Most of our blogs are related to touring. We started playing music at a very early age and everyone told us you have to tour tour tour. Everyone told us we should quit school and tour so we did. We toured before we even had a record out. We toured for the sake of touring. We played music for the sake of playing music. We didn’t understand the concept of playing music for money or for playing music because we had a commercial release. We didn’t care for any of those record industry rules. We just wanted to play our music for people and the only real goal we had along the way was to beat the Ramones touring record of 2000 shows - and you know we beat that record along time ago! Our first tour was in our Jetta all the way around America. These were good times. These were times before Myspace hits and Facebook announcements and tweets on Twitter. We just simply booked a tour on the telephone , sent out posters, got in the car and drove. We would show up at every venue in every town hoping it was really a venue. Sometimes when you book tours gorilla style the shows don’t really exist. The venue might not even exist. We were pretty lucky on this first tour. They all existed with the exception of our very last show we had booked in El Paso Texas. Our second to last show was in Denver Colorado so we had to drive 11 hours to get to El Paso to play a junk yard that didn’t exist. We drove all the way to El Paso to the junk yard and there was no show. That was shitty because we were very tired, we had been on the road for near 3 months. That whole tour was great. We ended up securing Jason from Denver as our booking agent. Jason worked at the venue that we played in Denver. Jason loved us and really saw the potential in us. He fell in love with us from our picture on our tour posters. The tour sort of sucked because we were all only teenagers so we couldn’t go inside any of the clubs until it was time to hit the stage. We would do crazy things on our days off like call up indie record stores and ask if we could play their store. They would say , “sure come on down” !. Of course they would never have mic stands so we would use a broom and tape a mic to the handle and tape the broom handle to a chair and that would suffice. I remember one record store in Myrtle Beach South Carolina let us set up our gear and broom stick and play right in front of their record store. It was awesome!. The coolest guy ran that record store. His name was Michael from a band called Something About Vampires and Sluts. They are a great band . I remember for our winter and spring tours we would use Richie’s grant money to support the tours. We would always sell tons of merch on these tours because everyone wanted to buy our homemade cd and if they didn’t want our homemade cd we would force them to buy one anyway. This was before downloading so we were still able to make a pretty good living on the road. We would spend all our money we made from selling our cd’s and go to every record store in every city in America buying as much vinyl as possible. That is when our record collections grew to astronomical proportions. I must say the only person that we have seen that can beat our collection is Pelle Almquist from the Hives. This has become our new goal, since beating the Ramones touring record we now would like to own as many records as Pelle has in his library.
Oh and please if you are anywhere near Louisianna, Texas, or Oklahoma check the Toadies tour schedule and get to their shows.
