In my early years as a musician, I was managed by an agency that booked us a week or two at a time at each venue. We’d play a club in one city, then move on to the next location and club. We played up and down the Florida coasts for several years, then throughout the Midwest, never more than that week or two in each town.
Each stop was like a short life. We met local people who came to the clubs to hear us play, made friends and hung out with some of them after a night’s music, even had a girl friend from time to time. It was a carefree, unencumbered way to live.
One constant in our lives was extensive travel. You’d finish playing on a Saturday night, then the next morning pack up your equipment and head out to the next gig. Unless the new gig was far enough away to change your routine.
When our agency moved us from Florida to the Midwest, we finished our last night in Fort Walton Beach on a Saturday and were to open in Minot, North Dakota, the following Monday. The travel distance is 1,800-plus miles, many of them not on interstate highways back in the 1970s. Including a few wrong turns—there was no such thing as Google Maps then, so we were pretty much on own own—it took us about 45 hours, from Saturday night after packing up to just enough time to set up and play the opening notes of our first set in Minot.
Yes, it wasn’t the most glorious of circuits. But while we were playing small cities, the clubs were typically the most well attended in each town. Ft. Walton to Minot was the longest of our road trips, but many others, especially through the Midwest, were long drives sometimes through bad winter weather.
We truly were road warriors.