FTV: Touring

 

     Perhaps Joe South said it best:  Walk a mile in my shoes / Walk a mile in my shoes / 

Hey, before you abuse, criticize and accuse / Better walk a mile in my shoes (1968).  These words popped into my head when I read comments deriding a pop star for complaining about how hard it is to make a living as a touring musician.  The commentator’s take was along the lines of, “You get paid a lot of money and get to travel all over the world to play music.  What’s the problem?”  I was lucky because from my start as a regularly gigging musician in 1970, I got to work within an easy commute to 99 percent of my band jobs.  My ‘touring’ experience (which meant spending a couple of nights on the road) was limited to four weekends over the next half a decade.  In no shape or form did what my bands do compare to a musician who tours for weeks or months at a time.  With that said, I guess even my limited ‘touring’ gave me enough insight to say, without hesitation, “As glamorous as it seems, it is a tough way to make a living.”

     The first time The Twig got a chance to play two nights out of the Marquette area, we landed at a place called Tiny’s Club in Niagara, Wisconsin.  We generally did our own bookings, but there was an agent working out of Escanaba that called us a couple of times when one of his regular bands couldn’t fill a gig.  The two nights we played at Tiny’s joint were a first for us (and for the club) on a couple of levels.  The obvious first for us was having to spend two nights out of town.  Secondly, we were the first rock band Tiny ever hired to test the waters of attracting a younger crowd to his traditionally Country & Western club.  If the first thing that comes to mind is The Blues Brothers having beer bottles rain down on them at Bob’s Country Bunker, let me assure you our experience was nothing like that. 

      Norbert ‘Tiny’ Cochart was born in Algoma, WI in 1932 and passed away in Marquette in March of 2015.  He spent several years as a blacksmith with the LS&I Railroad but his passion was singing country music.  He performed under the name Tiny C. Hart but in the era of Harold Jenkins rebranding himself as ‘Conway Twitty’, Norbert would have been a great stage name.  I can not find any reference as to when he became a bar owner or how long he ran Tiny’s Club.  We should have known we were in trouble when we set up.  The stage was in a corner behind the bar but elevated almost to the same height as the bar.  The room was not large and it was paneled all the way around with ‘marlite’ – a hard, non-wood, non-sound absorbing surface.  When Mike was tuning his bass, Tiny looked up from washing glasses and asked him, “Hey, that is kind of loud, isn’t it?”  I borrowed three bar towels to cover my snare and toms knowing we were going to have to tone it down.  We went on to play the quietest gig we ever performed.  

     We were put up for the night in a small motel down the road.  We spent a little time laughing about what we had gotten ourselves into.  We ended up killing time on a cold March 1971  Saturday by bumming around Iron Mountain and Kingsford.  Let me just say, there are only so many hours one can spend looking at records at ShopKo.  I do remember Mike picking up a copy of Grand Funk Live, but we couldn’t hear it until we got home.  We did fast food for lunch and hit a mom and pop pizza parlor for dinner.  That is when the fun started.

     We were the only patrons in the place so we were kind of perplexed when the guy working in the kitchen totally ignored us.  Ten minutes passed before the woman working farther back in the kitchen noticed us and came out to ask if we had been helped.  She looked kind of sideways at the man in the kitchen when we said ‘no’ and then she took our order.  When she delivered our pizza and drinks, she apologized:  “My husband (the cook who ignored us) doesn’t like kids with long hair.”  

     I had heard stories about encounters like this but it was a first for us.  We ate and left her a good tip because working with her husband’s attitude toward long haired youth must have been something she got tired of apologizing for.  When I first heard Bob Seger’s song Turn the Page, I thought about our brush with the pizza guy who didn’t like long haired teens.  Sure, we did not feel like we were in any kind of danger, but it still underlined the fact that things like this happened.  Interestingly enough, Seger’s song was based on a real incident that took place a little farther south than we were in Iron Mountain, on the road in Wisconsin (not ‘On a long and lonely highway east of Omaha’ where Bob’s lyrics put it). 

     The second night of our engagement at Tiny’s Club started much like the first.  The bar’s regulars watched us with what can only be called ‘mild bemusement’.  The few younger folk who wandered in stayed for a drink and wandered off.  Maybe they may have seen a playbill somewhere advertising the gig but we could tell they were not Tiny’s regular crowd.  As we wrapped up our second set, Tiny waved Mike over to talk.  Mike returned with an envelope in his hand.  Tiny (who wasn’t so tiny at 6 foot 5 inches or so) kind of loomed over Mike so Gene and I wondered what was up.  Mike said, “Tiny said ‘thanks for coming but this isn’t going to work’.  He paid us in full and said we can go home.”  Our two night road trip ended early and we were home a little after midnight, much to my parent’s surprise.  It was still fun because it was something different than what we normally experienced at gigs.  The more we thought about it, it seemed like the booking agent had kind of talked Tiny into giving rock music a try.  Obviously, The Twig wasn’t the right fit for Tiny’s Club.

     The third band I was in (active during my senior year in college) was a semi-Twig reunion.  Mike had graduated from Michigan Tech and had gone to Toledo, Ohio with a band he had joined.  Things didn’t work out and in the summer of 1974, he came back to Marquette to take a job at the college TV station, WNMU 13.  Sledgehammer was just getting ready to start playing gigs for cash when we parted ways with our bass player.  I had played in the band Knockdown for two years and recruited Lee to join Barry, Lindsay, and I.  He hadn’t been very reliable in Knockdown (particularly about paying back money loaned to him between gigs) but the last straw came when he got drunk at a rehearsal.  Having dented the door of my dad’s work car that was parked in the driveway, we decided it was time to replace him.  Barry and I ran into Mike when we went to see another band at the Marquette Mountain Ski Chalet bar.  Just like that, we had a new bass player.  As a bonus, Mike was also an electronics geek and we solved our last equipment problems when he designed a new PA that we constructed in my dad’s workshop.

     We were playing regularly in the fall of 1974 with Barry doing the majority of the booking.  He surprised us in late October when he said, “I just booked a dance at a friend’s old high school.  It will be a Saturday in early December so we can travel Friday, do the gig Saturday, and drive home on Sunday.”  Then he dropped the bombshell:  “She comes from Coldwater, Michigan.”  “Coldwater, as in south of Jackson?” I asked.  “That has to be 500 miles one way!”  For the record, it is 463 miles and we were not in favor of doing the gig.  We needed two vehicles to haul our equipment and the mileage alone for Mike’s van and my dad’s pick-up would have put us in the hole.  Then there was the cost of food and lodging on top of that.  Barry wasn’t happy but we told him, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

     The next day, Barry called and said, “What if we get an extra fifty for gas and the lodging is free?  We all have friends in Ann Arbor we could crash with Friday and a single teacher in Coldwater said we can stay the night at his place.”  We tossed it around and figured that a) it would be a cheap way to visit college friends downstate, b) it would certainly be an adventure, and c) the mileage for this one gig would be enough of a deduction to cancel any potential income taxes we would owe for the year.  Okay, the gig was on.  We arrived in Ann Arbor in the early evening on Friday and two of us crashed with my old friend Jim and the other two ended up staying with one of Barry’s old high school bandmates.

     There was only one small hitch in the plan.  On the way downstate, I started coming down with a nasty head cold.  Popping antihistamines helped clear my head some, but the drainage down the back of my throat was doing a number on my voice.  It was only another 90 miles from Ann Arbor to Coldwater by way of Highway US 12 so we took our time getting there Saturday.  The drive through the Irish Hills was enjoyable and we arrived in plenty of time to get set up and then catch dinner.  It was a typical high school gym dance (semi-formal as I recall) and we played pretty well.  My cold caught up to me and my vocals deteriorated as the night wore on.  I had told Barry, “We better do most of my songs early before I am croaking like a frog,” and by set number four, I certainly sounded like one.

    The teacher putting us up lived in a trailer so we crashed on the floor that night.  We awoke to a driving rainstorm.  After breakfast, we kiddingly said, “Gee, it sure will be great to drive north and get out of this rain.”  Little did we know that the rain wouldn’t slow down as we passed Jackson traveling north on I – 69.  By the time we neared Lansing, it was sleet and just north of Lansing, there was heavy wet snow.  Somewhere between Lansing and Mount Pleasant, the snow was coming down so hard there was at least a foot on the passing lane of US 127.  We watched a lot of cars slipping and sliding in the lane ahead of us including a big black Cadillac that did several donuts on the way to the ditch.  I pulled over in the passing lane to go around the spot where the Caddy exited the freeway and found I had more traction there then on the one plowed lane.  With a pick-up truck toting half our equipment giving us an advantage, we hit I 75 and stayed in the passing lane all the way to the Mackinac Bridge.

     Barry and I lost track of Mike and Lindsay somewhere north of Mount Pleasant.  When we gassed up, I called home to let my folks know it was slow going and while I was on the phone, Mike took off back to the highway.  I told dad, “As long as it isn’t blowing, the driving is good but if it gets bad, we may stop somewhere for the night.”  I was expecting the driving lecture but dad surprised me when he paused and then said, “Ah, well, okay.  Take it easy.”  We stopped to eat at the Big Boy in St. Ignace and Barry said, “I would be glad to drive from here – you look beat.”  That was true and Barry did fine, but I couldn’t get any sleep.  Every time a snowplow or semi would go by in the other direction, I would jolt awake.  By the time we hit Engadine, I just said, “Thanks for taking the wheel, but I am more nervous as a passenger than a driver so I would just as soon drive.  

     We took the M-117 cut across north to M-28.  Heading west on M-28, we drove out of the snow.  By the time we got to the Seney Stretch, the sky was clear and the highway was plowed wide enough to land a jumbo jet.  From Munising to Marquette, the roads were bare.  I had   wondered then why dad never mentioned it was not snowing at all in Marquette.  Maybe he figured we would keep pushing regardless of the storm if we had known that bit of information. Minus having a cold, losing my voice, and the snow storm, it was an interesting trip.

     We had two more overnight gigs in February and March of 1975.  Both of these were booked by the same agent who sent The Twig to Tiny’s Club.  The first was a Friday / Saturday job at the hotel supper club that used to occupy the plot of land across the highway from Sunday Lake in Wakefield (a building that has since been torn down).  It was the height of ski season so we were promised ‘great, appreciative skiers’ for the weekend.  That was true, but skiers on package tours have a midnight curfew so three quarters of the evening was great – the last set, not so much.  We rattled around Wakefield Saturday afternoon and killed a little time visiting my aunt and uncle.  Aunt Edith was gracious and brought out the coffee and bakery while my Uncle Ike said a quick hello from in front of the TV in the living room.  Most of the day we spent back in our crowded room listening to a reel to reel tape Mike had made of our Friday night performance.  

     We played the second night and had retreated to our four cot accommodations when there was a knock at the door.  A couple of girls on a package ski trip from Milwaukee had gone AWOL so the first place they thought to look was in our room.  Sorry, but the band was not involved in this caper.  It turned out they had met a couple of guys from a different tour and had slipped off to share a bottle of wine.  The next morning, we packed up and headed home (and they finally informed us they had found the missing girls from the night before).

     The fourth and final ‘tour’ gig for me (and the third for Sledgehammer) found us doing two nights at a popular club in Iron River, Michigan.  The accommodations there were even more spartan than we had in Wakefield.  This was a great weekend in spite of sleeping in a bare room (with peeling paint) above the club.  The bar normally booked rock bands so we had a crowd that was there to dance and party.  Again, killing a Saturday in Iron River was kind of a bore, but the two nights of playing were great.

     This club had rows of mugs hanging from the ceiling beams.  They featured a drink special where patrons had to down a concoction in one of these large mugs in a set amount of time.  If successful, one got their personalized mug hung from the rafters.  During the third set, Mike decided he would finish the night by joining the hanging mug club during the last set.  He kept doing time updates from the stage and got a lot of encouragement from the crowd.  He somehow managed to finish the gig still semi-sober.  It was a good thing we didn’t have to drive anywhere that night.  It took two men and a mule to get Mike moving for the load out the next morning.

     Playing music in high school and college was a great way to avoid bagging groceries for my tuition and fun money.  It was also work, albeit fun work, but I had no illusions that I would be making a living as a musician.  What I remember the most about all our band jobs was the travel – especially the Coldwater trip.  The second thing was the dead time between Friday and Saturday night on our few road trips.  Extrapolating the travel and time between shows into a life where this pattern is repeated over and over for weeks (or months) at a time, I can see how it burns some bands out.  Any band or solo artist that tours regularly for several decades will find ways to compensate for the numbing routine.  Those that don’t usually implode or find another line of work at some point.  I was just as happy to be a teacher whose hobbies included music.

 

Top Piece Video:   Has any one written a better song about touring than Willie Nelson?