PRETEND IT’S A BUSINESS: how touring works and why I’m not playing in “your town.”

The title of this piece is a paraphrase of the title of the Netflix documentary series about Fran Lebowitz, “Pretend It’s A City.”  In case you haven’t seen it, this first class Martin Scorsese production refers to Lebowitz’s marvellously irritated attitude towards almost everything, including the behaviour of some visitors to New York City who act…well, just like tourists - which means they can be quite annoying to the locals.  Watch it, it’s very good.

Therefore, think of the touring business in the same way as the title of this documentary, hence: “Pretend It’s A Business.”  This pretty much explains touring for most professional musicians, because it is a business, but I’ll throw a few basic parts out there below anyway.  Why not?  I mean, I don’t know how business works for an astrophysicist, or a plumber, come to that.

From the beginning of my career I have almost never chosen the venues or locations I’ve  played in.  Those very early shows with the Rumour, for instance, were most probably booked by my manager, Dave Robinson, who had plenty of contacts in suitable small venues after his years of managing the band Brinsley Schwarz, among other acts.  At some point after that when we quickly moved up from playing a small scattershot variety of pubs and clubs with the occasional college gig thrown in, some booking agency or other would have been involved regarding our work as the headliner in theatres and universities, etc.  Booking agents negotiate with the promoters/owners/managers of various venues and haggle out the prices, trying to get the act they represent the most money for each gig.  I don’t do this work and have very little input.  

There are a few exceptions to the rule.  When my agent is sending out the memo to various venues showing he’s looking for bookings in order to scope out who’s interested, we may have a discussion about the choices of venue and what they’re offering in certain towns, but only in territories where I receive interest from more than one venue, places where I have a good fan base, in other words.  Also, something else of importance should be added here: the “avails.”  This is not the 70’s anymore and there are now massive amount of acts constantly touring now that record sales are not a thing.  The agents of all those acts are feverishly vying for the same venues, often six months or more before a proposed tour is due to start.  This means from small clubs up to stadiums, the competition is hot.  Tours are better if they make sense logistically.  It’s very hard to do this with all that traffic on the road which is why you’ll see an act playing somewhere one night, then heading back towards the territory they played two nights ago, only to play somewhere in the middle.  From the outside of this industry, you'd think that whoever booked the tour must have a rather weak grip on geography, but it’s because of venue availability, or rather lack of it, that this happens.  Trust me, the artists don’t like it, but it occurs frequently.

And when I find an unfamiliar venue fronted on a proposed itinerary that I don’t know a thing about but the routing and the guarantee make sense, I often won’t even look it up to see what it looks like, or what kind of joint it is, or what their sound system consists of.  If the guarantee is in the right area and the routing works, I’ll just walk in door on the date and hope for the best, at least when I’m using a tour manager.  I don’t choose this stuff, it chooses me.  (This isn’t the same for everybody.  Some acts don’t have an agent, but they’d probably rather they did.  Agents don’t just take any act on.)

  

To add to the “avails” problems, on any given tour schedule of mine long before we actually get the gigs confirmed, there could be as much as, or sometimes more than two “holds” on some of those venues before they have cleared for me.  Other agents had their acts pencilled in but didn’t pull the trigger on them and they may or may not drop out of the equation, and after a certain amount of time the promoters will go back to the other agents to see if their act still want the booking.  Hence the squiggly nature you might see on any given tour schedule.  A real pain, but this is normal.  You sometimes have to wait, which can really mess with your routing. 

Furthermore, I have a certain worth in the marketplace, like any other act that acquires a cachet of some sort based on their level of international recognition, record sales and in the case of touring, the volume of ticket sales they are likely to achieve in certain markets at certain times.  This holds true to this day.  (Pretend It’s A Business!)  With social media now prevalent in the promotion (more like letting people know than promotion) of my tour schedules, it’s come to my attention that some fans - well meaning I’m sure - appear to express an attitude of mild accusation (OK, sometimes real annoyance!) when a tour schedule doesn’t include their state, or their town, and hasn’t done for some while.  In fact I see more “why aren’t you playing here"s to “Looking forward to seeing you"s!  (Keep reading that, it’ll make sense eventually.)  Venue availability, market value in different territories in different times - there’s a whole mess of vagaries involved.

If I am unpopular in an area, a promoter may want to book me anyway, often because they like my work, but the offer will probably be well below my usual worth (and rightly so), and too far out of my way to make it any more than a break-even situation, or near as damn to it.  It might be good to realise I’m just slightly older than I used to be; I’ve done masses of one-off solo gigs throughout my career, often in places where I might have had to go through the rigours of travel, the menagerie of airports and all rest of it, just for one show.  We all do, no biggie, but it might help to remember I’m not in my twenties now, and I now feel the need to be selective (yes, like Spinal Tap!) and to pace myself and play places where I not only get paid what I’m worth, but also have a good chance of pulling a fairly busy, maybe even sellout, crowd.  There’s no doubt that a good house feels like an event.  It all works better.  It might also be good to take into account that when I’ve got twelve shows on my itinerary, as I have on this latest American solo outing (October 2021), it feels like quite enough to me.  I’ve done my work in the trenches, and as you can see here, I have not been idle: 

https://homepages.uni-regensburg.de/~dej09534/gparker/gig-list.htm

A few people mention the recent lack of shows in Los Angeles and other places in that area of California.  If my agent had received any offers that made sense in that part of the state he would have put them in front of me. But they’ve just not been coming in now for a few years whereas shows in the more northern areas have.  I’m not the only artist whose worth goes up and down in various territories.  It happens.  It’s not because either my agent or me “don’t like” the southern part of the state.  “When are you coming back to Nashville?” I’ve been asked lately.  Here’s a clear picture of why it may not be for a very long time: I played in the small room (just a 100 seater) at the City Winery there on both of the last solo tours I did (2018 & 2019).  The first one sold out, so they repeated the offer for the following year.  It stiffed.  The exact same thing happened in Atlanta, which I also did on both tours.  That was packed in 2018 but thin on the ground the next year.  Neither of these towns are a stronghold for me, never have been, but if they are left alone for long enough (I’m thinking five years at least is realistic) I might be able to pull a respectable crowd.  I knew this would probably happen going into the 2019 tour but hoped for the best anyway, glad to be shown the confidence by the promoters to have me back so soon.  But promoters can’t keep throwing money away on an act who has a limited audience, like myself (Pretend It’s A Business!), they can’t keep losing money backing a losing horse.  The same fans won’t keep coming back in the same numbers.  Seeing anyone lose money on my behalf does not feel good.  Most promoters/venue owners are not sharks and a hell of a lot of them really like my work and know that I’m a class act and always put on a good show.  They’re just running a business, just like me.

I’ll never be able to write enough explanations of how this thing works and be able to convince some people that I’m not bullshitting here, I get it.  There’s just not enough words to make it clear enough.  And I’m betting that I’m still going to get a few “But why don’t you…?” - in other words, someone might kindly be offering ideas as to how I can play “in their town.”  I understand and am flattered, always, that people really do want to see me play, and I’m thankful for that, but maybe it would be less frustrating to just accept my description here, and that I’m not playing somewhere because I don’t like where you live.  And if you think I’m not playing a particular state because of political reasons, you’re wrong.  That never enters my head.

Whatever the system is, I still feel strongly that the part of this business that cannot be beat is the show - that part that isn’t a business.  The satisfaction - even transcendence - and all the other complicated emotions that live work brings, is the end result.  These are the real rewards - It’s the show and the response that brings the delight.  And It usually helps when it’s a well-attended house.  I often wish I could see a string of dates in other areas, but I’m a pragmatist and I fully understand that in the Northwest of America, for yet another example, is an area that I’ve had mixed success in throughout my career but that has now waned to not really enough to make a viable run of it.  Times change, it happens.  I’m just not going to get the bookings from some areas anymore.  Same with Texas.  I love going to Texas!  I’m not ignoring anywhere deliberately, but that particular state has always been a bit up and down and right now, a small venue in Austin is probably all that is realistic.  It would be nice to be popular in Florida (including Jacksonville!), but I’m not.  Hell, I’d like to see a string of dates in Arkansas!  But I flew in for a one-off gig in Little Rock once and it died a death.  I don’t think that particular state is going to pop up on my itinerary any time soon. 

Yes, yes, I can hear it: why not be an opening act on tours that play these other places?  Do you know what being an opening act usually pays?  Usually not much.  Even without that little matter, it’s all working uphill, being an opener, and it’s gotta be exactly right to make sense and it can be dispiriting for someone who isn’t young and trying to get somewhere to slog through against the wind of an audience that looks up at you on the stage like you came from another planet, singing in an incomprehensible language.  Been there.  It doesn’t kill ya, but…

I hope you can take this explanation at face value.  It is what it is.

(The above statement is not a complaint.  It is a description of reality. 

Or maybe a public service announcement.)