In an upcoming MusicLifeandTimes podcast, my partner jazz pianist Kevin Bales and I exchange stories about life on the road as musicians. Unlike most other professions, musicians don’t typically work in the same building every day (or night). Playing different locations means we’re often out of town, away from what we call home. That leads to a host of unique experiences. Again you’re not just going to the office for the day and returning home, you’re on the road for days, and if you’re touring, weeks or months.
In my case, especially in the late ‘60s and throughout the ‘70s, the road was home. I was booked through an agency, first out of Miami, then out of Chicago, that sent us from town to town a week or two weeks at a time. So we were in Waterloo, Iowa one week and Logansport, Indiana the next. Note that it wasn’t Chicago to New York.
The travel could be difficult, for example, finishing a week in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla. on a Saturday night and driving straight through to Minot, North Dakota to be on time to open that Monday. More than 1800 miles and about 30 hours by car back then was extended by a mishap which I recognized when I started seeing the same sites along the road. It wasn’t déjà vu; we had simply taken a loop of one of the highways that added another couple hundred miles to the trip getting us in Minot about an hour before we were to open, just in time to set up and start.
More appreciated memories are of the people we met. In each town, we’d typically get to know some people from our audience in the club we were playing on our first or second night who we became friends with. We’d see them most nights thereafter and spent some of our days hanging out with them. Might even have a girlfriend. It was a pleasant if short life. And when it was over, you were on the road to your next short life.
As musicians we benefited from all that travel, especially as individuals working in those communities, entertaining those people. So many different places and so many different people of different backgrounds: Expanding our world like that was a great education, opening our minds to different perspectives on life and living.