Touring can a lot of fun. If I told 12 year old Max that he would get to play music and eat out 10 times a week professionally, he would be over the moon. As enjoyable as touring can be, there is a downside to the act of traveling across the country by motor vehicle. You may think that this dark underbelly of touring is related to long amounts of time separated from family and friends, eating dangerous amounts of shitty fast food, being trapped in a small space with the same six people for 18 hours a day, or lugging heavy equipment in and out of clubs twice a day, every day. It’s none of these things. In reality, the most continually aggravating part of touring is that no matter how hard you try, you will always end up losing the same damn things. Here’s a rundown of all the things team Arkells have recently lost on tour.
Clothes We Love – 3
If we are lucky, a seemingly lost item will resurface months later when someone finally summons the courage to look into the potato chip crumb and gum wrapper littered abyss and clean the van. For the pieces of clothing that have been unintentionally donated to various hotels and green rooms along the way; all we can do is try to appreciate the good times we had together. This is dedicated In Memoriam to the following items: Tim’s Ray Ban sunglasses, Mike’s favourite Casio watch, and the thousands of nameless white t-shirts that have been lost over the years.
Wallets – 1
A couple of the guys in the band, myself included, are the owners of what have been commonly referred to as “Costanza Wallets”. If unfamiliar with the term, a Costanza Wallet is cash-carrying device that is far too big to fit comfortably in any man’s back pocket. That means you can often find our obese wallets resting comfortably on dinner tables, guitar amps, and on one horrible occasion, the roof of a moving van. Of all the things we lose on the road, this is the only one we will turn around for.
Control of Our Bladders
Whether it was the extra large coffee Anthony consumed at the morning Starbucks stop, or all the Gatorade Tim drank the night before to prevent a hangover; everyone has to go to the bathroom and its never at the same time. Plus, you can’t just pull over on the side of the road – we almost got a ticket for that in Minnesota. This means a lot of painful stretches of highway where all you can do is grit your teeth and hope for the best.
Computer/Phone Chargers – 4
To ensure people are occupied and up to date while we are on the road, everyone in the band carries at least two electronic devices that need to be charged frequently. We do a lot of this charging in hotels, venues, and even truck stops. If you ever stop at a travel centre and see an iPhone lying completely unattended on the ground charging, the answer to the question who is being that negligent? is Arkells. When you have five identical chargers, sometimes you are going to assume the charger lying on the table isn’t yours and whoever left it there will pick it up before we leave. This is one case where being on the same page is not necessarily a good thing.
Toothbrushes – 18
It’s easy for anyone to lose a toothbrush, so it’s to be expected that when you brush your teeth in a different place every morning, you’re going to leave a few behind. Despite coming to terms with not getting too attached to any one particular cleaning device, we still manage to lose an excessive amount; even for a touring band. Typically, when Max arrives at our hotel for the night, before announcing himself as a guest, he asks about the hotels complimentary toothbrush policy.
Luckily for us, the one thing we haven’t lost so far on the road is our love of touring (see that cute thing I did there?). So, as frustrating as losing all these things can be, we are still coming out on top. More updates soon,
Nick
