Tour was a desaster, though.
I don't know if I'm the only participant in this thread who has his own band, but I think it'll make for an interesting read anyways. Here's the writeup:
Spoiler: A tale of despair
Show
Allright, here it goes:
First, let's set the stage, shall we?
Dramatis Personae
BA - Booking Agency: The Guy who booked our shows.
IS - Inner Sanctum: The 2nd Band on the billing. Friends of ours from waaaay back.
VG - Venue Guy: The owner of the venue.
PG - Promo Guy: The local promoter. Sometimes the same as VG.
SG - Sound Guy: Sound technician. Sometimes the same as PG and/or VG.
SB - Support Band: The support band for any given gig.
History Lesson
We contacted BA to do a small tour through Czech republic in January to see if we would get along with IS in a touring situation. After all, if you're stuck with five guys in a van for the better part of ten days, better make sure you get along, right?
Turns out that yes, we did in fact get along rather well with IS. However, of the three gigs we had booked in January, one fell through because VG was sick, and another one was hastily put together a week before the tour after the first iteration got cancelled. Also, we found out when driving the tour that literally NO promotion had been made. Even though we provided flyers, posters and various facebook headers about two months in advance.
Well, **** happens. We chalked that up to misfortune and still had our fun, even thóugh we only had around 15 people on our first gig, and a whopping 4 (!) on the second one.
The Setup
So, we decided to do the promo work ourselves, since we made quite a few contacts on our first run. But still we were missing connections to venues etc., so we contacted BA again, this time to solely book the shows and accomodations. We gave him a rough outline of our preferred route as to minimize driving between venues, and he went on to procure said gigs.
The Prelude
As time went on and the tour grew ever closer, we had most of the venues names, but no word on support bands, door times or entry fees, which we needed if we wanted to do our flyers and promo work.
So we contacted the various venues ourselves, since BA did not really respond to our inquiries. He flat out ignored uncomfortable questions. He answered quickly enough if he had an answer to a question, but anything else he'd simply ignore. No "I don't know yet" or anything.
Of the nine (!) venues we contacted, only two responded. One was the one where the gig in January had been cancelled due to sickness, and that guy was eager as hell to make everything work. Kudos to him - for now.
The second Venue replied to let us know that they did not know of any concert on that day. BA didn't answer for a week, only to inform us later that yes, the gig in said venue was off, but he had another venue.
We packed an electronic drum kit, just in case, although the deal was that BA would organize a basic drumkit for each venue, either via support acts or from somewhere else. He agreed.
Tour preparations went on, and about 3 weeks before the tour we STILL did not have all the informations on any gig bar one. At this time a third venue answered ym inquiry from weeks back and told me that they'd LOVE to have us, but that we couldn't play on the date our BA had told us since there was already another event booked and they didn't know BA. Long story short: BA had arranged this through PG01, and the venue didn't even know which bands playede on this "external" event. Well, again, **** happens, right?
At this point we should have aborted, but this was three weeks before the tour, we had drummed up a bit of promotion through various channels and taken our vacations at the various workplaces, so we stuck to it.
Eppur Si Muove
Day 01
The time had come. T minus zero. Judgement day. Armageddon. We were off. After 8 hours in the van we arrived at the first venue. PG01 was nice, SB01 was nice, Venue was nice. So far so good.
Enter SG. Didn't speak a single word of english, which is... weird... give that the he was from the venue and they had big-ish international metal acts there semi-regularly (e.g, Belphegor). To my surprise he did speak a bit of german, so I made do. Didn't like the all-digital setup we had, hated my Shure SM58 and adamantly insisted on me using his crappy Samson (a cheap chinese SM58 knowck-off), because it presumably had less feedback than an SM58.
Two minutes into the soundcheck proved him wrong, and another 5 minutes proved that the guy had no clue what he was doing.
The Amps were too high output for him to handle, to the point were we had to lower the outputs that much that my Kemper literally could not get lower without shutting the outputs off. I found out later this was because he cranked the gain on his PA all the way to the max, not engaging a pad and quite possibly hitting the signals with compressors on the way in.
At this point my temper was quite mellow, so I basically humoured him and went along with most of his crap (apart from the SM58/Samson question). He was, after all, the SG of the venue, so he should know sound at his location, at least, right?
Wrong!
During SB01 everything went swell, since they had only one guitar and no bass, but IS reported that our sound levels were all over the place during our 2nd slot. When they played the 3rd slot, I saw that SG had pulled the second guitar WAAAAY down, to the point where you couldn't hear it, not even in the slightest. Well, long story short:
I told our bassist to pull up the channels while I distracted SG on one of his many, MANY smoking breaks during the slot. Sound was OK afterwards, and he didn't even notice, or at least he didn't change anything.
So, all in all the gig was OK, a few people were there, and we were content. Until we saw the accomodation for the night.
A completely run-down, quite spooky hostel with moldy as hell showers. At least the sheets were halfway clean.
Day 02
Mediocre night, breakfast at a supermarket nearby, but hey, the first night was OK, from the photos the accomodation for the second gig looked quite good, and VG for this gig was quite enthusiastic over this gig, so we took off with quite a good mood.
The accomodation was, in fact, quite nice once we arrived. The venue was damn hard to find, and when we got there quite before the agreed get-in time no one was there. Once the time arrived, still no one was there. Once the SB for the night arrived, still no one from the venue was there. Once the first guests arrived, STILL no one was there.
About 1.5 hours too late, VG finally arrives. Turns out his club is a quite well-known underground club with TONS of charme. Turns out also that VG didn't speak english nor german (this would get to be a pattern), was also the SG for the night and was, in the pathological sense, a choleric. Still, we set up the stage, I found someone to translate, the choleric told me to do our own sound, and the gig of SB went great. The 2nd slot this night was filled by IS, and it wasn't great, it was GREAT! The crowd was absolutely crazy. And to my surprise, most of them were even here explicitly for my band! We sold quite a bit of merch before our slot even started, which makes what comes next all the sadder:
We enter the stage, play our first song, crowd goes wild, we start the second song, and suddelny - SILENCE!
The PA had crapped itself. Queue the choleric VG who alternates between telling me that this hasn't happened once in the last eight years, that his reputation was at stake and that this was somehow the fault of our Amps. Wouldn't hear that this was, in fact, physically impossible, because our modellers and DI interfaces didn't have a power stage, and even IF by some weird fluke they put out too much voltage, it'd be his Mixer that'd crap itself, not his power amp.
So we had to cancel the rest of the show. I could still scream when I think of the faces of the people who ****ing KNEW OUR SONGS, standing before the stage and looking sad.
VG mellowed up once the brunt of his choleric attack faded (And I mean that literally - the guy was notorious for his choleric attacks, as in "he has this medical issue"...), we got drunk as hell and went back to the hostel.
Day 03
Breakfast, and off we go. We left Czech republic for the time being and headed to Slovakia. The mood is down, especially among my guys. IS is down because they had a great gig, and we didn't, even though the guests wanted to see us more, and especially because we did all the work both before and during the tour, barring carrying equipment and driving.
BAD still hasn't sent us any info on the last gigs, so we joked around how the next gig will get cancelled. An hour later, the news arrives: Gig is, in fact, cancelled! But at least we got a better accomodation since originally we would have to sleep in the venue.
Good food and quite the binge concluded this evening, but still a bad taste remained. Of the three gigs so far, which itself was a third of the whole tour since one of the 10 days would be a day off anyways since BA hadn't found a gig for that day, only one was what you could call "successfull".
Day 04
Wake up, check out, find out that in spite of BA telling us everything is payed, his credit card bounced or was invalid or something, so we had to pay for the accomodation ourselves. Keep in mind we already paid BA for this, for every night where he had a gig for us. At this point this is par for the course, but still it grates.
Hangovers all around we made off to the next stop. This gig was a bit special. See there were not one, ut to off-days in the schedule, because BA couldn't secure a gig here, either. So about two weeks before the tour we booked one ourselves. If we can do it, from germany, with no connections, one would think that BA could do it, too, but then I'll have my say about him at the end.
So, Krakow, Poland. Third country on our list. Nice Hostel, but then we booked this one ourselves, too, so no surprises there. We had booked a third band as SB under the condition that they'd bring a drumset. The deal was we would bring the rest of the backline, and they'd help with promotion and would maybe pull a few guests.
We would set up doors, door money would go to us and IS to alleviate accomodation, SB would get free drinks, and all parties agreed.
Enter the venue - No promotion had been done by the venue whatsoever, they didn't even share the facebook event. It was like they didn't care at all if anyone came to the concert. Same for SB - No mentions on FB, no shares, nothing. Well, [i]SG[i] turns up, looks at our setup, gets a stupid grin on his face and proceeds to give us a killer sound. That guy knew what he was doing, and spoke english more than well enough. MVP of the tour, really.
SB turns up - sans drumkit. We were mightily pissed at this point, especially after their drummer wrinkeld his nose on the electronic drum kit. Well, if you don't ike it, why didn't you bring your own kit like you were supposed to do?
Next thing is that we have to be done with the gig at 10 pm. Afterwards the sound needed to be less loud. IS agreed to cut their set to 35 mins, we did the same, and SB agreed to cut their set to 45 minutes and then proceeded to take an extra 45 minutes to get the drums up to their code. Brought 4 friends who watched their gig, didn't drink anything and went off before IS even began. Even with IS only playing 35 minutes (in front of us and the club owner. No one else was there) we didn't even START until 10 pm, but thank god no one turned our sound down. SB meanwhile stood upstairs, smoked, didn't watch jack **** of any one of the other bands and drank beer from the neighboring club, then ****ed off to god knows where somewhen during our set.
So: No promo by either the club or SB, no drumset by SB. We should've just played without them, then we wouldn't have had to cut both our and IS's set and had the same effect.
Day 05
Back to slovakia it is. Hostel is a hellhole in the worst district of the city, no place to (legally) park the van anywhere near it. Well, screw this, and screw everyone if we get a parking ticket.
Venue is a maze of underground corridors, patrons don't give a **** for anything that's going on, but the food is great, VG and his wife are more than nice, SG at least has a reasonable idea of what he's doing, even though the concept of "mix low, then, once your mix is ok, turn up the volume" is way beyond him. Gig is again in front of us and IS, plus three or so patrons who poke their head into the corridor where the bands played.
Still, here we had gotten FLYERS and POSTERS, so VG chalked it up to the gig being on a wednesday. SG tells us that the venue we'd be playing the next day had a big core audience and quite the scene behind it. That's something, at least.
Back to the hell hostel.
Day 06
After a 30-minute drive to the next city (shortest distance on the tour) we arrived at the hotel we were supposed to be accomodated in. Looked really nice. Only they didn't have any booking for us and were completely booked out.
At this point we googled the phone numbers of the remaining venues to contact them and see if the rest of the gigs were in fact taking place, since BA basically stopped communication. Only thing we got out of him was "VG told me he booked", and we knew that to be fake because the hotel staff KNEW VG and told us that he TRIED to book, but they were booked out.
The venue itself was closed, we saw a few posters of gigs MONTHS in the future, but nothign about our gig and concluded that there wasn't any promo being done here either.
So we booked a nice hotel, tried reaching VG via phone and decided that we would show up on get-in time, ask VG if he thought anyone would turn up, and make playing the gig dependent on his answer.
Queue us arriving ath the venue: VG tells us he'd told BA about the failed booking (which I'm inclined to believe, given BA's track record so far), says he didn't do any promo, but there'd be people showing up anyways.
So we set up shop, only to encounter for the second time on this tour a broken PA with no backup. VG barely speaks english, SG is only marginally more fluent, and it takes us an hour to figure out that his cables are faulty.
At this point I've had it, pulled the cables and mixed the room over two spare ports on our InEar-mixer, and just give him stereo out to his PA. IN addition to being vocalist, guitarist, tour manager and stage-tech for two bands, I've become the FoH-Guy, too. Great.
Gig was as expected: 3 club patrons watching us, clapping along with the music. So we pack up and get back to the nice hotel we booked.
Day 07 | Day 08
We had reached the other two venues remaining. The first one told us that they knew nothing of any gig whatsoever, the second (which would be the last gig of the tour) told us the gig was on. So we decided to skip town for the first gig, just drove to Prague and had two days off there.
While there we met with a few friends that we played with back in january. Remember the PA from Day 02? That hasn't failed once in the last 8 years? Well, those bands had played there, too, a while back. Turns out the Power Amp tends to **** itself regularly if you give it more than one or two vocal mics, so VG from Day 02 did not only lie to me, he slandered us to avoid taking the blame for using bad hardware and not having a backup.
****er.
Day 09
We were supposed to sleep in the venue, which we voted was not going to fly since we'd have an 9 hour drive home before us on the following day, so we booked a nice hotel a few minutes drive away.
Arrived, chilled out a bit, got a bite to eat and onwards to the venue!
What we expected was some small club. What we found was a cellar hole with surprising good sound, once I set it up, booted their SG guy out and we replaced the partial drumset with our e-drums. No food and no drinks, but that was par for the course at this point, really. We played our sets and headed home, but not before catchiong **** for playing with e-drums. Well fine, if you guys brought a complete drumset we wouldn't have, so **** you then. You should be GLAD to get two bands from another country, and for free nontheless, and with a passable sound for a change, but hey, I bet real drums sound really good if you've got your head up your asses!
Day 10
Drive home. Nothing to report.
The Aftermath
So, to summarize:
- Small czech, slovakian and polish clubs tend to not have sound guys that know their **** (with some exceptions)
- No matter if you're hosting international bands, as a club owner in czechia, slovakia or poland you don't see the need to at least passably UNDERSTAND english (or german, given it's a neighbor, but I'd say english'd be more useful)
- To be a booking agency, you don't need to keep your customers informed and never tell them anything bad unless it's basically way too late.
- Promotion is for chumps. If I open my small club, people will come. Or not. It's not like I care.
A few pointers to take away from this:
- Don't depend on others. Not your booker, not the support bands, not the venues. Do your promotion, accomodation and if possible booking yourselves. At least in the braket my band is in.
- Bring your own PA, or at least a pair of active speakers. Bring your own sound tech. Tell the local tech to suck it and do it yourselves.
- Do not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, do business with Bird Rain Agency. Seriously. Don't. Guy still owes us the money for the various accomodations, food buyouts and cancelled gigs. Comes together to around 600€, of the 880 we payed him up-front. It's a mystery to me how that guy is making money. My guess would be he isn't, and we'll have to see if he'll con us out of the cash or if he'll pay up. If he pays up, he's not a cropok but simply too incompetent to waste your time and money with, and if he doesn't, he's a con artist.
The bright side: My self-built guitar held up magnificiently and got quite a few curious questions about where I got it and how it looked so good. That's something :D
Originally Posted by Whoracle
From the other thread:
Re: Metal thread IX: Metal To The Pedal To The Other Metal
Now that is a RANT
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