Dillan Witherow - CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the folk artist, Dillan Witherow, shares one of his stories from being on the road. You can check out the story below:

Because I've spent a lot of time playing music with pop stars, friends, and touring acts as a guitarist, I’ve toured a lot—often on tour buses or flying to shows.

By far the most extreme tour I’ve ever been on was my own tour in 2016, though. All my music was printed on CDs and not yet online. My bandmate and I took off in my Ford Fiesta and drove around the country. We were often driving 10 hours in a day to play for fewer than 20 people.

Sometimes I would drive 10 hours on a show day to play for 0 people (like in Indianapolis) because of bad communication, or 7 hours to Plymouth to play for 20. It was random and exciting! Nothing beat the show I played in Rochester, though…

An online friend from an internet guitar pedal forum hooked us up with a local Rochester promoter and said I could crash at his house on our air mattress. When we got in, the local promoter had put us first of three on a local bill, and we were astounded when people actually showed up!

When the show started, they pulled out a projector and started projecting images behind our sweet folk acoustic duet. For some reason, the crowd was both extremely respectful but would laugh twice as loud as made sense to my banter—I thought I was really cooking! Slowly we won them over, and at the end to finish it up I said, “Thank you Albuquerque!” for some reason, got booed and then forgiven, and we stepped off stage to see what they had been projecting.

They had been watching WWE Raw to our sweet folk music! It was just the most incredibly ridiculous pairing ever. After us, the bands we were co-billed with turned out to be aggressive punk and metal bands. It was incredible and unforgettable.

Keep up with Dillan Witherow on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.