My Life on the Road: Touring America One Gig at a Time

Before I was a travel writer, I was a traveling musician. And before I was a traveling musician, I was a kid from Ann Arbor who just wanted to see what was out there.

The thing about touring is that you don’t usually see the tourist version of anywhere. You see the 3am vetrsion. The loading dock version. The version you find when you’re lost in a van at dawn looking for a Waffle House because nobody’s eaten in fourteen hours. That’s the version worth writing about.

Flexie on the East Coast

It started back east with Flexie. We gigged all over Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York City, and eventually out to LA. One of the early highlights was opening for Aerosmith at their club, Mama Kin, in Boston. Playing a stage owned by one of the biggest rock bands in the world will make you rethink what’s possible when you’re still figuring out what you’re doing. Cutting demos and CDs with Flexie and other local artists became more frequent at studios in Boston or Western Mass. Showcases took us back to NYC and LA.

I moved to LA in 2003, and the touring really kicked into another gear.

Feel the Burn

Chemical Burn took me all around LA, San Jose, and Las Vegas between 2004 and 2006. Short runs, loud shows, some driving through the desert at night. The Southwest at 2am is its own kind of beautiful. There’s a stretch somewhere past Victorville where the lights disappear and the sky opens up and you remember how small you actually are.

 

 

Charmed, I’m sure

Then The Charms sent me on my first real tour through the South. We cut through the South and up the East Coast. LA, San Diego, Tucson, Dallas, Denton, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Athens, New Port Richey, and back up through the Carolinas, New Jersey, ending in New York City, where we’d meet up with Little Stevens himself. The South hit different, long stretches of desert with a smatterings of dunes, massive rocks, big sky and truck stops all to the sound of Little Steven’s Underground Garage spinning our tunes and a rich playlist of incredible bands.

 

 

Like the tea…

Silver Needle was a long stretch, 2007 to 2012. We were based in LA but loved to hit the road. Vegas. Long Beach. Phoenix. Tucson. Santa Fe. And Austin, where we played SXSW and opened for Hatebreed, which was about as surreal as it sounds. I remember staying at a friend’s place in Austin that was basically a block party. The entire apartment complex was musicians, and they partied all night. I managed to grab a few hours of sleep in a room off the kitchen while the chaos carried on without me.

 

 

We played on and off the Sunset Strip, opened for Joan Jett at the Morongo Casino, and played with Steel Panther many times at the Key Club. Late nights at Waffle House. Something about that yellow sign after a gig, somewhere between Tucson and Austin, where the coffee is terrible and the hash browns are perfect and nobody cares what band you’re in.

 

 

You Know What They Say…When In Rome…

Then came When in Rome II. Eight years, 2012 to 2020. If you know the song “The Promise,” you know the world I was living in. This was the biggest touring I’d ever done. We opened for Information Society in front of 5,000 people at Pershing Square in downtown LA.

 

 

 

Played The Whisky and The Viper Room like every other band I’d been in. The Ventura Theatre. The Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. House of Blues in San Diego, Anaheim, and Las Vegas. Big Bear. San Francisco. Fresno. Phoenix. Bullhead City. Corpus Christi. Dallas. The Aztec Theatre in San Antonio. We shared bills with The Motels, Missing Persons, Bow Wow Wow, and Gene Loves Jezebel. Playing “The Promise” live, night after night, in cities I knew intimately as a performer but had never visited as a tourist. We arrived in Houston to find out half the city had lost power due to flooding. Show cancelled. And I got to spend the day with my Aunt and cousin who I hadn’t seen in over a decade easily. We visited the local shops, cafes and eateries, and caught up on over a decade of family we’d missed.

 

 

One night in Vegas, I ran into a friend from LA and we caught Zappa Plays Zappa. Dweezil doing his dad’s catalog. That’s the thing about touring. You stumble into moments you could never plan. You just have to be there.

 

 

 

Here’s what touring taught me about travel: the best stories aren’t at the destination. They’re in the getting there. The breakdowns, the detours, the wrong turns that lead to the right places. The diners you find at 4am in the middle of nowhere. The conversations with people you’d never meet if you’d flown directly to the hotel.

All told, I’ve logged more miles on American highways than I could ever begin to count. And now I’m ready to start counting countries.

The road continues. It’s just going to look a little different from here.

Written by: Chris Willett

Chris Willett is a Software Engineer and Drummer who enjoys traveling when possible. While most of his travel has been via touring, weddings or weekend trips, he’s looking forward to seeing more of the country and the world in the weeks, months and years to come.

Find his Drummer site at: chriswillett.com
Find his portfolio at bobsmedia.com

 

For more ITKT travel stories about The United States

Chris Willett
Editor-in-Chief, In The Know Traveler