Tell us about your tour vehicle.
Our touring with The Hooters has been seasonal and overseas for many years, so we don’t have a vehicle of our own. Typically, we rent two nightliner buses from a company in Germany that we’ve been working with for years. We let the crew have the nicer one – they spend more time on theirs than we do in ours.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
On show nights we usually have catering, which can vary greatly from night to night. By now, though, most of the venues we play feed us very well. All of our touring is in Europe, mostly Germany with some Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland thrown in, so it’s a pretty high dietary baseline. Fun fact: some of the best catering we’ve ever had is at Hard Rock festivals. I try to keep to a plant-based diet and the festivals are especially accommodating.
The hotels we stay in typically have a nice breakfast included, so healthy nutrition is up to the individual. When we have an overnight drive, breakfast is waiting for us and for the crew at the venue, then lunch.
We know how fortunate we are. We worked a long time to get here, and we never take it for granted.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
During summer tours our guitars are restrung every three or four shows. Mandolins every two weeks or so. I honestly can’t remember the last time any of us broke a string during a show.
We have an arrangement with D’Addario, who have been very supportive over the years.
Where do you rehearse?
For the past twenty-some years we’ve rehearsed in a cushy recording studio, where we all have control over our individual in-ear mixes.
The real stories go way back, starting in the warehouse we rented in Manayunk (a then-sketchy part of Philadelphia, long since way gentrified) during the Baby Grand years, until we were forced to move to an even sketchier part of the city several years later. We had one neighbor who would get his drink on and come a-knocking, demanding to arm wrestle someone, while hurling racial slurs at whoever was within earshot. Sometimes he would threaten to burn the building down with us trapped in it. One day, near the end of our time there, he sheepishly walked over to our doorstep carrying a copy of our Indie album, asking for our autographs. His daughter had made Dean’s List at Penn State, it seems, and he wanted to give her something nice. There was, in fact, a very intelligent bit of humanity that occasionally shone through that generally terrifying exterior.
As it happens, that long-gone building was the birthplace of The Hooters. I can trace the origin of our early songs, our first jam sessions, our first rehearsals, and our first demo recording session, where the hooter (a/k/a melodica) got its name, leading to the band’s name a few days later, all to that awesome funky warehouse we called The Umbria Ranch.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Childhood folly aside, I wrote this one during an archaeology lecture at York University (I got myself on a dig one summer as an excuse to go to England, where all of the good music was happening). Obviously, I was deeply engaged with whatever the professor was going on about.
The song was called, ‘The Strontium 90 Shuffle’ and it began:
I was there when they bombed Hiroshima
I’m the Radium Rhythm Revue
I’m a B52 with a hydrogen bomb
And I want to explode with you
Describe your first gig.
First gig ever was on local Philadelphia TV when I was ten. I appeared on The Gene London show with a nylon string guitar playing and singing a song I’d learned from Joan Baez’ first album, called, ‘El Preso Número Nueve’. Nobody told me that it was unusual for a ten year old to memorize a lyric in Spanish and play a guitar part that required some facility in the technique of rasgueado.
My first band gig was later that year, a party at my house celebrating our graduation from sixth grade. We called the band The Limestones, as a tribute to The Quarrymen, the band John Lennon so fortuitously invited a fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney to join. I played guitar, Paul (no relation) played downbeats on bass, and Bernie had a snare drum. There was an amp for the stringed instruments, but no PA that I can recall. We faked our way through a couple of Beatles songs, followed by the obligatory chase by our eleven year old female classmates.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I’ve been fortunate to be able to eke out a living in music pretty much my whole adult life. There was a ‘before’, though, which included climbing high on ladders scraping old lead paint from houses, selling stereo equipment (none of which I ever actually sold), building electronic equipment for the Biophysics Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and, most enduringly, working the night shift performing blood tests in the Stat Lab of an unnamed hospital from ages 17 to 19, with no prior training. Different times…
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Some years we tour less, some years not at all, that’s a big factor. Our ticket prices have not kept up with inflation but plane tickets, bus and truck fuel, hotels and crew salaries certainly have, so there’s that.
Same with publishing royalties. Mechanical and performance royalties, along with streaming payouts – which often feel like a black box – lag well behind inflation. As far as the future goes, opinions are varied. I have friends who are selling their catalogs because ‘AI is taking over’. Personally, I think that, barring a catastrophic change in copyright law, our songs will continue to work for us into the foreseeable future.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
If you see gum on the street, leave it there. It’s not candy.