Tips From The Road - Day One of the All Wood and Doors Tour

Today I arose at 4:20 am, showered, shaved and drove to the airport for a 6:30 am flight to Atlanta, where I picked up a car and drove to Charlotte, NC for a series of dates with Cliff Eberhardt (www.cliffeberhardt.net) promoting our upcoming CD release, All Wood and Doors (www.allwoodsanddoors).

I thought that I would keep you in the loop regarding the tour.   First of all, rent a green car, you’ll feel better.  Secondly, Cliff can get his email on his computer as we drive and he went on hot wire and found us great rooms for literally half of what their cheapest advertised rate was. 

Check into Hotwire, it’s great for us musicians.   The theory is that there are always rooms that go vacant, so a certain percentage of rooms are frequently available.   For a touring musician on a budget, this is it. 

Drink all the water that you can, but don’t take any into the airport as they make you toss it.   No one ever accused the office of Homeland Security of being green.

It’s now too late to keep going,  more up-dates tomorrow…

…Okay, it’s  tomorrow, and it turns out that from 7-9 this hotel serves breakfast.   I flew in from Los Angeles yesterday, so my body is still on Pacific Standard Time so I expected to wake up around 10:30 out here.    I woke up at 7:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep.

I  went downstairs and had an egg, a waffle, two glasses of juice  (one apple,  one orange), and a cup of coffee, plus I took an apple and an orange to my room for later.

So another one of the perks to hotwire is finding a hotel that serves breakfast.  That will also save you $15 a day.

Cliff and I will rehearse this morning and then check out and drive three and a half hours to the cultural hub of Tarboro where we will wow the wocals with our vocals and guitars.

This will be interesting in that we haven’t really rehearsed together.  I have been playing my part along with the CD for a week, and I hope that Cliff has been doing the same.   So this morning we’ll try to meld the parts and then, based upon our vast experience on the stage.  Actually it sounds boastful, but we probably have 20,000 hours on stage between us, so we should be able to muddle our way through it.

Because we are two solo acts doing a duet thang, we are going to use the model that John Batdorf (www.johnbatdorfmusic.com) and I developed on our All Wood and Stones tours (www.allwoodandstones.com).

We  do three songs from the CD, then I turn the stage over to John for three of his tunes, then he brings me up and turns the stage over to me for three songs (these are fifteen to eighteen minute segments).   I then bring John back up and we do two more songs from the duet CD and then take a break.

This way, we have done some stuff for our individual fans, done some solo stuff for the other’s fans and done some of the duet CD.   So we have demonstrated all we’re doing and we sell some of all the CD’s, our individual and duet CD’s.

So Cliff and I plan to use that same template for the first set.    The second set, we’ll both stay on stage the whole time and, when we can, contribute to the other’s tunes, so there’s some free form fun and we’ll also do all the rest of our tunes from All Wood and Doors.

I will let you know how tonight goes in tomorrow’s post.

Comments

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Additional tip while travelling. Stay with your luggage until the luggage is checked. If you must put your bag down, keep one foot on the handle.