Our Punk Rock Mayhem show has to be postponed due to circumstances out of our hands. So now it will take place on the 9th of September. Thankfully most of the bands were available to swop the date, only 24 broken amps cant make it, understandably so as they were already committed to perform at the Gateways festival :-). But JPKALLIO.COM will be with the 24 broken amps in the Purpleroom in Drogheda on the 23rd of September. We'll have full line up in few days time. Still Friday night, still only €5 in and still doors at 8pm and rocking the place until nearly 1am :-)
Now back to our touring tips. Two things people tend to forget about touring, first of all is the waiting around, believe you me there is lots of it, and the second is the travelling. Every one moans about the waiting bit, but here is a bit of a reality check: its part of the job! Get on with it. As to the travelling, this really is the mind numbing part. People have this idea that travelling is great fun... Yeah, on holidays, but when you do five hour drives on motorway day in and day out, it's not the kind of travelling that broadens your mind... I mean after about week you run out of things to talk about... And I know now you are saying “that would never happen to me! These are some of my best friends”, well, just wait and see, it is a very long road. But with time one of the most important skills you'll learn, is how to make it easier for each others. With time you'll know when not to disturbed some one, and when to come up with silly joke to cheer up some one. Weather you like it or not, you are a family when you are on the road. And as to all that waiting, I know hitting the bar could sound like a fun idea, but you'll regret it by the time the gig comes along, there's plenty of time after the concert;-) At this point I'm not sure if I covered everything on the subject, but if not, I'll come back to this later.
With JPKALLIO.COM we have bit of a dilemma and it's one that I'm sure most bands have at one stage or another. We want to get started on our album, but as every one at the moment, money is tight... I was contacted by one of Dublin’s older and better known studios asking if we were looking to do some recording. My answer was yeah, but has no budget. To my delight they had checked out my blog and knew about the 100 concert challenge. They said “surely it would not be too hard to get the venues to pay at least something for every concert?” I know there are lots of bands out there doing similar things as we do, and I'm sure many of you are laughing (or crying) while reading this. The Dublin scene for up and coming rock bands is buzzing at the moment, but still the fact of life is that it is very hard to make any money out of any of the concerts. Most bands are not looking to get paid as a salary, go shopping, go partying with the money, they would like to invest the money back in to the band. Running a band does cost money. Rehearsal rooms are not free, and we are trying to build our followers by getting people to sign up to our mailing list for exchange of our E.P. At gigs, and these again come out of our own pockets. As we are getting closer to the one year birthday of this blog, I seem to come back to the same issues that first got me started in the first place. At every level someone is making money from music, whether its just someone playing just for the fun (someone made the instrument and sold it), or your band packing a pub full of people, rehearsing for months, recording demos... It always seems to be the musician who ends up paying for it whom without the business just could not be there in the first place. So do we go with the same rat race? Save our hard earned money that we usually pay our rents with, pay for studio time, when this might take us a year? Or do it our selves?
There's some food for thought. Talk to you more next week :-)
J.P.
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