10,000 Mile Week
We’re getting ready to put the first week to bed. In the last seven days we’ve logged just over 10,000 air miles and only a few hundred bus miles. We had a Prevost take us from Toledo to Chicago for the overseas flights so we wouldn’t have to schlep the gear on an RJ and do a terminal change at ORD. This morning’s 01:30 airport departure for a 04:20 flight from Baku still has everyone foggy. Over at Dave Rat’s RHCP Euro blog he explains a bit about the schedule and workflow of doing an arena tour or at least a tour with coaches and production. The Monsters of Jazz do things a bit differently in that most of the these type acts aren’t in a position to carry production on many if not most of the legs. We do fly in dates with either rental backline or we are on a coach with a Sprinter full of our normal rented European backline. For single show headliner dates we’ve been know to carry mons and control but doing mostly festivals and several one off fly dates the numbers just don’t make sense to carry any more than our bare necessities and get the rest locally. Some of the logistics of the fly in dates can be a bit demanding. For example, this week I started last Saturday on a 0630 out of LAS and ended up in Toledo later that afternoon. We hung and gigged the next day then departed for ORD in the bus to catch our flights Baku via Frankfurt with a six hour layover. (Lufthansa was very accomodating) We arrived thenight before the first show, did the first show a bit jet lagged, the second the next day then basicaly departed right after the gig to fly to Poland for a couple of well deserved days off making it about 26 hours flying time on five legs in five days.
There was a bit of a scare on arrival in Wroclaw this morning. Seventeen of our 34 pieces weren’t on the belt, most of backline we carry and about half the personal luggage. Luftansa went ahead and sent those pieces ahead, but the baggage department in Poland didn’t realize it for several minutes until we started filing the claim paper work. It had all been there the whole time. Band will have to find somthing else to be mad about I suppose. We started the morning on an A330-300 to Frankfurt, then on a brand new A321 to Munchen and finally a Dash 8 to Wroclaw (which is Breslau for all you white guys following along). We joked that the next leg would either be a Cessna or a hang glider keeping the tradition of the planes getting smaller on each leg. Lufthansa has been spectacular, we’ve been using them for several years over here. We deal with the airline directly and are provided services such as gate to gate transfers and expedited security and boarding access, or as it’s know in the biz, “being Elvised”. Not to be confused with being John Malkovich, though it’s easy to confuse Malkovich and Elvis because they are so much alike. The amenities and service that is provided make these grueling runs much more managable and as fun as then can be under the circumstances.