ROCKY ROAD

You may or may not know this, but we're preparing to hit the road later this year. We'll be gone for a whopping 51 days and will experience a gorgeous FALL SEASON in regions of this country that NONE of us have been before! As exciting as this is, believe it or not, it is very bittersweet. Sure, we'll be away from loved ones and away from home, but that's not what will make the road rocky.

We're touring as a part of NACA which would take a series of lengthy blogs to explain sufficiently. The short story is we'll be performing in showcases and interacting with college students at conferences in convention centers. We'll be at three four-day conferences: Lancaster, PA, Covington, KY and Hartford, CT. The purpose of the conferences is to book us for a LARGE SCALE college campus tour for 2010. So, those of you with a calculator have figured out that 12 of 51 days will be spent doing the NACA conference stuff. What about the other 39 days?

Here's where things start to get rocky.

As a three-piece band, we've never ventured outside our home state of California. That said, it seems California is actually the BEGINNING rather than the END (a little 7k humor). What that means is we aren't a 'proven commodity' yet. Sure, you and your friends like 7k, but what about the rest of the United States? Now factor in the cost of fuel, not drawing an income from our day jobs and our need to consume food. See where I'm going with this? Don't feel bad if you don't...I'll explain.

Things are officially very rocky at this point.

Thanks to the current state of the music business, and the known fact that only a 'proven commodity' makes money playing original music on the road, 7k will be performing many COVER GIGS while on tour. That means we'll be playing your favorite AC/DC song, your favorite Journey song and dozens of other songs you enjoy singing and dancing along to while slightly or massively inebriated. Oddly enough, the classification 'proven commodity' doesn't apply to a traveling cover band. Even more oddly, clubs of all shapes and sizes in every city imaginable pay BIG MONEY (relatively speaking) for cover bands. If you can rock 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' and kick out a snappy version of 'Jessie's Girl' people will have fun, buy multiple drinks, cheer loudly, make-out with strangers and vomit in the parking lot. Most people would prefer to repeat that string of events in that order over and over again. Clubs pay bands to be the entertainment and evidently that entertainment consists of the same 50 songs whether you're in Omaha or Dallas or Boston or Daytona Beach.

It's no secret for 7k fans that 7k is not a cover band at heart. Although everyone knows of our genuine aim to please. It's also clear that this tour is the gateway for us to be able to tour next year. The tour next year will consist of mainly 7k getting paid good money for playing 7k songs with a cover gig here and there for some extra money. So this time around, we'll do what we need to do no matter how rocky the road. The way I see it, if you're trying to jump from trapeze 'A' to trapeze 'B' you'll be in mid-air, between the two, holding on to nothing for a short period of time. For 7k, trapeze 'A' is being a LOCAL band, while trapeze 'B' is being a NATIONAL band.

My guess is this won't be our last rocky road and I'm okay with that.

Someone asked me the other day what my goal for 7k is. An impressive answer sprung from my mouth before I knew it: "U2. U2 is my goal for 7k."

The adventure continues.