Eventric Interview with My Morning Jacket and Decemberists Tour Manager Eric Mayers

Eventric: What was your first tour? Do you remember the first tour?

Eric: My first tour gig was Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, we went out there for about eight months worth of clubs and a whole summer supporting the Allman Brothers. That would've been I guess in '03 maybe? But really, it goes back to the 90s with this band Calobo; we were like a total hippie family, but not a hippie band. There was nine of us, and we were all partners in all of the companies that the band had surrounding them. We owned our own label, we were self-managed, self-booked, so I was tour managing that band a lot of the time as well as managing them, booking them and also running their label. So that was happening in '94. Back then you have no cell phones, no email, you're jotting down plans on the dashboard of a van, and then making as many return phone calls literally on pay phones at truck stops...I can't even remember how I did it.

On the marquee of Radio City Music Hall with My Morning Jacket, 6-20-08.  Photo by Linda Park.

Eventric: Ok, as far as your first steps with each new tour, what's the first thing you have to get together? Do you have a step and an outline, like a way that you go about doing things?

Eric: I try to be as proactive as possible. I help with the band's management and connect with the band's agent, and will help with routing if I can. A lot of times the band's agent will call me and just get venue suggestions or at least send me the venue's tech pack that they are planning on approaching and making sure that the production that we have historically carried or plan on carrying is going to work in those rooms.

And then as soon as I get an actual routing that's firm, I'll pre-announce or pre-confirm and I'll immediately go get my buses and trucks on hold. Especially in spring and summertime, when things get busy and competitive, it's just great to have all of those things blocked. Then I'll usually call all of our existing crew members, make sure they've got the dates blocked and from there start working on devising a tour budget and booking the days off, and touring and travel. Because those are all the things you can get done months in advance; obviously I get better rates on everything. Then depending on the venue - if you're in clubs - you can't really do any kind of production advance until a couple of weeks out. But eventually, moving into larger venues, you can advance farther and farther out. So a month and a half out, I'll start actually doing advance work, having that correlate with making sure all of our tech design regarding rigging plots, what we're carrying, what we're going to be doing, making sure that's all finished and then we're pretty much off to the races.

Eric Mayers on the Best Part of Master Tour:

"The fact that I can have other people in my organization, whether it's management or another stage manager or somebody else is able to access what I'm doing in real time and not have to worry about miscommunication."

Eventric: Do you use the same existing crew? Is this a base of people, like a core group of people that you typically tend to go to?

Eric: With my festivals, I absolutely am going reach out to a specific group of people that I need to have surrounding me: stage managers, audio companies, regionally, what have you. The bands have guys have their core group of people around them, so that is easier. With someone of the bands I've come on and I'm the newest guy.

With the clients that I have, I rarely use any of the same crew on different bands. I try to, and sometimes the schedule is such that I need to try and fill in stuff, I'll go to guys that I've worked with in the past, but usually it's...for The Decemberists for example, I was the new crew guy, the rest of the team was already in place, so it was more me getting to meet all of them.

Eventric: When it comes to planning, what's the hardest thing to plan? Being the new person and having to build relationships with new people?

Eric: Yeah, definitely, that's a big challenge. I really think that the hardest part of tour managing is trying to accommodate all of the different people, all of the time. It's just tough to make everybody happy. The budget may allow for 5 lights and the band may want 50, so there's a problem. How do you balance between production desires of a band that wants something to look a certain way but can only afford something else, for example? Or, how do you deal with the interpersonal situations? Personal problems, family problems, reliability. You just have to deal with the egos of everybody on the tour.

With The Decemberists band and crew at Mountain Park, Holyoke, Mass

Eric: For example when The Decemberists this past summer did a special all request show at the Metro in Chicago, as a secret pre-show for Lollapalooza, a particularly rare event where the Metro staff totally kicked ass. I mean these guys were ready for it. I walk in there all "what are we doing in this small place?" Then all of a sudden within an hour we're totally loaded in. They totally made it happen and everybody was feeling really good.

Eventric: They set a good example, right? Vendors on tours - how do you work with vendors?

Eric: With festivals I try to use and maintain all of my existing vendors that I can. You want a festival to be especially as turnkey as possible, and smooth and as routine as possible so that you know, it's dependable; the budgets are dependable from year to year, your profit margins can stay close to the same, you know, and as the festival grows, you can hopefully improve your vendor's profit margin as well as yours. Of course, though it's a balancing act. I mean, every couple of years it's important to put the whole job up for bid so that make sure that everybody is staying competitive, nobody's going soft.

The same thing goes with touring; I try keep all my existing vendors and I certainly give everybody the right of first refusal. But with audio and lighting and things like that, technology is kind of what drives your needs. Certain vendors that don't have some of the cutting edge gear that we may want to be trying, demoing and using on certain tours. I find that I stick with my trucking and bussing companies because they've worked with me and been really effective. I find that lighting and audio tend to be a little less, a little less concrete. You may work with somebody for three or four years, and something comes up and pricing or equipment or what have you comes in and changes things immediately. So, the bottom line is it's not my vendor; it's the band's vendor. I need to answer to them, prove to them why we're going with a certain vendor. You know, it's important to keep them current and fresh and competitive.

Eventric: Right. Do you have any big time vendors on any tours right now? Do you have any sponsors for tours?

Eric: I don't work with any sponsors. You know, it doesn't really happen like that. I mean, my trucking company for My Morning Jacket is Roadshow, and I think they're one of the biggest trucking companies in the country. My lighting vendor is the lighting vendor out of New York City called Scharff Wiseberg. They're more of like a theater company. We took them out last our '08 tour for My Morning Jacket and it was one of their first hard rock touring gigs that they'd worked on. They had really great equipment. They are an IATSE Local One company even so their whole tech team at the company itself is comprised of some of the best and most well-seasoned techs available and all their gear is impeccably maintained.

Eventric: How did you even learn about Master Tour?

Eric: Well, I had known about Master Tour for a while. I think all of a sudden there was some kind of marketing push and a user interface overhaul that I heard all about, looked it over and it just looked better; it looked easier to use, easier for me to figure out, and, it was just time to go for it.

Eventric: What's your favorite part, as far as Master Tour and what it allows you to do?

Eric: I think it's the syncing part. The fact that I can have other people in my organization, whether it's management or another stage manager or somebody else is able to access what I'm doing in real time and not have to worry about miscommunication. If I were doing an electronic tour book update or something, I would have to reprint the whole thing, build a PDF, bind it all together, re-email it everybody and say, "This is an update. Disregard the last one." And not everybody would get the info. Not everybody would be like, ok, we're looking at version 3.0 now? What's current, what's real? And then you/they just stop trusting what you're looking at or I end up being the one who has to answer all the questions, being that I'm the one that knows what the schedule is, that I'm in charge of it all. That's what the hassle is.

But with the Master Tour iPhone app, I said: "Geez, this thing can do real time, nobody needs to question the validity of it and say maybe this isn't the real schedule." Because if I were to advance the whole tour and make an itinerary and give to everybody, that's more than three weeks long, the dates two weeks out are unreliable. What if something changes or what if press gets added late or what if a second show is added or who knows what? All of a sudden...this way people in the band and the crew, they know that when they're looking at what they're looking at, it's as current as it can possibly be and they can count on it.

Eventric: Do you think Master Tour was pretty easy for you to learn how to use? Do you think it's pretty user friendly?

Eric: I think it is user-friendly. It's definitely...I think that you need to be relatively computer savvy to begin with to work your way through it and...I spend a lot of time on my computer and so for me, I thought I picked it up easy. This guy that I hired to be The Decemberists tour manager down in Australia, who was an admin level user as well found it extremely easy. I've got another guy that I work with struggling with it a little bit more, but it just took him a little bit longer, that's all. I think it's pretty easy.

Eventric: Would you say that it's ultimately saved you time and money? Improved efficiencies?

Eric: Absolutely. All levels. Just being able to pick venues, adding them on just the data entry part, picking a venue, picking a lot of hotels that I typically go to are already entered in there.

Eventric: So how about the other people who know how to use it - do they feel the same?

Eric: Yeah - I've had two tours so far. On The Decemberists in Australia, I sent out Andy McCulla, our domestic stage manager in my place. I also am working with Chris Thile and Punch Brothers; they are a progressive acoustic quintet, on Nonesuch Records that I'm co-managing with Jason Colton and Redlight Management. They went out and they loved it. From all accounts I certainly can say with confidence that I didn't receive a single email and/or phone call during either, any of the tours. "What's going on this day?" Or "what's my travel info"? Or "what hotel" or anything. It was all in there. I also was working with people that were responsible, a proactive forward thinking band and crew that can figure something out on their own and they usually will. As far as I can tell, I was kept largely and completely immune to the minutia of trivial questions that can come up when people just don't know.

Eventric: That's good. Do you use any other things to help plan tours? Do you have any other systems in place?

Eric: Other than Master Tour? Not other than whatever standard websites and web tools and travel websites and tools that you'd typically be using. I don't use any other travel based software packages or anything like that.

I'm not 100% roped into the computer although I have been going paperless the last year. I used to lug around, two giant three-ring binders that had EVERYTHING. And I just found myself referencing my binder less and less and less to the point where it's like, "I don't even know why I'm lugging this thing around."

Eventric: It seems that there's a lot of younger people involved, people your age doing things with touring. Do you find that is a trend now?

Eric: I don't think so. I definitely think that there is a lot of young, intelligent, responsible people that are coming up doing this. But I also think that...there's a lot of people 10 or 15 years older than I am that I'm working with closely and that I'm learning tons of information from daily. Just the new technology and getting information definitely makes things more efficient, but I think the bottom line is, how do you still set up your tour? How's your schedule? How's your advance? How are your crew calls? If you can disseminate as much information as you want but if it's not good information, the tour is still run poorly. So I mean, this has helped me distribute information really, really well. But I think it's most important to have a well-balanced crew and people that have tons of experience in actual show production.