| |
Sister Hazel - Part 2
A True Team Effort
ANDREW: We all had different
jobs in the team effort. We found out there were different pieces
to the puzzle. I would say that Ken was definitely the mouthpiece
to the clubs. I don't know how I got stuck with it -actually I do
know - I am the accountant…
KEN: He wants to know where
the money is.
ANDREW: I'm the one that had
to go… I mean can literally remember times - and this is for the
bands just starting out - I can literally remember times when we
would come back after being gone for a week and going through all
the receipts and looking through everything and having to go to
these guys, "Here's $1.53," literally, or going, "You owe so much."
I'm serious -- after a whole weekend you come home and you're tired,
and you've been doing your thing for four or five days…
KEN: When your thing is going
through six bottles of Jaeger or [unintelligible] beer, that's going
to tap into your wallet a little bit. Initially I did a lot of the
stuff just to get it all rolling, but once we all committed to everything,
everybody had to…
RYAN: I was the first tour manager…
KEN: Ryan was the first tour
manager, where he had to book the hotels and stuff.
RYAN: And advance the shows…
KEN: (Laughing) No sex and drugs
for Ryan, he's out finding lost luggage!
Networking
KEN: When Hootie and Edwin broke
out of the Carolinas, and Collective Soul, Indigo Girls and Black
Crowes in the Atlanta area, and Shawn Mullins playing up there,
and we had Matchbox 20 which was Tabitha's Secret and 7 Mary 3 and
Creed and all these bands down in Florida…
ANDREW: And Four Squirrels…
KEN: And Four Squirrels, who
are sadly no longer a band, and some of whom are no longer with
us, also from Gainesville. And there was a lot of interest in a
band called What It Is and Big White Undies, and there was this
excitement and camaraderie instead of this competitiveness. And
all the bands, regardless of genres, would say, "Have you played
Sandpipers in Merrill's Inlet near Myrtle's Beach, and we'd say,
"No, man, could you give us the club owners name? Here's a club
in Atlanta, here's a cub in Macon, here's a guy in Columbus, here's
a guy in Tallahassee." We all just started trying to network. And
it House of Dreams, they got (us?) a deal with RCA. And it really
was helpful to have that camaraderie instead of a competitive nature:
All the Right Reasons
KEN: You gotta be willing to
do it. If you're doing it for the money, you're really doing it
for the wrong reasons. I mean, we've sold well over a million records,
and our lifestyles haven't changed significantly, and that's for
sure. We do it because everyone gets a piece of the pizza…we were
talking about it in the van over here…as tired as I was at four
o'clock this morning when I got picked up to go to the airport,
we're in NYC, a long way from Gainesville Florida doing interviews
like this, and we're doing a couple of TV things, and we're going
to have a sold out show with our friends Vertical Horizon at the
Hammerstein Ballroom tomorrow night, and all's right with the world.
Sometimes you have to, to quote our song, Change Your Mind - when
you're a little grumpy on the way to the airport, remember where
you came from -- and we're really good at reminding each other about
that.
No Regrets
KEN: A lot of work went into
this. We thought about everything. We were the band that was willing
to do…we first had to make sure we believed in the music, and once
we had that, once we had something we believed in, we never wanted
anyone to look at us and say, "Well, man, if you had only worked
a little harder here, if you had only stayed on the road a little
harder here… I mean we did 300-plus shows the first year "Somewhere
More Familiar" was out. And before that, we were doing 200-something
shows in a van and trailer.
ANDREW: And I have to be honest
with you -- from the beginning we did stuff that later on we realized
we were going above and beyond. But for us it felt like, "Man, we
gotta do this." Like when [Ken] was talking about going out and
flyering every time we'd go to a different campus and a different
town, getting out and flyering the town, and go the sororities and
fraternities and knock on doors and say, "Hey, we're playing tonight."
We did those kinds of things. It felt like, at the time, that of
course we're doing that - you gotta get people to the show. But
you find out a lot of times bands won't make that extra effort,
they won't do those little extra things that you may need to be
doing to lay your grass roots.
KEN: People are drawn to pure
art, but you still have to wave your arms and say, "We're over here,
take a look." We'd give away CDs - people would say, "What are you
doing, you're giving away your product, you're giving away your
livelihood?" But to us it seemed that for every one we'd give away,
five more would sell, or five more people would come to the show.
And next time we came back through that town, people would be singing
the words. And that started to get you fired up, and you'd play
to four people, and the next time you'd play to 14 people, and the
next time to 34 people and then maybe a 100 people the next time.
It was really cool to see it grow, a sort of grassroots growth.
And then people were talking about it on the Internet. And we would
come to club owners and say, "We have a plan. We know this worked
in this college town and this college town. You don't have to pay
us the first time - just give us some gas money and drinks, or whatever.
And I promise you by the third time we're down there we'll have
so many people in your club." Club owners…it's their business -
they have to have people drinking or they have to people coming
in and paying [for] tickets, and we understood that. And so we knew
that if we just got a chance, where he didn't have to pay the band,
we could build a following here. And it just worked for us. And
we appreciated it. We sent thank-you notes to the promoters and
we let all the local rags and newspapers know when we were coming
through town, whether they liked us or not. We just keep plugging
along so there was an awareness of Sister Hazel. We had T-shirts
we made up early on, and if we could sell one we could get an extra
hotel room, so Andrew didn't have to sleep in the "taco shell" (laughter)
-- it was a foam mattress that he'd sleep in between the two beds.
But promoters don't owe you anything, and radio people don't owe
you anything - they have a job to do. And we appreciate all those
people - and especially the people that buy your CD, and come to
your concerts. They're without a doubt the lifeblood of your army
marching.
For more information on Sister Hazel, go to www.sisterhazel.com
|
|
