Who’s complaining?

Let’s face it; life traveling with a band on the road can be pretty boring at times.  The sudden transition from banality to mind-searing, adrenaline-pumping activity is reward in itself; a purging of the endless hurry-up-and-wait tedium that characterizes this nomadic way of life.  We each have our own ways of dealing with this and I honestly don’t know what others get up to in their time off the stage but for me (when I’m not complaining) it’s a mixture of reading, Internet, television, food or exploring the vicinity. And the ratio of decent, if not downright luxurious, hotels to merely three star slumming is pretty high; we are lucky – most of the time.  And I shouldn’t complain (‘but sometimes I still do’, to quote Joe Walsh).

It wasn’t always this way; it was far worse.  It was no picnic, squatting uncomfortably for endless hours in the cramped space at the back of a van full of amplifiers, drums, guitars and awkward mic stands, with no light to read by, the threadbare denim of your favourite (read ’only’) jeans rippling with the icy blasts of freezing winter mixed with toxic exhaust fumes blowing up through the rusty gaps in the bodywork of the seventh-hand vehicle whose better days pre-date your birth by at least a decade.  And those were the ‘good old days’?  They are called that for one reason only; your youth was then, that was what was good about it.  Actually, that was the one thing that made it all bearable – you had nothing with which to compare it and it was an adventure.  Anyway, it was a laugh.  What else can you do but laugh?

These days are a breeze by comparison; we have it easy, not that we don’t sometimes have to endure all sorts of trivial irritations.  As Alice Cooper says in his song, it’s the little things that really get your goat.  Take the other day…

We had a couple of days off so after a quick trip back home I fly to rejoin the band.  Either a virus or a bout of food poisoning has my bowels in turmoil so after an anxious flight and then a taxi ride, I arrive at the hotel late at night, pay the driver and run for my room and the toilet.  Waking up exhausted the following morning I discover that I have lost my wallet, probably dropped as I paid the taxi driver.  After all the usual phone calls and searches I have to kiss goodbye to what was in it – not a lot, just everything of importance.

On to the next hotel and the job of cancelling the credit cards, which involves many phone calls.  The room is stifling, the air-conditioning inadequate, the telephone in my room won’t take incoming calls so I call reception and get that changed.  Subsequently, they then feel the need to annoyingly announce every call I receive.  Then I find I cannot get onto the 29 Euros-per-day Internet despite a strong signal.  Whenever one complains that the Internet is not working, hotels invariably say, “We’ll send someone to your room.”  With barely disguised impatience, I can’t help it – “There’s nothing wrong with my computer,” I bellow, “I don’t need anyone to come to my room, just get your (expletive deleted) Internet provider sorted out.”  I try to access my mail on my iPhone but for some reason it won’t accept my password and I don’t know why.

On top of that, I have absentmindedly left my prescription medication in a previous hotel and in an attempt to get it forwarded to me, I need to email them, but of course, the Internet isn’t working.  Even if it was, I would have to provide them with a credit card to pay for the shipping, but with a sinking feeling I remember that I don’t have any credit cards either.

Deciding to cool off and have a meal I go to the hotel restaurant to find that it has just closed.  Then I get a call to say that my stepmother in hospital in Spain where she lives and I need to call her.   My sister provides me with the telephone number but whatever combination I try, I get the same wrong number four times in a row before finally putting the phone down with some angry Spanish woman’s insults ringing in my ears.

There’s nothing more I can do but get ready for the gig tonight.  That’s when I do battle with the expensive-looking bathroom.  It is over-designed and would look good in a brochure but in practice it is useless; there is no surface on which to put my toilet bags so they end up on the floor; the plumbing has its own method of deciding the water temperature; the postage stamp sized piece of soap slips away like a shy little animal… and the shower has leaked water all over the floor, exactly where my toilet bags are.  Oh, and the box of tissues is empty.

The ride to the concert takes an hour, driven by some insouciant youth whose erratic brake and accelerator skills, of which there are none, leave me exhausted for the third time today and so after bolting some cold dressing room food down I get changed and suddenly I’m on the stage.   If people think I look happy, I am, because finally the day has started to go right.

Funnily enough that part hasn’t changed much since the old days. And occasionally, thinking of those long van rides years ago, they didn’t seem to be so bad after all.

Good luck,

RG