DENVER—Action Packed Thrill Ride has a spanking new album to promote, but no immediate plans to tour outside Denver.
Fuel prices topping $4 a gallon will keep the band’s five members home this summer.
“A tour is an amazing experience, but I think that gas prices unfortunately just price some bands out—including ourselves at the moment,” said singer and guitarist Lucas Johannes.
Unsigned bands accustomed to paying for their own albums, promotion and tours are finding their labor of love is getting more costly now that gas in some cases is $1 per gallon more than it was a year ago.
In Denver—hundreds of miles and hours of car games away from the next big city—that can hurt.
“No one goes on tour expecting to make tons of money, but with gas prices the way they are, it’s kind of a matter of how much money are you willing to spend to go on tour,” Johannes said.
To be sure, best-selling artists are paying higher gas prices too. But it’s the small bands whose members have day jobs who feel most of the pain.
From MySpace to iTunes to music blogs, the Web has made it easier for thousands of bands to build buzz online. But it’s also making it harder to stand out.
“A band really stands no chance of achieving any sort of success if they’re not willing to go on tour,” said Eric Elbogen of Seattle.
Elbogen should know. The former music writer started his own label to put out albums from his band, Say Hi to Your Mom (now just Say Hi).
Six years later, his tours make money and making music is his full-time job. But he turned down offers to play shows this year that would have had him driving a van full of equipment across the country to play out East, then drive back to Seattle.
“The problem with Seattle, I love it, but it’s so far removed from rest of the country,” Elbogen said. “When this band was based out of Brooklyn, it was easy to like do a couple weeks down the East Coast.”
Nevertheless, Say Hi has two California shows opening for The Long Winters in July and a multiweek cross-country headlining tour planned for the fall.
“I’m not going to stop touring completely. I just need to be a bit more careful,” Elbogen said.
Even bands signed to an outside label are feeling the sting.
Siberian, on Sonic Boom Recordings, paid for a 10-city tour from Seattle to Little Rock, Ark., in April, when the nationwide average for regular unleaded gas was still below $4 per gallon. Sonic Boom gave Siberian $400 plus 100 free copies of their album to sell at each stop. That and hometown shows in Seattle helped make up for losses on the road, singer Finn Parnell said.
The band initially budgeted $100 for gas per show, an estimate Parnell admits was unrealistic, given their Dodge Ram 15-passenger van gets about 14 miles per gallon. All told, the cost of gas to haul five people and equipment for 6,735 miles was $1,842.
“It was a little bit of a shocker when we got back and did the math,” Parnell said.
The Chicago trio Russian Circles is on the road in a GMC 15-passenger van towing a trailer. They try to go no faster than 55 mph to save fuel and keep the windows up to reduce drag. They draft behind big trucks as much as possible.
“After watching ‘Days of Thunder’ enough times, you realize it is pretty efficient to trail a large semi,” guitarist Mike Sullivan quipped. “Thank you, Tom Cruise.”
Bands out West say they have it tougher than East Coast bands, because it can be a day’s drive getting from one big city to the next.
This summer, half the shows planned by Vitamins, an unsigned band in Denver, are in town even though they would like to go farther. “There’s lots of places to play in Denver, but you can’t play to the same audience every week,” bass player Ryan Ellison said. “At some point everybody already has your T-shirt.”
Parnell imagines some bands might try to raise prices for tickets or merchandise to cover gas. Siberian, meanwhile, is working on another album and expects to tour again next winter.
“You do it because you love it,” Parnell said.
———
On the Net:
Action Packed Thrill Ride:
Say Hi:
Siberian:
Russian Circles:
