MRR # 261-foreign band tour booking
I’m currently in the process of booking a tour for Finland’s hardcore greats Riistetyt. Since I brought DS 13 over in 2001 it seems like the gates have opened for bands touring the USA from Europe down from like 1 or 2 a year in the 90’s to one or two a month today. Certainly there is nothing wrong with this. American bands have been touring Europe in with far greater frequency for a long time and it’s about time that a greater level of parity was established. However, the days when a band coming from Europe was something really special, exotic and exciting are coming to a close. Depending on the band, a tour for a European band these days can be less of an event and more of a routine tour than in the past. The difference of course is that an international band touring has huge expenses compared to a domestic band. Airfare, van and gear rental add up to the kind of overhead that will run most DIY hardcore tours into the red quickly. This coupled with the fact that a lot of bands only want to tour for a week or two makes it extremely difficult to meet expenses with fewer shows.

I have spent much of the last 4 years booking and driving touring bands from Europe and there are some principal differences in touring the US and Europe that our European readers who are considering coming over should be appraised of. Let me say, that I’m not trying to be negative or talk anyone out of touring the USA. I just want to point out some major differences and illustrate what CAN go wrong to help in planning.

The main factor you have to take into account when touring the US is a total no-brainer, geography. The USA is a fairly large country and distances between cities you want to play are so great that you will have to suffer extremely long and costly drives or play quite a few “in between” cities with less organized scenes. There are hundreds of cities in North America that you can play shows in. But to do a tour of only the very best places in just a few weeks is impossible. I’ve looked at some tour plans from European bands that were hilariously idealistic, like New York on Monday, Chicago on Tuesday, Seattle on Wednesday, LA on Friday, Dallas on Saturday, back to NYC on Sunday. Although Clusterbombunit’s tour was actually this crazy. . This means you have two main choices. Do a really long tour and hit everywhere, or pick one region like East Coast, West Coast or Midwest. There is actually a third option, and that is to play a few East Coast shows, then fly to the West Coast, but this double air fare expense is beyond most bands. Gauze managed to get some special tickets from Japan that included domestic airfare to any three US cities. And a few bands have flown between coasts, but this still cuts out huge parts of the US. To do a good US tour with some Canadian and possibly Mexican gigs I think takes a minimum of 6-8 weeks. Very, very few bands will tour for 8 weeks. A few will go for 6, but even then you can barely do both coasts the Midwest and south east in 6. Every tour I book I get tons of mail from people who wonder why the band I’m booking isn’t playing their town. I will refer you last months column. If bands could quit their jobs, leave their families and spend unlimited amounts of time on the road, they COULD play everywhere. But for a band playing for gas and food money on their vacation, don’t expect more than a few weeks, and you can’t hit everywhere in that time. To get from one coast to the other you will have to play a lot of “in between” type cities with less organized and smaller scenes. I’m not ragging on smaller cities with smaller scenes, but there is a serious “brain drain” on small and mid sized Southern and Midwestern scenes. The best and the brightest tend to leave for larger scenes leaving these towns permanently crippled in terms of band and venue development. There are bright spots of course, and some cities rise and fall with the careers of local bands or DIY promoters. You have to be on your toes to know what town is happening for your band at what time, because it changes from year to year.


You will probably have someone in the US setting up your tour for you. Keep in mind that who you choose (or who chooses you) will possibly determine the geographic nature of your tour. It should not be surprising that tours booked by Yannick, Shari or Max Ward would be on the West Coast primarily, while those booked by Myself, Ken Sound Pollution or Anton Underestimated would concentrate on the Midwest and Rustbelt, and of course, the Rattus tour booked by Bob Suren had five shows in Florida. Most likely your US label or a band you toured with in Europe will be booking your tour, make sure that you know how much they plan to do for you and what you are expected to do yourself. And don’t expect a two week tour booked by someone from Detroit to be mostly made up of West Coast shows.

Very, very few bands come into the US with work permits or visas to play legally as musicians. This means there is a potential hassle with customs entering the country. We all know the tragic story of Intensity being deported from the airport before they could start their US tour. A lot of bands come over with no gear or merch at all, shipping this ahead or buying gear in the US. I would note, that gear in the US is very cheap compared to Europe and buying new guitars here can be a win/win situation since you can always sell the guitar back in Europe for more than you paid for it in the USA. Make sure you have an airtight story for customs, names and addresses of friends in the US you will be staying with and some cash and or credit cards to show that you are coming over as a tourist and not to make money in the US. If your label or booking agent can get you visas to play legally, that’s great. But this seems to be rare at the level of touring common to DIY hardcore.

Don’t expect to get food or beer at gigs. This is the main thing that bands seem to point out that separates Europe from the US. In Europe it’s a given that there will be beer and food for the bands at gigs. While in the US this request is often treated with incredulity as some sort of throwback to arena rock culture. I always request food for the bands I’m booking but I can’t say we get it that often. I also must admit, I rarely get around to cooking for a lot of the bands I book here. I would say this to DIY show promoters everywhere. Bands really appreciate a meal before or after a gig. The chow at America’s truck stops is pretty sub par and over priced. Taking a few bucks from the door to make some soup or pasta is going to save the band more in the long run. It used to be quite common when playing bars in America for the band to get free tap beer. This has become increasingly rare. I rarely ever buy beer for bands, but then again I was recently called a “straight edge jock” in the pages of this magazine.

The gas in America is cheap, but the drives are much longer. If you are doing a full US tour, your fuel expense is going to be something like 1,500$. That’s probably close to what you spend on a tour of half the distance in Europe as it’s twice as expensive over there. Consumer goods are generally cheaper and American thrift stores and pawn shops offer bargains rarely found in Europe, especially with the dollar at such a low against the Euro. If a band does make any money here, they are probably better off spending it on musical equipment, records and shoes than taking it back to Europe and changing it for Euros. Guitars, effects pedals and cymbals cost a lot less here and can easily be resold in Europe if you don’t want to keep them.

I wrote a column about choosing a tour van a few years ago so I won’t go over that. But the main choices for transportation are touring with an American band or renting a van and gear. This is the same quandary that faces American bands going to Europe. Touring with another band doubles the expenses and increases the logistical complications, but provides the van and backline for free or cheap. Renting a van and gear eliminates the need to pay a second band, but adds a lot of daily overhead and expense. One thing Europeans should know, is that here in the USA, bands are ALWAYS expected to show up with ALL their own gear. Unless prior arrangements have been made, you will almost never see a band show up and expect to be able to play other bands gear. This seems quite common in Europe but it would be considered ridiculous here for local bands to show up with no gear and expect to play the touring bands backline. Sure if there is a crisis, you can probably borrow a snare drum or head, but expect to show up with gear or make arrangements with local bands to borrow it. I know of several occasions where touring bands have had to end their show because they broke a snare or bass drum pedal and none of the local bands would lend them one. I’m sure in Europe that would be a huge insult, but sad to say I’ve seen it happen.

Guarantee is a four letter word in DIY hardcore. Shows are booked independently of one another and promoters almost never set aside money to help cover shows that tank. Your show will either be good and pay well, or be bad and pay poorly. You can try to push for a guarantee but you will find that pay outs for gigs one a tour can range from a few dollars to almost a thousand. In years on the road, I’ve learned to weed out the promoters who think 16$ is pretty decent pay for a band from Sweden. However, you can’t rule out a show that bombs due to external events like a snowstorm, the superbowl, all the local bands canceling or the show moving at the last minute. American shows can also get horribly overbooked. Two shows happening the same night will be combined and then a bunch of bands will try to “jump on” the bill. A well attended six band show winds up pretty dismal at the end of the night when the promoter realizes that 30% of the crowd got in free and they have to split the money six ways. So don’t be surprised if the pay out from the door at a lot of shows is barely enough to cover what gas cost in 1982. Door prices are low, turnouts can be small, especially on weeknights, and often there are a lot of expenses and bans to pay.

This means you have to rely on merch sales to make most of your money. I would hypothesize that much of the bemoaned commercialization of DIY hardcore in the last 10 years has been driven by poor paying gigs more than any other force. Bands are desperate to come up with more “merch” to sell on the road, shirts, hoodies, hats, patches, pins, records, cds, bottle openers, anything to make an extra 10$ a night to get from city to city. Cool shirts make a big difference, and having a new release or special tour edition record to sell can be absolutely decisive. I try to time tours around the release of a new reocord. The band sells their royalty copies on tour and usually comes out way ahead. Of course, if your band doesn’t have a record out yet, I strongly suggest putting the damn thing out BEFORE you tour.

Which brings me to this, a lot of bands from overseas are totally unknown in the USA. Bands without records, or with no releases on US labels, are REALLY unknown here. Don’t expect people to show up for a band they’ve never heard before. Unless you are touring the bar circuit where attendance is driven by having an excuse to drink rather than music, no one is going to show up just because “some band from Italy is playing” you have to have releases available in the US and some publicity of your tour. The only way around this is touring with an established US band that people would come to see regardless of if your band was playing or not. I would advise not being in a rush to tour. Take your time, tour Europe first, make connections with US bands that come to play in your town in Europe. Put out records on US labels, write to US bands, labels and zines and try to make some friends and get some exposure in the US. I would give this exact same advise to US bands who want to go to Europe.

As I said in my introduction, so many foreign bands have been touring the US that it’s no longer much of an event, unless the band is quite well known to begin with. So make sure your tour is well planned, realisitic in it’s goals and being handled by people with experience.

Publication Date:
January 1, 1984

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