The Tour Bible

When my band tours Europe, we hire a tour booker and manager, mainly due to the language barrier that can sometimes be an issue. But when we tour the United States, we book and manage our own tours. This is obviously a lot of work, but it saves money, and at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, we know it was due to our own screw-ups and not someone else's.

A large part of what makes for a successful tour is organization. The more information you have at your fingertips, the less likely it is you'll find yourself in a stressful situation. To this end, every time my band tours, we bring along what we call our 'tour bible'. This is simply a huge 3-ring binder containing all the info relevant to the tour. I can't stress enough how helpful this is. What info yours contains is up to you, but here is how we set up ours... (The binder is divided up by each city, using dividers to keep everything organized.)

• Copies of each of the contracts. You do have contracts, right?

• A master phone list with the names and phone numbers of each promoter and venue. Other helpful phone numbers include any rental companies you used for vehicles or trailers, friends in each city, your insurance company, your merchandising or record companies, and AAA's number if you have it (well worth it!)

• Mapquest directions from hotel to hotel (most hotels offer booklets with listings for all their branches in each state so you can find one ahead of time), and from the hotel to the venue. It's a good idea to have either a dedicated GPS navigator or one on your cell phone, as sometimes online directions are inaccurate, or you might encounter construction that makes the suggested online route impossible, but having Mapquest directions is a helpful backup if you are in areas where there is no cell reception. (And where this is might surprise you. Downtown NYC can be a nightmare given all the tall buildings...)

• We usually don't bother making reservations for our hotel rooms (we prefer to book our own instead of having the promoter do it), but in large cities, it is always a good idea to make reservations, so in these cases, printouts of our reservation confirmations are included.

• A merch sheet for each city with sections for each merch item (with the price listed next to each). This way the merch person can simply make a mark in the appropriate section each time an item sells. This makes it easy to double check that the merch sold matches the amount of cash onhand, and if you use a program like QuickBooks (highly recommended), you can easily keep track of inventory, so you will know at an instant how much of each item is onhand, and when you might need to reorder.

• On a related note, we print out tons of price labels to display on the merch itself. Travel takes its toll on stuff like this, so having back-ups is important.

• If you have band members or crew members who need to fly in to or out of the starting/ending location of the tour, it's not a bad idea to have copies of their reservations.

What you include in your own tour bible is up to you, but the more info it contains, the easier life will be on tour. Even if something seems excessive, include it anyway. You'll never regret having too much info, but having too little can really put a damper on things. One final note... the name 'tour bible' is no coincidence. Treat it as if it was sacred. Make sure it is in a safe place at all times, and always confirm you have it with you. It's not a bad idea to have all the info in the tour bible backed up on an FTP server so you can retrieve it if you lose the real deal, but this should be a last resort only.