Long Island drummer Will Noon and Pennsylvania vocalist and guitarist Chris Cerulli saved money by doing it themselves.  Noon, who currently plays with Straylight Run, booked a tour for Eyeball Record’s Zolof The Rock and Roll Destroyer with his own booking agency “Super Hot Booking,” and Cerulli recently booked his first tour for his own band, Motionless In White.

Here’s what these “do-it-yourselfers” had to say:

Decide where you want to go—Take out a map or an atlas and sit down with your bandmates. If you have friends in neighboring states, try to go there first.  Not only will they have friends to bring to your show, but they’ll also offer you a place to crash. Sleeping in a van sounds like you’re living the rock star life, but remember home offers comforts, like a hot shower.

Keep your tour small—Don’t try to go cross-country on your first go around, “It’s hard work, so just be ready for it,” says Will Noon, who is also the stickman in the hardcore band Breaking Pangaea, based out of Philadelphia. “Start small.  Play locally and then slowly expand. There’s no point in booking a four-week national tour when you’ve never played the surrounding cities.”

Noon also suggests spacing out your touring schedule. Most bands take their first tour during Spring Break or over summer vacation when most bands and people who go to shows are out of school.  If you only have one week for your first tour, you may want to try to play as many shows as possible, but that’s probably going to burn you out.

Remember you can always tour again—You don’t have to go everywhere that first week; you can book some time to tour throughout the year.  “The first Breaking Pangaea tour, I think we wanted to play 10 shows in 11 days,” says Noon.  “We ended up playing four shows in seven days I think.  Ha!” Lesson learned?  It’s important to pace yourself.

So, let’s say you’ve dotted the map and gone online to find clubs where you want to play. One easy way to do your search is to type “list of venues” plus a city name into yahoo.com. Once you find a few good spots, you can cold-call them and send out demos.  Cold calling is fine as long as you limit your calls. After ringing the club once, follow up about a week later.  If you don’t book something right away, don’t despair.  Ask if the venue received your press kit and tell them you’ll call back once they’ve given your CD a listen. When you do book a show—and you will—call about a week before you perform to confirm.

Will Noon says, “The best thing you can do is everything.  Call, email, send press materials, and don’t give up.  Sending an electronic press kit including photos and a CD or DVD is also a nice touch.”

It’s important you not annoy the club or promoter. And though there’s a chance the club owner won’t even pop in your CD or spin your record, that doesn’t mean you can slack on presentation. Your disc is what’s going to get you into the club, so make sure your packaging looks good.  Send clubs a press release along with your CD.  If you don’t have one written, type one up.  Write about the band—where you’re from, what you sound like, where you want to tour.  If you mention this is your first tour, say how long you’ve been playing locally.  Mention your style and your audience because club owners will want to know you can draw people in the door.

It isn’t always easier to find a booking agency to do the work for you.  A booking agency usually has connections, but Noon has done it both ways.  He booked the first Breaking Pangaea tour with Fred Masherino, the band’s frontman. He has also booked as “Will from Super Hot Booking.”  Which was easier, you ask?

“Most of the people I dealt with were people I knew through Breaking Pangaea, so it was kinda the same thing being ‘Will from Breaking Pangaea’ or ‘Will from Super Hot Booking,’ ” he says. “If I continued booking, I think it probably would’ve helped to be associated with an agency, even a smaller one.”

But what about paying the booking agent? Anthony Strump, who runs the promotion/show company TriStatePunk says, “When you have an agent they get 10-percent, but when you book it yourself you waste a lot of time.”

So what if you take the other route—looking for bands on MySpace with whom you can do a trade. Most smaller bands will want to swap a show with you. You come to their town and hop on one of their shows; then, when they’re ready to make the trek out of their hometown, they’ll call you, and you repay the favor. It’s a great way to help other local bands, and you get to play other cities.

If a local band puts you on their bill and hypes you up saying, “A touring band from New York City or Chattanooga is playing with us,” it makes them seem desirable, like other bands are dying to play with them.

“At first you need to have the ‘anywhere anytime’ mentality,” warns Noon. “If you’re good, and you play enough, you’ll build up a following. Then clubs will actually want you to play.”

Chris Cerulli spent three months booking a 10-day tour for Motionless In White and a fellow local band called Auxilia. The tour took place over Spring Break this April.  It made both bands feel comfortable traveling out of the state together, but it didn’t stop problems from occurring. After just two hours on the road, Motionless In White’s van broke down.  Then, after sitting in a rest-stop for 14 hours and pouring $470 into the van just to get it towed, the band was kicked out for loitering.  “It sucked,” Cerulli says. “It was the worst week from Hell.”  The van had to be brought home and Cerulli and his father worked on the engine.  While tinkering in the garage, Chris spent time on the phone with venues rescheduling their club dates.  In the end, the van was fixed and the bands salvaged five shows.

“We were pretty scared,” Chris said. “But we’re fucking dedicated.

No matter how much planning you put into your first tour, there’s a good chance something will go wrong. Just remember to hang on to your sanity—you’re out there to have fun.  Plan every detail as best you can, and if all hell breaks loose on the road, make it the inspiration for your next song.

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In June, 2003, Mourning Maxwell showed up at the Kansas City Festival and started playing in a parking lot. After a week of impromptu parking lot shows, “Tour Creator” Kevin Lyman invited the guys inside to play. The band was asked back the next summer, but ironically, during the 2004 tour, half the band quit.  The remaining members kept putting up their tent every day, attracting new fans and pushing merchandise, what they called merch,’ so they could support themselves.  “We were having too much fun to quit,” Smith explains. “The Warped Tour is the best place to hear good music, meet cool people, sell lots of CDs and have lots of fun.  It’s an experience that you don’t want to [have] end.”  No wonder they didn’t want it to end.  The band’s debut EP, “Our Collective Voice,” released with Bob Hoag (The Ataris, The Format, Scary Kids Scaring Kids) sold over 9,000 self-released copies.

Okay, so let’s talk money here—when you’re touring, how much green can you expect to live on?  Smith says allot $10 per person per day for food.  Your total daily budget for the band should be about $50 to $100 for food and gas—per day.  That’s it.  “Staying in a hotel room is rare,” he admits, “But if we have a good show where we sell a lot of merch’, we might get a room.  [Otherwise] we sleep in the van.  We have a bed built in the back of our van that can sleep two to three, [and] we have two bench seats. It’s actually not that bad sleeping in the van, but it’s nice when people let us crash, use their showers and eat their food.”

Budget, Budget, Budget

When you’re touring, don’t rely solely on the generosity of strangers, you need to plan ahead. The costs you can expect to incur while on tour include gas, food, oil changes, tires and merch’—t-shirts, hoodies, CDs, stickers and buttons—which you should stock up on just before going on tour.  Of course, that list doesn’t account for any unforeseen mishaps that may occur along the way.

Here’s a huge tip: Log your expenses while on tour.  Then when your tour is over, sit down and go over the list to see where you can cut corners the next time around.

Mourning Maxwell’s Smith and guitarist Alex Kling usually set up the band’s budget, which they keep track of in a notebook.  And that notebook becomes the band’s financial bible—the guys carefully track how much money is going in and out of the cash box and exactly where the money is going.  They discuss how many miles the band is traveling and how many people they anticipate will buy their merch’.  Then, they sum up those numbers and create a tour budget from that.

The Numbers Guy

It’s important to designate one person as the “money guy.”  Only the money guy can reach into the cash box to get change when you sell a t-shirt.  Why? Because you don’t want other band members feeling like they can reach into the cash box and give themselves an allowance.  Ever. Let one guy deal with it. That way, if there is ever money missing, you know who’s accountable.

Take Mourning Maxwell.  When it comes to keeping a budget, Kling, the money guy, has a tough time. “Like most bands, we usually end up spending more money than we thought because shit always happens.” Lead singer, Smith explains, “The van blows up, the trailer hitch breaks, your drummer falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a freeway divider. You know, the usual stuff.”  (Okay, crashing into a freeway divider is probably not “usual.” But that’s another story.)

Yes. Shit will happen and assuming you have the money to make it all the way, you’ll have plenty of war stories to share at the end of your ride. Just remember to budget, feed yourself, and peddle your merch’. Gas will be the most costly expense, food—the cheapest. It’s perfectly okay to put ketchup and other condiments on crackers and eat Tom Hanks-style in “The Terminal” (remember that Kentucky Fried Chicken has pre-packaged butter and jelly at the registers) or you can always eat off the “Value Menus” at any fast food joint. Just remind your stomach that it’s only temporary, and you’ll be fine.

Peddle Your Merch’

If you’re playing a festival-type event, like The Warped Tour, you’ll have plenty of down time inside the venue to pedal CDs.  If you don’t have that luxury, take a page out of Mourning Maxwell’s tour book. “We make money by selling merch’—t-shirts, CDs, stickers and buttons—and getting people to the shows so the club will pay us,” says Smith and notes that the band aims to make $100 a day selling merch’ on a club tour.  During The Warped Tour, Mourning Maxwell anticipated making $1000 from merch’ sales a day.  But on some tour days, the band only made $50. That’s when they needed to peddle harder. “We’d go to malls and movie theaters and try to sell CDs to kids hanging out.  Anything [so we could] eat.”

Remember, you can try to sell merch’ on “off” days, but that’s usually when you do most of your driving. Keep a calendar with your show dates written on it, and mark how many miles you need to drive on days off.  Also keep a map nearby so you can calculate your route.  If you get lost, stop and ask for directions. Don’t drive too far out of your way for pride’s sake, because a long detour can be costly at the pump.

Bring Along a Tour Manager

The tour manager is in charge of life on the road—taking care of tour dates, making sure your band gets to the next show on time, paying the club (if it takes a percentage of your merch’ sold) as well as getting paid by the club and keeping track of expenses.

The life of a tour manager is really about as unforgiving as it sounds, but it’s great if you’re in the band.  You can spend time practicing songs while the tour manager takes care of the boring financial side.

Mourning Maxwell, had a tour manager for three weeks on one tour.  And it definitely helped. But touring with a manager also means an added mouth to feed.  It’s a great way to have your musically-dysfunctional best friend see the country, as long as you realize it’s your dime he’s traveling on, ”It was nice to have one guy whose job is to get you paid and make connections,” says Smith.  ”But it’s definitely more expensive to have another person on the road with you.  At the same time, it’s nice to have someone not in the band there just to hang with and help referee our arm wrestling matches.”

Facing Reality

So how bad does it get on the road?  “It’s tough,” Smith says, sounding all too wise.  “You’re gonna get in fights. You’re gonna be uncomfortable. You’re gonna lose money. You’re gonna be broke.  You’re gonna go hungry. The shows are gonna suck for the first year or two because nobody cares about you outside of your hometown.”  And on top of that, it can hurt your love life, “You won’t want to bring your girlfriend with you, and she will probably be really pissed off, and you will fight with her a lot while you’re gone because she misses you and thinks you’re partying and banging chicks every night like the rock star you are.”  He goes on, “It’s not glamorous.  It’s not a constant party. You won’t get any sleep. You will always be dirty.  But it’s fucking awesome, and I suggest everyone experience being homeless [as a touring musician] once in their lifetime.”

Surprisingly, Smith doesn’t regret his nomadic lifestyle at all.  “When you can’t afford food or a shower and you’re playing in front of three people a night, it can get a bit discouraging.  But I think a big part of being in a band is hanging out with your friends. If you don’t get along with the people in your band, there’s no point,” he says nostalgically.  “We all are good friends and enjoy each others’ company, so being out on the road is just a big, long, moneyless, crazy road trip with your friends. We always have a good time on the road no matter what’s going on, and we get to play music every night, which is our favorite thing to do in the world.  It’s tough, no doubt.  But it’s an experience that you really can’t understand unless you’ve done it.”

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