Ghost Robot Ninja Bear – TOUR TIPS

Indie punk rock band, Ghost Robot Ninja Bear, were kind enough to write a set of Tour Tips that you guys can learn from. You can check them out after the break.

1. Bands break up on days off so try to avoid those while you’re booking.  I not only learned this from the Poster Children’s blog but from first hand experience.  Related to this, it’s a good idea to have roadies with you and/or tour with a good buddy band.  While I wish we could’ve paid our former roadies all the money in the world most of them were fine with taking small per diems (which was of course all we could afford) – they were good friends that wanted to use their vacation time to tour, or they were college students looking for internships, etc.  The point is that having those other outside folks around who aren’t in your band will make your own band members behave better since there’s “company.”
2. Eat way healthier when you’re on the road than you would at home – all the partying will make you more susceptible to getting sick (and unfortunately I’m not one to just say “don’t drink”) so arm yourself with vitamins and solid meals the whole way.  Do not just eat 4 taco bell bean burritos a day (despite that fact that it’ll cost you less than $5/day to eat – I know this from first hand experience touring with my old old band De La Hoya).  I think a good regimen would be a morning fruit smoothie, a big salad for lunch, then maybe you can have something like pasta and a salad or a soup and sandwich for dinner.  Most of us tour without per diems but I really do think it’s ok to splurge on good food on tour.  Your body will thank you.
3. The second a driver yawns it’s time to switch.  And hopefully you’ll switch well before the yawns start.
4. Someone in the band should know a thing or two about van maintenance.  It not only helps with emergencies but that person can also translate when talking to mechanics.  For instance, if my van was having trouble and the mechanic told me there was a unicorn in the engine fucking shit up running around with it’s horn and it would cost $2k to remove, I’d just be like, “ok, here’s $2k, thanks.”  (That all changed when Lou joined my old band Nakatomi Plaza;  thanks dude.)
5. Always pad the load-in time by an hour.  It’s hard to move a group of people from once place to another in a timely fashion, and this definitely helped getting many bands I’ve toured with to shows on time.

Make sure to check out Ghost Robot Ninja Bear on Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.