September 16-17, 2003 - Nashville & On the Road

I'm doing this diary to chronicle the every day stuff that goes on being on the road. We have a 16 city tour that we're doing in 17 days. Well, 21 days if you count the stuff that has to get done before and after the tour. I want to list the people who are traveling on the bus - first of course there is Victor Wooten, he's the leader of the band and he's the bassist. Regi Wooten, Victor's oldest brother is the guitarist. Joseph Wooten, another brother is the keyboardist. Derico Watson is the drummer, Divinity is a rapper/bassist, Kurt Storey is the front of house (FOH) engineer, Ted Atwell is the lighting director, Danette Albetta is the tour manager (tour 'mamma') and then there's me.

Even though tour buses are big and fancy it can be a pretty confined area when you're on with 9 people - 10 if you include the bus driver. It's always a good thing to be able to get along with everybody for that reason. It's easy to find musicians that play very well, but not so easy to find people that you want to spend 17 hours straight on a bus with! We're very fortunate that we all get along very well.

Anyways,…I arrived in Nashville Tuesday (yesterday) morning at about 10:00AM (that's Central time - this is the first of many time zone changes this tour). I'm very excited about going on this tour, but I'm already missing my wife. The prior couple of weeks have been pretty hectic - we were at Victor's Bass Nature camp the first week of September which was great but is also pretty exhausting. Then, when we got back, Toné & I had a lot of preparation to do to get me ready and packed. She also helped me juggle my student schedule around since I was only teaching for a week before leaving for the tour. We're also working out the details of buying her a motorcycle since the one she had got tossed in a tornado last year and totaled. In the midst of all this craziness, we just tried to spend as much time together as possible before I had to leave.

As I was walking through Nashville's airport I saw a lot of musicians - lots of people carrying guitars and instrument cases. I even overheard someone on the plane talking about being on a tour. A lot of tours originate from Nashville, so it's not surprising to see a bunch of musicians in the airport. Funny thing is, I'm one of Victor's biggest fans and I'm also one of his closest friends, and when I fly to Nashville and I see him at the airport I wanna' run up to him and ask him for his autograph! Then I have to remind myself that he's there to pick me up.

We drove off about 10:30 and we didn't get to his house till almost 5:00PM because we had so many errands to run. We had to go to the tour bus place to pick out a bus and then we had to go to a place called Sound Check which is where a lot of famous artists rehearse for tours and keep their equipment in storage. We had to go by where the Flecktones keep some gear to pick up some equipment from Victor's Flecktones rig for him to use on this tour. We went past 2 metaphysical book stores while we were downtown, and then we had to pick up a U-Haul truck to load up all the gear. When I got to Victor's house we set up his complete bass gear and the PA rig to make sure everything was working. Then we loaded up all the gear in the U-Haul. By now, it was about 10:00PM and I was bone tired. I initially called my wife to do this tour entry last night, but I was so tired from all the running around, loading gear and the time change that I just went to bed.

Today I woke up around 7:30AM and I read a little bit. Then after I showered and dressed I went down into the basement to get the touring basses together. Victor tours with 8 basses. One of them is a Fodera that was being worked on & was being shipped from them and it arrived today. I eventually rounded the other 7 up and loaded them on the U-Haul with the rest of the gear. Then I just made sure we had everything packed up that we needed and I drove the U-Haul to meet the tour bus. I was the first one there - I even got there before the tour bus did which was around 11:30. So I walked to a book store to kill some time. When the tour bus showed up around 12:30 I picked my bunk out on the bus. For every tour it's usually a different tour bus, but we usually wind up picking the same bunk on each bus. I put all my stuff on my bunk, but I don't usually sleep on it because I'm a little claustrophobic, so I end up sleeping in the back lounge area. Everybody else started showing up around 1:00 and we loaded up all the gear. Then every body had to arrange getting their cars back home and we had to get the U-Haul back. Ted and Divinity are flying to Florida and meeting us there. The bus took off around 3:00.

This is the longest drive we'll be doing on this tour - from Nashville to West Palm Beach which is almost 900 miles and might take about 15 hours. So we figured that was cool because we would rehearse on the bus listening to CD's of the last tour and refresh our memories. But we ended up spending most of the time laughing and joking. At about 10:30PM (now we're back on East Coast time) everybody started to get really hungry, so we asked the bus driver when he was going to stop for gas and he said it would be a couple of hours. We knew we couldn't make it that long so we asked him to stop. We were in Perry, GA which is about 3 hours from the Florida line and we all split up and went different ways to find food. After we finished eating, Victor put in a movie in the front lounge and I retired to the back lounge to call my wife to do this diary entry. In the midst of my wife taking this dictation, we lose reception a lot of times so I'm going to sign off now and it's about 12:30AM so I'm going to sleep. When I wake up tomorrow I'll be in West Palm Springs, Florida.

peace & blessings,

anthony