Tour:Smart and Break the Band

by Martin Atkins
Smart Books, 564 pp., $29.95 (paper)

If you’re going on tour, this is the best $30 investment you’ll ever make. Writing with the sardonic, hard-assed bluster of a drill sergeant, Pigface/PiL drummer Martin Atkins draws on three decades of hard-won music-biz lessons to make an awfully convincing case for the touring-is-war analogy. A van of unknowns rolling into a new town typically has no leverage beyond the goodwill of strangers, but following Atkins’ advice on promotion, transportation, tour routing, budgeting, and accounting will help keep a band from becoming its own worst enemy. The book systematically hammers away at fantastic notions of easy success and drives home the reality that perpetuating a music career is an exhausting feat not meant for the weak. In discussing contracts, Atkins doesn’t bother with turgid legalese, because all a band really needs to know is that a “guarantee” is anything but. Career scenarios in the underground-rock pantheon are laid out to help acts determine when it makes sense to upgrade from DIY to hired guns. Co-contributors chime in on everything from groupies and fitness to border-crossing. If road-hogging still feels like your life’s destiny after reading Tour:Smart, at least you’ll know better than to take a dump on the tour bus. (SXSW Music Panel: Tour Smart, Wednesday, March 12, Austin Convention Center, Room 18ABC, noon.)

This article appears in March 7 • 2008.

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Greg Beets was born in Lubbock on the day Richard Nixon was elected president. He has covered music for the Chronicle since 1992, writing about everyone from Roky Erickson to Yanni. Beets has also written for Billboard,Uncut, Blurt, Elmore, and Pop Culture Press. Before his digestive tract cried uncle, he co-published Hey! Hey! Buffet!, an award-winning fanzine about all-you-can-eat buffets.