TO BE A SMALL TOWN, TOURING BAND

What does it mean to be a small town, touring band?

Most of the time it means fitting full-time hours into a part-time schedule, working other jobs, running on the fumes of a dream and learning to love it. It means loading drumsets and bass amps through loading docks, up narrow stairwells, down into basements or wherever they’ll take you that night. It means wrapping cables, playing heat-lazy porches and sleeping on floors of friends of friends’ houses with an occasional hotel room to wash up. It means trading favors. The best small bands stock up on those favors. There’s a whole lot of grind, pumping out music and content and artwork, booking shows, coming home to the messes we make when we leave, voices shot from weeks of singing our hearts out. One time for us it meant coming home to a beer that the local brewery named after us. That was a good time.

Sometimes it looked a lot like shooting pool after-hours at empty bars where we’d played to yawning bartenders hours before. Sometimes it was unlikely, pleasant company and story swapping in the late night, low light. Sometimes it was just hard-up longing for somebody to hold or a hot meal. There were a few packed living rooms and empty, echoing music halls, southern festival bills, days on end, slinging suitcases full of bumper stickers and t-shirts, cds and posters from behind grody merch tables, dog tired. There were some great hosts and homeowners. Good days we’d get greenroom beers or rye whiskey -- thanks everybody -- starting the first set sweat-soaked from equipment load in and setup onstage. It’ll help to note here that off the cuff car songs and twenty thousand questions will stimulate the brain just barely enough, fingers crossed, to stay awake for interstate all-nighters.

We’ve seen thousands of miles and more than a couple of those early mornings. We’ve found quite a few car shops that couldn’t find our car problems and found some car problems that wouldn’t go away. For our longest loop we were stuck in third gear off and on (mostly on) for hundreds and hundreds of summer miles, stopping to let the engine cool when the temperature gauge went creeping up. Yeah, I guess some of being a small town, touring band was playing shows. And the BANDS out there, man! I tell you what, they’re everywhere, so many good ones, so many of them trying just as hard, pulling their strings, pushing their limits, pushing their relationships, pushing their luck with rarely any money to go around. Strive, screw it all up, correct, go go go!

Holy hell, one time the money we made covered the cost of gas for the entire two-week trip. We found time and time again that the further out you go and the less people you know, the less money a venue will offer. Makes sense. We filmed and edited a music video with a day’s notice so’s to convince a venue down in Asheville we were legitimate enough to book -- that we could sell seventy-five tickets and of course those sales would cover the cost of opening the theater for the day. No problem. No, we didn’t really know anybody in Asheville. We called a local paper for an interview, crossed our fingers and hoped we wouldn’t have to pay to play. Can’t afford to buy out a theater yourself and so you make it work. It worked. Can you believe that it worked? We wrote dozens upon dozens of far reaching emails, bullshit sweet, for every proposed show stop in whatever city was next on the map -- and some of them worked.

You know, touring for a budget band like ours looked a lot like a series of frustrated little loops, playing near your hometown, trying not to play so often that folks will stop showing up but enough so that the bar-gig money will fund another loop further out. The spins, man. Those are the good kind of spins.

Practice.

Practice comes easy sometimes, kind of like you’re all taking turns adding a line to the same drawing – like as each person adds something it becomes a little clearer what the thing is and what it’s lacking and you know pretty much what you’re going to put down before having to think. You have to stop before it gets too muddled, of course. Other times it just turns into this fantastic conglomeration of a messed-up machine that makes no real sense at all. I think it’s safe to settle for a little bit of both of those. Hey, isn’t it funny how hyper concentration and lack of attention go hand in hand? You just need to communicate it to one another best you can, put it to parts and then keep showing up, day in and day out.

Sometimes you fall into this groove where practicing feels like you’re just hanging out together with nothing better to do than hold an instrument in your hands and then suddenly the heart of the thing comes bubbling up. Sometimes practice is a drag and you can’t imagine running the same ten covers again and again for a sad string of bar shows, essentially playing AT people who didn’t come to the bar to listen to live music in the first place. That’s the worst, feeling like your being there is just oppressive and killed whatever vibe they had going before you plugged in. Expensive weddings are kind of the pits, too, but those are the two money-makers. Got to make a little bit of money to keep going. Then there are those times when people come to listen, they sit on the edge of their seats and are truly forgiving or better yet they request an original song or maybe even know and sing some of the lyrics you painstakingly wrote in your bedroom or on your porch back home. Those shows make it all worth the while.

If I could only capture here the anticipation of recording at a big studio for the first time -- We flubbed it. Or. We nailed it. Or. On second thought that first take is kind of perfectly wrong, right? It sounds more genuine somehow with those mistakes in there. Run it again. Studio madness is real -- editing parts and singing harmonies until the wee hours of the morning, thirty takes and none of them perfect, carrying on, banging heads against the wall and falling asleep wherever you dare to sit down.

There’s usually a lot of over-reaching for small town, touring bands. Coffee shops, too. One learns to change strings on the fly. If you spend your birthdays on the road you can expect candles in gas station food. We once tried to light the candles on a pile of roadside fried chicken somewhere in the Great Smokey Mountains but the bottoms melted into the chicken quicker than we could blow them out and so we didn’t try it again. We’ve sat in silence, backstage at festivals with some of our musical heroes, feeling like maybe they would appreciate us not saying anything more than being fervently recognized in that safe space, just nodded and shared the space for a little bit. I’m proud of those moments.

Campfires -- hands down the best venues but not great for the instruments. Freezing towns and a car full of fragile, wooden instruments. One hundred percent humidity and a car full of fragile, wooden instruments. Having to fit the three of us and our photographer buddy in a car full of fragile, wooden instruments. Songwriting, poster design and album art in the backseat. Publishing, copyrighting, online distribution. Support from diehard friends. Support from our families back in our hometowns. More support from diehard friends. So much support. You know, when you get far enough out there it gets a little rough. We once resorted to soliciting random strangers online to attend a sparse string of shows in exchange for one beer each, on us. I think only one guy showed up -- probably for the best. For other shows we were essentially picking names out of a hat and cold calling people in far away places to please come see us when we come through town, and by the way bring all of your friends. This surprisingly worked, to a small degree.

We stumbled upon a pub in the Northeast with old, Irish reels pounding downstairs. Heigh ho, chicken on a raft! We stumbled out of other pubs with the ground reeling instead. We had these pork sliders from a lady named Josephine that were bar none the best road meal I’ve ever had. Most nights it was greasy fries and bar burgers, again. That’s fine, too. A Knoxville festival once put us up in hotel rooms for three whole days, leaving us a care basket with snacks and mason jars of alcohol. Rooftops. Basements. Failures. Glimmers. Pepperoni, cheese and crackers. Good Old Raisins and Peanuts. Cheese, crackers and pepperoni. Sound checks, brake checks, tiny little bank checks, reality checks, chex mix, it all checks out.

There are few things more satisfying than pulling over for a well-worn, abandoned house. There are quite a few of them in this country of ours. We hopped a fence one time to see a giant, legendary tree house of truly biblical proportions. No shit, god told this guy to build him the biggest tree house he could muster and the thing was just board after board foot reaching five stories and more, up and up into the sky. Turns out it didn’t meet the local Fire Marshall’s code and they chased us out before we even got to the tree. That tree house burned down a couple years back. We left corn fields and endless windmills in the rearview while the sun went down and came around again, dazed. New Haven, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Winston Salem, Asheville, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland and more, all in a couple weeks – and all I have to left say on the matter is that, on the whole, the smaller cities between were far better attended and so usually much more welcoming.

Frequent runs out to Burlington, Portsmouth and one time to Portland, Maine. City parking. Sixteen year old kids playing better than we could ever hope to. Old folks still trying to figure it out. Losers. Virtuosos. Burnouts. Bands inviting us back to their hometowns to play later that week. Fine, finish carpentry inside greyhound tour buses. Poorly-converted, tiny school buses. Jugs of moonshine.

For us it was about unwittingly following the band before you, playing the day after at venues down the coast, never catching up. It was about scheduling shows and whole tours just to catch up with friends in distant cities. It was about coming home, dragging road weary bodies back to a town that hadn’t changed, hardly noticed you’d left, grateful for a bed and a quiet afternoon. Sidewalk jams. Open mics. Dorm rooms. Busking at subway stops and movie theater entrances. Hula hoopers. Docks. Dancing. Courtyard weddings. Big tents. Small tents. Stages of all sizes. Shit shit shit, a torrential downpour. Diners. Radio Stations. Parking lots. A fancy studio. A makeshift studio. A bedroom studio. City apartments. A motorcycle shop. Breweries. We even tried Brooklyn for a few months. Odd day-jobs. Stairwells. Opera houses. Party barges. An open-doored boxcar on a speeding train. A racetrack. An ice rink. Grange halls. A couple golf clubs. Sure, we can play Happy Birthday. A six-hour Christmas loop at a teepee of sorts. A four-hour Easter loop at a dining hall. House parties. Fireworks displays. Pizza shops. Haylofts. A watertower. Three deep on a dusty motorcycle, headed down a dirt road with our photographer friend, broken arm in a sling, clinging to the top an adjacent Prius with camera in hand -- just got to get that perfect shot. We’ve had our sound engineer, his laptop and mixing board plugged into the cigarette lighter of a junk truck, videographer tied off with a length of rope and standing in the truck bed, all souls swinging wildly down the gravel road with us hammering away back there at some fever dream of a raving song toward gruesome bodily peril. Thought yeah, we haven’t tried that one before, let’s do it.

By the way -- if I haven’t mentioned it yet our friends are made of solid gold. You will not make it as a small town, touring band unless your friends are made of solid gold. It is mostly because of the generosity of friends that bands like these even exist. There may well be no way to ever repay that kind of generosity. Pouring your heart into your own vision is one thing, commendable, but doing the same for someone else’s dream is the highest form of love. I hope for you that you find friends as selfless as the one’s we’ve had. They lifted us up, elevated us to our small platform. They made us.

What does it mean to be a small town, touring band? It’s a series of small loops, small and seemingly inconsequential strivings. Like most things, it’s a tough time describing what that means to a person if they haven’t lived it. It’s also an instant relation to somebody who has dared to give it a go. We are so extremely privileged to have done what we did this last decade. We worked hard, reached for it and found some fulfilling time together. Our younger selves? Those young bucks that stuck it out some ten years ago? They did what I always wanted to do. They’re my musical heroes now. We got a taste of the dream that we had in our heads. Everything from now on is an encore. Hats off to musicians and artists everywhere – you guys know. Thank you everybody for lifting us up -- we are forever grateful for it. Thanks to you, we did it.

We did it.

(and maybe someday with some love and a little luck we’ll do it again)

Huge thanks especially to Jeremy Johnston and Jimi Button — essentially our 4th and 5th members of the band, Kevin Jacobsen, Maura O’Connor, Hallie Kohler, and the other artists who sacrificed their time and resources to help bring our dreams to life. Huge thanks as well to Randy Larkin, Taiward Wider, Lauren & Isaac Mettler for fleshing out early Rabbit tunes and live performances at the band’s beginnings. Also thanks to our partners, parents, families, housemates, good friends, this tiny town community as well as the bands, fans and venues across the map for years of undying support.

GOLD, GRAIN & GRAVEL TOUR, 2013 || JIMI BUTTON PHOTOGRAPHY