treemusic

Tour summary:

• Miles driven: 5321
• Driving Time: 95 hours and 56 minutes
• Days on the road: 19
• Performances: 16
• Cost of Gas: $537.38

Some Tour Highlights

• Breaking in my new Bayard
• Big Bend National Park
• Joshua Tree National Park
• The other-worldly drive from Sedona to Flagstaff
• Exploring the off-grid community, White Hawk, in Denton, TX
• Meeting and playing music with Victoria Williams in Joshua Tree
• Leaving Los Angeles
• Playing “Doomsday Sunday Sermon” in a church
• Playing for 5 great people in Las Cruces
• House Concerts
• Driving Ruby, the reliable red road-dog.
• Listening to many podcasts of This American Life, Talk of the Nation, and others during the long drives
• Listening to friends’ albums
• Selling lots of records
• Hummus and carrots
• Sunsets and sunrises
• Jude’s bagels
• Reuniting with friends from elementary school via facebook
• Putting Johann to work on my adobe floor
• Wearing Israeli sandals in 20 degrees
• Audiences who listen
• Tehachapi

Read further for pictures and stories…

Ruby (my trusty Volvo) carted Johann and I around the SW Desert communities for almost 3 solid weeks of traveling and music performance. Other than having to replace a tire, some belts, oil, and a fuse, the ride was trouble free.

Ruby the Red Roadster

We were the anti-rock stars, drinking coffee instead of beer, waking up early each morning (7 am on average) to start our next drive, doing a bit of hiking and camping (but not enough), eating lots of apples and carrots, keeping receipts and doing paperwork. Our tour would have been a rather lame rockumentary. Nonetheless, it was a great success and lots of fun. By merging two individual tours and being frugal on the road, were able to do the near impossible… make a profit. That was very satisfying, being that we don’t have managers, booking agents, bus drivers, sound engineers, or merch people.

another town...another coffee shop

We also got to see stunning parts of the country.

view from our room at the chisos lodge

Routing:

We only performed in one large city (Los Angeles) and that was the lowlight of the tour. Other than that, with the exception of Albuquerque, we stuck to small to medium size towns and that had a lot to do with the success of the tour. We purposefully avoided the musically saturated and overhyped music scenes. Some of the wonderful towns we performed in were Terlingua, Marfa, Joshua Tree, Sedona, Tehachapi, Prescott, Socorro, Taos, and Denton.

Paid Vacation

After each gig, we paid ourselves and then put the rest into a temporary “band account” in a microphone bag. We withdrew from that account for shared expenses such as gasoline and groceries.  We somehow managed to get through the entire tour without having to pay for a hotel. A handful of the venues compensated us with a hotel room or apartment of some sort. For the others, we stayed with friends, pitched a tent in a national park, or slept in a small shed. In Prescott, we used couchsurfing.org and had three hosts show up at our gig and fight over us. We only had to sleep in one rest stop.

We weren’t starving artists.

We had many of our meals compensated at the venues where we played. We splurged on a few satisfying sit down meals and a few risky greasy ones, but we also had a communal ‘pantry’ in the vehicle with us, which saved us from convenience store temptations.  But I must say that the best meal on the tour was Food not Bombs in Prescott Arizona.

J Wagner

It was a pleasure touring with Johann Wagner. His songs are some of my favorite of all time, even after hearing them night after night. By the end of the tour, we fooled some people into thinking we were a duo, as we started to come up with complimentary guitar parts and harmonies on each other’s songs. J Wagner is one of those artists who is on the fringes of recognition, but plays it down.  It takes many hours of conversation to find out about his brushes with fame. For example, he once collaborated with Norah Jones, not musically, but for a prank when they put a friend of theirs in their dorm’s clothes dryer in Denton TX and turned it on. Johann also used to be in a band with “Elliott” from E.T. Johann’s songs have been covered by Victoria Williams, Calexico, Gregory Isakov, and others.  I hope that this is not our last adventure together.

Johann playing a great new song for his friend Victoria Williams in the Joshua Tree Health Food Store

Can’t wait to do this again!

Here are some pictures (more coming):

Dueling Bayards and Coffee Mugs

our hotel in big bend

Johann helping prep the dome for an adobe floor

Sedona

folding lessons at the joshua tree laundromat

off-grid ferrocement house in white hawk outside of denton

white hawk off gridders