Barenaked Ladies by Paul Myers

Author:Paul Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Touring Truths of Terry McBride

BUILD, BUILD, BUILD

“Six weeks on, two weeks off, six on, two off, never ending,” explains McBride. “The idea is that I’m going to visit a city five or six times over about an eighteen-month period, and I’m going to market this band. Every time I come through, they’ll play a bigger venue and we’ll just build it.”

NEVER PREACH TO THE CONVERTED

“I always believe,” McBride says, “that you should never play only to those who already know you. So I’ll always stick Barenaked Ladies in venues that are slightly bigger than what they need, and I don’t care if I don’t sell that venue out. I just want to make sure that people who decide to come that day can still buy tickets. If a venue sells out, so be it. But I want to make sure that everyone who wants to come to that show has a chance to come to that show because I’m so confident that my band is so good live that people will walk out and buy the records.”

YOU CAN’T GO BACK

“You know,” continues McBride, “sometimes a city has a three-thousand-seater [theater], and then the next biggest room is like an eighteen-thousand-seater. You’ve already sold out the three-thousand-seater. It makes no sense to go back to that again. You’ve got nothing to gain. So you know what? You’ve just got to go into the eighteen-thousand-seater, knowing that you’re only going to get six thousand people. So be it.”

WALK-UP TRAFFIC GIVES YOU “BUMPS”

According to McBride, when you play in front of three thousand people, your record sales are likely to go up three and four hundred units. “That tells me,” McBride says, “that someone brought a friend or someone decided at the last minute to go with a bunch of friends, saw the show, was completely blown away, and went out the next week and bought the record. You know, another fan down. A convert. Like, ten percent of the people at a show went right out and bought the record on the way home. Pierre and I used to sit there, with Eric [Fritchie] the [Reprise Records] product manager, and watch the SoundScan bumps just to judge how good a job we were actually doing. We’ve seen it happen time and time again, where the SoundScan week-after ratio showed a huge bump. Funnily enough, the band started watching them, too. And that’s what gave them a lot of the extra juice to keep going, because they actually saw it working.”

The band was concerned about playing the same set of songs in a town within such a short time, and worried that it would sound stale if they did. “Well, then,” McBride told them, “you’d better think of another set to play. Because you know what? This is what you have to do. You know, any artist that I have has to be able to perform, to portray their character. People have to be able to get sucked in and walk out going, ‘Wow, I really liked that.

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