Feed The Beast

Everything is feeling more real now as the first tour date is less than a month away. Everything is coming together. The set has been decided and the live performance is being honed. Four more weeks of intense rehearsals and Van Rockman shall be ready to take on the country. The pre-gig buzz is a strange thing. Your entire body floods with adrenaline. It's almost a prehistoric sense of being. The predator is the stage. You have two options. Fight or flight. For the hardened musician it's an easy decision to make. Everyone has their own way of facing the predator. Some will flatly refuse to play until it's there time to go on, then they absolutely kill it. Others will walk on like it's no big deal and kill it. Some will make their entrance the grandest anyone will ever see and kill it. However you choose to go on, the end result must always be the same. Now multiply that feeling by a hundred and you have something close to the pre-tour buzz. The pressure to play better than the previous gig is amp'd up because it's all back to back shows. Absolutely nothing feels like it. There is a common misconception that a lot of 'partying' goes on every night on tour. This isn't true. Simple reason being there's no need to. The first time I went on tour, the band I did this with stocked up on alcohol. We had drunk maybe four cans after two weeks of solid playing. There simply wasn't time to drink. More to the point, we didn't feel the need to drink. What we got from that adrenaline buzz was enough. It took me eight days after that tour to come down from that. Such is the feeling from this that you don't think you need anything else. Even food seems optional. Then your stomach roars like a dying tiger and you realise no food in eighteen hours is a really bad idea. Then you realise you wouldn't want to change that feeling for anything else.