Bordeen – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the indie rock band, Bordeen, talk about some of their crazy moments from touring. You can check out the feature, after the break.

Bordeen set off across Canada for our first large tour in the summer of 2014. We had no idea how much could happen in the span of a few weeks with vehicles breaking down, gigs we had no control over, and a lack of gas stations on routes we had never traveled on before. As we were reminiscing over stories to write we all seemed to come back to a few that we’ll definitely not repeat on our next big tour! Anyone from Canada knows that there is a huge land mass between the east where we live just outside Toronto, and the west in beautiful Kelowna BC. We had planned a tour around places we had never been, and even though we tracked the distances the errors that were made on our journey were comical, to say the least. We left Toronto one morning and ended up in Winnipeg Manitoba by dinner time the next day. Then we headed to Edmonton Alberta for a show the next night. This was mistake number one.

People always talk about the Prairies as being this huge expanse of fields and roads that are straight and they aren’t wrong. What they don’t talk about is how gas stations close at 9pm and even on major roads and around towns that you think would have something open you can’t find anything. We decided to pass a few places at around midnight and kept driving even though we had less than a quarter tank of gas. Town after town we drove past had nothing open and we ended up literally having to pull into a gas station, right at the pump at like 3:30am and wait until the next morning when the station opened. We all had our sleeping bags and blankets but we weren’t prepared for waking up a few hours later, jumping out of our vehicle with our sleeping bags still around us and seeing tons of truckers and farmers heading into the gas station/restaurant we didn’t even notice in the early hours of the morning. No one asked us to move from the pump or anything – they just looked at us as we got out of our van and tried to pull ourselves together.

That wasn’t the end of our “next tour we won’t do this” enlightenments. We learned the gas lesson but we hadn’t learned the ‘vehicles break down when driven too long’ lesson. We also didn’t learn the ‘give yourselves an extra few hours to get where you need to be or you’ll miss a radio interview’ lesson. There was also the ‘2 hours late for your show isn’t a good idea when you have fans coming’ lesson. The ‘we didn’t tell you we weren’t bringing a sound system’ lesson. And then there was the best ‘your wallet should be something that you guard as the most important thing’ lesson when you end up at a party after a show and lose all of your ID and credit/debit cards. We could actually add a few more but the thing is that every tour and show we’ve had there’s always a ‘next time let’s’ component.

We will never again attempt a literal cross Country tour in under 4 days. We want to enjoy each city for its uniqueness and not stress over gas stations. We want to enjoy drinks with people buying them for us and enjoy free places to stay when fans want to hang out longer. We loved the connects we made with venues and managers and now understand more than ever that the most glorious part of touring is experiencing the drives, the places you are going, and having a chance to take it all in – not driving literally from show to show, seeing a country at night, and wishing you had a few hours to breathe before the next time on stage. Canada is a cool place and we can’t wait to be able to actually see it and experience it the way we should have the first time.

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