Doppler, A Roadies View

Another tour complete

36 hours at home and I still have the road on my mind.

I’m sitting here waiting to go to the dentist. I woke up in a great mood this morning and the day quickly turned bad. While I was flossing a piece of a molar broke off. I can’t believe it! I have excellent teeth; go to the dentist every six months. I was just there in March. I knew something was wrong though a week ago. The tooth just didn’t feel right and planned to make the call when I got home. Just glad it didn’t happen while I was on the road.

Looking back on the last five weeks. The tour was a success as far as the shows. Most of them were sold out and the band played great. I had the pleasure of working with three great crew guys. All of them total pros. We worked our Asses off and were tired all the time. We did have some fun and had a lot of laughs.

With that said, this tour was one of the strangest I have been on in a long time. If you know the movie Spinal Tap you will understand. I have mentioned it previously, some of the problems we had.

It looked like the last week would be fairly easy. Four shows in a span of six days. We got to the end only to have the last night become the biggest headache of the tour. It wasn’t a trailer problem this time, but a problem with the bus. We left Chicago around 3:30 am for a drive to Minneapolis for the last show.

I woke up around 7am to find us stopped on the side of the interstate. I knew something was wrong. The driver mentioned the transmission was overheating and downshifting. In my head I’m thinking there won’t be a show today and go back to my bunk.

Several hours later I wake up again and we have only traveled a short distance and find us in Rockford, IL. A tow truck is called and we end up at a truck service center. It’s now late morning and we find a truck to take the gear to Minneapolis. So you guessed it we transfer it in the middle of the parking lot. There is something very familiar about this task. Oh yea we did this four other times and usually on a day off. By this time we have it down to a science.

On this day I get left behind since there are four crew and only room for three. At first I am not happy about it, but then I think I can get some more sleep. We tried to get a passenger van for the band but no luck. The bus company we are using finds another bus in Chicago and my self and the band will ride on that. This is great except they tell us it will be a 2-hour wait.

Three hours later the bus shows up and we transfer all the bags over and off we go. We are about 5 hours from the gig and the show starts at 7:30 with Chantal. Our guys are to go on around 8:45pm. Not going to make it so the show is pushed back a half hour.

We make it and arrive around 8:20pm. Randy, our drummer joins Chantal for the last couple songs of her set. He has been playing with her the whole tour.

If we had been late the show could have still gone on since John has flown into Minneapolis that morning.

The unfortunate part was I didn’t have time to really go through the house lighting rig and also did not use the moving lights that we were carrying the whole tour. So the show ended up being very generic from a lighting standpoint.
It’s fine no one goes to see the lights anyway.

So it’s 10 days at home and then off to California for a one off late next week. We will be doing a couple of these during June.

Hopefully I will be doing a full tour starting in July. It will be something completely different from Five For Fighting. I am just waiting to get the confirmation.

Labels: Bus, FFF, Five For Fighting, Touring, Travel

posted by Doppler at 1:08 PM