Me and Charles are still reeling from what was supposed to be our biggest month ever, which slowly deteriorated into a month of being broke, sick and cold. Vegas has never really been my thing. It’s great to go to a couple times when you’re in your 20′s and can handle the huge amounts of alcohol that you’ll consume, but after a while it’s not that interesting. I think it’s the fakeness of everything, they have fake New York, fake Paris, fake Venice, fake Roman palaces, a fake pyramid, fake pirate ships, and thousands upon thousands of tourists being some fake version of themselves because they think that’s what you do in Vegas. Truly Vegas exists for one purpose, to fill people up with alcohol so you can extract their money from them.

What we went there to do

We went there to spend the bulk of the month of October getting people drunk and extracting money from them. In times past I had been there and seen friends of mine make insane money in their tip jars and many piano players make their way to Vegas at some point because of it. There are tons of gigs in Vegas and between me and Charles we know quite a few players in the area so we decided to see what the Vegas scene was like.

Asking for the Gig

If you want to get hired to play piano in Vegas an agent is a necessary. Almost all of the gigs are in huge corporate hotels so it’s actually good to have the agent to be your liaison between you and the hotel top brass who can be a real pain to deal with. Through our friends we got an audition with the guy in Vegas who books about 90% of the piano shifts in Vegas and  fortunately it went really well. We auditioned at the end of August and there was talk of putting us to work starting in October. Charles was heading to Washington DC and Europe for September so working Vegas in October seemed like perfect timing.

Perfect timing because we wanted to replenish a dwindling bank account, Charles had been on vacation and my last couple gigs had been pretty low paying, and I still hadn’t been paid from those gigs yet. Charles gets to Vegas and talks to the agent who says “we’ll probably put you at this place…..” “you’d be a good fit over that place…..” “you’d work well with…..” but never actually gives  up a solid gig. Keeps promising to call back but rarely does. Things are getting scary. Charles finally gets one gig after about 9 days of waiting, and it’s promising. Tips are about triple what you normally see.

The agent tells me and Charles he’s got us a Thursday – Saturday. Whew! At this point Charles is in Vegas, I’m in Seattle. I hop in my car and get about an hour into the 20 hour trek to Vegas when Charles calls me. No gig afterall.  OK back to Seattle. Meanwhile Charles is in Vegas getting really sick, and not just from drinking.

Seattle was like it normally is. Cold and wet. This was the first time since moving into the RV that we were faced with being inside the RV most of the time because the weather outside was miserable. Couple that with the fact that cash reserves were low because of the gig situation and you had a recipe for stress. I know I was stressing people out. So thank God when the call came that there was a Tuesday night gig in Vegas at Harrah’s, one of the top rooms in Vegas for dueling pianos.

I got in the car and headed for Vegas just hoping I wasn’t going to get another call saying this gig was off. Pulled over and slept in the van outside of Twin Falls, Idaho. Glad I brought extra sleeping bags, it was cold. Got an early start and got the Vegas late in the day. Who knew the the desert NE of Vegas was so cool? Really amazing rock formations and lush desert. Wish I woulda took pictures but I was on a mission.

A Welcome Face, Drinking and Smoking

Pulled into Vegas and promptly hooked up with Charles who I hadn’t seem in about 6 weeks and got to the important tasks of the night, getting drunk and smoking. Charles friend DJ Dan and his friends helped us out on both counts and we promptly headed to NYNY to see my buddy Eric who plays there and who I was crashing with. The place was packed and it was a Monday night, people were partying their asses off. Sweet.

Our next night at Harrah’s was awesome too. Tuesday and there was a full house of people lined up to throw money in the jar, thank God we were finally working again. More gigs were promised for the rest of the week but I had to head to Riverside, CA, about 3 1/2 hours away, to meet up with the family who were driving the RV down from Seattle. Thankfully their trip went off without a hitch and we got parked in beautiful Rancho Jurupa park in Riverside.

Driving back to Vegas

A couple more gigs came through in Vegas which was nice, we needed it, but I think I’m done barking up that tree. Vegas is cool for that weekend getaway but it starts to wear me down being there longer term. Riverside with it’s lakes, hiking and bike riding right outside our door was much more suitable to the living space I had in mind when we first took off.

Our Vegas trek didn’t turn out at all like we had hoped but things are looking great from here on out. Steady gigs in Reno, San Francisco, Phoenix and our very first gig on the Sunset strip in LA are all on the horizon, plus we’ll be parked in the LA area where the forecast is for sun, sun and more sun. Can’t wait.

Greeting from sunny southern California. God it’s amazing here, it’s the end of October and I’m still wearing shorts, the sun comes out every day, I haven’t even thought about my coat. This makes me really happy. We’re going to be hanging around the LA area for a while this winter because I’ve had my fill of Idaho and Seattle winters, and because Riverside, the town we’re parked in now is 1 hour to LA, 2 hours to San Diego, 3 and a half hours to Vegas, 5 hours to Phoenix, 7 hours to San Francisco, so it’s a good place to be so I can stay close to a lot of work opportunities.

Playing the Hottest Clubs in LA

Since we’re going to be here a couple months I wanted to find some gigs for Roaming Royalty so I started picking up the local weekly papers and doing local web searches to try to get a feel for what’s going on here. Craigslist was obviously on the list of local web searches I did and found that their ‘talent’ section is packed with listings for all kinds of stuff, lot’s of ads looking for movie extras, actors and actresses, comedians, jugglers, every type of musician, animal acts, kids, rappers, rappers, DJ’s, rappers, dancers. dates. and gigs. House of Blues, the Troubadour, Whiskey a Go-Go, all these big big clubs have slots to fill and they advertise the open slots on Craigslist.

How ‘Pay to Play’ Works

I’ve heard the term “Pay to Play’ for as long as I’ve been playing and it works basically like this, a club promoter advertises the open slots at House of Blues on Craigslist, if your band get’s a slot you’ll be given a hundred tickets to your show that night which you are now responsible for selling. By taking the slot you agree to sell $250 worth of tickets and the promoter is going to want his money the night of the show. In reality, how you come up with the $250 is beside the point, you can come up with the $250 out of your own pocket and give the all the tickets away, the promoter doesn’t care, the promoter cares about his $250, thus the term ‘Pay to Play’. He wants you to have a following because first and foremost he wants bodies in his club, but the $250 helps the club owner hedge his bets on a new band. Running a club in downtown LA ain’t cheap.

Are Some Shows Worth Paying For?

I figured I’d hit up some of these shows just to see how it goes and the first guy that hit me up was a promoter from House of Blues. He had checked out our website and wanted to put us in on an acoustic night with just me and Charles. The other acts were a singer who had done some dates opening for Britney Spears recently, she was doing an acoustic set, and an other act that had recently signed with Capitol. I checked out the ‘Britney Spears’ chick on Youtube and Kristinia Debarge turned out to be fantastic, a good fit with us in the acoustic setting, and her Youtube videos had hundreds of thousands of hits. I didn’t have a name to go on to search the other act but I figured if they just got signed to Capitol, there’s a strong possibility that they have somewhat of a following already.

So My Question is…

Is this a show worth buying our way on to? The possibility of playing to a decent crowd in a good club in downtown LA is cool. Being on the bill with other performers who I can confirm are really good and are likely to have a following is even better. We don’t have a chance in hell at selling tickets to anyone because we have never played LA so the the $250 would be a straight up out of pocket expense, that sucks. If we do a good show and sell everything right we will get some e-mail addresses, sell a few cd’s, maybe a t-shirt for a net return of maybe $50 on our $250 invested.

Is There Other Value in that Gig?

Is having a video of you playing to a full house at House of Blues in downtown LA worth the extra money? Is it worth it to jumpstart building a following in this area by being on a decent show? Both me and Charlie make our living playing music already so this runs contrary to how we normally do things to say the least. Part of me wants to do it just to see if we’re up to the challenge of maximizing the opportunity. Can we make enough of an impact on the audience to move them to take more interest in our music? After watching Kristinia DeBarge’s video, I’ll bet she’ll sell some merchandise that night, she’ll probably get a lot of e-mails if she asks for them. Will we?

What We Definitely Won’t Do

Me and my daughter went to see Kate Nash last night and the opening band was fantastic. Too bad I can’t tell you who they were, because they never told me who they were. They never once said their name or mentioned if they had something out. The singer made some half-hearted banter about a download card, once. Too bad because they could have made a bunch of new fans if they had employed the simplest of techniques, tell us who you are. If they had payed $250 for that show, they could have easily made that back if they had any merch, that is , if they told you about it.

Back in My Day

Actually, with my first original bands back in the 80′s we used to do business like this all the time. We would rent the space, rent the PA and lights and then charge money to get in the show to pay for it all. Same basic formula. If nobody showed up we were still responsible for the bills, so it could have been Pay to Play, we were lucky enough back then to have a following that made it profitable. We don’t have that now

For Now It’s Kind of a Moot Point

I don’t have $250 extra to throw at a show so it’s not going to happen right now, but I can see that if I do want to play one of these clubs, that’s the way it’s going to be. I figure I’m going to work on building a following in the area by starting at the outskirts, like Riverside where we’re parked, then maybe between that and meeting people at the dueling piano gigs we have in the area we can build enough of a following that we won’t have to sweat the $250 because we have the crowd to cover it.

Are some shows worth paying to play for?

Making a living doing nothing but music. That’s the dream isn’t it? Most musicians I meet never say “I want to be famous”, “I want to be rich”, or “I want tons of free drugs and booze”. The vast majority say they want to be able to make a living doing nothing but music. I’ve been lucky enough to do just that my whole life, music related jobs are the only kind of jobs (with one exception) I’ve ever had. There’s been a big buzz about an article titled “How Indie Musician Amanda Palmer Made $19,000 in 10 Hours using Twitter”. You’ve probably read it by now, it’s about a year old. I’d never heard of Amanda Palmer or the Dresden Dolls but it’s quite a fascinating article, however it’s not really applicable to the musician who hasn’t had a major record contract for years, had your album produced by Ben Folds, has a personal assistant and a fanbase willing to pay $200+ for an empty wine bottle that she drank out of. I can’t sell my empty wine bottles, I have to pay someone to take them away.

So How Is a Decent Living Made By Regular Musicians?

I’ve had a number of different income streams from music-related jobs but the bulk of it has come from live performances. I’ll come to your bar/church/club/house/event and play some quality music and in exchange I need a little scratch to stay alive. How much depends on what you want me to do. If it’s your wedding and you want me to be there for 4 – 5 hours, bring a bunch of sound gear and learn several songs that are specific to your wedding, that’ll cost you a lot more than just showing up and plugging in for a 45 minute set of originals. I can play solo or bring other musicians. I frequently get hired by bands. Wedding bands, original bands, circuses, broadway shows, established artists like Smokey Robinson and unestablished artists like most everybody else. There are other ways to bring in cash but for me this is the most consistent way. I’ve had job security on par (or better) with my friends in corporate America for 30 years now and even now I get calls for more gigs than I can do. It’s like having 100 part tie jobs and most of the musicians I work with that don’t have a day job are doing this same thing.

The Key Part of Selling Out is Selling

I know I do a lot of gigs that other musicians would consider beneath their integrity and playing music you don’t like just to make a buck is equivalent to selling your soul. That’s OK with me, you can have your integrity while you’re painting my house. Sure, I don’t totally love banging out “Brown Eyed Girl” again and again, but I do enjoy seeing the smiles that it puts on peoples faces when I do, so it’s a fair trade. Plus it’s an opportunity to introduce people to what I have to offer musically and sometimes a good version of  “Sweet Caroline” leads to a conversation which leads to an e-mail which results in a CD sale or booking. As long as you’re willing use your skills to get paid the way you stay booked is simply keep asking for the gig. When ever you get a chance, put yourself out there and ask for the gig. Make yourself available and keep asking for the gig.

Other Income Streams

When gigs we re kind of lean I did other things that allowed me to use my musical skill for something besides being on stage. I had to hone my skills in things like doing live sound. Knowing how to setup and troubleshoot a PA system is valuable knowledge, not just because you can use it to make money, but on the gig it’s good if you can speak in terms the sound guy can understand. I had lot’s guys ask me to make their guitar sound “fatter”, what does that mean exactly? Ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different definitions, so knowing to ask for a little extra 2k on my vocal helped me sound better and got the sound man on my side.

Owning a recording studio and having solid knowledge of recording is another way that has kept me paid. Getting calls for studio sessions and producing people’s records has been great too. Typically you get paid at the end of the session but getting a call for the right studio project is something that can keep on paying for years to come. I did some production work and playing early in the career of a band called Built to Spill who went on to do pretty well for themselves and every time their fanbase expanded their back catalog would sell. I got a percentage of some of the early work as a producer/musician so as they gained new fans, I got checks in the mail.

Turning Songwriting Skills into Cash

Obviously there’s writing songs, putting out albums and selling them for money and ideally that’s what I’d like to be doing, but my songs haven’t captured people’s attention enough to make this lucrative enough to keep gas in the car so…….

I wrote some commercial jingles, sadly I didn’t understand how one should charge for stuff like that. One jingle I wrote was used by the customer for at least 10 years after I sold it to him. I took me about 3 hours to write and record it so I charged him $180, 3 hrs @ $60 per hour and thought I did pretty good. In reality I should have charged him at the very least $1,000 and there should have been a time period attached to it, for instance, $1,000 for every year that he wanted to use it. I got smarter after that one.

I did some custom song writing for special occasions like Valentines Day, birthdays, weddings. Those kinds of things can be very lucrative and your customers love it. A song written just for someone, with their name and life circumstances in it makes the recipient feel pretty special.

Soundtrack Work

There’s more to soundtrack work than movies and TV. When you buy a new printer there’s a tutorial disc that comes with it that has music on it. When you’re on hold and an announcer comes on to sell you something there’s music behind him. There’s the local theater company that needs music for their shows. When you start to listen you realize there’s music everywhere and someone has to make that music. Find out who’s putting those thing together and go ask for the gig.

It’s Not as Sexy as Selling $200 Empty Wine Bottles….

but it’s a living, and not a bad one. It takes work scaring up gigs but do your best at every gig you get and you’ll start getting more referrals and more repeat business and you’ll have to work less at that part of it. Just keep asking for the gig, that’s ulimately how it’s done, when you get a gig make sure you deliver your best, on time and with a smile and your phone will ring again and soon you’ll be making enough to keep yourself alive. I’m sure someone as creative as Amanda Palmer would find a way to turn all those skills into bigger money but I’m happy where I’m at. Although, if you have a gig for me, any gig, I’ll take it. Let’s talk.

How do you make a living with your music?

Roaming Royalty website

Roaming Royalty on Facebook

The Twitter Thing

What a short, productive trip it’s been

So here we are at the end of the 9 week contest, and first off I have to give a big thanks to Ariel and Carla for putting this together and being our cheerleaders. I’ve read dozens of music industry how to books but this is the first time I have been motivated to really take some time to try and apply every principle. It’s a great contest where everyone wins just by participating.

Goals update

I went back and looked over week one and revisited my goals for the contest and did some evaluation on how I did, and some areas I met or exceeded what I wanted to do, and some areas I made little or no progress. Booking was one area that I had big goals that have kind of stalled but I had a lot on my plate the last 2 months (like moving) and I had to keep my focus on keeping the family fed rather than driving around doing a bunch of gigs for little or no money. I have managed to keep booking new paying gigs as a dueling pianist, that wasn’t the goal I had in mind but it was important that I focus on that for the sake of our well-being.

In addition, after the tour that Charles and I did with a band we had to reassess what our live show was going to be like. Should we keep trying to use a band or should we do the best 2-man show that we can until it becomes more feasible to have a regular band? Should we focus on playing rock clubs or should we put our efforts into something like house concerts? The best development is that in October we have a meeting with Nine 12 records in LA who will hopefully help us flesh out some of these questions. There is one more HUGE development in the booking area that I will cover in a minute, something I’m super-excited about so I hope you’ll keep reading.

Sales Funnel

This is covered in the last chapter and something I had in mind from the very beginning. Thankfully there has been A lot of progress in this area. I first got introduced to the sales funnel concept by Greg Rollet at Gen Y Rock Stars and I’m stoked to get this going. When we started the contest we had no one to put in the funnel, now we’ve added hundreds of people to our mailing list and so the sales funnel idea is in full swing now, so we’ll see if this starts generating some sales for us.

Blogging, features, affiliate links

There has been medium progress in this area. I’ve gotten some articles published on other blogs, got a couple of reviews but our online presence outside of our website has not reached the level I would like, especially compared to the amount of work I have put into it. I’ve been out there commenting like crazy, sending out e-mails to bloggers, trying to build relationships but I haven’t really gotten much love from bloggers. Mostly I feel like my efforts in that area have just gone out into the ether and disappeared. I don’t know if I’m taking the wrong approach or maybe our stuff just isn’t capturing people’s ears but I feel like for the time I’ve put into this I should have gotten more back. I’ve done my best to follow the guidelines but maybe I just need to give it more time. Affiliate links are something I’m still excited about but without the connections to other blogs I’m not generating the traffic to make this a worthwhile area for us. Hopefully in the future this will be better, it’s all part of creating the continuum program.

One goal we nailed

One thing we really got figured out was how to incorporate our dueling piano skills and use them in our original act, the last couple nights of our tour we got this nailed and got a ton of e-mails and sold a lot of merch, too bad it took us the whole tour to figure it out.

The idea I’m super-excited about

One thing that’s been missing from all these goals has been purpose. Yeah, I want to make more money doing originals and sell more merch and connect with more fans, but the big question has been, why? What’s the purpose? Money? I make pretty good money playing music already. Fame? I wanted that when I was 25 but now I’m 45 and I could care less about being a celebrity. I looked at my last goal where I said I want to give people something of value.

I was looking a Gigmasters.com trying to find ways to scare up more good paying corporate work for the dueling piano shows when the idea dominos started to fall. We have done a few dueling piano shows for charity in the past and dueling pianos works amazing for charity events because we can set out our tip jars and use the techniques we use to extract money from people at the bars, only at these events we donate our tip money to the charity. We can get good tips at the bars but when it’s for charity, we can really get people to loosen their wallets. Here’s a typical technique we use.

Todd: I’ve got $5 here to play “Friends in Low Places” for the country fans

Charles: Dude, country sucks, if someone gives me $6 I’ll stop this country crap and play some rock and roll like AC/DC or Bon Jovi

an audience member gives $6

Charles: Stop that song! Let’s play some rock -n- roll

He then launches into “You Shook Me All Night Long”

Todd: OK country fans, give me $7 and the country fans will rule the room again and we’ll go back to “Friends in Low Places”

and so on, people keep bidding up their favorite songs. This technique generates a lot of cash, and sometimes some ill will when a person puts in $20 – $30 and end up not hearing their song, but when it’s all for charity, who cares?

Pianos with purpose

Then it hit me. Pianos with Purpose. I can apply all the lessons I’ve learned about cyberPR and niche marketing and sales funnels, etc.. and put it towards a musical act that focuses all our efforts towards raising money for charity. We have an act that is perfect for fundraising, there is a niche that is wide open, we know how to get hired as dueling pianists already, rather than playing crappy bars and soul-sucking corporate events we can actually give the world something of value. On the more selfish side, we can use that act to promote some of our original material, for instance we have a song about human rights activist Beate Sirota Gordon that is perfect at a charity event. Win-Win. We can sell CD’s and donate some of the proceeds to the charity, which makes the attendees more likely to buy CD’s or join our mailing list. Looking at Gigmasters.com this niche is wide open.

I’m way excited about this idea and now I have the tools to make it happen. It’s still in the formative stages but I can see a situation where we can, get paid, promote our originals, sell CD’s and merch, connect with new fans, travel, have a unique angle that can generate publicity for us but most importantly, we can use all that to give something back to people who are in need and have a more purpose-filled act.

So thanks again to Ariel and Carla and all the other cool people I connected with over the course of this contest, I don’t know if I could have come to this conclusion without the kick in the butt the contest provided.

Before we get started on this week’s lesson about real live social networking I thought I give a quick city driving lesson. Check out that picture, that is what happens when you try to get a truck that big into a San Francisco parking garage. The truck is tough, but the ticket dispenser was tougher this time, only because these fenders are made of fiberglass and not steel. If the fenders had been steel, bye-bye ticket dispenser, and hello to an odd bit of pleasure that comes from destroying something that forces you to pay for parking. Cities in general aren’t made for rigs that big and parking garages are particularly small so they can cram as many cars as possible in there. Oh well, I figured something like this would happen sooner or later, it takes a big rig to haul a big trailer which leaves you driving your big rig to work and to do simple errands when you’re unhooked from the trailer. It’s not always convenient to have this size of a truck, especially in the city but it can handle the bumps and scrapes. I call them ‘character marks’.

Real Live Social Networking

This is my favorite area. It’s why I like playing music in the first place. I love to see people’s immediate reaction, and look them in the eye when we are playing for them. Recently we had a gig where some fans already had our CD and they had played it for their friends and so when we did our set we had a bunch of people we didn’t know singing along to our songs. That is a thrill like no other and you’ll never get that on the internet. It was the first time having that happen for Charlie so he claims he can die happy now. I’ll die happy when I can go into lot’s of cities in lot’s of countries and have that happen.

Rules, Friends and Fraternizing

Let’s be real, one of the main reasons most of us want to make a living playing music is because we want to be our own boss and make our own rules. That’s great but it will never really happen. There will always be a bar manager, promoter, booking agent, not to mention customers to satisfy so you go from having one boss to thousands. Johnny Foley’s pictured here has a few bar managers to answer too and they have a lot of rules. A whole page of rules that they make you sign before you play. Rules about how to dress, what you must say and what you can’t say, no drinking. I’m an Irish guy in an Irish pub and no drinking? ugh. One night a friend from Seattle was in SF and I told her to stop by the pub to hang out. She is a real close friend so when we saw each other it was all hugs and kisses and on my breaks we hung out a lot. After the night I had 2 bar managers tell about the ‘no fraternizing with the customers’ rule. OK, that’s just too far, what am I supposed to do? Hang out in the back room and talk to no one? That’s not me at all, and it’s frankly a ridiculous thing to ask of your performers. We are there to fraternize with your customers, that’s one of the things that will keep them coming back. You know, real live social networking.

Things I’ve been applying from chapter 8

My favorite bit of advice is, ‘to be memorable talk about them‘. This really, really works. I was OK at this before, mainly because I’m usually truly interested in the people I’m meeting, but I’m really seeing the light on how this makes me more memorable to the person I’m talking too. Listening closely and asking yourself how can I be helpful to this person will score you big points in virtually every social situation and people will be much more responsive to you when the time comes to ask them for something. I’ve been working really hard on dropping the I’m just… statements, I’m bad about that but getting better. I need to stop qualifying myself like that and remember that they are probably already somewhat receptive to me and the I’m just…. statements are doing way more harm than good. The how can I help… approach just scored me a ton of new gigs in Vegas because I didn’t approach the agent wanting something from him, I approached him as a partner trying to solve his problem together.

Business cards

I can’t believe I’ve been so lame about business cards and it took this contest to kick me in the ass and finally get some. You’d think that getting asked for business cards on a regular basis at gigs would have been kick in the ass enough but it wasn’t. I can’t believe how many request slips with my phone # scrawled on the back I gave out when getting legit business cards is so easy. I’ve also started asking the audience to drop their business cards in the tip jar to get added to our mailing list. Duh. I should have been doing this for years. This goes all the way back to chapter 1 and one of my initial goals of how to integrate my “day job” of the dueling piano shows with the original shows we’d like to be doing more of. I put this together in about 5 minutes at www.vistaprint.com. All I paid was about 10 bucks to ship them to me.

Greetings from San Francisco where I am doing a 2 week run at Johnny Foley’s Mad Pianos. Cool spot in downtown SF so if you’re in the area over Labor Day weekend or the week after, stop in and say hi. I love traveling like this where I get to go and hang out in a city long enough to really vibe with it. I have my home, my RV, parked here, the family is here, I have a job here so it’s like living here, but I’m still enough of a tourist to get a thrill when I drive across the Golden Gate bridge every night on my way to the show. Plus it’s a chance to connect with a whole bunch of new people, potential fans and get their e-mail address. We have been all about the e-mail list building since the beginning of this contest and I’m happy with the results. We have added hundreds of people to our mailing list since we started MSi9W and we are adding at least a few people every day, and at our shows we’ve made much more of a point get people’s e-mails.

The e-mail pitch at our shows

At shows before we play one of our giveaway songs from our website, we pitch to them by saying something like ‘we want everybody here to get something of ours so after the set hit us with an e-mail and we’ll make sure you get the song you’re about to hear.’ Then we play one of our songs that gets the best response so it’s pretty effective at getting people interested enough to give us an e-mail.

The rest of chapter 7

Some of the rest of the pointers in chapter 7 are either things that we have been doing habitually for a while or some things that we’ve needed to put a lot more effort into. Bribing with free songs? Done. Added most of our friends? Done. List building at our live shows? Done. We haven’t list traded with any other bands because we don’t know any other bands with a mailing list that we could trade with. I’d love to trade, it’s an awesome idea, but we’re the only one’s we know doing it, other than the people I’ve met here. Any MSi9W bloggers wanna trade?

Where we’ve been dropping the ball

Regular communication. We’ve been blowing it in this area, although, the way we’re living right now we’re thrilled to have a stable internet connection for an hour so we haven’t had regular communication with anybody at all, not just our mailing list. Our spot in SF has really good internet and we’re going to be here for a couple weeks so we’ll take advantage of that.

Home is wherever I’m with you

This is the view just outside our RV tonight which is parked in Morro Bay CA. They say that when a song gets stuck in your head it’s a reflection of what’s on your mind at that time. There a song out by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros that’s everywhere right now, especially in my head. The headline above comes from that song and I’ve been singing a lot in the last month or so. Moving from our house in Seattle to a permanent ‘on the road’ status is a huge change for a family but I’m more surprised at how many things are pretty much the same.

Same stuff, smaller space

In Seattle we had a 4 bedroom house with a dining room, living room, big enclosed porch, huge kitchen, jet tub, steam room, a TV room and a recording studio. Now we’re down to 2 bedrooms and a kitchen/living room/dining room/TV room. I miss the steam room the most, man I loved that steam room, and I miss the recording studio although it hasn’t stopped us from recording. Other than that we do a lot of the same stuff day to day, and we’re spending a lot more time together as a family, which has been great. I feel like we’ve had more quality family time in the last month than we have in a long time.

Is the road a place for a teenage girl?

I know the transition has been hardest on Madi my 15 year old daughter. She had a great group of friends in Seattle. Smart, motivated, funny, trouble-free kids that any parent would want their kid hang out with. All in all she has taken the change quite well but I know there’s plenty of times she’d rather be hanging out with friends than her family. She still has a phone and access to the internet (sometimes) so it’s not as though she’s completely cut off, but sometimes I’m sure it’s worse knowing what she’s missing. I just hope the cool things like seeing ‘Love” (the Beatles/Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas), giant sequoias in California and spending time with cousins in Boise are a decent trade. Not to mention not having to go back to school, what teenager wouldn’t love that?

My other girls

My wife and younger daughter seem to be having a great time. My wife doesn’t have a soul-sucking commute to work anymore, and we get to hang out more, although not as much as you would think. We both manage to stay pretty busy. Getting to visit a bunch of great places while sleeping in your own bed every night is pretty cool too. Our RV has electricity, hot and cold running water, and cable TV in every room (all 3 of them) so it’s not like we’re roughing it. I know our youngest daughter wants to be with friends sometimes, but she’s at an age where she can be pretty happy doing whatever mom and dad are doing. We’ve had the time to do a lot more things with her so it’s good to keep her busy and distracted.

A place to go

I have to conclude that for us, we haven’t yet hit the point of having too much togetherness and even though our space is small we have enough space to make it work. Everyone has a place to go when they need some alone time, and of the few frustrations I’ve had with this experience (wanna buy a house in Seattle?….. anyone?) none of them have revolved around not having enough space from everyone else. For me, it’s been great spending this much time together, and I’m pretty sure that as time wears on Madi is going to be glad she had the experiences we’ve had and will continue to have, despite the trade off of not seeing her friends as much.

See you in San Francisco

So we’re about 2 weeks or so into our little adventure. I’m currently in Vegas enjoying the first real solid internet connection we’ve had in our RV and it’s HOT here, 105. Charles and his brother got a room at Mandalay Bay (same spot where I’m playing tonight) so we’ll be enjoying the pool before too long but I wanted to hit some highlights if the last few weeks. We’ve been across 9 states, played a bunch of shows and in general are figuring out how to settle into life on the road. I’m probably most surprised at how many things are the same, once we have our running water, electricity, cable TV and internet hooked up, we pretty much do what we’ve been doing all along, just in a smaller space. If you’d like to see more pics from the tour click on our Flickr feed that’s in the sidebar.

Boise, Idaho

Boise is my hometown so I was really looking forward to this gig. It was at the Visual Arts Collective a cool newer venue run by my friends Annaliesa and Sam, plus my old business partner Steve Fulton, has the studio we used to run together, Audio Lab, in a new space attached to the VAC. It’s absolutely gorgeous and we did some recording there in late August. Here’s some pics from that.

Couer d’Alene, Idaho

This gig was interesting because they had a very unusual booking policy. In this case RR got a Saturday night here but it was up to us to find 2 – 3 other bands to play with us. I proved to be really difficult to do that but a couple of bands came through and we had a pretty good gig, except that no one was there. Not surprising considering our drawing power in Couer d’Alene. We asked the guy why he booked that way and he said that it was important to get the bands talking to each other and that’s how you make a scene is when everyone is pulling together to make successful shows. I see the merits to his idea but it seems like business suicide, leaving it all up to the bands, as evidenced by the lack of turnout for the gig. we still played a good show and got a really good live recording of ourselves. Not too many pics but this extremely drunk girl drew our attention with her pole antics.

Ashland, Oregon

We had a great show in Ashland. This Oregon town is breathtaking and downtown Ashland hosts one of the largest Shakespeare festivals in the world so it’s crawling with people. We played at the Caldera Tap House in downtown and fortunately we had some girls (Chelsea, Kelsey, and Brittany) who had seen us in Seattle so they rallied some friends and there was a decent crowd to start with and we killed it. We started the set with some dueling pianos, went into out original set and closed out the night taking requests. The show and the crowd were a blast, can’t wait to go back.