The View From the Road
I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Being out on the road presently, it in general is all that is on the forefront of my thoughts for the blogsphere. However, it is not my goal to merely blog about life on the road, since this is merely a result of circumstance. I hope to give light to life and the enjoyable elements that arise from traveling the country on a tour bus with a band. As you can imagine, such circumstance can create just about anything but the mundane.
Here’s a quick run down of my typical show day:
Phone alarm goes off, I try to figure out what time it really is because I’m sleeping in what is basically a cocoon that which sunlight has no access. Once I figure out that I actually have to wake up I work my feet around to hang out of my third tier bunk and slowly make the descent to the floor. After all this, you can imagine the rest of the process of getting ready. (I will attempt to only point out those details of my typical day that are not altogether normal, as normal people might define them (getting dressed would be considered one of those normal things)).
The next step is usually figuring out how to get in contact with the promoter, which is followed by a walk through the venue. This process is one of getting all the questions that I know I am going to be asked eventually, answered before I am asked. If you are ever aspiring to be a tour manager, this is the greatest challenge you must learn to embrace. Questions come from everywhere, about anything, and it is best if you try to think of them before they get asked in order that you may sound smart and look like you know what you are doing. Unfortunately I just gave away a secret to my band who may possibly be reading this at some point. Oh well, I think they’ll like me anyways.
Post walkthrough my life gets a little bit easier, as I help set up where I can, I set up my production office (complete with a travel printer, a travel scanner, a travel case and what might be called a travel computer, my macbook. If you really didn’t believe that I love travel stuff, just ask anyone on tour with me and they will let you know the extent of my travel stuff love.)
Once the production stuff is set up we do our soundchecks, which is usually quite the process of listening to a number of different elements while realizing that the room I am in is aweful and the sound will completely change as soon as people show up. That’s a key for any aspiring FOH audio engineers, realize that you never get the same circumstance twice and that the human body is quite a ridiculous sound absorber.
Moving on, the rest of the day is replete with some rest, dealing with promoters, making sure everything goes on schedule, starting the show, then making sure it runs to schedule and eventually mixing for Sanctus. I’m moving a little quicker here so as to not drop those of you not all too interested in my daily routine.
Show ends, pack up begins, and soon we’re off to the next city. Whether there’s a hotel stop for showering, possibly a quick stop for food, eventually I end up back in the cocoon, ready to sleep, getting ready for another day.
I hope you enjoyed my day. Now I can move forward with plenty of other interesting topics that I need to dig up.
Travel Pillow
Nicknames are often a product of shortening one’s given name. Like, take for instance, my older brother. Kevin Aschliman is his name, but he is known all over the campus of The Ohio State University as KASH, which is quite easy to understand where that came from. I once made an awful attempt at emulating such a nickname, and for a time was called little kash by those that knew Kevin who then got to know me. So that name never really took for me, and for the most part of growing up no other name was presented that stuck. With no real birth name-changing nickname, the next best option is one that encompasses some quirky thing that a person does.
When I first started working with the band I currently work for, Sanctus Real, I began to travel extensively in the car for the first time. Yes, I had made car trips before, but usually with the wheel in my hands and the road outstretched before me. With Dan and Pete, I was stuffed in the back seat where guitars once resided, which had subsequently been placed in a new formation to allow for the new addition to the Nashville crew. For nearly three years now, Pete and Dan have been driving to Toledo or wherever the next gig is in order to meet up with the rest of the band who would come from Toledo to wherever. SR’s old road manager was a Toledoite, so me having my home base in Nashville changed things around a bit. Thus entered numerous trips in Pete’s awesome Volvo or Dan’s ‘Lumisine’ (as it is affectionately named. Check out the link to his blog to understand more.) In these trips I knew that I would want to find as much comfort as possible. Since I knew that my neck did not always like the way cars are built, and having such a likeness of sleep, I decided that I would procure myself a pillow. However this was not any ordinary pillow, it was a neck pillow, one of the travel variety.
The first travel pillow I purchased at a Pilot gas station somewhere in Kentucky. It was light and cheap, but it did the comforting job and allowed me to sleep, as I wanted. However when I next visited home, I came across many other neck pillows in which I was most delighted to find a sturdier, more expensive feeling pillow. Thus the second pillow entered the picture. Finally while walking through a target I found it. I found the ultimate travel pillow. It was a travel size memory foam pillow that came with a roll up case with which I could hang from my backpack.
Thus I found my current travel pillow.
Not too long after this pillow came out on tour with me, the name followed. The first mention was a bit difficult to hear. I possibly did not like it because I was reminded that my mother had some of the same tendencies to not be satisfied with such things as pillows and those little handheld solitaire games. I felt like I shouldn’t have that association, but the nickname seemed to be sticking. Once I got over myself and realized that in the end I will be just like my parents in many ways and that I should simply embrace it, the nickname became a bit more endearing.
Thus Travel Pillow I became.
Now it is used mainly whenever a radio is used, as a call sign to those in the band backstage when I’m out at front of house. But there is another person who likes to use such a nickname to her advantage, and that’s my girlfriend Hannah. You see, the many times that we get to see one another are accompanied by a desire to rest and relax. Hannah, thus, uses me as her pillow quite often. When she heard that the guys in SR call me travel pillow, all of a sudden I became her travel pillow as well.
It is endearing, and I am now accustomed to the nickname both from the band and from my girl. We all have quirks, we are all prone to strange things with which many others can make fun, but in the end we enjoy it. Thus came the name and how it stuck. Soon enough though, the realization came that travel was not limited to pillows for me, I soon became known further as…you guessed it…’Travel Size.’
More to come….but thanks for reading my first blog. Maybe the name might make more sense now. If not yet, soon methinks.
Moving on, the rest of the day is replete with some rest, dealing with promoters, making sure everything goes on schedule, starting the show, then making sure it runs to schedule and eventually mixing for Sanctus. I’m moving a little quicker here so as to not drop those of you not all too interested in my daily routine.
