Touring prepared me for fatherhood. Being in a situation that you have to constantly attend to and can’t turn off while trying to function on very little sleep is a skill that applies to both. For many years of traveling with Grandchildren, I did the majority of the driving, and sometimes we had to drive late into the night and even overnight after playing a show. One memorable night we played in New Orleans and then drove straight to Austin after the show for a 10 a.m. South by Southwest set.
We played our last show as a five-piece in 2019, and after not being able to experience live music throughout the pandemic, I was the most pent up for it that I’d ever been. Throughout my time in Rad Racket and Grandchildren, I rarely felt the desire to go out to see a live show. For some of that time, I saw pretty much every show at the Danger Danger House (where I lived) and the Danger Danger Gallery (where I did not live) and played so many shows that live music became something from which I needed respite. I still loved playing and watching live music, but I was so constantly exposed to it that my need for it felt overfulfilled.
As my feelings about playing and seeing shows lightened in the past year, I’ve been trying to go out to and play as many shows as I can muster the energy and money for. Which is still not many, with having a family and being stable but not affluent. But it’s more than I would have at any point before the pandemic, and it’s the first time in a long time that I resumed my high school habit of searching all the live music listings for shows I might want to see.
I also missed the long-distance driving, weirdly enough. Some of my favorite driving occurred while the rest of the band slept, and I always wondered what it would be like to tour by myself. In March and August 2023, I did a couple of practice rounds trying to book strings of shows out of town. Even though everything was on a very small scale, I had a blast going out both times. And after playing a piece that emphasized the difficulty of touring, I came back thinking, Parenting’s harder.
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In the following clips, both Jamey Robinson and Martin Schmidt bring up some phrases they hear from fans about touring: “Oh, cool, you go on tour” and “Well, you make your money on touring, right?” I remember at one of our shows, one of my closest friends from childhood said to me, “Going on tour seems like a lot of fun. Must be nice.” My verbal response was, “It’s a lot of physical labor.” My unverbalized response was, “You wouldn’t last a day.”
Before we go further, I do want to express that I personally love touring. Even with the exhaustion and physical labor, I find it fulfilling, validating, and cathartic. It can be fun, but it’s also a lot of work.
As Billy Dufala points out, audience members see only the hour or so of your day when you’re performing, and they don’t see what the rest of your day looks like. I worked at the School of Rock Cherry Hill (New Jersey) for a short period of time, and I used to joke that if we really wanted to teach kids what it’s like to be in a band, we should have them put all their gear in a van, drive eight hours to an empty room, set up all their gear and play a set in an empty room, pack all your gear back into the van, and then meet up with a strange dude and sleep on his floor. Have them get about five hours of sleep and then get back on the road and repeat. And for those who don’t know, if you’re a gear-heavy band, breaking down and packing up your gear can be basically like packing up an entire living room.
I also have never experienced tour as a well-paying endeavor. I’ve generally had to have remote work to do on the road to maintain some income. And now that I have a child, the logistics of touring have become much more difficult to figure out, and it’s impossible to do it the way I used to.
When I started this project, I was 28, and as I write and record this intro, I’m 42. A lot has changed, but I believe this project is important, and I want to get it into the world and perform it for people. In the following discussion, there’s a lot about the connection between music and youth, and I think one reason that it’s easier to sustain a scene when you’re younger is that you and your friends all have much more energy to go out, attend shows, and socialize. That gets harder as you get older, but part of the goal of this project is to try to make sure my musical life is not something that’s limited by the time spent in my early twenties, when my social circle was energetic enough to do it.
For information about these interviews and the people in them, please visit this post.
Vice Cooler: In a way public interest does push what people do creatively because I think deadlines might be the biggest influence. Because if someone’s expecting something from you and they want it done, the fact that they’re interested is a good motivator. So if you have something where someone’s interested and then something with no one interested, even if you think both ideas are good you’re going to focus on the one where someone’s like, “I really want to hear this get done.”
Deadlines push you to focus on something, get it over with, and get it turned in. A deadline for a record usually leads to [touring] for it because the record’s out and people want to see you play those songs. So in a way creatively what people do is highly influenced by who’s making the deadlines for the person and who wants them to play.
Me doing some of my other bands that aren’t this, I was playing in a band and the band was setting up a tour. I was like, “Well, I gotta do the tour, they set it up.” Or someone wanting to fly one of us out for something. Then that becomes a focus because you’re getting flown out to do something. So externally things do really influence what direction people go. It doesn’t determine it, but it pushes it.
Billy Dufala: Well, I was just going to say deadlines are the motherfucker, because that will always get shit done. I’ve been living my life on getting things done by having deadlines for the past five years being in the band. That’s the only way that you can plan around is by having a definitive date and no ASAPs. This is the date; it has to be done. This is when it’s going to get finished by.
And that is the good thing about the band, because when you’re playing a show, that’s the fucking date. There’s no fudging it either way. So at least with that it’s really well-grounded. To plan around that is very black and white, there’s no grey. And then as far as the concentrated work areas, for me it’s do or die, almost. You get off tour, you have that month to make all that work because you’re opening is a month after you get back. And if you don’t, you’re going to fail, and you can’t because that’s just not allowed. {laugh} You can’t do that. And not only that, it’s totally enough time if you just hustle. And that’s the thing that you always do.
Matt Gibson: Hustle.
Billy Dufala: I’d love to be able to vacation more. That’d be fucking sweet, man. That’d be nice.
Matt Gibson: That’s what you do when you’re old, man.
Billy Dufala: Whatever. No, it’s not. {laugh}
Matt Gibson: {laugh}
Billy Dufala: I know a lot of young people who vacation all the time. And it sounds and looks like a lot of fun.
Chris Powell: If we have a busy year touring, a very busy year as we have in the past, not only is there no time to work, but there’s no need because you’re traveling. You’re making money while you’re traveling, and although everyone has their bills to pay at home, your expenses are really low. So the years that we have really busy years, then it’s good. The years that we don’t travel much, we have to work. That’s when I, for example, end up teaching a lot more, those years.
Ryan Kattner: The hardest thing I feel for a band is just sticking with it, because everybody quits. I know there’s always the fear of not staying relevant, but I feel like when you do what we do and do what you guys do, it’s a matter of creating your own language, your own musical language, your own way of expressing. As long as you stay that path and you’re not swayed by, “Geez, how do we write a hit song? How do we throw in that disco beat that’s going to sell a million records?” Once you start thinking like that it’s game over.
Being broke, at least in the beginning, and the instability of doing what we do, it’s so fickle, that has always been a big influence. You just have to not think about it. You can’t think about, “I don't have anything to fall back on. I don’t have a 401K plan.” You just gotta do it. You just gotta stick with it. That’s the hardest thing. I wouldn’t tell anybody to pursue this kind of livelihood. Very few bands can sustain themselves just playing music.
Chris Powell: It’s a struggle. Yep. Definitely. Everybody likes money and when there’s no money going around, it’s stressful. You can ask anyone on the planet Earth. {laugh} Having money around, I guess it can’t buy you happiness, but if you’re a happy person, it can really help. {laugh}
Jamey Robinson: Yeah, we’re talking about paying bills, try writing a creative masterpiece with the bill collectors knocking on your door every time you try and do something. It’s impossible. Unfortunately you have to pay the bills.
But we’ve put ourselves in this situation for years and years where we wanted to really do this music. So everyone’s like, “Oh cool, you go on tour.” I’m like, “It’s not for everybody; it’s pretty tough to maintain.” Not a lot of people want to not know where their next check’s coming from or when or how much they’re going to get. That’s why people have regular jobs and enjoy going to concerts to see the people who gave up everything to do that.
Drew Daniel: Our friend Vice Cooler, he tours as Hawnay Troof relentlessly. That dude’s on tour all the time.
Martin Schmidt: Like 330 days a year.
Drew Daniel: Kronos Quartet, they’re on tour 300 days a year, 320 days a year. They truly tour. We’re kind of finicky [and] want to go to Venice more than we want to go to Columbus, Ohio. And no disrespect because in fact in Columbus, Ohio, there’s an amazing performance space, the Wexner Center.
Martin Schmidt: We love the Wexner Center.
Drew Daniel: So there are these weird islands of hospitality, but otherwise the United States, just the experience of endlessly looking at the same chain stores on a freeway system that was designed to just keep you fueled, in transit, and away from anything interesting, away from anywhere where people live, it’s grim.
Martin Schmidt: I find touring in the United States to be fairly depressing.
Drew Daniel: So we tour a lot, but we tour in Europe. This summer we were in France, Norway, Italy, England, Croatia, Serbia, Japan. So we go on tour but we don’t play all these American towns the way a rock band tours.
Martin Schmidt: They way we should, if we were smart. If we really wanted to be successful that would be a good thing to do.
Drew Daniel: {laugh} We’re old and lazy.
Martin Schmidt: He’s got a job! And I used to be the one with a job. I used to have a job so I literally had to be there five days a week, what do you know? {laugh} And fortunately we’ve always been oriented around academia, so we’ve always had the summers off. We tour during the summer for however long that might be.
Chris Powell: We actually have a very exhausting tour schedule as you know, having traveled with us. We have tons of stuff to set up, ton of stuff to break down at the end of the night. We’re actually in this cycle now where, in the past we used to actually be able to hang out with our friends and family that would come out to see us at shows, and now we’re lucky if we get 15 minutes with them. You get to see people at the beginning of the show, but the work and traveling have been actually getting a lot harder for us. Of course traveling on the East Coast is wonderful because the drives are short and a lot of places to play, so that’s good, but once you start zigzagging through the country, as we all know who tour, it gets pretty gnarly real quick. And when we have four PM load ins, you’re going through nights of four hours of sleep and that’s hard.
Jamey Robinson: To clarify, four PM doesn’t sound early, but that’s with a six or seven hour drive sometimes before it.
Chris Powell: Getting in at night at two AM.
Jamey Robinson: Two or three, yeah.
Chris Powell: So there are a lot of nights you’re getting four hours of sleep and that’s simply not physically sustainable.
Ches Smith: Usually it gets to the point towards the end of the tour where you’re just kind of dead all day but then when you play it’s pretty much fine. Secret Chiefs 3 just did this tour where something went crazy with the routing. We were in Europe and our second drive was a 26-hour drive. We had a night off to do it but it was just driving all night. Then it was nine, ten hour drives everyday after that. So it got to the point where I was a little bit worried about being able to play with the full intensity, but you just get through it anyway. Because we were playing like three sets a night anyway and it’s also pretty bashing music.
Jamey Robinson: It’s kind of torture over the course of weeks. I think that a lot of people in the industry that I know have to be a certain kind of person, low maintenance, pretty easy going, and don’t overreact to things. Low maintenance in that you keep yourself together, you keep your stuff together, you don’t want to encroach on other people’s experience in this torture van. You want to make everybody have as good a time so we’re all in a good mood when we play.
And it works; I mean our tours have been pretty fun. I love touring, personally. It’s my favorite thing to do. But I’m definitely groomed for it. It’s definitely something that you have to have a certain attitude to make it work.
Chris Powell: Luckily everyone in the band has that. Which is great because we’ve all traveled with people who aren’t, where it’s not for them and it’s very obvious to everyone involved.
Jamey Robinson: Yeah, if someone’s miserable then everybody’s miserable sometimes.
Chris Powell: I really think you have to have the total desire to do it. It’s a commitment to your art, to what you do. As a person you just get used to the ups and downs of it, you get used to the really low lows that come along with the really high highs of touring. And if you decide that being at home and having a very sane, normal lifestyle with your normal routine, if that ends up feeling more important, then more power to you, that’s great. But there’s tons of sacrifices, you have to just be up for it, and then it works.
Greg Jamie: I wish we could spend more time everywhere we go and really be able to figure that out. It’s such a weird worldview playing all the 200 to 500 capacity music venues around in all the cities everyone wants to play in. That’s not [really seeing] America at all.
Martin Schmidt: Europeans respect art to a degree where, what do you know, they’re willing to pay for it. It’s built into government budgets, art. They actually consider art an important part of daily life to the point where there’s a line item budget in every fucking city. Not just in state and national, every town over like 20,000 people has like, “Yes, of course we have an arts budget.”
Drew Daniel: And so there’s this incredible gravy train in Europe that Americans want to get in on.
Martin Schmidt: Yeah, they’ll buy your planes tickets, put you in a hotel, and actually pay you a respectable amount of money.
What does that mean for America? How do you guys see America’s appreciation, or unappreciation of art?
Drew Daniel: I think it cuts both ways. I think the fact that you have to hustle a lot harder here tests people’s motivations. I think it’s good in that there’s a certain weird sterility to work that seems to have been created entirely because there was an Arts Council budget for it.
Martin Schmidt: There are disadvantages to it.
Drew Daniel: There’s a problem if you spend a lifetime suckling at the bureaucratic teat.
Martin Schmidt: It means the art that gets produced is art by people who write really good proposals.
Drew Daniel: And press releases.
Martin Schmidt: Not necessarily people who make great art, {laugh} but by people who fill out forms well.
Drew Daniel: It’s like the danger of a job interview. Does a job interview find the best person that can really do the job or does it find the person who’s the most articulate, oily, and smooth in a conversation? We think that the interview’s about finding the talent but maybe the interview’s just about rhetoric. And I think the European arts funding world rewards people who know how to translate their work into the terms that those people like.
Martin Schmidt: Which, by the way, as you were saying, a lot of American bands keep going to Europe. Europe keeps wanting a lot of American bands because we have this incredibly brutal, ruthless training system of—
Drew Daniel: Indifference.
Martin Schmidt: Yeah, of, “Sink of swim, motherfucker!”
Drew Daniel: “No one cares!”
Martin Schmidt: “Oh, you’re crazy and/or lazy and can’t make it? Great, no one’s ever heard of you and no one ever will because you couldn’t strive hard enough.”
The danger of the American thing touches on our previous conversation. What do kids say to me when I say all that stuff about CDs and the dissolution of the object that you buy? They say, “Well, you make your money on touring, right?” Touring is fucking brutal labor. I’m 45 years old. It is a different thing for me to tour now than it was ten years ago.
Because we make weird music, we will never rise above a certain level. I know what that’s like because of our time with Björk, and yes, it’s possible if you have a million dollars to tour when you’re a tired old man.
Greg Jamie: I’ve been thinking about that and it was actually true in Europe too when we went after the US tour. It felt like a lot of the ground work that we’d done—to my mind, and I’m probably the most negative person in the band—in terms of building an audience that really cared about us just evaporated to some extent, not entirely.
We didn’t have bad shows. People were at our shows in general on that whole tour, it was good. But LA in particular, and even places like Portland, Oregon—I just love that town, we’ve always loved going there and shows have always been really good there—it was just dramatic drops in attendance. On a small scale because it’s small scale anyway. I think that some towns remember you more than others. I don’t know if it’s us or if it’s a particular type of band.
Martin Schmidt: So what it means if no one buys CDs and what it means if there is no government support for the arts is that, and I mean specifically music, you only hear music by young people. You’ll never get to see what they did next, because it’s just too fucking brutal to go on.
Ryan Kattner: Honestly I really wrestled with quitting playing music after the last record just because I wasn’t really feeling anything. And not in a writer’s block kind of way, I just felt really empty. I know a lot of people can write from miserable circumstances, but the place I was at I just didn’t want to play music at all. I’d rather not play music than have to go back to the well creatively. And that was the hardest thing to muscle through. It’s definitely something that I’m always combatting. I mean it is just songwriting but, fuck, I have no idea how to write another record’s worth of songs right now.
Joe Meno: Yeah! It sucks! I mean I love it; any time I hear a writer complain about how hard writing is, it’s difficult in that it takes some mental energy, but I’ve worked in a plastics factory and the line of a restaurant, and that’s real work. This is you carrying around make-believe people in your head all day.
And there is some anxiety, [but] the anxiety isn’t from you expending energy for ten hours a day, it’s from doubt. That’s the thing that kills you as a writer, and you can see the long list of writers who killed themselves because of that doubt, from Virginia Woolf to David Foster Wallace. You never know if what you’re writing is good, and if it is good if people are going to be interested in it, and if people are interested in it if they’re interested enough to buy copies.
So it’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that you never get rid of this sense of doubt.
Ryan Kattner: I think it was just a matter of reconnecting with the whole reason why I fell into playing music. Because for me, being in a band and touring and putting out records wasn’t a childhood dream. It was kind of a diversion from myself, a way to get stuff out of my head. It was kind of brash and naïve and young and arrogant, but I remember when I first started I was like, “I don’t really know how to write songs, but I feel like in a strange way, it qualifies me more than someone who’s been taught to write songs, and all that matters is how much conviction I put into it and whether or not I [believe] wholly into what [I’m] doing.”
Greg Jamie: It’s always interesting to think [that] this type of music kind of expires in people’s minds, like certain types of music in certain towns. It feels sociological or something. What is it that connects you with a certain place in that year or why does it make sense at that time? And where does it go after a certain amount of time? When we were getting more attention it felt weird, like, “I don’t know why.” And then when it goes away we’re like, “I don’t know why.”
It just happens. Just keep going. Things pick up or slow down and it’s hard to really pinpoint what’s going on, because we’re not that tapped in and you can only be in your early twenties for so long.
Drew Daniel: There’s a weird association of music culture with youth where it is this adolescent expressive model of, “Our bodies are flooded with hormones and we’re full of this mysterious rage that we think is at the patriarchy of our evil capitalist fathers, but really it’s that we want to get laid! And then we get laid, we wind up picking somebody, we’re a couple, we have a kid, we have a mortgage, and then we settle down.”
And it’s this weird model of expressivity as nothing but sublimation, nothing but this adolescent off-gassing. And I think that’s unfortunately really narrow. It’s insulting both to the young people that are expressing all kinds of stuff and not for one simple reason, and it’s limiting in terms of the notion that music or a music scene is really about only one part of the arch of a life.
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