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Wednesday, December 07, 2022
Rules of the Tour Bus - Make Friends Not Foes
Rich Roadie: Unfortunately, a lot of people who have been in our industry for years have left it during the pandemic. This was either for necessity to pay the bills, loss of faith for shows ever returning, or a combination of both.
This is an interesting list of suggestions. My roommate, James Gallo used tour buses this summer to get from point to point. This article was written with people new to touring in mind. Don’t poop on the bus seems like pretty swell advice and don’t drink the water also seems like a good idea. The two suggestions about keeping the bunk area quiet and waking up to your first alarm I would hope would go without saying, but I’m sure it doesn’t. When I went off to college and got a roommate, I obtained a $25 “smart” watch from amazon that had a silent alarm feature. This watch was cheaper than cheap and it’s only job was to wake me up by vibrating my wrist so that I wouldn’t bother my roommate. For the most part, my roommate was good about waking up on the first alarm, but it was a pain in the butt when it went off. Sleeping in a bunk room with five other people in EMS also meant this silent alarm was imperative. That I imagine is more like the tour bus.
This is definitely super accurate. With my first tour being this past summer, this would have been really helpful to have read ahead of time, but nonetheless, I learned all of these rules over the course of the tour. I found that you learn a lot of these the hard way, but one of the rules that I learned even before stepping foot on the bus was to not poop on the bus. Fortunately, no one on our bus ever did that, and we kept our bus mostly clean the entire tour. It was difficult because everything on our bus was white, so coming in and out of it with shoes on quickly made the floor very dirty. We had a great driver who worked hard to keep that floor clean and maintain the bus for us while we were at work. The drivers definitely have a pretty hard job. Not only do they have to get you where you need to be in the right amount of time, but then once they get there there is usually a few more hours of maintenance they all have to do on their buses before going to their hotel rooms and sleeping. We had 20 buses on our tour and our driver was the lead driver of all of them, so he definitely had a lot to manage.
2 comments:
This is an interesting list of suggestions. My roommate, James Gallo used tour buses this summer to get from point to point. This article was written with people new to touring in mind. Don’t poop on the bus seems like pretty swell advice and don’t drink the water also seems like a good idea. The two suggestions about keeping the bunk area quiet and waking up to your first alarm I would hope would go without saying, but I’m sure it doesn’t. When I went off to college and got a roommate, I obtained a $25 “smart” watch from amazon that had a silent alarm feature. This watch was cheaper than cheap and it’s only job was to wake me up by vibrating my wrist so that I wouldn’t bother my roommate. For the most part, my roommate was good about waking up on the first alarm, but it was a pain in the butt when it went off. Sleeping in a bunk room with five other people in EMS also meant this silent alarm was imperative. That I imagine is more like the tour bus.
This is definitely super accurate. With my first tour being this past summer, this would have been really helpful to have read ahead of time, but nonetheless, I learned all of these rules over the course of the tour. I found that you learn a lot of these the hard way, but one of the rules that I learned even before stepping foot on the bus was to not poop on the bus. Fortunately, no one on our bus ever did that, and we kept our bus mostly clean the entire tour. It was difficult because everything on our bus was white, so coming in and out of it with shoes on quickly made the floor very dirty. We had a great driver who worked hard to keep that floor clean and maintain the bus for us while we were at work. The drivers definitely have a pretty hard job. Not only do they have to get you where you need to be in the right amount of time, but then once they get there there is usually a few more hours of maintenance they all have to do on their buses before going to their hotel rooms and sleeping. We had 20 buses on our tour and our driver was the lead driver of all of them, so he definitely had a lot to manage.
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