Tour is Hard
Balter’s Essays of Mostly Acerbic Witticisms
part II of II [read: I love tour here]
In the middle of a three-show run in Manchester, NH, my friend Devin found police tape blocking the entrance to his hotel (word of a scuffle, shots fired, a water pipe hit). Devin's no amateur, so he trotted to the show, still glazed in sweat from his afternoon 12-mile sun-blazing-90-degrees exercise-walk, danced for four hours, only to return at midnight to find his hotel still impenetrable.
With no rooms in a fifty mile radius, his crew drove nearly two hours to a friend's in Providence; in the morning, running on fumes, he returned to Manchester to get his clothes and brush his teeth, felt Tour FOMO and went to the show, where he rested with his head in his hands for most of Tweezer Reprise.
For nearly a decade, Joseph drove our crew from Denver to Dick's in Colorado, where he'd wait in the dust and scrabble limo lot to pick us up. At year eight, on the return trip, Joseph road raged at another driver and performed a variety of obnoxious racing stunts. I suppose a year makes memories short, because Joseph rode throttle for us again the following year - where, after the show, we found him huffing nitrous and puffing joints in the lot, mumbling sheepishly something about "being fine" and "just being curious."
At Ween we sat center, five rows back, at the Orpheum in Boston. A portly, jean jacketed gent in front of us spent most of the show scrunched snoring in his seat passed out - until he woke during Roses and started vomiting as if birthing a glorious pinkish orange sand castle - that which he worked on for the better part of an hour while the nearby crowd, refusing to leave their prime seats, twisted in place like lemmings standing at the edge of a mile-high cliff.
In in the early '90s in Albany, I was told I had a bed in a room. Turned out six others were told the same thing, so somewhere around three AM, I crawled under a high top, wrapped a towel around myself and slept in a dazed twilight while Spunions spilled beer and pretzels on me, and used a flashlight to abuse me with beams from a disco ball.
At Red Rocks we attempted to set up our tent after the show - in pitch black night, in a blinding rainstorm, on a seven degree slope, in the woods. In the drizzle of the morning, I woke to find myself smothered in the canvas, wedged up against a tree, a pool of tepid water halfway up my spine, and my tent mate Pablo - also having tumbled in the night - splayed on top of me, where we slept like two potato pancakes frying in crisco on the griddle.
My partial-friend Brad, with a dislocated shoulder from earlier in the evening, had to stand on the rim of a port-o-potty to grab something (god knows what) up high. He fell in, and returned to our campsite in a sling, smothered in blue water, yellow fumes and specks of brown, putting his paws on nearly everything and everyone. A few years later, in Telluride, my pal Bill, blackout drunk, face-planted on pavement, alone; he returned with a broken nose and two black eyes, and traveled home for an anniversary dinner with his wife (she wasn't pleased). Later, at SPAC, a methy local got amped up and absent-mindedly punched a hippie next to him square in the jaw, reason unexplained.
At Deer Creek, a small-town adrenaline-fueled farmboy held court about his manliness and the small size of a tab of LSD; to make a show of it, he licked a 10-strip in front of a bemused crowd. After the show we found him crawling in between cars like a lizard, bawling like a baby, shouting that he couldn't move his legs. He moaned for help. He begged for it to stop.
The nitrous mafia inflates balloons at a money-grabbing pace that would make your ears bleed, servicing jam-band hippies who float $20 bills for 3 fatty cold ones, just to feel the whomp whomp of a 45-second huff. The endless whoosh of the canisters will leave you with PTSD; the hustlers would make an auctioneer blush; the streets littered with used, shriveled, sagging, limp balloons is a stain on the good vibes.
Tour is the seedy side of a business that services unrestricted pleasures.
The Wook Flu arrives like a forgotten houseguest after long stretches of shows. It's a mix of the sniffles and Covid, or a persistent fever and aches in places you didn't know you had, plus dry mouth and a rash of unknown origin. It's a headache for days. It's your weakened immune system asking you why you were noodling for hours, ingesting chemicals, smoking weed, eating little, sleeping in snatches and hydrating with unfortunate infrequency.
Tour may be loved, but don't underestimate Tour - not for an instant. Because Tour is hard. Tour will challenge you. It will beat you down. Tour - real Tour - will tucker you out, tire you sideways, and pick your pocket when you're on the lot buying a burrito.
That said, maybe - if you squint, and you look with your head tilted just so - maybe Tour is Hard, and that's just one more thing to love about.