Summer is a Pitch

Local band Jesse James Wax Museum has agreed to chronicle its summer of touring for GO Magazine. In this installment, lead singer Trey George laments the difficulties of booking a tour sans agent. Or money.

Growing up in the MTV culture, I’ve been taught bands are to be mounted on platinum pedestals of light shows and overpowered amps. Touring is supposed to mean buses with satellites, packed arenas and touching lady parts after the shows.

Starting a local band solidifies the harsh reality that arena rock represents less than one percent of touring. For most, it means crowded vans, an uncomfortable shortage of showers and asking strangers for a place to sleep. Regardless, Jesse James Wax Museum has been a band for a little more than two years, and we feel like touring.

Unlike the more endowed bands, we don’t have a label or a booking agent to negotiate with venues for certain dates and contractual guarantees. We have friends in bands, a few promoter contacts and a MySpace account. It’s nothing glamorous, but it works—kind of.

Todd Balisle, our trumpet player, warned us we were starting too late by making calls in April for a tour in early June. He plays guitar with local doom-core phenoms El Minotaur, which is no stranger to packing into a van and traveling the country. It’s safe to say Todd was right.

We’re not the only ones wanting to stretch our legs. Local ambient-pop band Cloud City (formerly Better Left Behind) is currently trying to schedule a month-long summer tour to promote its soon-to-be-released EP Everything is Getting Colder. AJ Moore, the band’s singer and guitarist, says the band is taking the same route we are: running down a list of contacts. “Not having a booking agent kind of sucks,” AJ says. “Well, it really sucks actually. It’s pretty hard.”

Currently, Cloud City has just a handful of dates booked, but it has given itself more of a head start, which is necessary to make a do-it-yourself tour happen. AJ says he’s not sure he’s going to get every date, but the band will work with what it can get. AJ says he’s been doing what he can to get whatever guarantees he can from each venue to ensure gas money to the next city.

For our part, we understand that touring at our level is not a money-making venture, so all Jesse James Wax Museum can hope for is exposure and enough money to cover gas and food. That’s not to say filling a gas tank at $4 per gallon and feeding a seven-member band is any small task. That said, we’d be glad to leave each show with more than $100—between merchandise sales and payment from the venue.

Being virtually unknown outside Springfield, venues aren’t exactly going to bend over backward for us, or bend over at all, for that matter. Our procrastination turned our planned week-long tour into a long-weekend tour. We were making calls and sending messages to promoters and allied bands we’d met over time in cities as far away as Chicago and Indianapolis. We were usually redirected from our original contacts to various venues or other bands who might offer some help.

We kept hitting closed door after closed door, except in Kansas City, St. Louis and Quincy, Ill. Even those shows aren’t without problems. In Kansas City, for example, we ended up getting a show at The Brick, which I’ve heard has a nice atmosphere. But the catch is that we’re playing with unknown bands with clashing styles. Translation, we won’t be making money from this show unless we draw our own mild crowd.