My part of those all this tour booking business (aside from helping plan the route) is to research venues in some of those cities. This part is kinda fun. Digging through other bands old tours. Checking show lists. Trying to figure out the Byzantine structured web pages of all those terrible weekly papers. We need to know what kind of stuff they book, when and who to contact, what format they want submissions in, etc. Lucky for me, I only have to do this part of the booking. Someone else is going to do all the actual crap work of dealing with these people.

 

It's weird to do this again. The last (and only) time I ever booked a tour was in the summer of 1999. My band and Those Peabodys were going on our first tour. Adam from TP and I booked it.

 

Hardly any of the clubs had a real internet presence. If they did, it would just be a phone # and (maybe!) when you should call. The way we did it was through contact lists. Every touring band had a notebook full of phone #'s and addresses. I remember we got most of our from Ben Webster and from the awesome people in the Most Secret Method (who we played a show with in an empty storefront on Red River teaming with crackheads - it's now Bull McCabes).

 

So we gathered all our contacts and started the long process of trying to fill up 3 weeks worth of dates. We actually did pretty well. The shows that stick out for me were in Lake Charles LA, DC and Chicago (where we played at Fireside Bowl!). In Milwaukee we played in the attic of a three story townhouse. In Akron it was an old fraternal lodge that had been turned into a squat/venue.

 

I think only Adam and James from Those Peabodys had ever been on any kind of tour before. We went into it very naively. Very wide-eyed. Mostly it was fun. We never broke down. The only fights were between me and our 17-year-old douche pothead drummer. We met tons of good people. We hardly knew anyone, anywhere, so we'd end most shows asking if anyone in the audience wanted to put up eight sweaty boys for the night. Every time we asked, someone did.