If you’re on the Gracie’s Newsletter, you might remember me writing about my time as a tour manager for a band made up of my best friends. Yes the Gracie’s Newsletter is purportedly about ice cream, but often I just send stories I remember from our time on the road. For the first time, I’ve collected all of the different newsletter stories and they are below, lightly edited from when I first sent them. If you like them, here’s a second batch of more stories.

The Time We Gave the Governor of Vermont a Ride

OK so, here's a story about when I was traveling around the country as a tour manager of a band and an exciting afternoon in Vermont. We would drive around sort of in style in a 15 passenger van with a trailer. We had removed the front bench and put a table there, but I can't remember why except if maybe it was to hold a TV/DVD combo unit, which it did. And what made the whole thing very stylish was the table was covered in a padded black leopardskin felt material which was very satisfying to touch, and under the table was an extremely unsafe little hovel we padded with sleeping bags and dirty pillows liberated from dirty motels, but that's not the point of this story. What gets closer to the point is how on some occasion, the band had liberated taxidermy water foul from a prestigious New England university that for the purposes of this story shall remain nameless, but if you must know rhymes with martmouth and OK so we had this table with the TV on it and two stuffed quackers on wooden platforms and these dumb ducks became mascots of sorts, not in a mascotty way where we thought they were lucky, because darling, we weren't never lucky much to be honest, but mascotty in that they was always in the van. The problem with a van is it's not the best environment for maintaining the physical integrity of taxidermy and so these ducks were in pretty rough shape if I'm being honest again, which I try to be.

OK so one afternoon the band was performing at an alternative energy festival on a farm in Vermont and it had been raining a lot and the farm was now a mud bog. This farm was very hilly and everywhere we were going was downhill and several times people were like, "Huh, if you get the van and trailer down there, you're probably going to have to get towed out by a tractor." And that's up there with a contractor saying, "We found an issue with the floor" or an employee saying, "Is the ice cream machine supposed to sound like that" as things you never want to hear, but whatever bro, there's nothing more rock n roll than getting towed by a tractor, right? One of the features of this festival was politician speeches and since the democratic candidate for governor had given a speech, Jim Douglas, the republican governor figured he'd stop by, too. And so the band played their set and we were ready to leave and I went and asked for a tow and they said, "Hang on, we've got to figure out how to get Jim Douglas back up to the road first." And I asked how Jim Douglas had gotten down there and they said he'd gotten a ride in Brian's 4 wheel drive Jeep Cherokee, and when I asked why didn't Brian just drive him up. It was because Brian had taken acid and walked off with his keys, which sounds funny, but gets more funny when you find out something very similar had happened to us at Vassar as if integral music production staff eating acid and walking off is a problem endemic to the endeavoring to perform live music as a career. They had the tractor ready to tow the Jeep Cherokee out of the mud bog, so I suggested Jim Douglas and his retinue could get towed out in our van, and literally (used correctly) no one was wild about the idea, but I wanted to get us on the road so that's how I found myself sitting on the bench seat of a 15 passenger van next to the governor of Vermont looking at two deteriorating taxidermy ducks with his wife sitting shotgun and his press aide sitting on the bench behind us while a tractor towed us up the muddy hills of that Vermont farm for 10 minutes. No one was really talking, brother it was silent, but when we got to the road his wife said thank you.

The Bad Places I Slept While On Tour

I thought I might tell you about the worst places I ever slept when I was traveling around with my friends as the tour manager for their band. We didn’t make much money so we’d often try to save cash by taking what we could get when it came to lodging. Have I told you about these places before? I can’t remember. Anyway, bands always need places to sleep, so many clubs realized they could get a competitive advantage and attract better talent by offering free accommodations, which, however, was seemingly the last time they thought about the accommodations they were offering because they certainly didn’t think about cleaning them. What follows is a list of the worst places I ever slept in no particular order. The Morgantown Inn, in Morgantown, WV was pretty bad, and we actually stayed there twice because it was so affordable. I don’t remember much about the room, but the fixtures in the bathroom were both terribly rusted and had an insane amount of hard water damage. The carpet was thin and sticky. In Myrtle Beach, SC, the club had a “band house” in the back, which sounds cool as hell until you realize the toilet hasn’t been flushed in a while, because it can’t be flushed, which hasn’t stopped people from using it, but has also made it so people turned the shower into a urinal. (This space was also problematic because we were booked for a Widespread Panic after party, which normally means a late start time, which sucks, but whatever. But then Col. Bruce Hampton got added as a headliner and didn’t go on until 11:30am and decided to do a second set at 1:30am. The band got on at 3:30am and played until 6am, mostly precluding the need for a band house.) And back to Morgantown, WV for the band condo above 123 Pleasant St, which had an unlit living room and seemed to function as a place for employees and those in the know to do drugs or to try to score. There were also sheets on the bed, which is gross in this context. In Saratoga Springs, NY, we stayed at the Gateway Motel one night when it was 5 degrees. Unfortunately, the thermostat in the room was broken and it was 87 degrees in the room so we slept with the door wide open. Not ideal. The least expensive hotel rooms we ever got were at a truck stop in Brunswick, Georgia, which were $29 a night and it was also the last time I saw gas for less than a dollar per gallon. Lastly, we stayed at a sorority house in Memphis over the summer one time when most of the sisters were away and the guitar player went to sleep in the room of someone who was away and he came out of the room holding a handgun the resident of the room kept under her pillow and the sorority house was on the decent end of the spectrum as far accommodations go, but it does have some demerits for loose guns.

Brendan and the Ants

One time when I was a tour manager for a band we were in Charlotte at Sarah’s house who was one of the Sarah girlfriends of our sound guy (he had two girlfriends both named Sarah, not at the same time, I don’t think) and we liked going to Charlotte because Sarah lived close to a Harris Teeter grocery store that used to do a $0.99 sub special every day and it was only half a sub and some days it was something gross like tunafish, but sometimes it was turkey and so we had stopped at this shopping plaza and I think the sandwich that day wasn’t good so we went next door to a Canadian-themed coffee shop and I just googled to find out the name was Caribou Coffee and Dave took a look at the prices on the menu and walked out mournfully and said, “That’s OK, I can eat tomorrow,” which we all thought was pretty funny, but none of us felt great about an $8 breakfast because that was half our food budget on a good day and way more than half on a bad day, of which there were plenty because there’s not a lot of money in gallivanting around the country with your best friends stopping nightly in every city’s most mediocre bar. And that’s not fair because some of the bars were much better than mediocre, though it must be said far more of the bars were worse than mediocre and OK where was I, so Brendan got a coffee and put it on the table we had installed where the first bench in the van used to be and then Ben started driving and Brendan’s coffee flew into his lap which was bad for a number of reasons and here are a few of those reasons: 1. Very few people like a crotch full of hot coffee (Brendan isn’t one of them). 2. That was his morning coffee he was looking forward to in a way I can’t relate to because I don’t drink coffee, but I’m sure you can. 3. We’d just done laundry at Sarah’s and now he was going to have coffee shorts until the next time we could do laundry. Brendan was understandably upset and so we stopped the van for him to get out and clean off in the grass, but the problem was he happened upon a patch of grass lousy with red ants and soon he was yelping in pain as a large and unregulated militia of fire ants streamed up his legs expressing their displeasure at his intrusion. His mood for the rest of the day certainly cast a pall over the van until we got to the mediocre bar we were going to that night at which it didn’t improve.

Brendan and the Filet-O-Fish

My friend Adam told me today he thinks the Filet-O-Fish is the best thing on the McDonald's menu and I think he's out of his mind, but it reminded me about this time when I was a tour manager for a band and we all met up early so we could go pick up Brendan on our way out of town for a weekend of gigs somewhere and we were waiting at Brendan's house at 1:30 when we had arranged to pick him up and he called at 1:40 to say he was just about to leave Providence which was at least 45 minutes away ON THE BEST OF DAYS and we said, ugh fine we'll go get some lunch and come back and grab you and he said oh cool could you get me something I haven't eaten today and we said sure and then we went to McDonald's and got him a Filet-O-Fish and an orange Fanta and he was so mad at me he didn't talk to me for the rest of the day because somehow he knew it was my idea, but we worked it out eventually.

When the Rhodes Fell on Me

One time when I was a tour manager the band was playing in Portsmouth or Manchester, NH, I think it must have been Manchester and this isn't a story except it's a time something bad happened to me, but not too bad so it's a little bit funny, at this point anyway. In any case, the band's keyboard player had lots of gear which we had to load in every night and this included an organ with a giant Leslie speaker, but the speaker was in a really nice road case with the best wheels, so that was pretty easy for a couple guys to move around unless it was upstairs and then that sucked. He also had a Fender Rhodes piano in a case that was heavy and didn't have any wheels and it required two people to carry it on the corners because the handles weren't very good. And this bar in Manchester had a few stairs down to get to the door and I was carrying the Rhodes backwards down the stairs and I was wearing flip flops like an idiot and walking backward in flip flops is asking for trouble and so I fell down the bottom two stairs landing on my back in slow motion, which would have been terrible if I wasn't carrying a Fender Rhodes piano, but since I was, it was even worse. And I kind of remember thinking as I was falling, "Don't drop the Rhodes, what if it breaks." So I held on to it and cushioned the Rhodes with my body. (I just Googled "how much does a Fender Rhodes piano weigh" and the answers range from 80 pounds to 200 pounds depending on the model and I'm not going to text Rob to ask what model he has, but let's go with 100 pounds because it really was heavy as shit.) So I cushioned the Rhodes piano with my body and this story is only funny because despite falling down the stairs and having a Rhodes Piano land on me, I didn't crush my guts or break my hips or anything. That's it. Sorry.

When We Got Thrown Out of Our New Year’s Eve Gig Because of Prince

Here's a story about when I was a tour manager for a band and I was thinking about it because of New Year's Eve which just happened. We got invited to open a show for a pretty big band playing at the Palladium in Worcester and we took the gig because it was a good gig in front of a big crowd. This is just an aside, but the singer of the popular band went on to do a side project band where all the band members, including the singer, were incredibly smug, just the smuggest fucking dickheads treating us like we were beneath them whenever we did a gig together. And look, it's true we WERE beneath them, but you're not supposed to act like that and the singer was a marketing executive for Snapple, anyway, so how's that for credibility. Jesus, like 22 years later and I'm mad about them being dicks all over again. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked.

So the band played and we were in the support green room which was on the third floor and we were you know being idiots in some of the ways 21 and 22 year olds will be idiots and the dressing rooms were surprisingly well-appointed and when we asked why it's because Prince had just played there a few months ago and they had renovated the dressing rooms to be nicer for Prince's entourage. Another aside, this was the second time we'd benefited from Prince coming to town a little bit before us because one time in I think Tulsa we were at this rock club / bowling alley / Mexican restaurant and they gave us a case of Fiji water for our rider and when we asked why they hadn't just given us bottles of grocery store brand water like every other club did, they said it's because the Fiji water was on Prince's rider and he had just had an after party at the rock club / bowling alley / Mexican restaurant.

A thing about the band I tour managed is it was pretty easy for John and I to get ourselves in trouble often because we'd dare each other to do some kind of dumb thing and then we'd do it like this one time John dared me to set off a firecracker out the window of the van whilst we drove through the Smoky Mountains. So that's just what I did and then Ben yelled at me real loud because he'd been startled by the noise, which is reasonable, and Ben yelled regularly, but not usually with as much mad behind it. And so on NYE I dared John to dump the bus tub full of ice on Brendan and John did, but first he carefully took all the beer out because he wasn’t a monster, but then he dumped the tub right on Brendan's head. Somewhere there's a picture of Brendan directly after this occurrence, a youthful Brendan in his nice NYE shirt soaked through, but the other thing is the ice tumbled down the stairs seemingly forever on account of the fact we were on the third floor. And the club being sensitive to the Prince’s freshly renovated green rooms sent bouncers stomping up three flights of stairs at which point they kicked us right out of the club. Normally it would be my job to negotiate with the club to let us stay please because we're sorry and we won't cause more trouble, but none of us had any interest in celebrating the New Year with that popular band and if we left just then we could get back to a party at home just before it struck midnight. So we left as the bouncers watched and happy new year to y'all. Unless you want a third aside which is a few years earlier, I'd been to the Palladium when it was still called EM Lowes to see Mighty Might Bostones / Murphy's Law / Neutral Nation / Sam Black Church and maybe another band? for my second concert without parents. At some point this guy ran by me looking more scared than anyone I have ever seen look scared and three beats later a bunch of other guys ran by chasing him and several years later I heard there had been a gang-related stabbing at the show.

That Night in Charleston

A thing that used to go around the internet was how almost every episode of Seinfeld couldn't have happened if cellphones were prevalent and that may be, but I was thinking today about how when I used to be a tour manager we didn't have cell phones, but most of the shenanigans with which we got ourselves involved would have still happened with cell phones. Except for maybe the time we slept on the floor in the wrong house. That probably wouldn't have happened if we'd had cell phones. I saw a band from Charleston last night and it reminded me about a time in Charleston where cell phones might have helped and what happened was we had been selling a lot of t-shirts on tour because I ain't never been good at much, but I could sell the shit out of some t-shirts to music fans in the early 2000s. So we did a re-order of shirts and for some reason we didn't have them shipped to the club, we had them shipped to the friend of a friend who said he was going to bring them to the show and also that we could stay at his house and I say "we" did this as if I had help or something, but no, it was just me getting t-shirts shipped to a stranger.

OK, so I confirmed the address with this guy and got the shirts shipped and tracked the shipment that it arrived a few days before the show, but then I called him a couple days ahead of when we were going to be in Charleston and he didn't get back to me, which was kind of weird, but whatever, and then I called the morning of the show and he didn't get back to me and then he didn't come to the show with the t-shirts. And so then it's 1:30 and we're leaving the club and we decided to go to the house because he had said we could sleep there and when we get there the house is totally dark and no one comes to the door when we knock on it and that could have meant no one was home or that everyone was asleep because it was late, but there on the porch were our t-shirts. So we grabbed the boxes and went on over to another stranger's house who said we could stay at their place and gave us directions after we called them from a payphone like how it used to be. (We knew how to get to house with the t-shirts because I had printed out Mapquest directions from the club to the house because I used to be pretty organized.) A few days later, the friend of the friend sent an email saying they were sorry they weren't there, but they had moved out a few days before the show and forgot they had said we could stay there.

Some Things What Happened in Atlanta

This isn't so much a story as a couple things that happened in Atlanta one time when the band I worked for was touring around the Southeast. OK so we used to stay with this guy Derek after the shows down there and he had a fancy little bar set-up in his house that was pretty impressive to us, us drinking Manhattans after a gig like a bunch of so and sos and that was unrelated, but something I remembered. We had gotten on a big smoothie kick on tour somehow and had these two blenders we brought around with us for some reason and a thing we'd do is go to the 24 hour grocery store after the show and get a bunch of bananas and frozen fruit to put in the freezer of wherever we were staying and then in the morning we'd have smoothies as if that would offset every other horrible health decision being made on tour, including the horrible health decision to go on tour in the first place. It was also a good way to form allegiances to all of the wonderful regional grocery stores around the country like Harris Teeter. So after the show in Atlanta, Derek had us follow him to the 24 hour grocery store and after grabbing some snacks and frozen fruit we ran into someone from high school, which was very strange because we went to high school over a thousand miles away so what are the chances of someone being in the grocery store from our high school at 1:30 in the morning in Atlanta. And look, here's the thing, OK so I LOVE this kind of thing. These spooky happenstances. It's like when a friend texts you right after you walk by the street they lived on 5 years ago or someone gets you English muffins when you've been looking for English muffins. As an aside, another time something like this happened was when I was on a high school German exchange program with a bunch of people including Jon who had gone to middle school in Utah and we were on a field trip to some cultural site and we ran into Jon's middle school girlfriend who he hadn't talked to since moving away from Utah.

So anyway, the point of this story was supposed to be about how we were leaving Atlanta to go to Columbia, SC and we got kind of a late start because they're not too far apart, but right before the on-ramp to the highway, there was an incredible bang and we didn't know what it was, but when we pulled over and got out, we noticed the trailer door was open, even though it had been locked, and that our sleeping gear, a case of Red Bull, and a bunch of merch were strewn about the road to the highway on-ramp, and see what had happened was a weld on the frame of the trailer had snapped apart, probably because we had too much weight in it, and that had popped the door open. Which is no way to travel on the highway, so we went back to Derek's house to re-group. I used a phone book and first tried to find someone to weld our frame, which isn't something you can do on short notice, so then I called up a handful of trailer stores? or dealers I guess, and found one that had some in stock, because sometimes they'll have show models and then have to order one in for you. And so we went over there and picked out this fancy schmancy trailer with breaks and two doors and it was bigger and better and somehow we had enough money for it and they also gave us like $2500 for our broken trailer, which was good because I thought we were going to have to pay them to throw it away and then we headed over to Columbia and made it before the band was supposed to go on, despite missing soundcheck and it was a whirlwind. I think I'm mostly telling you this story because of it's probably the most challenging tour problem I ever solved successfully without missing a show (except for maybe when our soundguy got arrested in New Orleans and got lost in the jail system for a day, but that was mostly solved by luck).

About the Time Steve Got Arrested in New Orleans

One time when I was a tour manager the band had a day off in Louisiana and we decided to go to New Orleans, which seems as pleasant a place as any to spend a day off when you're a van-full of young ruffians out on the unforgiving road. A fun thing someone told me about New Orleans, at least back then, is the roads into the city were of terrible quality because they didn't receive federal high way dollars on account of them insisting 18 was a safe and legal age for the consumption of alcohol and I don't know if that's true and it has no bearing on this story except insofar as the roads into New Orlean surely were terribly bumpy. Some of the details in this story are hazy because immediately upon getting to New Orleans we went down to Bourbon St and got Hand Grenades, which in my recollection taste like a cocktail made from Tang and grain alcohol. Not great! At some point the 7 of us split off into different groups and some of us went to the casino and possibly the Hustler Club, where I swear we didn't stay for more than a moment because we just wanted to say we'd been to The Hustler Club, and Andrew and Steve went off elsewhere and at some point Andrew called to say Steve had gotten arrested under suspicious conditions, which I guess is something that happens on occasion. Another thing someone told me one time is the City of New Orleans gets a fee from the state for everyone who spent a night in jail so potentially Steve was just a moneymaker for them. And I don't remember if Steve ever called, but I do remember talking to Steve's mom at about 2:30 in the morning who asked me to get him out of jail, but seeing as it was 2:30 in the morning and we had just gotten back to the hotel room and Steve's mom didn't know where he was and I surely didn't know where he was either and I was about as drunk as I've ever been in my life, excepting a night in Forth Smith, Arkansas after which I woke up to find a pair of scissors poking an enormous hole through my only pants, but thankfully not sticking into my thigh, and I have no idea where I got a pair of scissors, so seeing all of that, I made the executive decision any attempts to spring Steve that night would likely result in additional arrests and also Rob slept in the bathtub that night on account of his drunkenness. I can't imagine Steve's mom was comforted much by our call, but I did the best I could given the circumstances.

So the next day after a quick breakfast we went to work trying to find Steve in the City of New Orleans's cloudy criminal justice system, and they don't make it easy, they never do. After looking in the yellow pages for New Orleans Jail, me and Ben drove to the central jail and they didn't have him, but they said we could try this other jail and they didn't have him there neither, so we went back to the hotel because we had secured a late check out and we needed to do some more calling, but the problem was no one we called knew where Steve was, and we weren't worried about him because we were pretty young and pretty dumb, and I guess I should have said before that when we asked Andrew why Steve got arrested, he had no idea. He said, and I quote, "We were just walking down the street by these cops and then all of a sudden they tackled him and Steve was wriggling out of his coat and yelling at me to take it." We had exhausted all the different places to call, even the bail bondsmen didn't know where he was. One of them we suggested we just go back to the second jail we had gone to, so on our way to Baton Rouge that evening we stopped by the jail and they said again they didn't have him. Welp. We figured he'd get out eventually and call us and we'd figure out how to reconnect, and as we were driving away, Steve banged on the window of the van for us to stop because he had gotten out somehow and saw us pulling away. What we think happened is he'd been processing to be released at the same exact time we were asking at the desk if he was there, since he'd been released in the system, the person at the desk didn't have a record for him. He said he had bribed a guard to use his ATM to bail himself out, which I didn't believe because Steve occasionally told a tall tale or two, and he didn't know why he was arrested, but we were just glad he was out and we went on to Baton Rouge for the show and Steve wasn't at his best that night behind the sound board in view of the fact he'd been awake in jail all the night before.