The Last Summer On Earth
delsWith some trepidation, we are on our way across the Atlantic once again to spend the summer as the opening act on the Last Summer On Earth Tour.
The prospect of living on a bus for seven weeks and playing thirty odd shows across the USA certainly has its appeal. The tour will take us to some exotic places; Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Mankato Minnesota. Nampa, Idaho. Indio, California. We play at Red Rocks, Colorado and the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The main act is The Barenaked Ladies who are the organisers of this undertaking. They have run similar ventures before and by all accounts they run a cool operation and take pains to look after everyone on board.
But (and it is a big but) we will be on stage first as part of a three band bill. It is a long time since we played as a support and it is kinda hard to get my head around going on tour to play ten songs in the early evening sun. There will be a LOT of down time. Our bus will travel in convoy with the entourage so we will be at the venues until 1am and arrive with the trucks at 8am. Sound check at 5pm with show time at 7. We will be off stage by 7.40. Time to write a novel, or learn a language. Or something.
But my experience is that it is hard to settle down to anything constructive on show days even if you have a nice hotel room at your disposal. On the back lots of what are euphemistically referred to as `sheds', or even `boutique sheds' in the business, the preciousness of time is undermined by always being in a state of waiting for something—access to showers, food, a runner to deliver something, a guitar to be restrung, sound check, show time. Add to this a lack of REM sleep that comes built-in to a lifestyle where a part of your brain remains aware that you are hurtling along the interstate at 65mph even while you are dreaming about something else and it can be very hard to persuade your being to concentrate on anything other than the oversaturated pixels of an OLED screen.
We have done this kind of thing before, albeit thirty years ago, and it was a shamble. But we will be looked after on this, and looking after ourselves, which was not the mindset when we toured in the nineties. A large part of my schedule then was built around whisky consumption which took care of a large part of the day, one way or another. It seemed big and clever then and I had a lot of fun (probably much more than I even remembered at the time) and went to a lot of great bars. But if, heaven forbid, the spirit took me after a week or seven on the road we will not be in places where partying after the shows will be the order of the day.
Maybe this time I will find time to write that novel.