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For one thing, my baby loves the fuck out of it. So I was outnumbered from the start; for another, it really is as fucking comfortable as a real place onterra firma.
And really, the first reason was more than enough to persuade my ass to lift my veto over it.
I’d do anything to make my little beauty happy.
Besides, she was right. Flying while touring makes getting where you have to go easier and faster for sure, but it also brings with it the temptation of just scheduling another date, another venue, cutting those two days off down to one, and everything that comes with the territory when you happen to be a workaholic bastard obsessed with his music. And since it gets worse when your bandmates are just as bad as you are, we needed to come up with a plan that would save our asses.
We were never stopping, never resting.
I was a wreck, Rick was a mess, and Sly was constantly in pain, but we kept on going. It drove Mia up the fucking wall. She loves what we do and is one-hundred percent supportive of our passion, but she was getting as stressed as us just worrying about my friends and me not getting enough rest or even basic shit like four hours of sleep per night. Those two lugs have grown on her, too, and she drives herself insane with worry over them. I had hoped she would come to see them as two more brothers that she could trust just like she does her own, but I never imagined she would become so attached. She's not just my woman, she's our family now, and she really put her little foot down when she saw up close what kind of life we led while on the road.
There’s no describing what seeing such a tiny thing pissed off and trying to corral three giant ass men does to me. Not that getting me hard was what she was aiming for on those occasions, and she had no trouble reminding me of that.
Underneath the scared little rabbit with walls all around her, Mia is smart, funny, sassy, and strong-willed. She is also affectionate, adorable, and caring and has a possessive, jealous streak a mile wide and a fiery temper that I fucking love to pieces –since it goes so well with my own overprotective ass– and that my groupies have become more than a little bit acquainted with.
I’m so lucky she got me past those walls. Hands down the best thing that’s ever happened in my life.
She’s my fucking world, and I love her so much I can’t fucking breathe without her.
I’d been saying that we needed to slow down for a couple of years and never took the necessary steps, even if the guys agreed with me that we were this close to burning the fuck out.
What did it, in the end, was seeing what touring on such a strict schedule did to Mia when she was done with school for the year and followed us on the longest leg of our Asian tour over the spring.
One month in, and she was so tired she could barely stand. It tore me up inside seeing her distressed and yet stubbornly refusing to get some rest just so she could be with me. Which, in a way, finally made me understand what she had been trying to say all along and how she must have felt watching me destroy myself for the glory of performing on stage after stage and dragging my friends down with me.
After that, we all really decided to slow down.
We took a month-long break for the first time in history and even discussed going on a longer hiatus.
After so much angst over it, in the end, it was easy for us to decide we would do things in a different, more healthy way going forward. For future tours that won't come up for more than a year or so, we achieved that by spacing out the dates more when the tour brings us from one nation to another, by adding week-long breaks here and there, and by penciling in at least one or two days of downtime in between venues in the same country.
The remainder of this year was the real issue because the dates of our international tour were all sold out, and the arrangements were all made so we couldn’t just follow a healthier schedule without having to cancel even more of our concerts, but the idea didn’t sit well with any of us. We just couldn’t bear to disappoint our fans like that.
So since stopping point-blank wasn’t really an option for us no matter how tired we were and how bad Sly was doing, we had resigned to just power through until December.
My wife understood but wasn’t too happy about it. The stubborn little thing told me she wouldn’t stop looking for ways to make things better for us, no matter how many sold-out dates and prior engagements we had on our plate.
It was Jared, of all people, that made Mia think of a solution. He told her he had been wondering how things were done in the past when flying all over the place wasn’t really an option.
Mia looked into it and discovered tour buses and went nuts over them. Then she trapped us in a room and pitched us her idea. We wouldn’t need to pause our upcoming tour but simply change some of the dates to increase our buffer time between shows, and in order not to succumb to the temptation of getting on the fast lane again, we would forgo flying as much as possible and do classic on-the-road tours both at home and in other countries.
Traveling this way would inevitably slow us down by stretching the time needed to get from one venue to the next since we would not use my jet, and we would all benefit from the forced R&R while driving from point A to point B.
Rick and Sly went fucking crazy over the idea of just driving off the beaten track like an old rock band from the seventies.
I wasn't all the way in at first, but the devious little thing reminded me I couldn't say no to her since I likedoing things the old-fashioned way. She got me there, so I relented. Kinda. I drew the line at actually traveling on some beat-up bus up and down back roads in some foreign country. I figured if we were gonna do it for the fun of it, to rest up, relax and recharge our batteries, we had to do it in style.
I should have never said those words aloud.
My baby and those two maniacs I call friends got in research mode, and that’s how we ended up buying this wheeled beast.
But even if I grumble here and there, I can’t really complain. This is really working out. We’re all happier and more relaxed, and we actually get some valuable shut-eye.
Oh, and I have my woman in my arms, and I’m soaking up all the love I can before she has to back to Gallaudet.
Rather than being something I have to try to survive, something unsustainable in the long run, touring is something that it’s nurturing my creativity now, something that I’m truly absorbing in a calm, non-frantic way –at least until we reach a venue and it’s showtime again.
Stuff had already been booked when it came down to venues, hotels, and shit, so we had to lose some money over that when we implemented all the changes. We offered reimbursement to those fans who had prior engagements on the new dates in certain venues, but we were happy to bear those costs. It was a great compromise between not displeasing our fans and managing to actually squeeze in some normal healthy life even while touring.
