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deepdarkriver-blog · 6 years ago

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Debut DEEP DARK RIVER album coming August 24th!

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/06/30/debut-deep-dark-river-album-coming-august-24th/

Debut DEEP DARK RIVER album coming August 24th!

Hi everyone who might happen to be reading this! Welcome to my website!

I am beyond excited – and totally terrified – to announce that my debut album – DEEP DARK RIVER – will be coming out on Friday, August 24th!

I first started this project in the summer of 2017 after learning that I would become a father in 2018. With the help and support of my wife Hannah as well as my dear friend Tim – and a fair share of alcoholic beverages – Deep Dark River was born. Since then, I have spent many sleepless nights finessing and cherry picking from a collection of songs I have been writing (over 50 to be exact!) to make up the 14 songs that will be on this album.

Hell, I’ll be honest – I wrote almost 80 songs. Those extra 30 are going to be on the next album. But that’s another story…

On Friday, August the 24th I will be holding my debut album release party at TOWN BREWERY in Whitby, ON (1632 Charles St, Whitby) from 7 – 9 PM. Joining me that night will be my good friend Cheryl Ireland and her band! Admission will be FREE and my album will be available for purchase. I also have lots of special things in store for this night, so come hang out and celebrate with me!

I also have a tour that I have been silently working away on for several months now to promote my new album. I will be announcing all of the dates for that shortly.

Thank you everyone so much for all of your love and support for me and this project since it’s inception. I have lots of cool plans and ideas and I cannot wait to see what the future has in store.

Lots of love, Morgan/ DEEP DARK RIVER

DEEP DARK RIVER:

Deep Dark River combines all the humble qualities of blues, folk and classical into a well-balanced, artfully crafted musical reflection on life, hope and old-fashioned storytelling while delivering a uniquely fresh and uplifting listening experience.

BIO: Born in Toronto in 1989, singer, songsmith and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Rider had his earliest imaginings of life as a musician while contending with an often tumultuous childhood.Often overhearing his mother – who is a trained operatic soprano – rehearsing in the kitchen, his love and understanding of music as well as harmony blossomed at an early age. Mornings and evenings were soon spent banging away on an old Dominion upright piano – made in the town he now resides – often to the displeasure of those around him.

Within a voice that soothes like a dewy spring morning tumbles enough grit and command to trigger a rockslide. Effortlessly soaring above a soulful, melodious grind, his lyrics reflect several lifetimes’ worth of triumph, defeat, love, woe and many allusions of where his travels in life have borne him. Over a decade of touring and recording experience in metal bands has honed Morgan into a formidable factotum of his pursuits.

During the summer of 2017, Morgan’s adoration of folk, classical and blues music finally culminated into a project and the beginnings of a collection of songs. The name Deep Dark River had been stuck in his head for years, as a byproduct of his writings and alluding to the very nature of his ideas as a musician and artist.

While his ideas began to take form, so did his mindset for what became the early stages of Deep Dark River. After months of creating cover songs and music videos for some of his oldest favourite songs, the first original Deep Dark River single ‘The Golden Bough’ was released in March of 2018. Morgan began performing live and also toured to the Canadian east coast to promote the single.

As the Winter of 2018 thawed into Spring, the final touches were made on the debut, self-titled record. Comprised of 14 original tracks, the decision on the final track listing was a difficult one – Morgan had written and rewritten over 50 songs for this effort alone.

With a new album and tour dates booked across North America over the remainder of 2018, if you haven’t heard of Deep Dark River – you soon will.

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setherpiecemasterpiece · 7 years ago

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👑💝✊ #DDR2018 #FathersDay2018 Congrats G11 Congrats Helm Congrats Sa Inyong Lahat!!!

#ddr2018 #fathersday2018

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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TOUR TALES # 10 - SLAYING THE BORDER BEAST

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/03/05/tour-tales-10-slaying-border-beast/

TOUR TALES # 10 - SLAYING THE BORDER BEAST

TOUR TALES # 10 – SLAYING THE BORDER BEAST If you talk to any touring band about their experiences at the border of the United States and Canada, I’m sure you’ll get a mixed bag of stories. The Canadian/ American border is a sort of legendary beast that musicians of all shapes and varieties will attempt to slay at some point or numerous points in their career. It’s kind of like that Legend of Zelda game where you can turn back time and reface the bosses in each temple again for laughs. That being said, I can’t think of many times I’ve laughed at the border. Or smiled… or anything joyous, for that matter. Pro tip: Don’t smile at the border. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.

I’m pretty sure they have these signs at the border.

Weighing in at just under 9000 km’s from tip to tip, with dozens of different crossing checkpoints, the US-Canada border can range from Kirby’s Dreamland-level simplicity to Dark Souls-level tomfuckery at any point and for no reason at all. There doesn’t need to be any reason for a border patrol officer to guide you simply and authoritatively off the rails of your dreams to spend the night (or day… or days) sitting in a dreary, windowless waiting room to dissect your every notion of who you are as a person and what little you have accomplished in your short and meaningless life. They can and will do what it takes to keep their nations protected from the many different threats that may try to infiltrate their way in. They will do it with an unseen, mightily guided hand and they will do it with as little empathy that could possibly be mustered by anything remotely resembling a humanoid creature.

Probably not the best recipient for knock-knock jokes.

This particular installment of Tour Tales finds me on that very same border, attempting to slay that bitch of a creature in the purgatory in which it resides. The year was 2014 and the road was treating my band well. We had just confirmed a month and a half of shows across North America, followed by an album release party in our hometown, followed by a mega-big European tour. We had a big label behind us and a very competent management team helming our day-to-day operations. All in all, things were looking good! I had just bought myself a house as well, which took a bit of a toll on my general health as the tour began 2 days after we moved in. My band wouldn’t let me drive the van for some reason. All the better, because I needed sleep! We played our way to the west coast and performed at the Armstrong Metal Fest in BC. We were supposed to tour back across Canada to cross into the United States at the Manitoba/ North Dakota crossing. We had spent all the time and money possible to acquire our work permits and we had a mountain of paperwork that we were one hundred percent certain would gain us access to the Land of the Brave and the Free. We could almost taste that sweet, sweet Liberty Sauce slathered atop those mountains of Waffle House pancakes.

The meals not over when I’m “full”. The meals over when I hate myself.

We aimed to cross at a low-traffic period of time; not that southern Manitoba and North Dakota get very much traffic regardless. We rolled up to the border around 2:30 in the morning with our drummer driving. I remember being fully awake, as I always am before a border crossing.

I didn’t quite catch what our drummer was being told, but I knew from the body language of the border patrol officers that we were not in for a good time. One of them was motioning us toward a massive bay garage door on a separate building beyond the border gate.

We entered and there was a team of officers awaiting us inside. They instructed us to remove our shoes and step outside of the van. We were then made to line up down the length of a massive steel table and empty our pockets for our personally assigned officers to root through. We were then taken for questioning; being escorted out of the garage with officers armed with rifles. We were told the van and trailer would both be searched with their canine units.

The best way to start a tour.

From there we were made to sit and wait in a large grey detainment area where they individually interrogated us, took our fingerprints and took mugshots of us. We were there well after the sun rose before they handed us each our belongings back, along with shiny new Homeland Security records, escorted us back to our van and then sent us back to Canada. I won’t go into details about why they wouldn’t let us across, but I will say that it is within their power to deny anyone access to the country for any reason above them just not liking the look of you or if they are in a bad mood.

Having to cancel several weeks of US shows definitely sucked and everyone’s moods were as low as they could get. We had no idea what to do as we made our way back to Manitoba.

The news quickly spread however, and a friend of the bands quickly messaged us to offer us his place to stay for a couple days while we got our bearings. We gratefully accepted his offer and got to his place where we plunked down for a few hours of sleep; completely exhausted from the entire ordeal.

I awoke to my drummer and sound tech waving burgers, beer and mead in my face. While we all slept, they had gone and prepared a massive BBQ session for the lot of us to try and get everyone back into a decent mood. What sweethearts!

So we spent the next 2 days BBQing, drinking, blasting music and going on drunk adventures around the outskirts of Winnipeg; making the best of an absolute shit situation. The bands’ morale restored, we set off on the massive 30 hour drive back to Toronto.

The moral of the story: always keep a positive attitude in every situation. Murphy’s Law will always be there to rain on your triumphs, so just know that there is nothing you can do but give your 100% regardless of the outcome.

Thank you for reading Tour Tales! Next Monday I will be back with another installment Tour Tales. To help spread the love, share this blog with your musician or traveler friends!

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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TOUR TALES # 9 - THE STAGE BAR

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/02/26/tour-tales-9-the-stage-bar/

TOUR TALES # 9 - THE STAGE BAR

TOUR TALES # 9: THE STAGE BAR

When you have been to a music venue, then you have basically been to all of them. After all, there isn’t much more expected from a music venue than to have a stage (most of the time), a bar (almost all the time), a PA (most of the time…) as well as 4 walls and a roof (this is the less important component, depending on what climate the country you’re going to see the show in… not that metal heads care). That’s not really a long list of things to have. 1 of those things isn’t really a required component, but any less than 3 and you basically just have a glorified jam space filled with drunk people. Which is… basically just a regular jam space.

In the end, nobody seems to really care what state the venue is in. Sure, you might have shit reviews on Google Maps and/or Yelp, but most venues aren’t exactly catering to the type of folk looking for $45 artisan cheeses served on a live edge oak slab. Loud music and cheap beer is usually where its at with a lot of rock and metal venues. You don’t have a very huge list of demands from people who barely remember anything after 9 pm anyways. Well, besides more cold PBR… Besides, think of all the legendary stories that could start at your venue…

Those artisan cheeses at CGBG’s tasted kind of… off…

In this particular Tour Tales installment, we find ourselves in Brescia, Italy. For my friends who tour internationally or have played in Brescia before, you will know exactly what venue I am going to tell you about.

My phone read 10 AM as the bus pulled up alongside the front of the venue. Funny enough, there were already fans milling around the entrance. One of them was wearing my bands VERY limited print shirt that I had actually mailed to him personally, which helped ease the apocalyptic hangover I had from partying the night before in Slovenia. When we walked through the doors into the ground level venue, we all stopped and our jaws dropped. This place must have been 600 feet deep and 400 feet wide. Absolutely massive. Yet the ceiling wasn’t any higher than the ceiling in your average bowling alley. On top of it all, there were at least 200 couches filling the entirety of the venue, all arranged in various ways in what I am guessing to be attempts at filling the massive space and its obvious EQ problems.

Before long, we had our Italian red wine and some delicious pasta dishes. Italy has always been the best food stop on any tour.

My belly full, it was now time to sound check the headlining bands. I got to skip out on all of that because I had a phone in radio interview with a big magazine publication in Japan. Now, I am a dumb ass, I’ll admit. I was relying on WiFi hubs all across Europe to get the internet on my phone and this particular interview was going to be over Skype. If you owned a massive venue like this, would you put your awesomely powerful WiFi router in a back office or would you purchase the shittiest one you could find without any intention of ever replacing it and place it directly besides the stage’s monitoring console? The latter, obviously.

The only way I could get the WiFi to work atop the 30-ish number of band and crew members vying for IP addresses was to stand directly beside it. So I got to give the nice lady on Skype an earache by screaming at the top of my lungs while contending with a metal band sound checking and picking apart her broken English (which was WAY better than my Japanese will ever be). The interview concluded unsuccessfully with a promise to connect after the tour had finished. Did I mention the stage was absolutely titanic? I didn’t? Well, it was! We could have fit an entire orchestra comfortably on this stage. With our wireless packs and each band having 5 members tops, we decided something special had to be done for the nights show.

Scanning the room, it was obvious what we had to do…

The headlining band had brought with them on this tour two large risers meant for their keyboard player and their drummer. Most of the stages we had played up until this point had just enough space to get them side by side with room to spare to maneuver about or stash gear beside. Tonight was a different story though, so we moved them about 10 feet apart and began chucking these couch segments up between them. Somebody also found a table and the liquor shot dispenser that was usually clamped to one of the drum racks. We built ourselves a goddamn bar between the risers in the middle of the stage.

We put the lighting rig in front of it and all the banners up behind us. Our masterpiece was complete.

This is us. I barely remember most of this night.

The entire night after our set, the lot of us sat there merrily drinking away and directly facing the crowd amid the band as they performed. It is one of the greatest memories I will hardly remember.

Moral of the story: when life gives you lots of couches and a massive stage, you use those couches to build a rad bar on stage and sit there the entire night drinking from the booze rider.

Thank you for reading Tour Tales! Next Monday I will be back with another installment Tour Tales. To help spread the love, share this blog with your musician or traveler friends!

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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TOUR TALES # 8 - HEROES AMONG US

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/02/20/tour-tales-8-heroes-among-us/

TOUR TALES # 8 - HEROES AMONG US

TOUR TALES # 8 – HEROES AMONG US

There goes the video budget.

Have you ever randomly thought of one of your favourite bands and it occurred to you ‘Hey, this band hasn’t done anything or visited my city in forever. I wish they weren’t so lazy!’ – as you wake up on a coffee and mustard-stained mattress in your parents basement. Before you roll over to out that cigarette on the already-mountainous pile of cigarette ashes and empty cups filled with unidentified gelatinous material, you realize that it’s not your band and they clearly don’t have the same zest and work ethic as you do. One day, you’ll do something. And it’ll be awesome. I know it’s usually common practice for a touring band to have some down-time so that they can enjoy their hordes of wealth accumulated from each touring cycle. Usually, they have a large Scrooge-McDuckian style vault filled with coins that they can dive into and back-peddle about in. I mean, I haven’t got mine built yet, but I think it’ll go nicely with an entrance through some wicked-cool Conan the Barbarian-esque dungeon palacade with some tigers standing sentinel. Yeah, it’s going to be siiiiiick. This particular installment of Tour Tales is not about being on the road, but being off of it. The type of tour tales that happen off the road can sometimes be as tale-worthy as those delivered from the cigarette ash-burned middle bench seat of the tour van as you hurdle through a swathe of North American wilderness in the middle of the night with non-operating headlights. It was just before summer and my band were on a massive upswing. We had just completed a new album, signed with one of the largest metal/ rock labels in the world and we had our first European tour beginning in only a couple short months away. We were only a few months away from our own gigantic pools of jello and private jets. The anticipation! For the time being though, we had to create promotional material to help boost album sales so to get that sweet, sweet paper green a’rollin’ in. Actually, in Canada we have these new polymer bank notes that look and feel more like they belong as packaging for chocolate or cigars. Sometimes they get stuck together and you either pay or get paid double. Bonus! That’s extra jello in the jello pool! Our new label decided for us that we needed to make a music video for one of the singles on our new album and gave us a pile of Canadian plastic bank notes to do it! I don’t know who humped their leg so hard, but hump it well they did. We promptly went to the beer store and bought 10 flats of cheap beer, which by Canadian standards is… just cheap beer. I’m not sure why every country loves to tote that their beer is world-class. We can’t all be from Belgium or Germany. C’mon! The other half of the money got split between a videographer from Montreal and presumably matching gold grills for everyone in the band. I still have yet to get my pair and I think my drummer is holding out trying to get a pair for every day of the week.

Now since all the money was now gone, we had no idea where to film this music video nor a budget to rent a location, travel to said location or invest in anything more worthwhile. So, we decided we were going to just film it in the backyard of the drummer’s parents house out in the countryside. Lucky them! The drummer of this band’s parents are fucking awesome, by the way as we got to also rehearse in their basement 2-3 times a week, eat the massive dinners they made us and also have impromptu bonfire parties in their backyard. We aren’t children at all, no… Oh, and as an added bonus, their neighbours also agreed to let us film in their wasp-infested former sugar shack in the back end of their cornfield. The ingredients were there. Time to make a video! Since we now had a couple of beers, a location and a Cinéaste Québécois, we now needed to figure out what was going to take place in the video. Thus the beers began to flow. Thank hell for the videographers having a vision for this video, else we would have just sat beside the pool drinking all that shitty beer, like a regular summer weekend. We ventured out to the sugar shack with beer, giant beer steins, weapons and a few decks of cards. All the things metalheads wouldn’t be caught without, of course. Before we left, we heard coyotes across the field yelping and making tons of noise, which is unusual in the middle of the day. We knew the next door neighbours had livestock, so something was probably going down. We drove around the field toward the sugar shack and came across the heavily torn remains of a sheep. Brutal! With the shack in site, we readied our Frenchmen to capture some magic. Despite all the beer we had, we actually ended up with more of it covering us than anything. They had us sit down on hay bales ‘round a giant wooden wire spool for a table and play pretend poker with gigantic steins full of beer. They really wanted to make an emphasis on the drinking component of the video, so they made us fill the steins up repeatedly and smash them together in gigantic boisterous cheersing gestures. They made us laugh maniacally, they made us take enormous gulps from the steins and they made us play many rounds of fake poker as we sat in this wasp-infested sugar shack while they pumped fog machine smoke into the building. If we didn’t know what the finish line was supposed to look like, then this would have been all the ingredients to some weird underground European fetish video or something. Maybe there’s an alternate version of this video lurking around out there on the internet somewhere with some sort of early 90’s electronic soundtrack behind it. I kind of feeling like taking a shower now… With the beer supply heavily depleted and our clothes dripping in it, phase one of the video was now complete. The second component was going to be the band performing the song, like every other music video you’ve ever seen. Honestly, I would have been happy if the entire video were just us raging drunk threatening each other with medieval weaponry while playing poker. And if you take away the band performance footage from the video, that’s exactly what you get. Additionally, the songs lyrical content was an homage to Canadian soldiers legendary victories during World War II. This video was making no fucking sense so far.

Returning back the backyard, we began to set up the ‘scene’ for the band’s performance. I was pretty intoxicated (there’s a recurring theme throughout these Tour Tales) and decided we needed homemade torches, so off I sent our drummer to root through his closet for old clothes while I and the others went off in search of straight-looking branches. A can of Paraffin oil was also on hand, so we had everything we need. While the guys set up all the amps to look ultra-metal and cool, I was cross-legged on the ground ripping up my drummer’s old sweaters into strips, dousing them in Paraffin oil and tying them to fallen branches. Obviously our bizarre behaviour coupled with the loud drunken shouting at the sugar shack earned us the attention of all the other neighbours. While we prepared to begin filming, all of the neighbours had come out with lawn chairs to watch what we were doing. Mightily we plunged into the song, faking every single note to look like we were actually playing it. And honestly, lip-syncing a song for a music video feels exactly as stupid as watching somebody lip-sync to song to a live audience… which I guess we were doing. Maybe we should have went the hip-hop route and filled the pool with red jello after all.

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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Tour Tales # 5 - Miami Beach Adventures

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/01/29/tour-tales-5-miami-beach-adventures/

Tour Tales # 5 - Miami Beach Adventures

TOUR TALES # 5

Miami. The land of beautiful people, apparently. I had been to Florida once on a family vacation when I was a boy, which concluded with my pale white Northerner’s skin roasted to a peeling, crimson hue. I remember my 7 year old self woefully crying out to the displeasure of many at Miami International Airport. I always look back at that memory with a strong fondness, as it was my first time on a plane and first time out of my country. There were a lot of firsts on that trip.

I never had given going back much thought as I matured into adulthood. It was when a dear friend of mine (who is now gone) invited me and my then-girlfriend (now wife) to go on the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise with him that my interest in Florida rekindled. The deepest roots of my skin began to boil at the very thought of it.

‘Ominous feelings’

We went through the motions and patiently waited through the first dreary months of our Canadian winter before setting off to those scorched, leathery lands. The hot humid night air made us sweat as we walked out of the airport and took a taxi to our hotel on South Beach. I had never set foot on or near South Beach so I was unprepared for that particular swathe of madness. Supercars, overpriced food and hotels (we got a deal, haha) and a white sand beach. The people there look like they were pulled straight from a reality TV show, as I am sure many actually are. Herds of passerby mounted atop Segways with gigantic fishbowl-sized yellow and blue drinks. I was beside myself with disbelief by the time we arrived at our hotel on Ocean Drive. I’m not quite sure to this day what the problem was at this hotel, but they ominously declared to us that it was ‘the pipes’. We didn’t have a room. I’m not complaining though, as they immediately gave us a free upgrade to their sister hotel on the north side of South beach. What they upgraded us to was like a sultan’s palace compared to anything we saw on South Beach; saying that seems kind of weird considering the decadence of the former. It contained massive marble fountains, enameled trim on each doorway, gilded engravings in the floor stones, a private beach, a parking lot full of immensely expensive cars. All in all, it was ridiculous.

Poor Jerry – he can only afford 3 Ferraris. Please pray for him.

After spending a few hours drinking beer and eating pizza in our equally ridiculous, balconied room near the top of the hotel, we made our way back to Ocean Drive to meet up with the Scottish band Alestorm for dinner and for the 70000 Tons of Metal beach party (unofficial at that time). I don’t know why Alestorm is such a recurring theme in my life, as I have crossed paths with them unexpectedly many times and made dear friends of some of them. I’ll bet if Chris Bowes is reading this between guitar pro sessions he is probably rolling his eyes or deciding what design he’ll put on his next phone case. Anyway, we met up with Alestorm at one of the restaurants and began into drinks and lunch. Chris and I quickly developed a bond over our mutual enjoyment of drinking and ridiculous elaborate drink orders. Taking the ‘special’ drink menu, we opted to traverse it alphabetically. And as with most receipts on Ocean Drive, ours was astronomic. The hours rolled by almost instantaneously and the sun was beginning to set, which meant only one thing: beach party! Settling our massive drink bill, we stumbled across the street to where there were already hundreds of black-clad people partying by the shore. We spent the evening in increasingly blurry detail partying, singing and jumping in the waves with a lot of new friends, drinking whiskey and moonshine from inconspicuous vessels and talking about the ship boarding the next day. I awoke in bed in what seemed an unfamiliar place. I was covered in sand – head to toe. Sand was in my ears, in my matted hair, all over the bed a lay starfished on. I was still wearing my swimming shorts (a good sign). Somehow, I had passed out on the beach near the end of the beach party. My now-wife and our buddy somehow managed to pull me from the beach, convince a taxi driver to have me as a passenger, locate my phone, clothes and wallet, get me past the almost princely sentinels at the hotel and get me in bed on our top floor hotel room. All of this occurred while I was mostly naked. I spent the next morning laying in the bathtub in cold water trying not to fall asleep and drown.

Probably me.

I have the best wife ever, and I really miss our friend Rob. Rest in peace, Rabba. The moral of the story: No matter how big of an alcohol tolerance you think you have, you CANNOT keep up with members of a band called Alestorm. Moderation is key, kids.

Rest well, my friend!

Thank you for reading Tour Tales! Next Monday I will be back with another installment Tour Tales. To help spread the love, share this blog with your musician or traveler friends!

LIKE me on Facebook HERE FOLLOW me on Twitter HERE SUBSCRIBE to me on Youtube HERE

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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Tour Tales # 5 - Miami Beach Adventures

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/01/29/tour-tales-5-miami-beach-adventures/

Tour Tales # 5 - Miami Beach Adventures

TOUR TALES # 5

‘Ominous feelings’

Poor Jerry – he can only afford 3 Ferraris. Please pray for him.

Probably me.

Rest well, my friend!

Thank you for reading Tour Tales! Next Monday I will be back with another installment Tour Tales. To help spread the love, share this blog with your musician or traveler friends!

LIKE me on Facebook HERE FOLLOW me on Twitter HERE SUBSCRIBE to me on Youtube HERE

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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Tour Tales # 4

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/01/22/tour-tales-4/

Tour Tales # 4

TOUR TALES # 4 There is something about travelling through actual wilderness that I love. There is no cell phone service; there are no lights, no gas stations, no stores… Nothing. Beyond the odd vehicle, it is just you, the road and endless expanses of trees or mountains or flats. It’s places like these that remind you what you are and how powerless you are at the end of the day.

“I know we’re lost. My phone stopped working. Shut the fuck up, Barbara.”

Take away all forms of technology and how far can you make it beyond the remaining fuel in your vehicle? For many people – not very far, I guess. Most are busy living in populated areas full of every amenity and modern convenience you can think of. I believe if all of a sudden, the power went out and stayed out, then total anarchy would arise within weeks. Many wouldn’t have learned to live without a distraction, having taken these things for granted most, if not all of their lives. The worst thing is that a lot of people feel like they have a right to most of these technologies that they had no hand in creating. And to some degree, I suppose the life they were born into grants them that. As of typing this, I am only 28, but I remember when computers were a very expensive and almost pointless (by today’s standards) luxury that took up way too much space. The internet was only a soft word spoken on many a tongue; few knowing what insanities lay in store! Regardless, pluck someone out of their luxurious modern western life and plant them down in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of kilometres of nothing surrounding them and you’ll learn what kind of person they are! Will they be a self-sufficient hero of the wilderness, building you shelter and shaping a spear from that duct-taped on tail pipe of your equally duct-taped van to hunt the meal for the day? Or will they crumble from the weight of having absolutely zero survival skills and curl up shivering under the van? Well… enough with the doom and gloom… this is supposed to be a fun blog! My band were on the road one April and we had just finished a tour that had been routed across the entire continent within 20 days. We had a show every single day, most of the drives were around 10 hours and almost all of the load in times were around 3 pm. Some were earlier…

I think we averaged about 2-3 hours of sleep per night, then made up another 2-3 each in the van each day. It caught up with us really quick.

This was fun after 2 hours of sleep.

I’ll think I’ll chalk up this story to that condition! So we are driving through North Ontario. We had played in Thunder Bay the night before and were on route to Timmins (about a 9 hour drive). Before the show in T-Bay had ended, we voted to drive through the night so we could get to Timmins early, get a huge breakfast and chill out before the show the next evening. So off we went! I remember earlier on that tour we had driven the opposite way on the exact same stretch and there was a 200+ km stretch of highway that had nothing but 2 lanes and trees. Before you left the towns on either end, there are gigantic flashing signs saying ‘NO GAS STATIONS FOR 211 KM, CHECK FUEL’ or something of that ilk. I was the driver on that particular stretch, and having half a tank of gas I thought we were well in the clear. In the past, we would have made it without any problems, but our van’s oxygen sensors were fucked. So of course we burned way more gas than I thought we would. We made that entire trip with all the windows up, no music playing and me counting every single kilometre beneath my breath. We literally made it to the next gas station before we ran out of gas. Thank FUCK. On our way back through that very stretch, I was one of the lucky ones to get to sleep after that show in Thunder Bay. Slinking down onto the bench behind the driver’s seat, I went to bed stressing the importance of making that last stop for gas before the warning signs numerous times and then I drifted off… I awoke sometime after sunrise to our guitarist and soundman having a bit of a panic between themselves. Sitting up, I was just in time to catch a sign indicating the next town was about 100 km away pass us by. I then looked at the fuel gauge, whose needle was nearly resting on EMPTY. And of course buying fuel canisters was only a conversation we had on numerous tours and of course the fuel warning light did not work. I love band vans.

We ran out of gas pretty quickly after that.

It just so happened we ran out of gas just as we were passing the entrance to an abandoned quarry, which was easily large enough to pull the van sideways in.

We came to a stop and got out to stretch our legs. We were in the middle of nowhere, broken down with no phone service with one remaining date on our tour.

What we did was write ‘GAS?’ in the back of a pizza box with a sharpie and took turns trying to flag down passing trucks…

Pictured: Every musician ever.

There were mostly semi trucks, who didn’t even bother to slow down – not that their diesel fuel would have helped much. Before long, we found some beer left in the cooler and continued to hopelessly flag down traffic.

After about 2 and a half hours, an older couple driving a pickup drove up to us. I guess one of the truckers passing by had radioed to them to tell them about our situation, which was VERY lucky for us. They gave us a full canister of fuel which allowed us to get to the next gas station.

We actually made it to load in on time.

The moral of the story: just buy a fucking gas canister and keep it filled.

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deepdarkriver-blog · 7 years ago

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TOUR TIPS: 5 WINTER TOURING TIPS

New Post has been published on https://deepdarkriver.com/2018/01/30/tour-tips-5-winter-touring-tips/

TOUR TIPS: 5 WINTER TOURING TIPS

[BANNER] TOUR TIPS: 5 WINTER TOURING TIPS Welcome the first ever installment of Tour Tips!

This will be a weekly article located HERE designed to help bands, musicians, travelers and anyone of that ilk – amateur or professional – gain more insight into a life on the road.

Winter is bitch in most countries in the Northern hemisphere. But Canadian winters are a cruel, miserable, heartless old crone who likes to throw rocks at the paper boy for no other reason than it’s funny. It takes certain level of courage to pack your life into an ancient, dilapidated vehicle and drive 15,000+ kilometers to hopefully earn some money and followers. Yet more and more people seem to be setting out to do just that with startlingly lustful fervor. This is the first installment of Tour Tips – a blog series designed to paint a helpful picture for those chasing the dream on the open road. Whether it’s your first trip, or your one thousandth – you’ll be sure to glean some helpful information from what I have to tell you. Now where was I? Right! Throwing rocks at children. Now the first thing you need to realize when you leave your front door is that Mother Nature is in charge. Not you. Mother Nature. She is a dominant, mindless force that governs the planet’s ebb and flow and she has no time to wait for you or your guitarist to have a fucking smoke before you leave on a 10 hour drive in February through the Rocky Mountains. No, you must respect her and bow before her might. Take into consideration the fact that winter in the Northern Hemisphere hurls all sorts of calamity into the paths of travellers. Roads become entrenched with black ice, accumulations of snow or drifts of snow hurled up by gale force winds. Travel by air becomes much more treacherous at whiteouts and ground planes for hours or days. Even in the unlikely event you can’t drive or fly – entire lakes can and will freeze over. So here are 5 dos for surviving your first winter tour: 1 – WINTERIZE YOUR VEHICLE This might seem like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how unprepared most motorists are when it comes to winter. Before you set out: A – Change your oil (and buy a 2nd jug to keep in the back of the vehicle). Use a slightly less viscous oil than what your engine requires (eg: if your engine takes 5W30, then use a 5W20 oil). Thinner oil will flow more easily, allowing for easier start ups. B – Check and/ or change your spark plugs once every year or 2. If you drive a lot (touring musicians do), then once a year. The copper tip plugs (most common type) have a life expectancy of 30,000 miles (48280 km), but are the least dependable. If your plugs are bad, you won’t be able to start the engine. If you’re like me, you hate changing spark plugs because most modern vehicles’ engineering has made half of them ridiculously inaccessible. If you value your time and are seeking to check your spark plugs, it’s usually better to just change them to save yourself more time and peace of mind. C – Check all fluids and belts. If you are running low on any fluid, chances are you have a leak. If it’s within your means, then fix the leak. If not, keep a spare bottle in case of emergency. Belts should be changed if they look like they are cracking. If they squeak, it’s either the belt or one of the pulleys guiding the belt. Better to be safe and check both. You can get old milk crate from a lot of grocery stores. These make fine containers for holding fluids and other maintenance supplies. D – Replace your wiper blades. They aren’t expensive. Just fucking do it. E – If snow tires are too expensive for you, keep a Home Depot bucket full of sand and gravel with a scoop to toss beneath your tires to help you gain traction on a difficult stretch. Alternatively, buy some traction mats for around $10-100 each. They will save you some real grief if you get stuck in a snowbank.

“I’m having a great time, guys!”

2 – Ensure your warmth This is also a no-brainer. Winter is cold, no? On some of my tours in the winter, we have encountered temperatures as low as -40 celsius. If you were to break down in the middle of nowhere in that temperature and the doors of the van flung open (so someone can fucking smoke) and you had nothing but shorts and a t-shirt on – chances are you won’t survive very long. Seriously.

“I’m also having a great time!”

Finger-less mitts come in very handy when loading in gear or having to communicate on your phone outdoors. Bring larger mitts to slip over them, just in case. Bring sleeping bags, pillows and extra blankets. I would recommend this in any season, but most importantly in the winter time. Even in the event of having to sleep in the van, use gorilla clips to hold blankets up over the windows to contain more heat. Which brings me to my next point… 3 – Plan smart routes Sure that scenic route was bad ass when you passed through there last July, but consider what it might be like in the middle of winter. Even if you’ve never been there before and it might cost you a hundred kilometers or more, always take the route more frequently traveled. If you run out of gas or you slide off the road, you’ll be happy that there is a car or ten about to pass you from either direction. One of them might even stop to help! Take a good look at Google Maps well before you leave. Keep a weather app on your phone and frequently check your destinations. Google Maps automatically details numerous routes for you to take, and always displays the best one first.

I will be sure to write a much more detailed Tour Tips installment around routes and cutting costs on the road, so stayed tuned for that! 4 – Pack lightly This one is good for any season, or even another Tour Tips segment. Less is more. This is more focused towards music equipment. Nothing makes a load in or load out worse than bad weather, and you never know what will happen when you are touring in the winter time. This problem only gets worse when you are going into unfamiliar territory, or venues you have never visited before. I remember once upon a time, my band was obsessed with big amps, loads of stage equipment, lighting, effects, stage risers and extra PA speakers. My mind changed on all of this when we had to load out during a massively torrential downpour in Montreal. All of our gear was totally soaked and we were left ringing water out of merchandise and guitar cases for the next week. It took me a while to convince my guitarists to downsize, but they eventually relented. My band now plays without amplifiers, running mostly DI signals from preamp units. The drums are the only bulky thing in our setup (when will drummers let go of the past?). Additionally, large luggage can also be a massive hindrance upon your load ins and load outs. If you’re constantly climbing over big bulky luggage to get in and out of your trailer or vehicle, or having to remove it to get to other things, you’ll run of these things quickly: patience, time and respect for your companions. Hard cases are definitely attractive for guitars when you are on the road. I recommend guitarists and bassists look up bags from Mono & Reunion Blues. Not only do they acclimate much more evenly and safely, but in most cases they even protect your instrument better than any generic hard case. They even have shoulder straps so you can take 2 or 3 of them into a venue while still have hands free to carry other items. In the future, I’ll make a more detailed post on this subject. Or I might make a whole series on this. Stay tuned…! 5 – Buy a small kettle This is one of the best decisions I’ve made when it comes to touring. You should already have an adapter to plug your 120VAC units into your 12V as I am sure almost every person in a touring band has fought for dominance over the only outlet to charge their phone. As far as small electric kettles go, I don’t leave home on a trip without mine. Every band or traveller should buy a small kettle for boiling water to leave up in between the seats of your vehicle or to bring with you when you are out on the road. You can get them from Wal-Mart for $15 (Canada – HERE) (U.S. – HERE). Buy one of those inexpensive plastic kettles, instant coffee (or a big box of tea) and a stainless steel travel mug. You will not regret this. I have personally spent my last couple of dollars at a Tim Horton’s to get a coffee on tour. It sucked. But if you have the ability to brew coffee or tea in the van or venue whenever you want one, you’ll be happier for it. You won’t have to stop as many times, the extra heat it generates will help keep YOU warm and you’ll keep lots of extra money in your pocket and your bands money fund. Now that’s being thrifty. Thank you for reading the first Tour Tips! Next Friday I will be back with Tour Tips detailing the 5 Unwritten Rules of the Tour Van. To help and spread the love, share this blog with your musician or traveler friends!

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