Every now and again, Damian gets invited to write an
article for a magazine, newspaper or website, an invitation he frequently accepts. You rarely see these things again after they're published (you can change that, ASME), so we're making them available here. You'll find Damian's columns for Japanese rock magazine InRock, as well as various things he's written for various other places. Please enjoy.
10/05 InRock - Driving
I just re-read what I wrote to you last month, my summary of what tour feels like, and I realize that I hugely under-represented the main ingredient of touring: driving. The vast majority of what we do is get from one place to another. In an average day, we drive about 250 miles (about 400 km) before we get to the club where we're playing. In the huge expanses of the American west, we often have to take days off between shows so that we can cover 1000 miles or more. This means driving for 15 straight hours one day, sleeping for a few hours, then getting up and driving another 5 or 6 hours before the show. There is one grueling leg between Minneapolis and Seattle that we do a couple times a year; it takes three days of non-stop driving. To put that in perspective for you, the distance is more than five times farther than Tokyo is from Osaka, with no major cities in between.
When we first started out, we did all of this travel in a 1989 Dodge Ram, an old family-vacation style van. We named her Larry. Some former owner had installed the wrong type of radiator in her - one that was meant for a compact car - so to help distribute her excess engine heat we had to leave the heater on full blast whenever it got hot outside. Going uphill was tough on Larry - she conked out all the time. And we drove her into the ground. After a year and a half, we'd put about 90,000 miles on her, and she had to be retired. Poor old Larry.
Now we've graduated to a two-vehicle setup. Our gear and a couple band members ride in a cargo van, and the others follow in a car. Our manager happens to also be a car critic, so he convinces car companies to let us test their cars for a couple weeks at a time. Right now, I'm typing this up on my laptop in the passenger seat of a 2006 VW Passat, for instance. Last week we had Volvo. Before that it was a Dodge station wagon, which met an untimely demise when our merchandise guy, driving alone, fell asleep at the wheel and knocked over a utility pole in small town outside of New York City. Luckily (and miraculously) he was fine, but the transformer he felled managed to light fire to two separate roofs, and he took out power to the whole town for the better part of a day. A sobering incident, needless to say.
Extremely successful bands do most of their travel in busses, of course, and for a couple of especially demanding tours, we've shelled out the cash to rent a real tour bus. Bus travel means that after a show, you get to sleep in a little bunk while a professional driver whisks you to tomorrow's city. By 'professional driver,' what I mean is 'lunatic who has chosen to spend his life completely alone, awake only in the dark, sleeping in random hotels every day and piloting a bunch of unconscious strangers around with only a seat and a radio for companions.' These guys are, as you might imagine, not like other humans. The first driver we had introduced himself thusly: "I'm Tim, and I'm a real easy guy to get along with." Think about that for a second. Have you ever met a likeable person who had to explain in advance that they were easy to tolerate? The reason Tim had to tell us this was because it was absolutely not true. Luckily, we were usually asleep when he was awake.
Traveling in Japan is a whole different game, of course. Bullet trains. I wish there were bullet trains across America. What a different life we'd lead.
Hey, on a different subject...Perhaps you'll recall that, a few months ago, I wrote in this column about our homemade dance video, and how it had taken the internet by storm. Well, things have gotten even crazier. It's now been featured in two of the biggest newspapers in America (the New York Times and the Washington Post), and last week we performed the dance for nearly 6 million people on one of the country's biggest morning news shows. It's blowing our minds. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out at our website: www.okgo.net.
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