You know what you do a lot of when you’re on tour? Drive. You drive a lot, and not just on highways. You spend a lot of time driving around cities, trying to find the club, or the record store, or the radio station, or a restaurant, or the RV mechanic. Hey, I’m not complaining, we loved to drive, but the next week was gonna be a slog.
Back in the days before GPS, the most valuable tool in the van was the AAA atlas, dogeared, and scribbled upon, that helped us get to where we were going. Often times, all we had was an address and a phone number of the club and we’d try to call and ‘advance’ the gig, the night before or from breakfast that morning. If you couldn’t get in touch with anyone though, you had to wing it as there were no cell phones to call from the road.
I usually took the road manager role on our early tours and that meant finding a phone booth every time we stopped for gas and using our Sprint Calling Card, where you called a 1-800 number, then entered the 144-digit access code, followed by the phone number and hoped you could find someone to guide you.
But, we learned pretty quickly that most clubs were near the college campus so, when approaching, say, Iowa City, we’d look at the little mini insert city map on the Iowa page of the atlas and locate the school. Then we’d look for the exit nearest the school and head for the general area. Then we’d find someone who looked like a student (preferably a female), roll down the window and politely ask after the location of the club. Luckily, this worked a lot of the time and the occasions we got hopelessly lost were few and far between.
There was not much driving today, however, as it was only a couple hours down Hwy 70 to St. Louis, and, with a day off to make the trip, we could have walked. In St. Louis, we always stayed with Randy, an old friend of Bill’s who had a real job working at Josten’s, the company that sells school rings and yearbooks, etc. He was about our age but owned a really nice place outside of St. Louis all by himself. I remember thinking, “hmmm, so this is what adulting looks like.”
To give you a sense of all the fun, I’ve linked below to a G**gle map of our itinerary for the next week, starting in Columbia on Sunday morning, and ending on the following Saturday night in Chicago, 1600 zigzagging miles with 24 hours on the road. Enlarge it and print it out and follow along at home with a little Matchbox RV! Remember, It was 90 degrees with 80% humidity so dress appropriately!
Passive-aggressively, I’d pretty much stopped volunteering to drive at this point, so I spent most of the time in the bed above the cab, the only place that you could really be alone in the RV, watching the miles speed past.
Calculating Route... 