We hadn’t had to double up on rooms for a while, and we did it only in extremis, and that with a lot of grumbling.. When you’re on the road, your room is your castle. It’s also your cave, your turf, your womb, your library, your studio, your padded cell, sometimes your gym. Having to share that space with a bandmate, even for a few hours, can be difficult. And let’s forget sharing a bed.
As soon as we entered the room, a vast, marble-encrusted high-roller suite, I shucked my shoes and plopped down on the California king. I looked up and started laughing. Looking down at me, wreathed in faux cherubim, was me, laughing. Sean took one doleful look at the mirrors and said, “Oh geez.”
He stayed on his edge of the bed, on top of the gaudy bedspread, fully dressed, hands knotted over his chest, and I don’t think he so much as twitched during the few hours we had to catch some desperately needed sleep before an early morning rehearsal call. Even though I dropped off almost instantly, I recall seeing Sean’s face across the broad expanse of Vegas whoopee, wide awake and staring up at himself.
Now, why am I, after all this time, airing this sordid tale? It’s quite simple, really. Sean refused to cough up the bucks I attempted to extort from him. He didn’t actually refuse, technically speaking. He pulled his pockets inside out and shrugged, expecting sympathy from an ex-bandmate. He should have known better. Seeing my intransigence, he grabbed a claw hammer and smashed his priceless one-of-a-kind Beatles piggy bank, scattering change and sending Ringo’s ugly cloisonné head flying. After scraping it all together, there wasn’t enough to buy a large pizza with one extra topping, let alone the three I demanded (sausage, mushroom & onion), so there’s the story in all its pathetic seediness. Not.
The real reason for this trashy revelation is that, aside from a cheap, attention-grabbing first line, it makes an amusing intro to a frothy discussion of surviving the rigors and indignities of the road.
First of all, as the above tale hopefully illustrates, insist on private rooms if you can possibly afford it. Your band will probably stay together a lot longer if you don’t have to deal with each other’s disturbing personal habits. A salient example: a mere five minutes after check in, one of my exe’s rooms looked like a chimp on acid had flung the entire contents of his luggage to the Four Directions. I don’t know how he did it, and I never asked, but it was frightening and awesome, both in its stunning regularity and its aleatoric randomness. If we had, in some unfortunate circumstance, had to bunk together, I’m sure that one of us would have come to grief.
Another couple of pointers about rooms: don’t accept a room that is right next to any of the following – an elevator, an ice machine, a snack vending alcove, or a drunken, loudly fighting or fornicating couple. If you want a decent night’s sleep - which is in itself a neat trick in a dank, musty room, on a creaky bed topped with a lumpy, mildewed pillow, lying next to an a/c unit that sounds like a bored out small-block Chevy - avoid the abovementioned pitfalls at all costs. If you have to change rooms four times, do it. Also, tell whoever is doing the advance work and booking arrangements for your group to avoid lodgings that are hosting proms or intramural sporting events. In the unfortunate instance that you end up for a night in a place that is the locus of either of those unnatural disasters, be prepared. Always keep earplugs and mace in your travel kit.
Yet another type of roadside hellhole to avoid is any place that’s built around an indoor swimming pool. While they may appear exotic or attractive, you might as well stay in a foul-smelling petri dish crammed with screaming toddlers. So unless you’re the type who cares to spend his nights in a place that sounds and smells like the Times Square subway station, or you like to swim laps in a toilet, make sure that, if the place does have a pool, it’s outside.
Most touring musicians can perform whether they are sick or hung over or dead tired. Not so singers. Even a mild case of the sniffles can sideline even the most ironclad voice. Staying healthy on the road presents a serious challenge. Exercise is an important component to staying in the plusses, but hotel gyms can present some serious risks.
Lots of places advertise that they have gyms or exercise rooms, truth in advertising be damned. In way too many instances the ‘exercise room’ is an airless closet with a broken treadmill. One step up from that is the tiny room with a junky, treacherously malfunctioning universal machine. You know the kind of apparatus I’m referring to – a four-sided affair upon which you can supposedly do an entire weight lifting and exercise routine. Yeah, right. Avoid them like the proverbial plague. They are, in reality, thinly disguised instruments of pain and self-injury, placed there by some bean-counting, image-motivated MBA type who never exercised a day in his life. I’ve heard that they’ve begun installing these contrivances in the CIA’s black ops prisons, and are forcing the inmates to use them.
With a little ingenuity, a jump rope and a very large rubber band, you can turn your room into a private gym and get a better workout than in most of those putative exercise rooms. You can even use your suitcases and whatever furniture you have as ungainly but usable weights.
If you like to soak after your workout, avoid anything labeled “hot tub” by the establishment. My disparaging remarks about hotel pools are ringing endorsements next to these tepid cauldrons of pestilence. When you figure that three people in a hot tub is the bacterial equivalent to three hundred people in a swimming pool (I kid you not – those are actual stats) you will never be tempted to stick so much as a toe in one of them. You are better off in the tub in your room. Besides, open pustulent sores are so unattractive on stage.
Nourishment. Another vexing conundrum of road survival. Unless your body runs well on empty calories and lots of highly saturated fat, you have to find some way to fuel yourself that doesn’t somehow lead to hellish flatulence, uncontrollable drizzlies, or even worse, losing your lunch during a show. Most fast food, which is nearly all you’ll be able to find out there in this great land of ours, is indigestible. I survived for years on protein drinks and power bars. It was boring, but at least I knew what I was putting into my body, and it didn’t contain forty grams of fat per serving or traces of rodent feces.
Being a deeply flawed and inconsistent health nut, I consider coffee an important food group, and my pseudo dependence on caffeine is well documented. Until Starbucks began snapping up real estate like The Donald on a crack binge, it was nearly impossible to find a decent cup of coffee outside of my kitchen. It’s still dicey in the vast retro eight-lane deserts that make up disturbingly large chunks of the continental 48. The solution? BYOC. A bag of beans, a grinder, a small electric teakettle, a single cup filter holder, a bag of filters and a cup are the components of the road survival kit of the true coffeeholic.
Many hotel rooms are furnished with small coffee makers, usually found nestled in a corner of the bathroom, with cute little arrangements of preground, premeasured ‘arabica inferioris’, artificial sweetener, and that scariest of culinary chemical weapons, “coffee whitener”. These little ersatz coffee crèches are meant to lull you into a false sense of security, telegraphing the subliminal message that you will greet the coming day with the sunny fragrance of your own private wake up juice. Listen, my friends. Those innocent looking little contraptions are decoys. Don’t be hoodwinked. Like they say in computer lingo, garbage in, garbage out. The vile brown liquid that spews from those things bears no resemblance to real java. If your day revolves around a decent jump start, make your own, or make sure that your digs are comfortable walking distance from the nearest quality caffeine franchise.
Finally, make sure that you have decent directions when you’re traveling. Since this blog is for the a cappella community, I am reasonably certain that there aren’t a lot of groups out there who are gadding about in big tour busses with professional drivers and GPS locators on the roof. Most, if not all of you have to hump yourselves and your gear to your gigs, and there are few things more upsetting than getting lost on the way. As you meander wretchedly through mazes of corn fields or the pocked and broken streets of urban slums, lost and cursing, watching your nap time, workout time, soundcheck and dinner time evaporate in a miasma of confusing and contradictory road signs, wrong turns, and switchbacks, remember that somewhere you read about this; you were warned. Yahoo maps suck. Google maps aren’t much better. Current hard copy maps or the most recent edition of Microsoft Streets and Trips running on the laptop you have plugged into your cigarette lighter are the best insurance against becoming hopelessly lost, unless you are in Somerville, MA, where there are no street signs anywhere and nobody seems to care.
Of course, you could always stop and ask for directions, but that can often leave you just as lost as if you hadn’t, depending on whom you ask. Most people get lost going to the bathroom, but they’re only too happy to give you complex directions to places they’ve never been based on folklore or the vague description they once overheard from a distant dyslexic relative.
There is an evil deity who gleefully reigns over the traveling singer. His name is Zool, and it is his perverse delight to see a cappella bands floundering in a perpetual hell of one-way streets and dead ends. Without maps – big, fold-out maps with every freakin’ tiny street and alley – Zool will dick you around every chance he gets. Don’t let Zool have his way with your butt. Get a map.
Love and kisses,
Bear
Click on the wrench in the upper left-hand corner to see what else you can do.