Ottawa Tonite.com : Section Title

We’re hitting the road this Friday, crisscrossing the country in a giant blue van we affectionately refer to as “The Sparkling Blue Angel” (long story on how it got it’s name, I’ll save that for a future post). Almost a full month of driving for hours every day and playing a gig every night. It’s a ton of work, and requires a ton of planning. As we close in on the time to depart, I’m starting to feel like the hard part is done. The gigs are booked, contracts are signed, posters are mailed, band is rehearsed, the plan is in place. In this post I’m going to go over some of the challenges we faced when putting this tour together.

We’ve toured before, but this time it’s different. We booked and planned the whole thing ourselves whereas in the past we relied on booking agents. This involved a ton of cold calling (and by that I mostly mean cold-emailing). I once read that Cheap Trick got their start after winning a local battle of the bands competition. They took the money they won, bought a beat up old RV, and packed up and left. They didn’t have a plan, they just hit the road. They’d stop in whatever town they arrived upon, find a phone booth, look up every bar and venue in the phone book, and start calling them. They’d pretend to be some big time manager of a new up and coming band, and they’d book themselves. You can’t really operate that way these days unfortunately, as venues have become wise to these tactics. Instead, it becomes a mass google search on every target city you plan to hit. We mapped out where we wanted to be and when we wanted to be there, then searched for every bar, coffee shop, theatre, or any other kind of venue that hosts live music. After emailing and calling every single one of them, you start to get some replies. About 1 of every 10 emails or calls get returned in the first place. Then, out of those, it’s down to who actually wants to book an unknown band from out of town. You see, it’s much easier for most venues to book either locals or well known bands. A local band will draw out all their friends and family and probably has somewhat of a local following. A big out of town band will draw because they’re already well known. But not many people will go to a bar and actually take in a new band these days just for the sake of seeing something different. So it takes a savvy bar owner to take a chance on the unknown out of towner. Finding such owners is the challenge. Luckily everytime you tour you get to weed out all the bad gigs and keep all the good ones. We’re returning to 6 or 7 of the bars we played at last time we did this route, and a lot of new ones.

Live music venues owners and bookers are a lot like musicians – incredibly unreliable. We booked a mini tour back in October. Three days of gigs, with three bands, all coordinated by us. A few days before leaving, I emailed the first venue that we were planning on playing at. When they replied, they informed me that the bar no longer does live music, along with some scathing remarks about how musicians had caused him to close his bar because they all asked for too much money… The next night, we found out that the other two bands both couldn’t make it to the show, leaving us to play three sets by ourselves. And the third and final night, the bar double booked us with a hockey team’s party and decided that they were more important than are show. This is how we learned the hard way that contracts were a must.

Canada is a tough landscape to tackle. In the USA, you can’t really drive for more than 2 hours without hitting a decent sized place. In Canada, this isn’t the case. From Ottawa to the Manitoba border is a 23 hour drive alone, which, to put it into perspective, is almost the equivalent of driving to the southern most part of the USA from Ottawa. This means you’ve really got to think about routing. You try to hit larger cities on weekends to maximize your exposure, and you somehow have to find gigs on the other days of the week in small towns that most people probably haven’t heard of. Some of these small town gigs turn out to be the real gems of the tour, but a few turn out to be pretty scary encounters. One thing remains constant though – if you’re not playing a gig on any given night, you’re losing money and wasting the efforts you put into driving all the way out there. This time around we decided to try and think outside the box a little to address this problem. One of the things we did was book ourselves at a few ski resorts while we’re out west. Ski resorts are full of people who are out spending money and partying regardless of what night of the week it is, so it’s condusive to a band playing their on a Monday or Tuesday. We also booked a gig at a hockey game in Red Deer. An arena with 6000 people in it is better than any pub on a Wednesday night.

This only begins to scratch the surface of the things you need to plan your way through in order to have a successful tour. Touring is incredibly rewarding and a ton of fun, but it’s not for everyone. Hopefully I’ll be able to shed some light on other aspects of touring while we’re out there.

In the meantime, check out a demo we just posted on our myspace. It’s a bit of a theme song for our upcoming tour. Don’t forget to check out our streaming performance tomorrow night at 7:00pm on our website as well.

- Mark

PS: Follow us on twitter! @creeksilver

Tags: Music, road blog, Silver Creek

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 12:57 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.