Got any tour stories?

Larry

"Uncle Larry"
I never went on tour, have you? If so, let's hear some stories from your road.

I've traveled down the East Coast for week long engagements a few times, but we'd come right home after it was done, so I don't consider that a tour. So I must live vicariously through your tours. So let's go and don't hold back, OK?
 
I spent two years in Germany from 1969 to 1971. I loved that tour and the US Army Europe was pretty good at that time.
 
In all my time touring:

I played a bar that literally "ran out of beer" once.

The band was paid at gunpoint once.

While playing, a drunken brawl broke out between the local PD and FF's (they were bowling against one another for charity).
 
I've done really short tours with friends, but when I was 15 I was on a national tour with a drum and bugle corps going from California ending up in Montreal over the course of 30 days one summer. We had these biker-looking dudes driving the busses and one day I got a splinter in my left hand, but of course, no first aid was available (this was the 80s), and one of the biker bus drivers unhooks his belt buckle and reveals the other end as the sharpest knife I'd ever seen. He grabs my hand and digs out the splinter, pats me on the shoulder and says, "now get back out there!" I kept those bass drum mallets from that tour and there's still blood on one of them ;)

Sorry if that wasn't exciting enough.
 
In all my time touring:

I played a bar that literally "ran out of beer" once.

The band was paid at gunpoint once.

While playing, a drunken brawl broke out between the local PD and FF's (they were bowling against one another for charity).

Who was pointing the gun? The band?

I do recall a funny story. We were in Washington DC on a week long engagement. They set us up in a fairly nice hotel. So one night after the gig I dispensed like 8 inches of shaving cream over my bass players entire pillow while he showered. When he emerged from the shower, I was lying on my bed face up. So stupid picks up the pillow, walks over to where I was lying with the foamed pillow resting on both his forearms saying "I can't believe you did this!"

Since he was standing up and I was lying down, it was real easy to push the foamed pillow up in his face lol. All I saw was this person whose whole head was covered in shaving cream, save for 2 eye holes. It was a rib splitting-ly funny sight to see. A major shave cream fight ensued.

What a dope!
 
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I was lucky enough to have a very nice summer in 94 or 95. I can't remember.
It was six weeks in the US with a band on Atlantic records.
I was subbing for a drummer who was playing for a larger band and touring with Tom Petty, so he let me do his tour with the other band.

It's a hell of a lot of fun to be away travelling and seeing new places and playing every night.

What stayed with me most about the process was how important the publicist's work was.
A couple weeks before the tour we went to NYC and sat in the publicist's office and did interviews all day with music media people all over the world. The interviews were set up to be published a few days or a week before our shows. That's what got people to show up to the clubs.
We could be playing a large full place one night and an empty small place another, just because of whether an article had been out earlier to let people know we were playing.

If you get to your hotel at 2am, you have to be out by 10am. Not much sleepy time.

After a month the vehicle smells like socks because everyone takes their shoes off.

Everyone asks where you've been but you can only say you've seen that city at night.

There's a very cool thing when you're on the highway. It's the tourbus nod. vans, winnebagos and busses with windows; musicians waves to each other.
 
The only touring I ever did was the summer of 2000. I was in a band that traveled all over NC playing at different churches six nights a week for eleven weeks straight. For four of those weeks, we played at a big camp that had a really great stage, and for those weeks, we played at least twice a day.

The music was really, really crummy and cheesy, but it was an opportunity to tour so I jumped at it. I went to audition for drums, and I ended up playing bass and keyboards all summer.

What's funny is that I can't for the life of me remember a lot about that summer. This was not due to a drunken or drugged-up haze, but that tour schedule was in-freakin'-sane. I made some good friends and some pretty bad enemies that summer. I swore that if I ever saw our road manager out on the street for the next few years, I'd give him a beat down of a lifetime because was an incredible jerk. Oh, I don't care anymore, but I've never hated someone so much either before then or since then. What was funny is that when we had our debriefing at the end of the tour, we all just left. A few hugs, but no tears or anything. We just all walked out of that building, and I remember all but running to my parents' car and saying, "Get me out of here." When I got home, I don't think that I've slept so hard in my life.

It was anything but glamorous, that's for dang sure. Parts of it were really fun but a lot of it wasn't. It seemed like everyone else thought that it was such a big deal to be in that group, but I didn't. It was actually a step down from what I had been doing just a year earlier. The band I was in had just broken up, and I needed a change of pace. I'm glad I did it, but it would take A LOT to get me back out on the road again, that's for sure.
 
Was touring with the VFW orchestra back in the 70's and we were playing at the national convention in Chicago.

We were staying at the McCormick Place Hotel and one night and at about 3 AM there was a knock on the door.

One of my room mates opens the it without asking who it is and in pours about 5 or 6 Chicago police and the hotel detective.

One of the other drummers is in handcuffs and whining (my moms gonna kill me!) and the hotel dick is asking which one of you is Chuck Weaver.

Seems as if Chuck and the other drummer were partying with a with a group of girls that were there for the convention and one of them had OD'd on booze and pills and was at the hospital getting her stomach pumped.

Cops said if they gave her booze and she dies ,it's manslaughter charge.
So they search the room for drugs and contraband (none of us are of age),and find some papers and proceed to read us the riot act.

In the meantime Chuck gets dressed and they both get hauled down to the local precinct.
The girl is going to survive ,but they need to do a test to see if she had been molested and if it comes back negative ,they will let them go.

That comes back negative ,but the kicker is she was doing everybody on our floor BUT them.

It was good thing these boys were of the type that couldn't score in a house of ill repute with a $100 bill taped to their forehead.
 
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From urinating in the back of the guitarists amp, in Germany to the bass player returning to the van after getting into a fight in a kebab shop, when he was blind drunk.
He looked like a Hunchback with his big leather jacket, when we took his jacket off him, he had a huge knife stuck in his shoulder blade.
He was so drunk he didn't feel it.
Playing in Florida, I was blind drunk, the opening band said we could use their gear. Soundcheck I was in a bar downtown and didn't show up.
We walk on stage, place is packed and the previous drummer is left handed and I didn't realise until I sat behind the kit and prepared to count us into the first song.
I was beyond shambolic at that show lol
Our Van being towed while we were on stage.............I should write a book!
 
Let's see... D.C. area the bass player ran off to San Diego with the guitar players GF (never to be seen again) so we got a quick replacement, the singer split over all the weirdness (1974 I think).... anyway had this gig lined up, several actually, we played all the military bars in the DC area plus some nice places like Rocky's and Louie's, Bayou etc... so we really needed to step up and continue with the gigs despite these freak show mishaps so we could keep our creds and continue working.

We show up to the first gig after the soap opera, in complete disarray, all the stuff was located at the disappearing bass players place so we got there and had to wait for someone to open up the apartment etc..., which finally happened...

Get to gig.... no mic stands! "Hey look! We can use these" They were potted plants with stakes and climbing trellis's etc... got three affixed the mic's... the waitresses were in complete stitches... the stands kept falling over... we did a lot of instrumental numbers that evening.

We finally got our stuff together, went through 3 or 4 bassists and the singer came back, the guitarist was in the dumps for months afterwards. It was... unique and probably one of those heavier straws that finished off that musical endeavor.
 
Nothing salacious or scandalous to report from the Al tours, it's pretty much all business out there for us. But one incident in 1987 sticks out, partly because it happened to me, but mostly because it spawned something in the show that stuck with us for many years.

On tour opening for the Monkees, we were using video quite heavily to fill time during costume changes. No Jumbotron for us, it was a projector on a white screen. We were mostly in theaters, and had a contingency for outdoor shows where it was still light out (during the summer) and we couldn't use the video. In those few instances, we would use a bad/stupid drum solo while Al & the rest of the band changed, then we'd transition into "Living With A Hernia (parody of James Brown "Living In America".) But as of the first few dates of the tour, we didn't have the opportunity to try it out, which was fine with me - I can only be stupid for so long.

Well, the night of July 4, the bass player and I were messing around batting a balloon back & forth at close range. I hit his hand with my left hand, pretty hard, and hurt my hand pretty good. In fact, I went to a clinic the next day and they determined I had sprained my thumb and possibly two fingers.

Well, wouldn't ya know it, the very next show was outdoors at Red Rocks near Denver, and I would have to do a solo at the prescribed time in the set. Playing was hard enough, but I wasn't about to needless abuse my hand with extra fireworks. After, it was supposed to be a deliberately stupid solo, not just bad because I was injured (there's a difference!)

So, in order to enable the costume change, Al decided to write out a James Brown style intro for me to read, so that I wouldn't injure my hand beyond the abuse it was already going to be taking. It was one of those "Ladies and gentleman, would you please welcome... the godfather of soul!" and the band would do a stab. "The man who puts more strut in your stuff" STAB! "More glide in your stride" STAB! etc etc.

Anyway, the bit got such a great response and was infinitely more appropriate that a drum solo, so we kept it... for like 20 years! It was eventually used to occasionally introduce "Fat" (hey, Michael Jackson... James Brown... same idea.) One of those happy accidents, except that it happened to me!

BTW, about 6 weeks after the tour, my hand finally healed.

Bermuda
 
Oh, lord...I basically lived out of a van for over a decade.

I've been to every state in the U.S., plus all over Canada.

I'm in the process of getting stories together for a book. I did the bulk of my touring in the pre-internet age, so I think it's hard for modern players to understand what tours were actually like back then.

You couldn't check the club's calendar online to confirm a date/time. You couldn't enter an address into GoogleMaps to find the venue. You couldn't upload your clips onto YouTube for prospective club owners as a preview, and you couldn't see what the other bands on the bill sounded like. You couldn't ask Siri to find the nearest motel, or the nearest music equipment shop, or the nearest auto repair shop. There were no online outlets for selling merch, so the majority of sales were made on tour - meaning you had to lug all your shirts, discs and LPs with you for the entire trip (taking up valuable van space). Early phone plans were ridiculously expensive - especially with roaming charges (what are those?) - and you couldn't just stop at an internet cafe to fire off an email to your manager, or booking agent, or girlfriend.

It was TRULY a different era.

These kids today don't know how good they've got it! (Which will probably serve as the title for my book.)
 
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