Hard Traveling: Summer Tour Slump Affects Artists at Every Level
“I’ve been doing some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed.” –Woody Guthrie
As the slow scorching summer of 2010 drags on, touring artists are feeling the heat everywhere but at the box office. A recent report from Pollstar revealed that for the first six months of 2010, gross revenues for the top 100 tours in the U.S. totaled $965.5 million, a decline of 17 percent from last year. With 15.9 million tickets sold — a 12 percent drop from 2009 — the two figures represent five-year lows. While U2 and Simon & Garfunkel have cancelled shows for medical reasons, other superstars — including the Eagles, Christina Aguilera and the Jonas Brothers, as well as package tours such as Lilith Fair and American Idols Live — are cutting dates due to soft sales.
It’s tough news for an industry that has come to rely on touring to offset the losses of plunging CD sales, and is now experiencing the first drop in online song sales in seven years. But in keeping with all aspects of the recession, the impacts of the decline are borne hardest not by the millionaires, but by those fighting just to keep going.
For John Paul Keith — a rising Memphis favorite, whose fiery guitar playing and honky-tonk songwriting proudly continue some of the city’s best musical traditions — sometimes even getting on the road can be a struggle. Over the course of the year, he has shared dates and a band with acclaimed BMI great Jack Oblivian, a Memphis garage rock trailblazer. Keith’s Spills and Thrills, recorded for Fat Possum sister label Big Legal Mess, and Oblivian’s raucous The Disco Outlaw, on Goner Records, are two of last year’s best rock and roll releases. But that hasn’t made things much easier.
“It was very hard to even get a booking agent,” Keith says from the van. He is driving from last night’s show in Chicago to a radio interview and gig in Cleveland. “We got turned down by four or five established agencies. They all liked us but they were just not taking on any new acts. So much work goes into breaking a touring act. If it is a new band that nobody has heard of on a small label, the agency is guaranteed to take a loss. So more established agencies only work with bands they know are going to draw a couple hundred people in every town, no matter what. And those agencies are impossible for a new act to get.”
Working with a part-time booking agent, Keith and Oblivian put together tours that found them crisscrossing the country twice in the past five months, as well as most of Europe. To pull it off required a fiscal discipline that more closely resembles a small business start up than the clichés of a rock and roll band on the road.
“I do a very detailed Excel spreadsheet before we leave,” Keith says. “Once the gigs are all booked, I add up all the guarantees to determine our gross, and then I budget out our expenses. I know exactly how much mileage my van gets and I look up the national average for gas. I allocate 75 bucks a night for a motel, times however many days, and then factor in how much we need to eat, about $10 a day. It’s a business. You have to do a budget and then stick to it.”
For Keith, a motel is the only luxury allowed.
“That is the one area where we bite the bullet and spend it,” he says. “None of us are in our 20s anymore. I’m 35; Jack is 43. When you crash with people that are at the show, nine time out of 10 they are younger than you and they want to party. They’ll keep you up all night and you don’t get any rest. And when you’re our age, you’ll be hurting the next day. They may want to hang out the next day, and go get breakfast, and you have a long drive and you don’t want to be rude, but you have to go. It’s just generally way better to get a motel so you can get some sleep. So we do that but we keep it real cheap.”
Keeping it real cheap applies across the board.
“Anywhere you can trim costs you have to,” Keith says. “We all travel in one van and to help with mileage, we don’t get a trailer. We pull the back seat out for the equipment. We have a cooler in the van, and we’ll go to Wal-Mart and buy cases of water for $3, and maybe even refill them at the motel. If you stop at gas stations and get a bottle of water, it’s a $1.50. Four guys do that a couple times a day for 30 days, you’re looking at several hundred dollars just for bottled water. It’s kind of sad, but that is what you have to do if you want to come home with any money in your pocket.”
For all the cost-cutting measures, though, Keith and Oblivian are still running up against the hard realities of the economy, especially when they play areas of the country most severely impacted by the recession.
“The big cities are good,” Keith says. “L.A., Chicago, New York, D.C. But in the Rust Belt, and the eastern industrial areas — Pittsburg, Cleveland, Buffalo — it’s really tough to make any money. I don’t know if it is the economy or unemployment, but every time we played those shows, they were really rough for us.”
For artists like Keith and Oblivian, though, there is not much difference between the band and their audiences.
“We’re bringing home roughly what we’d make if we were working an 8- or 9-dollar-an-hour a job,” Keith says. “Enough to pay rent and the bills, but it is real tight. If you screw up or if the van breaks down or something, it can blow the whole thing.”
While the economic realities of touring are causing many bands to stay home, a decision that impacts everyone from venue owners and staff, as well as the state of live music across the country, that is not really an option for Keith.
“We wanted to get one short run in before August, when it really slows down,” Keith says. “But we’ll get back to it in the fall. I have to. This is how I make my living now. That brings things into stark contrast and clear perspective. You get a lot more careful handling the money when this is how you eat.”
To read more of Ari Surdoval’s work, visit arisurdoval.wordpress.com.
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