Why It Sucks To Tour in the West US

[Outcast]

Everytime we book a tour and we don’t hit the west coast, fans from California are almost always the first to verbalize their discontent. “WHY THE *$#@ ARE YOU SKIPPING CALI?” Not too long after, we hear from Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Our band is actually FROM Arizona. And we STILL don’t play their nearly as often as we do the Midwest, Texas, and the East Coast.

I think it’s time that someone leveled with you. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it:

TOURING THE WESTERN UNITED STATES SUCKS.

Now, it’s not you guys personally. I love the west coast. I love Colorado and the Rockies. Montana and northern Idaho are absolutely beautiful. Portland, OR is one of my favorite cities in the country, and California obviously is awesome because it’s fucking California.

But touring the west coast is HARD. It’s a financial nightmare. Every touring band knows this, I’m just the first to come out and say it. If you break even touring the west, you’re doing very well for yourself. Here’s why.

NOT ENOUGH CITIES TO PLAY.

Take a look at the US at night:



You see those white blobs? Those are cities and communities. You see all that black? That’s NOTHING. Lots and lots of NOTHING.


More people live in Oklahoma City than the entire state of Wyoming.

You can’t play a gig at nothing. For some reason, to play a show you have to go where there’s a population. Part of an effective tour is booking enough shows to make it profitable. With less options, the odds of not getting a day filled goes up greatly. So you can be left with holes in your tour routing, which means you are losing money on that day off.

I remember one particularly stressful tour when we were in Idaho. I had routed the tour, we were losing money, and a bandmate got in my face about it. “Why the hell did you route us with such long drives on this tour! We’re losing our asses
out here!”

My rebuttal was to pull out the atlas, point at the emptiness on the map around us and say, “BECAUSE THERE’S NOWHERE TO PLAY AROUND HERE!!!”

LONG DRIVES

Because there’s a lot of nothing, this translates to long drives. Long drives are bad because you waste a lot of money on gas, you lose sleep (you have to be at the venue at 5pm, and you had a 10 hour drive that day), and being cooped up in a vehicle that long really wears on your sanity.

The drive between Portland, OR and Sacramento, CA is what I like to call the <b>Drive Of Death</b>. The only way to mitigate the suck of the Drive of Death is to book Eugene AND either Redding or Chico, CA. Otherwise, you’ve got a long ass drive on your hands.

CRITICAL STOPS

In addition to the long drives, there are certain cities that are like an oasis in a desert. But if you don’t have any luck booking these cities, your long drive becomes a longer drive.



If you don’t get Salt Lake City booked, you’re FUCKED. If you are going from LA to El Paso, and you can’t book Phoenix or Tucson, you’re FUCKED.

But luck will not be on your side booking these cities. Since these cities MUST be played or face the drive from hell, it means you are COMPETING AGAINST EVERY OTHER BAND that also needs that gig to avoid the drive from hell. Think of it like a game of musical chairs, except that you only have 2 chairs and there and a few dozen people trying to sit on them.

TOO MANY MOUNTAINS

For some reason, you tend to use more gas when you are climbing 1000 feet in elevation. If you are doing the west, sooner or later you are going to have to cross the Rockies. Engine overheating, wearing down breaks going downhill, and SNOW IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE are some of the fun challenges of touring through the mountains.

CALIFORNIA SOUL CRUSHING, PART 1: GAS PRICES

Gas prices in California are brutal. Ya know, because you weren’t already paying enough in gas driving long stretches across mountains. The cost of living in California is higher, and the gas itself is more expensive due to cleaner fuel standards.

CALIFORNIA SOUL CRUSHING, PART 2: DIFFICULT BOOKING

The highest concentration of cities on the west coast that would give you a fighting chance to book enough shows to make back some of that lost money is in California. But California is notoriously hard to book. Especially LA. I’ve seen multiple tours crash and burn that were routed with 4 stops in California, and one or even NONE of those dates ended up getting booked. Zip. Nada.

It’s even worse when a band puts their tour routing up on their calendar before their shows are confirmed.


An embarassingly long drive to the only gig you could get.

CALIFORNIA SOUL CRUSHING, PART 3: LA DON’T PAY.

We once booked a show with a band we’re friends with in the LA area. They sold 200+ presale tickets. Everything was going great until… the venue got shut down a month before the show.

They scrambled to find another venue, and they found one. The venue wanted HALF of the money from those presale tickets upfront to do the show. HALF. Nearly $2000 dollars! All they would have to do is open the doors to a guaranteed 200 people and kill it at the bar. But I guess that wasn’t good enough.

This venue was terrible, too. BUT IT’S IN LOS ANGELES, DAMNIT. THEREFORE, YOU SHOULD FEEL HONORED TO PLAY THEIR SHITHOLE.

CONCLUSION

If you plan a west coast tour, make sure to book some dates in an area of the country that will make you money so that you can take the financial hit.

When bands tour the west coast, they don’t do it for the money… they do it to spread their music to every corner of the country where people will listen.

That, and the killer weed.

http://backstagesmarts.com/2010/11/why-i...ed-states/