August 5, 2008  I just got back from tour managing Guy Forsyth's east coast tour.  What a whirlwind.  A month just went by in a blur outside the van windows.  It's the kind of experience I look at and know that I am a better person for it. 
A lot of people have asked me exactly what a tour manager does.  For big tours, my job would be divided amongst numerous people including road manager, accountant, merchandiser, stage crew, etc.  Essentially, I handle all the logistics, finances, and merchandise as well as helping schlep equipment and set up Guy's gear every night.  At bigger events like festivals, I also help coordinate any press or media appearances, act as liaison between the guys and anyone trying to make contact with them, interact with the festival crew to make sure everything goes smoothly.  At smaller venues, or at radio appearances and in-stores, there is still a lot to do, and it changes every day.  In general, I interact with the venue owners and crew to make sure everything runs well and to insure the contractual terms and hospitality are met.  I make sure the guys get to the venues on time, in good spirits, and without feeling rushed.  I make sure the guys know what they have scheduled every day so they can mentally prepare themselves.  I check us into hotels and deal with anything that might come up unexpectedly (like lost keys, credit cards, lack of parking at the venue, etc.)  The job changes daily, even under the best of circumstances.  A big part of the job is to anticipate things before they come up by gathering as much information as possible about where you're going.  I had a conversation with Guy about how I saw good tour managers.  I said, "If I do my job well, then it is completely invisible."  And I liked to think about that as I worked, to challenge myself to achieve invisibility.  Tour management would be the worst job ever if you were working with overly difficult people.  All the guys were great, and I can say that I came away from the experience having more respect and admiration for them than I started.

Photos: (left) A Chinese woodblock at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.  (right) Stone sculpture of Sarasvati.

We had long drives from Austin to Memphis to Chicago where we stayed for two nights in a swanky condo overlooking the lake.  What a fantastic city Chicago is!  It was my first time there aside from layovers in the airport, and I gladly wandered around on my own to go look at art. The Museum of the Art Institute was easily one of my favorite museum collections I've ever seen.  Many pieces deeply impacted me, and the Asian collection is incredible.  Also, Picasso's Old Guitarist is one of the most devastatingly beautiful pieces I have ever seen.   It's the rare kind of art that hits you right in the gut, brings you to your knees, in tears.  Hegel says a good artist is the 'vessel of Spirit's sorrows,' and for me, this piece embodies that idea so profoundly.  It is divine, devastating, haunting, beautiful, sad.  Hegel criticized the direction modern art was taking because it caused us 'to bow at the knee no longer.'  And in general, I agree, but this particular piece, and several others I saw that day, are notable exceptions.   They continue to impact me long after I left their presence.

Photos: (left) [...]  (right) Picasso's Old Guitarist. 

From Chicago, we went onward to Canada.  The border crossing required all sorts of paperwork, but in the end, it was easy and uneventful.  The guys played in Toronto, and then we moved on to Ottawa for the spectacular Bluesfest.  I loved working the bigger festival shows.  I have tons more to do, but somehow that's easier for me.  The guys sounded fantastic for both days they performed.  Their second show was inside a war museum which had a phenomenal theatre.  They played a completely full audience, and you can hear that performance along with an interview with Guy here (scroll down about half-way where the artists are listed alphabetically by first name).

Photos: (left) Guy with guest musicians from Texas Strings sitting in at the Ottawa Bluesfest. (center) Rob and Will holding it down in Ottawa.  (right) Guy's daughter, the most adorable little girl in the whole wide world, Mary Mae, watching the show from side stage.

Photos: Feist in Ottawa.  Her stage design was awesome and made use of some really amazing shadow puppets and other cool props (like flowers petals thrown on her).

Ottawa was the first of several towns we passed through where Feist was playing on the same night.  My crush on her was an ongoing topic of conversation on some of our long drives and was a continuous theme on the first part of the tour every time we saw her posters up in a new town.  In Burlington VT, after my morning and early afternoon were eaten up  dealing with a whole bunch of work unexpectedly, I walked to a sweet little place for brunch.  I noticed one of the waitstaff had a Feist shirt on, so I said, "nice shirt."  She said, "She was just here, in the restaurant, not even thirty minutes ago, she sat right there."  Sweet!  But damnit that I had just missed her by a little.

On to New York City, one of the few places other than Austin I have called home.  I met up with one of my best friends in the whole wide world to go gallery hopping.  We saw some amazing exhibits as well as some sweet street art.  One of the more interesting exhibits we saw made us feel like Lilliputians.

Photos: (left) LL at the Richard Therrien exhibit.  (right) Another view of the Therrien exhibit.  (below) Some nice poster art up on the streets of Chelsea.

Then on to Washington DC to record at the XM studios.  This was one of the highlights of the tour.  The guys recorded an hour long set for one of XM's stations.  The sound engineer, 'Q,' was phenomenal, the guys sounded fantastic and recorded two songs never recorded before, the program director was hanging out the entire time having tons of fun, and passers-by would stop and linger to listen to a song or two.

Photos: (left) Guy setting up in the XM studio.  (right) Will, Rob, Guy, and sound engineer Q listening to the playback and liking what they hear.  (below)  Rob, Jessie Scott (program director), Guy, and Will at XM.

And look who else was recording in front of a live studio audience in a super swanky studio at XM the same day.  That's Alejandro Escovedo and band with Carrie Rodriguez sitting in on violin.

That night, Guy's manager, Nikki Rowling, took us out for one hell of a dinner at the phenomenal Clyde's in Georgetown.  We dined like superstars.  I had the best eggplant parmigiana I've ever had.  After our entrees, Nikki snapped a photo of us contemplating dessert.  Afterwards, we walked to a nearby theatre to see Wall-e.  I thought it was a pretty ballsy move by Pixar to make a film with no dialogue for the first 30 minutes, and the multiple layers of social and political commentary were brilliant.

Be sure to read PART 2 of my adventures with the Guy Forsyth Band....

... From DC to Pittsburgh, the land where streets make no sense whatsoever.  Our GPS system took a break (i.e. stopped working inexplicably when we arrived in Pittsburgh, and had a miraculous and equally inexplicable resurrection as soon as we left).  It has got to be the gnarliest city to navigate.  Aside from taking hour long detours on what should have been 10 minute drives (good thing the city is interesting to look at) it's a pretty damn cool town.  The Asylum Street Spankers were also in town on tour, and a couple of them sat in on Guy's show, and then Guy sat in with them during their show the next night.  We had a day to explore, and I had heard of an awesome art space in Pittsburgh for years, so Guy, Will, and I went to check out the Mattress Factory and were all thoroughly impressed.  Photos:  (left) The wall outside Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.  (center)  An urban revitalization art project at the MF.  (right)  A sweet herb garden in the middle of a dense urban area near the MF.

The Mattress Factory is one of the best art spaces I've ever seen, it exclusively shows installation art, and the artists can augment the buildings by cutting big holes in exterior walls and floors and flooding the basement.  I loved being able to experience that space with Guy and Will who were just as excited about the art as I was.  I was very inspired by what is going on there, and I'd love to be involved in a project at the MF one of these days.

Onward to more stops in Pennsylvania and then on to Ohio.  The guys opened for the Asylum Street Spankers in Cleveland at the Beachland Ballroom.  What a rowdy, enthusiastic crowd. 
Photos:  Guy with some Spankers at the Beachland Ballroom.

Next night was Terre Haute, Indiana which was, in my opinion, the worst night of the tour.  The guys were champs, bringing everything to the performance, as usual.  But the crowd was awful, mostly frat boys and sorority girls that could care less about the music and, instead, sat around chain smoking cigarettes, drinking their booze, and engaging in the vulgar teenage mating rituals.  I wasn't feeling particularly well for a couple of days, and so I think that amplified the situation for me, but that night epitomized all that is wrong in this world, as far as I can tell.  First of all, there are three guys who have traveled across the country bringing their music to attentive and receptive audiences.  They are not just incredibly talented musicians, but they are some of the best human beings I've met, they are thoughtful, engaged with life and the world around them, they are incredibly intelligent and funny, and most of all, each of them brings such a gift to the stage every night, regardless of whether five people are watching or five thousand.  There are not many musicians I know that will still play a good show when almost everyone in the venue is talking very noisily amongst themselves and who show more enthusiasm for the formulaic crappy pop music that the bartender puts on inbetween sets than they show for the energy these three musicians are bringing to them live.   I had come to have such immense respect and admiration for Guy, Will, and Rob and their ability and willingness to bring it every night, no matter how good or bad the venue or audience or sound was.  And here we were, in a frat boy hang out full of other people's second hand smoke and loud, obnoxious, drunken college kids who totally lacked any meaningful or substantive engagement with anything going on around them.  They were so disconnected and unaware of anything but the things they were using to distract themselves.  I really think this attitude and way of being in the world is the cause of so many ills, both individual and collective.  That night had such an impact on me that I still felt it the next day as we made our way to St. Louis.  Guy and I had a long talk about it, and I broke down.  I fell to pieces talking to him, sitting under a tree.  The thing they do every night is such a gift, and to see so many people fail in their ability to see and appreciate that made me so sad.  That gift is one of the closest things to an experience of the divine in this lifetime.  The ones that get it go back into the world with new eyes, and then there are those who cannot see it at all because they are so disconnected from themselves, much less anything else in this world.

Photo:  Guy, Will, and Rob at the legendary BB's Jazz Blues & Soups in St. Louis.

Thank the gods for places like BB's Jazz Blues & Soups in St. Louis.  This was just the opposite of Terre Haute; the folks at BB's really get it and that fact resonates so brilliantly in everything they do there.   From the owner right on down to the bar and restaurant staff, you just feel the love of music hit right to the core of all they do, and it's clear the audience feels it too.   The fans there are attentive, enthusiastic, and have a willingness to surrender to the experience and see where it takes them.  There is nothing like dancing and sweating with strangers that makes all with the world right again.

Photo:  (above) Guy and Will at BB's. (below) Kuan Yin Buddha at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.

Onward to a couple more stops on the way back home to Austin.  I got to take a very quick peek at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City where I saw a really great Joseph Cornell box in homage to one of my favorite composers, Jacques Offenbach.  There was also a surprisingly extensive Asian collection.  The thing that interested me most about that museum was the attempt to design interior spaces that in some way add meaning and context to the art that is exhibited there.  A lot of philosophers have famously claimed that museums are places where art goes to die, and I think that designing the interiors of museums similarly to Nelson Atkins, in a way that the space actively engages the art, helps bring aesthetic experience back to life in richer and fuller ways.  Ultimately, though, I agree with the likes of Hegel and others that there is a moribund quality to work contained in museums.  It reminds me of the story about the highly coveted Stradivari violins that lose their tonal brilliance, the very thing that sets them apart from all other instruments, because they sit in a museum and are never played.  The wood, no matter how beautiful to look at, tonally degrades without regular use.  It always seemed ironic to me that preserving Stradivaris in museums diminishes the very thing that makes them worthy of preservation.  So, too, I think, the spirit in visual art is diminished in museums.  Hegel says, "We bow at the knee no longer," in the face of great works.  I walked around the sculpture garden for quite a while after the museum closed, and my attention was turned back toward the ways in which art and the environment intersect and interrelate, and because of that relationship, new life is breathed into both.

This whole idea of contextualizing art reminds me of a conversation Guy and I have had a few times.  He does a song called Play to Lose where he gets off stage and walks through the crowd, engaging audience members directly by making them into the character that he addresses in his lyrics.  It is very theatrical, and it always takes the audience by surprise.  It recontextualizes the act of performing, and it makes the audience into an active particpant and co-conspirator.  For me, the most effective art - whether it be visual or performance based - is that which shakes up and blurs the boundary between the artist and audience.  I love art that implicates the viewer, that makes them a co-creator, that compels them to some sort of action.  I love art that engenders a sense of active participation, that creates roles around which society convenes.                                                                                                                                On the last day of the tour on our drive from Oklahoma City to Austin, we stopped for lunch.  The woman who rang up my order took a good look at us and said, "Y'all have been on the road for a while, huh?"  We did indeed look a little ragged and road weary.  A month on the road will do that to you.  In that time, we only had two days off.  That's a lot of nearly constant motion.  All told, the tour was an amazing experience.  I'll be going back out with the guys in October for a shorter tour through the southeast, so stayed tuned for more tales from the road...                      Photo:  Guy, Will, and Rob at the Continental Club in Austin.

xo

LL