Gabe Dixon – TOUR TIPS

In this Tour Tips segment, the pop rock artist, Gabe Dixon, gives you some advice for being on the road. You can check out the feature, after the break.

#1 – Be where you are. You’re seeing the country. You’re seeing the world! If you get a day off in a city you’ve never been to before, try to resist the temptation to laze around the hotel room surfing the internet or watching TV. You can do that at home! How often are you in Seattle or Berlin or Savannah or Toronto? Get out and take in the sites! Use an app like Local Eats or Yelp to find out what the locals like to do/eat, and go there! Unfortunately, most of the rural U.S. is a healthy-food desert. Often you have to go to a tried-and-true chain like Starbucks or Panera just to find something that won’t zap your energy and give you diabetes, but I’ve been surprised at how many hidden gems are out there that taste even better than restaurant chains, and they also allow you to have a truly local experience. Use some of your drive-time to plan where you’re going to eat before you start getting a low-blood-sugar attack and end up at the Taco-Bell drive through.

#2 – Keep the home fires burning. Video chat and phone calls work best. Text messages work less well, but they’re better than nothing. There’s no way around it: Being away from your significant other WILL put a strain on your relationship, but talking every day will make breaking up a lot less likely. I mean, the fact is, when you are gone, there IS NO RELATIONSHIP outside of calls, video chats, etc., so make communicating a priority if you want the relationship to last. If you don’t keep in touch, the relationship is ONLY IN YOUR MIND, and that isn’t a relationship at all. So, when in doubt, reach out and remind that person that they are important to you.

#3 – Sleep late if you can, and take naps. There is a deep-seated cultural notion that only lazy deadbeats sleep late. Well, I am here to tell you, “sleep late” is a relative term. When you make the decision to be on tour, you are making a decision to be more nocturnal. Most working people need to be at their peak energy level sometime in the morning, 11 am or so. But when you are touring, you have to peak around 8 PM or later, about 9 or 10 hours AFTER most people! So, if you get up early in the morning, you are going to burn out long before the show. Sleep in and conserve your energy as much as you can until a couple of hours before showtime. That way, you can give the crowd the energy and excitement they came for. And if you have to be up early for press or radio stuff, make sure you find time to take a nap later, even if it’s on a bench at the venue before soundcheck. That has made all the difference for me in the past. Also, for singers: the second best thing for the voice is water. The best thing is sleep.

#4 – Take advantage of your drive time. Some people like to talk about how boring it is to sit through long drives. Personally, I have never understood why people don’t like this. Think of the typical working world: You get up, drive to a job, do your job all day long, go home at the very end of the day, eat dinner, do some chores, maybe watch tv or something for a few minutes, and then go to sleep and do it all again the next day. There’s hardly any downtime! As a touring musician, think of how many hours you are just sitting, being driven to your destination. What? You can read a book, discover and listen to music, write a journal entry, meditate, look out at the countryside whizzing by, make and edit a video for your fans, interact on social media, do your taxes, or, best of all, you can CREATE MUSIC! What? You can put on your headphones, zone out, and just have fun with Logic or ProTools or whatever. No pressure, just create something for creating something’s sake. If you end up trashing it later, who cares! But, you never know… That little beat you created in the van on the way from Pittsburgh to Akron could end up on your next album!

#5 – Don’t get wasted all the time. It seems counter-intuitive, I know. Touring musicians get lit often while on the road, right? This is the stuff of rock lore for a reason: it happens a lot, but the most notorious and glamorized cases are the ones in which millions of record sales, massive touring budgets, and a large touring staff (bus driver, tour manager, production manager, production crew, artist manager, record label) were there to prop up artists who chose to live that lifestyle. That can be sustained for a while, but inevitably, well . . . watch “Behind The Music.” If it’s just you or your band in a van with a tour manager, and you’re barely breaking even, constantly getting trashed is going to trash your career pretty quickly. Having a career as an independent touring musician is hard. It requires a ton of energy and wits to do it right. Everybody needs to be firing on all cylinders if a band is going to grow from an act that plays for nobody to one who packs places out. If you stay up super-late getting drunk, and everybody oversleeps and doesn’t make it to the next show, or if you are so smashed that you give a terrible performance, club owners and fans remember that. And if you develop a reputation for being an unreliable wild card, people aren’t going to want to deal with you, no matter how talented you are. Touring can be stressful, and everybody needs to let off steam sometimes, but I think it’s wise to save the major partying as a reward for playing a few great shows, preferably on the night before an off-day. Just remember, your immune system goes M.I.A. when you get totally hammered, and getting sick on the road just plain sucks, so be sure to have Emergen-C on hand. I suspect that choosing to never get intoxicated, and just be all about making amazing, transcendent music might be the best way to go.

#6 – Be supportive, let stuff go, and be grateful. If you are confined to a bus or van with any group of people for long enough, you’re going to get on each other’s nerves. You’re with these people 24 hours a day, sometimes for many days on end. Don’t make it harder than it has to be by holding grudges or criticizing your tour mates. Be easy going. Be inclined to smile, laugh, and let the past be past. We used to have a rule in my band that before you criticize anyone’s idea about anything, you have to say something that you like about it first. It’s amazing how much good that does. Find genuine, non-cheesy ways to tell your tour-mates things you appreciate about them. Be grateful for the adventure and the experience of being on tour. It’s amazing how your own gratitude for a situation, even a bad one, can instantly create positive energy. Positive energy is important to tap into, whether you are on a massive tour with a 100-person crew, or all by you’re lonesome in your car. Being positive and grateful can make touring more like heaven and less like hell.

Keep up with the artist on Facebook and Twitter!

Let us know what you think of this feature in the comments below or by tweeting us!