. . .
The above video is Michael Dafferner’s hour-long documentary Why You Do This. Dafferner is the vocalist of the Long Island math-metal band Car Bomb, and his film follows the band on three tours in the late aughties (2007, 2008, and 2009). Why You Do This originally came out in 2010; Dafferner posted it in its entirety to YouTube in December 2011.
Why You Do This raises an uncomfortable question for underground metal bands with both its title and its content. In 2007, Car Bomb occupied an enviable position. They had just released their debut record on Relapse Records—not a major, but as close as any band that self-applies the term ‘mathcore’ is likely to come. The album, Centralia, was a moderate critical success.
But their 2007 tour—dubbed the “Loss of Pride Tour” by the film—was a disaster. Judging by Dafferner’s cinematic account, the tour was a string of humiliating empty-bar gigs and even more humiliating outdoor shows in gazebos and parking lots. The local openers were often truly horrid. Says Dafferner: “When we arrive, there is an opening act playing his music through an iPod strapped to a statue of a dog. There is no way for me to put into words how incredibly stupid this makes me feel.”
Car Bomb’s 2008 tour was equally catastrophic. Van breakdowns and skeezy promoters abounded. For some musicians, the romance of traveling the country with a band would compensate for the tough breaks.
Not Dafferner. “Every show we play makes me feel like a bigger and bigger failure,” he says. “The reality of being in a metal band is like an overwhelming weight, crushing my hopes and dreams.”
Brutal, as we like to say. And he’s not alone—many upstart bands have equally bad experiences on tour.
. . .
So why do virtually unknown metal bands take to the road for weeks at a time? My own band [Editor's Note: Doug is vocalist for the band Pyrrhon] is in a similar position as Car Bomb circa 2007, and I’ve been asking myself the same question lately.
Why You Do This reaches its emotional nadir after the 2008 tour when Car Bomb’s members assess their financial situation. For most of that summer, gas prices exceeded four dollars a gallon and sometimes reached five. The consequences were dire.
Their ledger broke down like this:
+$6,400 in tour earnings/sales
–$3,200 in merch manufacturing costs
–$4,000 in automotive costs (gas, repairs, etc.)
–$2,600 in van rentals
The bottom line: Car Bomb lost $4,500 dollars in 2008, or $1,125 per member. That’s a lot of money for a cash-strapped young musician to lose. Car Bomb’s members have professional day jobs; many bands aren’t so lucky.
Certainly, not all DIY tours need be so punishing. Small bands make money on the road all the time. Chris Grigg of Woe, for instance, offers this set of rules for successful DIY booking. They make good sense.
But his rules are demanding and not all inexperienced bands have the discipline, organizational acumen, or interpersonal network to apply them successfully. Even salty vets can fall prey to the harsh economic realities of the extreme metal circuit. Witness Ryan McKenney of Trap Them’s painful rant about the difficulties of maintaining the underground-level touring lifestyle.
And maybe touring isn’t as necessary as it once was. It’s becoming increasingly possible to build and maintain an international fanbase without relentless road-dogging.
Darkthrone, of course, never plays live. Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega, both more recent it-bands, don’t play live either. Cobalt hasn’t toured, though they might soon. Agalloch didn’t tour until they were popular enough to do so profitably, and they typically stick to festival dates. The inverse is true of Neurosis and Pig Destroyer: both used to be road warriors, but now they’re both in the mostly-fests camp.
In spite of these facts, grueling low-budget tours remain the standard for underground metal bands.
. . .
There’s no simple explanation for this persistent state of affairs, but tradition and emotion figure heavily into it.
Sixty years of historical pressure urges bands towards the road. What do rock bands do? They jam; they party; they go on tour. It’s a shibboleth as old as the genre itself.
The DIY tour as we understand it today is younger—perhaps 30 years old. It was developed mostly by American punk bands in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Such tours have never been glamorous enterprises; read Get In the Van, Henry Rollins’ compiled diaries from his five years in Black Flag, for some truly horrifying tales.
But these tours nonetheless retain a sort of ramen-chomping romance. You pile into a van with your best friends and hit the freeway. Together, you see the country—or at least its truck stops and dive bars—and meet new people. You live as frugally as possible and develop creative solutions to problems of scarcity. And you get to rock out in front of strangers every night.
This lifestyle satisfies the wanderlust of the young, who are often desperate to forestall the punch-clock drudgery that will eat up most of their adult lives. Many of them are willing to eat the potential financial costs, just for the sake of that experience.
Other folks have tried the workaday lifestyle, found it lacking, and have found ways to make DIY touring sustainable in its stead. Mike Hill of Tombs, for instance, does sound work for films and TV. He said the following in his interview with Justin Norton last year:
“Travel has always been something I’ve enjoyed. I like going to new places and seeing new things, and it’s something that’s important to my life. To do the same thing every day, see the same people without new stories to tell or interesting people to meet—that’s not for me.”
And then there are those who have been touring unsustainably for years, doing irreparable damage to their lives in the process, but still don’t know when to quit.
. . .
Why You Do This offers some answers to its own question in its third act. Car Bomb toured with Gojira and The Chariot in 2009. Dafferner says in the film that this tour is the first time he’s felt like he’s playing in a professional band; there’s no talk of shame or failure here.
Dafferner also interviews some better-known metal musicians about their reasons for touring. Randy Blythe of Lamb of God says that he enjoys making thousands of people beat the shit out of each other. (This is the kind of answer that someone who doesn’t listen to metal might invent for why metal musicians tour.) Joe Duplantier of Gojira offers a more nuanced response:
“I can’t explain the reason why I’m playing this music, but I feel it in my whole body. I need to express something that I can’t explain, but it’s here in my body, and I need to get rid of it . . . Music is nothing. It’s just vibrations in the air. But at the same time, it’s so powerful—it means so much to everybody. Everybody can understand music without being able to explain it. It talks to people.”
Dafferner himself explains that he plays in a band because it offers him the opportunity to be remembered as more than just another office drone. It allows him to reach out and touch thousands of strangers, and what better way to do so than in person? Touring may leave you poorer in the pocketbook, but it can bring spiritual riches to you and your audience.
And sometimes, the central question of Why You Do This has a ready-made answer: “That is why we do this,” says a band member in the film’s opening minutes, pointing to a packed club. The crowd’s roar speaks for itself.
. . .
BUY WHY YOU DO THIS
. . .
HEAR CAR BOMB
. . .
Car Bomb – “Gum Under the Table”
. . .
BUY CENTRALIA
. . .
“Darkthrone, of course, has never played live.”
My,oh my.
There’s this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRWsTuu4UA4
And this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqPOduHP8c4&feature=related
And a whole lot more where those came from.
Yep, I can only hope he’s reading the comments.
Puts the headline in perspective,too.
I’ve amended the text, so that it now read “never plays live” instead of “has never played live,” because it’s true, at one point in his career, Fenriz, though he never toured, reluctantly played live (and has famously refused to do so for the last decade and a half), and we botched that. Thanks for the heads up.
Ironically, that only makes Doug’s argument more compelling in my eyes. Just the same, I plan to dock our fact-checking department for this one.
Fire that guy and hire me!!!
“Brutal, as we like to say.”
Well, I feel sheepish. I was under the impression that they insisted on not doing so?
So having done some digging, it looks like that Darkthrone has barely gigged since the Soulside Journey days, and their last live appearance as a unit was the above video from ‘96. Nocturno Culto played some Darkthrone songs with Satyricon in ‘04, but that’s it. So while Darkthrone HAS played live, they don’t now and haven’t for some time.
Check out the following quote from a Fenriz interview with Guitar World: “Since I was a kid growing up with music in the Seventies, I only wanted to make albums. I never saw myself up onstage. Not playing live is my religion. I could write a book series about it.” (http://www.guitarworld.com/inquirer-fenriz-darkthrone)
So I stand corrected, but the point remains.
Exactly. The point was clear already.
There are SO many factors that go into being able to do this and have moderate success at it…the “inspiration/perspiration” phrase definitely applies, and Chris Grigg’s article holds a lot of truth and can be very helpful, “Book Your Own Fucking Life” has been around for 20+ years and is a wealth of info and knowledge for DIY touring, but one of the biggest things, as always with ANY entertainment medium, is almost always WHO you know more than WHAT you know!
Also, quit nitpicking this dude…Darkthrone has played a handful of shows and has never done an entire “tour”!
I interviewed Ben from Goatwhore a few years ago in the run-up to “Carving Out The Eyes of God.” I think he summarized the whole thing here:
Even when I was growing up I used to think that “this band is probably booming.” Then I started going to shows and realized it wasn’t like that. But it was still interesting. When I was young I went to a show at a VFW Hall, Destruction and The Cro-Mags. I was outside and Harley (Cro-Mags founder Harley Flanagan) was at the steering wheel and had the window down. He looked at me and said “Don’t ever get in a f—ng van.” I never heeded that warning but I now understand what he meant.
Great example. Falgoust embodies both the pros and cons of touring. On one hand, he’s been on the road since some time in the 90s (when did Soilent Green start touring?), and his band is still playing opening slots almost exclusively. But on the other hand, he really seems to enjoy the lifestyle.
Not to mention he and the rest of Soilent Green almost died in a van accident.
Dupantier’s answer is beautiful. I’ve always assumed that bands look at the financial math involved with underground touring, thumb their noses at it and move onwards because of other reasons. If the bands don’t review or understand the financial aspect, they quickly learn it the hard way.
There’s a middle ground between poverty/financial drain and rockstardom or selling out(if such a thing truely exists). I don’t see how there are enough dollars in the underground to provide any but the biggest bands with a reasonable lifestyle in that middle ground based solely on band-related income. Fortunately for all of us, the bands tough it out, as the documentary and this article show. Personally I want my favorite bands to focus on doing the stuff that bands form to do: creating art and touring. Great art can come from suffering in poverty, but not all bands concern themselves with that type of commentary. I see no point in…let’s say Suffocation having to do 9-5 jobs to be able to maintain the band.
Good stuff, Doug.
I <3 Car Bomb!
It’s a brutal life. Trap Them lost money opening for Napalm Death. And even Napalm members (aside from Shane) have to work jobs to make ends meet. When I saw Immolation this past October here in NYC, they mentioned how they all have full-time jobs here in the city and can only go on the road when their vacations align. That’s incredible since bands like ND & Immolation are at the ceiling of successfulness.
Think of music like professional sports. How many athletes who are able to call themselves “professionals” at one point in their life make enough money over the course of their career to support themselves for the rest of their lives? The answer is not many, even in big professional sports.
Now, you’re in underground metal, so this is not even the equivalent of one of the big 4 sports (talking USA here: baseball, basketball, football, hockey). This is like darts or high jumping. Everybody does something else.
Does this band even exist anymore?
Technically, yes. They’ve been inactive for a while though.
Great article Doug. I plan to get the DVD. Are there any extra interviews on the DVD? I think full-length interviews would be great considering the bands on here with different levels of ’success’.
Great article and I look forward to watching the documentary.
I studied computers in college but always told my friends/family that it was merely a back-up plan in case my musical career didn’t pan out. I was half joking. Half dead serious. But like many others, there was really only a small window in my life (about 4-5 years) when I could have made it work given the right break, and that break never came. But I did have a hell of a time. Opened for some pretty big acts. Even played in bands with members that now tour internationally. Now I’m settled with a wife and kids, a mortgage, and a desk job that makes use of my college degree, so the “backup plan” is in action! Though the dream of touring may be gone I’ll never quit playing.
It really is an eye-opener though, when you get a chance to catch a band you really admire on tour… a band you only wish you could compare your own band to, then see the conditions they endure to stay on the road. After playing a gig with one such band, I offered them a couch/floor space to crash before heading to their next gig. I’ve never seen anyone so thankful just to be able to shower.
I did a twenty date tour of UK shitholes in a freezing nov/dec 88, two bands (Cerebral Fix and Bolt thrower) six cabs, five heads, one and a half(!) drumkits, eight guitars, twelve humans and their luggage all in one van,slept in there apart from one night when we kipped a kitchen floor, played mostly to no-one, if we were lucky we got to shake our tail feathers to a crescent of disinterested armfolders.
I’d kill to see Bolt Thrower, nevermind tour with them. Respect!
It was mostly comprised of In battle there is no law material, but they were playing realm of chaos tunes to, halfway through the tour we went to the BBC and they recorded their second peel session (the first with Karl)
2008 was a brutal year to tour, gas prices were just insane and if it wasn’t for the fact that we had lots of royalty copies of our brand new album to sell we would have lost a lot of money. Merch basically subsidised gas costs that summer.
The reality is that yes, on a small level you get can get shafted on tour a lot and play mind bogglingly bizarre shows with anarchist puppet groups from the mid-west, or reggae DJs in polish night clubs occasionally (for just two examples)
I have to comment on that financial breakdown though. The figure of $3,200 for merch manufacturing costs strikes me as incredibly high, naively high even, to the point where i’m wondering what they made and how how of these items they made. Not to mention if they took any home with them to be able to sell later, if they priced them too low so that they had zero profit margin, if they traded shirts with every band they played with. You get the picture.
Or maybe they just had so few people at their shows that they sold five of the 600+ shirts they made?
Thank you for turning me on to this documentary and telling me the story of a strong but unsung band.
“… desperate to forestall the punch-clock drudgery that will eat up most of their adult lives.”
Amen.
But about the matter of ‘not-playing-live’, maybe a better example could be Mekong Delta – played live only around 1991, then nothing. Even their DVD released in 2007 was a recording of that era.
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