Slam Tour Diary Post-tour wrap-up: Any tour needs a good accounting and here’s what we all just re-lived: 48 days (including the travel day back to Boston); 33 gigs with 14 days off (not a good ratio, IMHO); 11,300 miles driven; approximately $25,000 earned from gigs/t-shirt, about a $750 per-show average; some unknown (but hopefully lesser) amount paid out in hotels, gas, per diems, vehicle repairs, and miscellaneous expenses, and 3 different Road Managers. This doesn’t include the rental of the RV, which was a recoupable expense, paid by Epic. I believe that when Jeff dropped the RV off in Boston, there was some allowance made for all the mechanical issues. We didn’t tell them about running out of gas, not that it should have mattered.
I hope the recounting of the journey was enjoyable for the most part, I know that much of it was somewhat harrowing. I was hoping to give you a glimpse into what it was like for Big Dipper on the last tour for the first lineup of the band, and also a look into the “non-stop thrills” of a band touring at that level. Admittedly, we were not the most exciting band when it comes to road stories. We always used to joke that our idea of trashing a hotel room was not making the beds or replacing the soaps. We were not representative of every rock band and that lack of flair may have cost us in the long run. We, perhaps naively, hoped that people would appreciate us for our songs, our intelligence, and our dry wit (and the occasional hand-painted shirt). Many of you did, of course, but appreciating subtlety was a lot to ask of a larger, mainstream audience. Ultimately, our ambition took us too far from the path we started out on and that may have been our undoing.
About a week into writing this diary, things got very dark in our country and I was tempted to stop posting and let people focus instead on absorbing the important events going on. I checked in with some friends and family was encouraged to go on and I’m ultimately glad that I did. I hope the silliness of the diary was at least a distraction from the trauma of the last few months. I owe great thanks to my bandmates for tolerating this look back through some of the darkest days of the band here on our FB page. It was incredibly cathartic for me and helped me work through some of the feelings that still linger, three decades later. Thanks, Jeff, for allowing me to use parts of your personal diary. Thanks to my wife, Denise, for allowing me the time to write this and to all of you who ‘liked’ or commented and helped me remember the details of clubs and opening bands, etc: you all made this so much better by joining in. Thanks for reading. You are the best fans and we appreciate that you have stuck around all these years.
Calculating Route... 