Jay Pray – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the indie pop artist, Jay Pray, talks about some of his crazy moments from touring. You can check out the feature, after the break.

Well, I wouldn’t say this is the “craziest” story, but it’s definitely one that stands out to me. In the summer of 2013, I was living in Los Angeles with my band at the time – SHMNS. Our semester was starting in September so we decided to do a little tour back across the country. My manager at the time said he was working on booking the tour and so we just sort of let him do his thing. Then about two weeks before the start of the tour, we find out at that we only had about 3 or 4 dates booked. So in a mad dash to book the rest of the tour I booked just about anything I could get.

One of the places I booked was in Flagstaff AZ. My fiancée was going to school there at the time and I thought it would make sense since we had a gap between LA and Tucson. So we make the 8 or so hour drive out to Flag and when we get there we realize it’s a campus coffee shop. My band was pretty pissed at me because we relied heavily on our equipment and weren’t prepared to play acoustically.

We walk inside and talk to whoever is working behind the counter. We informed him that we were there to play and he just gave us this look and said: “I didn’t know anyone was supposed to be playing tonight.” When I asked if they had a PA he just shrugged his shoulders. I suggested we just shouldn’t play it, but the band said that I had to, basically out of spite that they just drove all this way for nothing.

So we had to move a bunch of tables to clear up a little space. There wasn’t even a stage. I get up there with this janky acoustic guitar, one of those kid sized acoustics – like I said we weren’t prepared to play acoustically. I proceed to play like half of a song and when I look up I just see a bunch of pissed of college students who are there studying or whatever. I just stopped and apologized and walked out of the coffee shop. Although I was pretty upset with the situation at the time. I look back at it now and cry with laughter. The funniest part is that a year later my fiancée went to that coffee shop and on one of the TVs was our tour poster. We still talk about it to this day.

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