My first blog

Welcome to my 1st blog and post. I've never been much of a writer, but I love to email and have turned into a FaceBooker at times to help market music bands. My main source of income comes from being a Tour Manager. What I do is a little bit of everything, but mostly I steer where rock bands go to get them from their homes out on to "the road" and ultimately where they want to be: on stage making music in front of their fans. Hopefully they'll be happy musicians and also their tour makes money so they can pay me and afford to do it again / some more. Bands used to rely a lot more on record sales to afford to tour, but now it's even more important to combine that with merchandise sales, efficient spending and smart marketing opportunities.

My latest Road Trip was with 4 lovely gentlemen know as the Trashcan Sinatras, who I will call mostly TCS [band started as Trash Can Sinatras, changing the name to just 2 words in 2004, but there's a better "ring" to TCS vs TS]. TCS released their 1st CD in 1990 and hailed from Glasgow Scotland [really Ayreshire / Irvine but soon up to the big city]. They couldn't be more skilled or lucky that their 1st 2 singles are still great songs "Only Tongue Can Tell" and "Obscurity Knocks."

I have been a Tour Manager since 1983 [though I also traveled around since 1980 with the regional Cinci OH based Erector Set]. My 1st tour with TCS was in 2004 for their [IMO best CD] Weightlifting. The latest CD was released in 2009 called In the Music [also quite good; ALL their CDs are really good] and I've guided [TM'd = Tour Managed] all their tours in N. America since then.

Frank [Francis] Reader is the lead singer of the band and is an amazingly clever writer of blogs, likely in general, and for sure, great songs. I hope and wish he'll get back into doing blogs for the band, so I won't have to, but until he or the band step up and do it themselves, I'm going to share some of my thoughts, musings, photos and experiences of what it was like to be on tour for the month of March 2011.

Note: I wasn't sure of what to call this and took a stab that "Another One Writes a Blog" wouldn't be taken. It is now, for better or worse.