003 Back-To-Back Tours

I used to complain about my work schedule all the time when I was employed at a local Pizza Hut in Toledo, I hated it even when it was built around my personal “needs.” [Needs - a word to describe my whining enough to get days off for concerts, friends being in town, or just to sleep in.] My favorite thing to cavil about was the dreaded open-to-close followed immediately by another. It was the worst. Wake up “early,” [Early - 10:00] work all day and late into the night [Late - 23:30] just to get up and do the whole thing again longing for that day off to come so you can just rest and watch repeats of Law & Order all day long, was there anything worse that the back-to-back process?

Here I sit on an airplane thirty-thousand feet in the air. We will soon begin our decent into a warm Atlanta, Georgia airport, well, at least slightly warmer than Newark, NJ and the New England states that I am leaving behind along with the end of the Mindless Self Indulgence tour. The tour was over before it started to a degree, or so it seemed. We wrapped four “quick” shows with no days off, no days to recoup, no days to worry about accounting or make sure all of our bags, which we barely unpacked, were packed up again and ready to fly with. I have today to travel between two tours, I have only today. Yesterday I was vending for MSI in New Haven, CT. Tomorrow I will be vending for Ice Cube in Atlanta, GA. The turn around between these two tours is more stress than I ever would have had to deal with at home before let alone what happened between the bookends of flights that compromised the tours and allowed them to transit into each other.

The pilot is telling us that we will be in Concourse D this afternoon, that is my queue to turn this off and pick back up when I check into my hotel downtown, on the ground.

* * *

Back on the ground now. My Thai food at the hotel was sub-par, but thats a digression at best.

The last day of the MSI tour was a bit hectic to say the least. I had to inventory all remaining merch, do all my merchandise accounting and have the money ready to turn in. Since the tour was over a weekend, I really didn’t have an opportunity to head to a bank. That took me until just before doors where I then had to advance a few shows for the Ice Cube tour. The show itself kept me steady and the band didn’t even go on until 22:45 (Remember “Late” from earlier?) The show ended around midnight and I was on the bus at 01:00. We stayed awake until we got back to NYC, helped the band get off the bus, and then dropped everything in Newark at the storage place in the bitter cold, this was around 05:00. We finished at 06:00 and then had to head back into NYC at 0930 to meet up with their manager and then accountant to settle the end of the tour. Immediately after were dropped off at the airport and now I am here, in Atlanta, Georgia - where it is not as warm as it sounds.

A lot of people try to look at me like I don’t have a real job when I go back home. They’ll make comments like “what do you have to worry about, you tour for a living, how hard can it really be?” The thing is this - it is physically exhausting to a degree you don’t imagine until you load in at 9am and load out at 1am, sleep and do it every day, with the rare and worshiped day off. It is an amazing job that I love doing far more than I ever liked my job at a pizza place, but that doesn’t change the fact that people on tour do far more work then anyone gives them credit for. Merch sellers tend to get lumped into this all time time, even amongst other crew members who don’t see the hard work we do.

Tomorrow I start the Ice Cube tour and I will try to update a little more often on more relevant topics.

Until Then,

Joe Lemble