Playing in a band over the years I’ve had lots of crazy, memorable experiences both on tour and off. Here are a few that come to mind with an emphasis on crazy.
My band Freakhouse was on a short run, maybe a week or two during the winter. We started in Texas where we lived, then on to Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico and then completed the circle. Multiple shows in and we had just played Wichita the night before and were on our way to Denver. If you’ve ever driven across Kansas east to west you know it’s a surprisingly long drive. The drive was pretty boring and we always joked that the state tree was the telephone pole. Think lots of flat land with not a lot of scenery. Being winter there was snow on the ground so we would have snowball fights at the rest areas. Lots of fun. At that point we were touring in a grey GMC 15 passenger van towing a single axle 5×8 trailer. Pretty bare bones. I was behind the wheel as we drove west down I-70. It was a clear, beautiful day and life was good. We’re living the dream, right?
There was an older El Camino a bit in front of me. If you aren’t familiar the El Camino is like half car in front, half truck in back. It has a low riding open flatbed. It’s the mullet of the automotive world. In other words, unique and way cool. Now unbeknownst to me there was a full size tire sitting in that flatbed. We’re crossing along behind the The El Camino as it went over a small bump in the road. But it was just enough for the fully inflated tire to launch out of the back. I could see it was a on collision course for our windshield. Just like in a movie, everything slowed down like we were in the matrix. Get me outta here. Now here’s the wild part, the tire bounced and easily went 25 feet in the air. No joke. At that point I knew I had two options: try to brake or gun it and outrun the bounce. I chose to gun it. We slipped in right under its arc as I predicted and watched it bounce above us. Looking in the rear view mirror I could see cars swerving to avoid it as it continued to bounce behind us. Thankfully, it eventually landed next to the highway and no one was hurt. I went with my gut and made a decision. Win or lose, one choice. As Ron Burgundy says, you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel. Having a tire go through your windshield can ruin your day, I don’t care who you are.
This story I told on our dvd release, “No Way Down”. We were playing in Houston, a town we used to play a lot in our early days touring regionally. I believe it was at a club called Backstage. We were running pyro on stage, namely concussion mortars and flame pots. Concussion mortars are little metal cylinders mounted on a heavy base that you put some explosive powder in and when detonated make a BIG BOOM. Like, watch the waitresses all drop their trays kind of boom. Hence “concussion”. If you look at early photos of KISS, like on the cover of Alive, you will see some of these same devices. We got them from the same company. The flame pots were much larger tubes that were made out of super tough plastic. You would literally pour a measuring cup or two of smokeless shotgun powder in and blend it with some green or red colored powder. That would determine what color your flame would be. It was easy to singe a club ceiling so you had to be careful how much powder you used. The first time we ever tested it out behind our rehearsal space it easily went 20 feet in the air. Now mind you, all this was long before the Great White pyro incident which burned a club to the ground, killing numerous people. We had stopped using this stuff prior to that. We learned our lesson with the story I’m about to tell. Strong disclaimer: Don’t try this at home or anywhere else.
So, we’re on stage and there is a fan in the crowd that had been to our shows previously. In those days we played a few covers at the end of our set. Being a big KISS fan, He wanted to come up on stage while we did a cover of “Cold Gin”. Our singer told him to stay away from the pyro as this was the song we shot flames. Before the flames were triggered, our singer pointed at the flame pots and reminded him again. Somehow, he interpreted that as he was supposed to go closer and take a look at them. Unbelievable. I was behind him as flames shot up in front of his face. I knew right then this was going to be bad. Really bad. He turned to me though and had a big smile on his face. Whew! He didn’t get his face burned. As he turned the rest of the way toward me I realized the side of his hair was on fire. I quickly patted down the flame and got the fire out. We of course apologized profusely and asked if there was anything we could do for him. Thankfully he was a good sport about it and laughed it off. If you play with fire it’s not if you get burned, it’s when. Not my finest moment and one I’m very thankful turned out with no real injury. It’s actually kind of embarrassing to tell because I know how dumb that was, but I would rather people learn from my mistake than not to share it.
These are just a couple examples of things that could had catastrophic consequences for us. One that was out of our control and another that we should have known better. Touring is awesome but it can also get dangerous on a dime for a variety of reasons. From my experience it’s mainly the travel that can put you in unsafe situations. People are tired, driving for hours upon hours, and dealing with conditions that most people don’t experience on a daily basis. Touring is full of risks so keep your head on a swivel.
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One skill that I think only comes after considerable time is the ability to dial in a guitar tone in the context of a band. I’m talking about your main rhythm tone. It’s easy to come up with what I call a “bedroom tone”. This is a guitar tone that sounds great on its own but gets lost in the context of a mix or live situation. There are a couple of things that you can do to solve this problem. One is to find a couple of areas in the frequency spectrum to emphasize. These are areas where the guitar will have its own unique spot to shine. In a mix I might pull down some frequencies on the bass where I’m going to be boosting on the guitar. For live you can do the same thing by tweaking your tone a bit while the bass is playing. The bass player can do the same thing by finding areas to boost where the guitar tone is scooped a bit or not dominating. For example, the 200 hz range is one good place for the bass to have it’s own territory. This can be an area to pull some frequencies from the guitar. All of this of course requires experimenting but is time well spent.
Another thing you can do is be mindful of piling on anything that is washing out your tone like too much reverb for example. If you need ambience, short delay with low feedback (repeats) is a much cleaner way to go. This is going to reduce cloudiness in your tone. Also be mindful of the amount of distortion you are using. I have different tones for different parts especially on a record. There are single note parts where I will crank up the distortion much higher than I would on a main rhythm tone. This is of course somewhat subjective, but if you are looking for more clarity from your tone and it’s getting lost in the context of things, this is worth experimenting with.
in the context of a mix if you find that you have to turn up the guitar to the point where it is louder than all the instruments just so you can hear it, you have tone issues. This means either frequencies are getting masked by other instruments or the guitar doesn’t have it’s own unique frequencies popping through. Live it is natural for each musician to want to hear a little more of themselves in their monitor mix so they hear the details of their performance.
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