Even If It Kills Me is presented by Manhead Merch.
Do you ever look back on history and attempt to put all the years into different brackets?
You know,
like little totes of space-time?
For the most part,
you can easily see the boundaries of them.
By the time humanity hit the 20th century,
those little buckets of space-time began to sync up with the changing of the decades.
Once we hit the year 2000,
our neat little decade numbering system was falling apart.
Y2K didn't fuck with our physical computers,
it fucked with the one in charge of our sense of time.
Trends began to blur,
old was new was old again,
and we all slowly and permanently connected to the internet.
The Information Superhighway was how it was originally sold to us.
They promised us answers to questions we couldn't even think of,
which meant no more using the Dewey Decimal System ever again.
You either have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about,
or you're laughing right now because you haven't thought about the Dewey Decimal System since grade school.
I should zero in on what I'm talking about and cut the wordsmithing.
The perfect shitstorm for any one of the new bands attempting their run at Stardom was a simple mix,
dramatically rising gas prices,
and dramatically changing technology.
When we started touring,
gas on the East Coast was around $1.50 a gallon.
And in 2007,
only three short years later,
gas was over double what it was.
When we all started,
all the band's weekly income had stayed the same.
Picture,
if you will,
a group of young men traveling the United States on less than a shoestring budget in a van with a gas tank so large and gas mileage so small that eventually all their earnings would be poured back into that oversized tank.
And not in the fun,
roll your bills up and put them into a rubber hose with a cork on it because you're Peter Fonda and Easy Rider either.
When all the money you can spend goes into the gas tank,
you can't really buy anything else.
I mean,
this doesn't just apply to bands on the road either.
It's not rocket science.
I mean,
economies go to shit when no one has any money to buy anything.
And where did everybody's money suddenly go?
Up into the air somewhere,
adding to all the atmospheric carbon dioxide that's slowly cooking our planet from the inside out.
The first major doomed-from-the-start mile marker had been passed.
The cost of getting to the next paycheck was greater than the check itself.
Like it or not,
everyone's favorite bands are divided up into different tiers.
Those tiers are based on many different things.
But the biggest,
of course,
ticket sales.
At the top,
you've got stadiums and arenas.
And for these bands,
spending money to make money is a very real thing.
So just how big of a check does the band have to write to pull off,
let's say,
a two-month-long stadium tour across the U.S.?
Well,
nowadays,
it's about...
Let me see here.
Six million dollars!
Wait a minute.
On what?
Oh,
okay.
I see.
Hotels,
buses,
semi-trucks,
pyrotechnics,
video screens,
laser beams.
Okay,
that makes sense.
Oh,
and not to mention like 100 plus crew members.
Yeah,
that would add up to 6 million pretty quick.
Okay,
so what about an indie band?
Just a small indie band touring the U.S.
for a couple of months in a van.
No pyrotechnics,
no laser beams,
and just a few crew members.
What would that be?
Let me
$50,000.
How is anybody making money?
We never,
ever,
ever made money in this band.
We only lost money.
It doesn't matter what size the band is.
After all the crew members and all the bills get paid,
the band can walk away with half of what they made that tour.
You got yourself a happy band.
Unfortunately for us,
we made half of nothing.
We were getting a hundred a night.
We were first of four on every tour basically we were on.
That was the rate for one of four.
So that's what everyone would pay.
in that situation you're just kind of like okay we want we need to be on this tour so we'll just do it for whatever they give us being in a band sounds like it's pay to win because even with a record contract the band had no
say in their ridiculously low pay
What you did say was,
thank you for the tour.
Tried not to fuck it up.
You're there solely to ride the coattails of everyone playing after you,
right?
Like,
that's why you're there.
I'm not there to make money.
I don't deserve money yet.
I am there to try and win an audience,
which we're now paying money to do.
So that you're making a hundred bucks a night and you're trying to keep gas in the van and you're trying to,
you know,
keep like food in your bellies.
You know,
the biggest thing was making the van payment and the insurance payment every month.
Just to keep us moving because that was our ticket to getting places is having the van and having...
you know,
gas in the van,
no van,
no band.
Well,
we aren't making any money and there's no one at this fucking show and this sucks.
So I think it was,
you know,
you needed one silver lining in that whole process to kind of keep you going.
I remember like a couple nights selling just like a shirt or two,
right?
And we're just like,
holy shit.
You know,
you're,
you're in the negative.
You're in the red before you even left the venue that day.
You're already in the red.
How many more signs do you need to realize that this isn't working the way that you thought it was going to be?
So what drove these guys to keep going?
On the surface,
it was a day-to-day thing.
But deeper down,
stubbornness.
No one had any money and everyone had a vice.
Only some of us were aware of the vice.
I was five years into a still ongoing love affair with smoking pot,
but I had a really hard time admitting it to myself back then.
Somehow,
Ryan's three-year head start on life gave him the wisdom of knowing that as long as he scratched that itch,
shit was a-okay.
That time of my life,
I just wasn't really concerned about stuff.
I didn't get stressed out about,
like...
if we blew a tire on the trailer or if the van was breaking down or anything like never got,
it never got to me.
Like I never got worried or never got,
you know,
stressed out about it or anything like that back then.
I think my biggest thing was like,
I needed enough money to buy cigarettes.
Like if I didn't have enough money for dinner,
no big deal.
I'll have a smoke and I'll just keep on going.
You know,
we would have blown a tire or.
engine breakdown,
you know,
something with a van or,
you know,
like all of a sudden didn't have a place to sleep or whatever.
None of that stuff really bugged me.
But if I ran out of money,
I can't buy any cigarettes.
You're not making any money in the band,
right?
So that means that you have to,
between tours,
find a place to make money so you can save money to tour.
Thankfully,
those places were jobs just cushy enough to always be waiting for us when we got back home.
Here now is a small list of said jobs.
Tow truck driver.
auto mechanic construction concrete work barista warehouse worker milk packer scrap metal recovery phone book delivery pizza delivery debt collector but only for one day tbvcr
repair and accounting wait no i lost where i was it just always seems like i'd always leave for tour with like 170 bucks in my pocket and sometimes i had to last you
Like,
a month?
The money we saved at these jobs was for us to just simply live off of while we were on the road.
We still needed money for van payments and gas for the van and other inescapable bills.
And that's where those hometown shows would become most valuable.
those shows would also leave everyone in the band vulnerable in a way that they would never see coming.
Yeah,
they made us feel good and like people liked us,
but they weren't really any different.
The last one we did from the first one we did before we had an album and were,
you know,
signed.
As we know,
the band wasn't making money while actually on tour,
so all the money earned at these shows,
the band couldn't even enjoy because it was already spoken for.
It was foolish to equate it to anything.
You know,
like it was never going to be any sort of benchmark of us being successful in any way.
Having your own small hometown like the band that went out and got a record deal feels awesome and the people are great,
but it's certainly not representative of what's happening in the other 50 states or the world.
Ever been overwhelmed by the logistics of merch on tour?
I remember a chaotic night trying to keep everything organized while the crowd was surrounding the merch table.
As I scrambled to find the right size t-shirts for everyone,
I realized we were completely sold out of all of our most popular shirts.
Okay,
now imagine you're managing merch for an arena show.
How do you make that leap?
Manhead merch is the powerhouse behind some of the biggest names in the industry.
They offer a full suite of services,
pouring,
e-commerce,
retail,
licensing,
tailored for top-tier tailoring.
They take care of everything from design and manufacturing to seamless order fulfillment,
ensuring your merch game is as polished as your performance.
Manhead Merch transforms chaos into streamlined success.
They manage every aspect of merchandising so you don't have to.
If I would have had Manhead Merch back then,
they would have handled the logistics and
I could have handled that crowd.
Ready to take your band's merch to the next level?
Visit manheadmerch.com.
The second Doom From The Start mile marker was just around the corner.
And who better to blame than Steve Jobs?
I mean,
no one wanted a CD in 2004 or 5 or 6.
The mecca of the target audience,
the teenager,
had moved past the CD the moment that silhouetted dancer with those sharp white earbuds went dancing across their TV screens.
CDs were as dead as disco.
Or we could blame Michael Scott for buying Ryan an iPod when he should have just got a $20 gift like everybody else.
After that,
no one wanted CDs.
And remember,
if no one wanted a CD,
no one wanted half of what we had for sale.
Besides t-shirts and
50-cent pins,
all we had were round pieces of plastic with even thinner plastic stamped on top of it and wrapped inside of,
you guessed it,
more plastic.
Looking back,
CDs were fucking stupid.
The infinite drought of the CD sale was just beginning when we hit the road for the first time.
Much like a real drought,
we didn't really see it or notice it when it was first starting.
Two and a half years later and I couldn't even give a CD away for free.
It's honestly hard to imagine a world without always-on internet.
But it did exist.
And for a time,
it was good.
You had to dial in,
and when you did dial into the internet,
it wasn't very fast.
And no one really needed anything faster.
Until Steve f***ing Jobs again with his bullsh**t.
He's dropping the iPhone on everybody now saying something like,
here this just changed everything.
It's an iPod,
it's the internet,
it's a phone,
it's an iPod,
it's an internet,
it's the phone.
You know,
before that gorgeously smooth touch screen first touched our fingers,
the wireless internet or mobile internet was utter trash.
Eating at the merch tables back then was like eating in the wild west.
Nobody had the internet in their pocket?
How do you have the internet in your pocket?
Who's got the internet in their pockets?
If you could access your email or some sort of messaging system,
and maybe,
God forbid,
Facebook,
it was just a text file anyway,
slowly loading a few lines at a time,
with a kilobyte-sized thumbnail of a negative megapixel-sized photo.
I mean,
it was bad.
And your phone,
your smartphone,
was either a Blackberry or a Sidekick.
I,
okay.
We,
you know,
I can't go any further.
We got to talk about these fucking sidekicks.
The first time I saw a sidekick was on tour and I don't remember which tour it was,
but it was just like this weird,
like,
what the fuck is that thing?
Holy shit.
You know,
if you had a sidekick whipping it out in public was very much like whipping it out in public and it would spin,
it would come out of the pocket and it would be flipping as it was coming out of the pocket.
And all of a sudden.
whip in the screen it came out of nowhere and just kind of slammed into place it was fucking sexy probably the people that i saw that had them may have been a little bit bigger more successful bands or had been doing it longer reminds
me of patrick fake company showing off their business cards like oh i see you have a flip phone there that shows signs of being used as a bottle opener i wouldn't do that with this
okay whatever manny but i mean i wanted one i never ended up ever having one we all had cell phones at the time you know at least we had the ability to call and old school t9 style text all
right so what else i mean what other everyday thing was about to completely change forever oh i don't know how about a map you have all your math questions done yep
All the way to Seattle.
Yucky Seattle.
Missing the wireless revolution by a few short years meant that we still had to plan our routes with maps and printed directions from the computer.
GPS wasn't a thing.
We had an atlas in the van.
Garmins?
Tom-toms?
Nope.
Not for us.
70.
Set.
The next thing.
Getting lost at 3 a.m.
in the middle of nowhere,
Illinois,
was a much bigger deal back then.
You'd have to find a spot to safely pull over so you could call the person at your destination for help.
And that's if you even had cell service or a cell phone.
Or are we dead?
As of the
2000s, the radio was somehow still a thing,
even for a tiny band like us.
We had been tasked by the record label to call radio stations across the country.
well i just tried one and it's like so um yeah all right because you're like why would you bother having this person call you back we were calling to find out if they had the band single and if they were playing it
what's exactly what we wanted to hear that all right thank you very much have a good day thanks ryan bye yes yes yes yes the trouble was none of us knew what to say after we asked those questions because we
all assumed that the answer was going to be no they answered and they're playing cool
She said,
it's in rotation,
it's getting medium play right now.
And when DJs come back from summer break.
Where was it?
Prince George,
BC,
British Columbia.
God,
it's listening to you.
For give or take over 50 years,
how a band promoted themselves revolved around getting their song on the radio.
I mean,
this was so entrenched in pop culture that they've written movies around this idea.
They got it.
They're playing it.
But he stepped down as music director.
So he's like,
He's like,
we have to see.
It's really good.
and just like that just while we were out just trying to promote the band it just all changed if you were gonna have like that big
you know,
big bang moment of a band.
We couldn't have picked a worse time to try and be like,
Hey,
we're here.
It's just like,
like being a band during the great depression.
Be like,
no one fucking cares right now.
I wonder if all along we were part of a bigger movement happening.
Like an extinction level event within the music industry.
One that completely changed the idea of what a band on tour was.
And this whole thing only took four years.
So why in the hell did it feel like ten?
I think I might actually have an answer for that.
Technology.
When everything around us was changing at speeds we humans had never seen before,
our perception of time slowed right as all of this technology began to wrap itself around our day-to-day lives in a not-so-symbiotic way.
Changing the way bands promoted themselves and,
oh,
I don't know,
everything else we did in our lives?
four years time was all it took for hundreds of bands and thousands of their fans to be affected by it sprinkle in some wartime economy and a punch of gas prices and in the words of the late great jim lahey you got a real shit storm on your hands julian it
leveled the same the era of the band on tour as we knew it had changed forever and we had no idea you
Even If It Kills Me is a Fang Workshop production.
Written and narrated by me,
Aaron Joy.
Produced by John Lulo and Brendan Walter.
Featuring original music by Alex Dozen and original theme song by Matt McGinley.
Thank you.