Rock ‘n’ roll mythology, like every mythology, is only tenuously tied to reality. For a band without the huge audience, huge cash flow, and huge appetite for debauchery of, say, Led Zeppelin or Motley Crue, life is considerably harder and less exciting than Hammer of the Gods or The Dirt might lead you to believe. Life on the road is especially misunderstood by people who aren’t in working bands.
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But for those who can handle the grind, touring has its benefits: the number of artists who’ve kick-started their careers on MySpace notwithstanding, there’s still no better way to build an audience than actually going out and playing to them. “It’s amazing when you start going back to the same places and you know people and the town and you feel kind of connected to the country or the world or wherever you’re touring in a very specific and strange way,” Clarke says. “I can say, for example, that I’ve been to Athens, Georgia, and I have, like three times, but I’ve only ever spent time on one street.”
One nice thing about touring is that under the right circumstances—if you don’t get stuck doing more than your share of the driving, for instance—you can find yourself with a lot of free time, both in the van and during the hours between loading in at the club and playing your set. (On a recent tour by my own band, I edited a bunch of short movies on my laptop.) Clarke, a Brit who now lives in Chicago and fronts a band called Follows, has collected some of the fruits of that kind of mental space in The Art of Touring (Square Root Books), the new book she put together with former Erase Errata guitarist Sara Jaffe, who lives in Massachusetts. A multimedia tribute to the road life, it includes photographs, essays, journal entries, comics, paintings, collages—and, on the accompanying DVD, plenty of footage by and of touring bands, onstage and off.
For someone who helped put together what amounts to a celebration of touring, Clarke is ambivalent about going out on the road again herself. She says her favorite part of touring is getting to play at the end of each day—an excellent albeit idealistic answer—but by her reckoning the stress of doing “so many tours I couldn’t even count” is what broke up Electrelane. “Your relationships suffer. You miss your friends, you miss family, you miss being in your city for any amount of time, having a proper home. I feel like now I wouldn’t tour for months and months on end.” She pauses and adds, “It’s still fun to go out for a few weeks at a time.”
