charcoal dinner fumes, a drop of blood from a paper cut the atlas gave you, a kiss from some cutie at the show the night before still stinging your lips like sour candy the next morning, several gallons of Bloody Mary for breakfast. Mix it all together and let it sit in your soul for a month-and-a-half, and voilà: spiritual soup. Gut-wrench Gazpacho. 

So what does it all mean? What is it all about? What exactly is tour? Hell, I dunno. There are too many parts and pieces. All I know is summer tour is a coming-of-age story. Case in point? Last night at the home of the record shop owner, he told us the tale of his four favorite kittens…

“We’d heard rumors of stray dogs in the hills up here,” he said. “But I had no reason to believe them until the barn cat had her litter. She passed during the birthing. Left us four kittens. Wasn’t long before the strays came. They took two of the kittens. The strongest, more muscular two. So I got my rifle. And I took the strays.” 

Listening to his story, I was thinking to myself, “Holy shit... this dude just straight-up Harper-Lee-style described how he shot and killed a couple wild dogs to avenge his murdered kittens.” I could see his long-barrel winchester leaned up against a rocking chair in the corner of the room and I believed his every word, the ember orange from his tobacco pipe softly key-lighting his face for his big monologue. And at that point, I started asking myself some questions. 

What the fuck piece of Southern Gothic literature was I caught in here? Who the fuck booked this tour, Tennessee Williams? Exactly what passage of Dandelion Wine was this from again? And did I even wanna know what magic was behind all this? 

Maybe that magic was best left undecoded. After all, a trick is only a trick if you can’t figure out how it works. Maybe that’s important to note in regard to the mystique of these spellbound and supernatural summer tours. Let a trick be a trick. Enjoy it. 

Most important to note, though, is the search. The search for what? It’s hard to describe. Maybe it’s a search for something greater. Something bigger than before. Something newer than you ever knew was possible. Some nod of the unknowable. Some distant silver flash in the underwater murk of some mid-August midnight dip. 

Holy shit, did you see that? What was that thing? A vision? A specter? A hallucination? A freak occurrence? A once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon? A momentary fold in the fabric of time and space? A flash-in-the-pan piercing-through of the all-inundating veil of reality? Or was it just a fucking fish coming up for some air? What’s the difference really? Who cares? And, more importantly, whose turn is it on the rope swing? I think I feel a cannonball coming on. 

2. WINTER 

If summer tour is a coming-of-age story then winter tour is a Russian novel. 

Will we ever have dry socks again? Who ate the last of the onion bread? Excuse me, but where do we piss and shit and puke now that the water has been shut off here? Does anyone even live here? Hello? Anybody? Do you think someone will feed us or give us a small patch of cold floor to sleep on? Searching for crumbs, avoiding the light, only drinking poison... have I turned into a bug? Are we all cockroaches now, living on top of each other and walking all over each other and existing in our collective filth and greasy steam? 

Watch out for the state police. Be wary of the townspeople. Be suspicious of your friends and neighbors. Cold, dark death hides behinds every break-neck twist of icy mountain road. 

The ghosts are riding with you. They are hidden amongst you. They live inside of you. You and yours alike very well may be these ghosts. And just when you thought it couldn’t get anymore desperate or dire or deathly, a call comes in from the venue where you’re supposed to play that night...

“Load-in is at 5:30.” 

The streets are paved with the frozen tears of your people. You are standing in the center of town square nose-to-nose with your closest comrade, and you are both screaming bloody murder at one another. You are both shattering glass bottles on the ground to punctuate your statements of anger and disgust and unfiltered hatred. Tonight, the air has an extra chill to it. It is the frigid burn that comes with the lingering potential for ugly and unexpected violence. End of days, end of days. 

It is clear now to you and your entire traveling party that all human existence leads to but one place: a cold, cold death. A forever winter. A frostbitten eternity. And there is no escaping its grip. 

Earth is left vacant in this new era, for this is the time of the Great Big Cold. The ice-shard winds take their rightful place as the owners of this pitiful frozen rock. They take command of the desolate godless Heavens that surround our dead rock too. 

O, Nothingness! O, Void! O, banal and brainless maelstrom! Sweet deliverer of perfect finality! Destroyer of all things living and therefore dead! Granter of total oblivion! So this has been the meaning of life all along: Death! 

And then another call comes in from the venue... 

“There’s free food and free beers for bands. And we got a loft upstairs y’all can crash in and smoke weed in or whatever else y’all do. Touring bands get 100% of the door money. Just let us know if you need anything else. Oh, and it turns out we’re gonna line-check, so get here anytime before 10pm. No rush. Should be a barn burner!” 

So, um, yeah... scratch all that shit I said earlier. 

I guess the truth is winter tour is like everything else in life: it’s alright if you know alright people. You just gotta remember to keep your chin up. And keep your spirits up. Especially when the bad vibes start popping up. 

(And goddamnit, just keep some extra dry socks in your bag. You’ll thank me later.) 

3. SPRING

In the spring of this year, the heads of several longtime touring “rock-and-roll outfits” and “DIY musical collectives” convened for an emergency summit of the upmost importance. 

Their main objective? To draft and to put into practice the first ever DIY Touring Band Bill of Rights. 

The product of that historic and monumental occasion was the following five articles and their enshrined inalienable rights… 

Article 1. The right to a place to crash for the night.

Article 2. The right to (at least) two free beers (per band member).

Article 3. The right to a cut of the door money.

Article 4. The right to a late night snack.

Article 5. The right to party with you all night & for the rest of your life.

Now, I know these might be rather radical concepts to some people out there. I can hear some uninterested eyes rolling around already. But what it all boils down to, my people, is this: we all just wanna feel safe. We are far away from home and all the comforts of it, not to mention being far away from most everyone we know and love. All we need is a place to crash, something to drink, some food to eat, and a little dough for the gas tank. For us, those simple things justify everything... driving hundreds of miles a day, spilling our souls out for total strangers, leaving our blood and guts on your living room floors where we will most likely be crashing later. Food. Drink. Shelter. Means of passage to the next town. That’s all we ask. 

And what will you get in return? Oh, I dunno... how does friends for life sound? 

How about knowing people all over this funny-ass fucked-up country and world who will drop everything to hang out with you whenever you come and visit? How would you like to show up somewhere you’ve never been before and already have a huge network of friends to party with, and places to stay, and free food to eat, and honestly whatever else you might need to feel comfortable and at home? What’s your take on building a community of loved ones who want nothing more than to nurture and care for and support each other, and keep things growing and expanding, and keep the good vibes going? How do you feel about having a chosen family of your own making who will love you and take care of you through thick and thin just as you would do for them? 

Not your cup of tea? Then no worries! I’m sure there’s a digital jukebox at some bar near you. You can go make friends with that thing. But for those of us who desire a touch of real-life and living-and-breathing human interaction in our arts and music and everyday experiences? Let’s catch a cocktail and make a snack and play some tunes and party all night until we all pass out on your floor and dare you to jump in the van with us the next morning. 

“You can play the tambourine, right? Whatever, it don’t matter, I’ll teach you on the way to St. Louis, just get in, come on.” 

4. FALL 

You will bring a small plastic bag of radishes to eat throughout the drive because you’re trying to quit drinking hard liquor in the morning and something about how the radishes taste bitter and coat your tongue tart helps you cope with missing the burn of brown booze. 

You will nap with your head against the bass drum in the seat next to you and let the music of the road whirring beneath you sing your ass a lullaby. 

You will have to rush a quick smoke in while everyone else is peeing at a rest area between Des Moines and Chicago. 

You will do a couple-few one-hitters once you finally get out into “The Nothing” of flat farmland and (fingers-crossed) no cops. 

You will call whoever you know in the town you’re playing that night and tell them to come hang-the-hell-out, which they will if they can get out of work early or get their friend to come with them or if they feel like getting out at all. 

You will wonder where the summer went, these long nights putting on jean jackets already, the swimming becoming less and less frequent—almost like all the good water is evaporating as the days get shorter. 

You will remember to call your ma back and check in with your family, and you will make arrangements to go visit them when tour is finally over. 

You will think about tour. This tour, the last tour. All of the tours before it. You will remind yourself that it’s all the same fucking tour. One long neverending stream of shows and kids and roads and smokes, and couches and floors and cats and dogs, and basements and backyards and kiddie pools and deep ends, loud laughs and bad beers and breakdowns and brawls, short songs and long tuning breaks, gas station bathrooms, and door guys and sound guys and wise guys, and Roman Candles, and mega-babes and young punks and old hippies, and firecrackers, moonshine and homegrown weed, bad sleep and fast dreams, wild-ass antics and odd brushes with pure freedom, insights on humanity and personal epiphanies and lightning-in-a-bottle type instances of self-realization along with the occasional taste of a fragmentary understanding of the meaning of life, as well as a taste of the occasional free burrito, and nothing to do other than show-up and set-up and tune-up and play your songs, and do it all over again in the morning. 

You will get choked up about this thought and buy a 25 oz. can of beer to wash down the boulder in your throat. 

You will think about the people you love and miss. Some alive, some dead. Some far away from you in the physical sense, Some far away from you in the emotional sense. And you will attempt to picture the smiling faces of every single one of these people all at the same time which is utterly impossible, but it is comfortably abstract enough of an idea to remind you that there are people you love all over this planet. There are people who love you, too. There are so many people who you have only met because of this wild and whacked-out longterm lifestyle game called Rock-and-Roll… and you will remind yourself to be appreciative and in awe of this major miracle. 

You will spend all day stuck in the van and at some point you will finally fucking crack and start to lose your cool, and you will want nothing fucking more than to get-the-fuck-out of the motherfucking van. 

And what will you do when you get to the show? 

You will check in. You will load in. You will get a quick drink in. And finally? You will go get right back in the van again to be with your friends, just like you do every night. Just like you did last night, and the night before that, and the night before that. Just like you did on the last tour, and the last tour, and the last tour, and the last tour.

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