The Touring Test: Trials of Musicians' Travels.
November 01 2010

Touring. The glorious burden. The grind. Music's can't live with it, can't live without it handmaid.

Long live touring.

Country to country. City to city. Hall to hall. Audience to audience. Face to face.

For the performing musician (as distinct from the composer or studio player) touring lies at the heart of a career. It is the systole and diastole. It oxygenates and renews.

For civilians, i.e. non-professionals, touring forms part of the musician's gestalt. I get "Any tours coming up?" constantly. Dinner invitations are always prefaced with: "I'm not sure if you're in town or on tour that day, but..."

Musicians need to get around. To play for new people, in new places. Not only to avoid the staleness stasis can induce. To create new markets. To expand public recognition. More people listening to our music, means more people buying it. We risk saturation- of our fans, our market, our musical ambition -if we don't tour, and stay in one place.

Touring, in civilian imaginations, glows with a romantic shine.

In real life, touring dims one's time, energy, money. It is the musician's self-strip-mining. Not for nothing do musicians refer to touring as the grind.

Just booking a tour. You can realistically play only one stage in a city. You book performances one by one. Night by night. City by city. Imagine an office worker having to find and change jobs every day.

Then there's scheduling.

"New York has an opening for you on Thursday. Newark the following Wednesday."
"Nothing earlier? I have to sit around for a week?"
"Well, Tallahassee can fit you in on the Tuesday."
"Do nothing for four days, then fly to Florida and New Jersey back to back?"
"'fraid so."

Cost.

"I can get you $2500 for the first gig, but only $500 for the next four."
"$4500? Playing the musicians' fees, travel and hotels, plus your 15% alone are going to cost me more than that."
"That's the most I could get. And even then it was pulling teeth."
" ."
"You'll have to take a loss on this tour."
" ."

Logistics.

"We need to make sure there are plenty of CDs at each venue."
"How many?"
"Well, at least 250 per show."
"OK. We'll have to ship some ahead to each city. Drag the rest along with us. And we'll have to make sure any unsold CDs get sent on. At the end, we'll need to collect any unsolds and ship them back..."
" ."

Energy.

"We land at 2:00. We'll get to the hotel by 3:00, assuming they don't lose the luggage. Assuming. You can shower. Then we get to the theatre for 3:30 to set up and sound check. Back to the hotel for 5:00. You can rest. We should be at the theatre for the show by 6:30. Change into your performance clothes there. After the concert and autographs, we have dinner with the promoter. We should be dome by midnight. You can do what you want after, but we need to be packed and in the lobby ready to go by 7:30 tomorrow morning. The flight's at 9:00."

Touring. Some performing musicians find ways to eliminate it from their careers and survive, as did the Pianobabbler's great favourite Glenn Gould. The last 18 years of his career unfolded in recordings.

Most musicians don't escape the grind. We endure the travel, the distances, the loneliness, the variable halls, the uncertain food and the endless demands.

But soft- Did the Pianobabbler say we endure touring? We tour happily, thankful for the privilege of making music. We love touring. It renews us. It brings us face to face. It oxygenates the music we live to make.

"I love touring," say Ringo Starr, Neko Case, classical clarinetist Andrew Marriner, and jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves.

Long live touring.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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