Followship - CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the post-hardcore band, Followship, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story below:

As far as touring goes, our band is still pretty green. We’re no strangers to strange scenarios surrounding our gigs and having things go wrong, both within and beyond our control. It’s easy to let moments of technical difficulty or other malfunctions get the best of you when you’re trying to perform. Some incidents are easier to brush off than others, but this story is about confronting a problem with reckless abandon; an approach that performing high energy, chaotic music at a DIY show can often be conducive to if not enhanced by at times.

We got our first taste of life on the road in February of 2022. Our hometown friends Asylum 213 brought us out for a weeklong run of shows that routed up north to NY and back down to Richmond, VA (our home). This short, sweet trek gave me some fond memories and character building experiences. There’s something about sleeping on the concrete floor of the same basement where you just played your set that makes you feel like an underground rock n’ roll badass. We didn’t even take a van on this tour and ended up taking a total of 4 personal vehicles for 2 bands. Definitely not the best financial move, but I like to look at it as a blessing. Without a van, we weren’t an obvious target for robbery. We’ve all heard horror stories from bands about their vans being broken into and all their gear stolen. I don’t know how we’d ever recover from something like that.

Before our homecoming show, we played a distillery in Rockville, MD. At this point, we were all used to playing DIY shows at venues that don’t typically host 5-piece rock bands, but even with modest expectations, being offered a karaoke machine speaker as a PA has to take the cake for the most humble sound accommodations that have been offered to us. Obviously, that rig wasn’t going to cut it, and fortunately, our friends in Pulses. were also playing this show with us and brought two powered PA towers to make the show possible.

I’m a beer drinker myself, but I indulge in a little whiskey on occasion. With whiskey being my only option (I’m usually a beer drinker), a couple of drinks had me feeling the buzz quicker than I am used to. That buzz must have had at least a small influence in how I would handle my rig failure of the evening.

Halfway into the first song of our set, my guitar signal went silent. Everything was still powered on. Rather than scramble to find the cause of the issue, I seized the energy of the intimate space, the cacophony of sound, sat my guitar on the ground, and tumbled into the mosh pit. After flailing about for a few seconds, I attempted a somersault and smashed my face into the leg of a barstool. I saw blood droplets hit the floor and I ran to the bathroom in the back of the venue. A little more spatial awareness and a little less alcohol would have served me well that evening. As the band continued the song without me, a friend gave me a pep talk and I returned to the stage, plugged my guitar directly into my amp, bypassing my pedalboard, and continued the show using one guitar tone.

It’s moments like this where you have to just stop caring about the nuances of the sound you intend on creating, embrace a little chaos, and roll with the punches. The cavernous acoustics of the high-ceiling distillery completely obscure certain details anyway.

Later in the set, Ben, our other guitarist, managed to gash his hand open and shed blood himself. It seemed as though we were making efforts to out bleed each other, thrashing about, physically exerting ourselves beyond reason but riding high on the excitement and new experiences we shared over the week.

While it’s fun to go buck wild and leave it all on the stage, these days, I’m trying to find that happy medium of putting out infectious energy while reining it in enough to play our challenging songs as cleanly as possible. I’ll report back once I’ve figured that out.

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