The Lost Art of the Lost Band

There is a cluster of highways you have to pass through to get to the center of Sheffield, England. Built in 1961, this knot of roads is notorious for trapping drivers and then spitting them out all over town. In 2003, my old band, the Walkmen, got stuck in this three-mile loop and went around, no joke, 25 times looking for a club called The Leadmill. Each time, we went a little slower in front of a sign diagramming the system’s shape, arguing a little more pointedly. A few more times around, and they would have had to put us on the sign.

This type of nonsense doesn’t happen to bands much anymore, thanks to smartphones and GPS. At the very least, getting lost is now measured in minutes rather than hours or whole afternoons. But there was a time, not so long ago, when you could go wildly off course and drive to Chicago by accident—which we actually did once.

I don’t miss driving in circles, but I do miss the slapstick comedy of touring. It could be one of the best parts. The Walkmen wedged our van in the Drive Thru Tree in Leggett, California, causing a traffic jam on Drive Thru Tree Road. Spoon frontman Britt Daniel tells me about finishing a tour in San Diego and, five minutes into a two-day drive back to Texas, accidentally getting in the line to Mexico, eventually crossing into Tijuana at about 2 a.m. When the band turned around, U.S. Customs asked, “How long were you in Mexico?” To which they responded,“Ten minutes?” Their bus was searched top to bottom.

Tim Kingsbury of Arcade Fire recalls losing his red-headed, 6-foot-5 bandmate Richard Reed Parry on multiple occasions. In 2004, on their first tour through the South, they had a day off in Austin and went swimming in a nearby spring. The hour to meet at the van arrived, but Parry wasn’t around. Time passed, and folks might have been getting annoyed when Parry finally wandered up, a little dazed. Apparently, he had been swimming in the lake when a snake swam by on the surface of the water. Impressed, he followed it across the lake and then down along a dirt path. Eventually, the snake led him to a beautiful little waterfall. The snake hopped back into the water, and Parry looked up to see two girls in bikinis, taking pictures of each other. They asked Parry to take some pictures of them, and he said yes.

The days of touring modestly without phones and GPS could inspire a sense of purpose. Alex Scally of Beach House describes how he used to happily print out a little booklet of MapQuest maps for each tour, studying highways and byways in advance. Like him, I enjoyed plotting routes and taking an interest in where we were traveling through, and we both agree that we miss having a little less information in general. Cities rarely looked the way you expected them to. We rolled into Cincinnati for the first time in 1994 and found ourselves in a neighborhood, Over-the-Rhine, that looked shockingly similar to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where we had started 10 hours earlier. The first time we went to Los Angeles we drove through the entire thing without realizing it—it just wasn’t what we thought it would be.

Ultimately, though, it was the threat of genuine disaster that made for the most remarkable—and unifying—parts of pre-phone touring. People really could get left behind. And getting separated from the group could be downright frightening. There was another instance when Parry was nowhere to be found, and Arcade Fire was forced to start a show in a particularly questionable area of Birmingham, Alabama without him. Kingsbury remembers thinking to himself, “Oh my God, Richard’s dead.” He wasn’t. But, in the moment, there was no way to know for sure.

Facing serious problems on the road has united some of the most stable, long-lasting bands I know. The National frontman Matt Berninger tells me of a nighttime drive through the Italian Alps towards France. They took what looked like a reasonable shortcut on the map but didn’t comprehend the elevations involved, and the road just went up and up and up. Too far to turn around, but also running out of gas, they started to see abandoned trucks along the increasingly icy route. I’ve been in a couple of situations like this, where you have to call a band meeting to deal with a real problem—as opposed to discussing, like, how to record a bass guitar. It’s inherently funny because it never seems like the forum for legitimate problem solving. But you can get desperate enough in these situations to stop finger-pointing. In the end, the slippery climb was an important moment for the National, who eventually arrived at an empty customs house at the top of the Alps, with nobody for miles. They coasted down the other side.

For the Walkmen, the survival moment came in 2005, when we drove directly into Hurricane Rita (“just look at this hotel deal…”) and were awakened by air raid sirens and a mandatory evacuation of Beaumont, Texas. We spent 18 hours, through a night and a day, in traffic to get 40 miles out of the evacuation zone, complete with extraordinary heat, ominous road fires, a bug orgy, and people pointing guns at one another in traffic. All the while, we pushed our opening band’s gasless rental car with a pillow tied to our bumper. This sweet move landed us on the front page of the Houston Chronicle with a headline that wasn’t far from “Fucking Idiot Band Drives Into Hurricane.” The article closed with this wise quote from our drummer, Matt Barrick: “In the future we probably will try to avoid driving to the town that a hurricane is heading right toward in an attempt to get a leisurely sleep.”

If this stuff was happening every day it would have finished us, but it didn’t. And when we were lucky, getting lost could offer little pleasures and surprises. In Sheffield, we spoke with a lot of sweet, older English couples; after the inevitable “oh dear,” they would almost always tell us to go straight, even though England is all roundabouts. We tried around 10 exits in Phoenix before finding a series of graffitied cactuses that led to the club. And one memorable day, looking for a Florence and the Machine concert we were set to open, we took a wrong turn and drove into the middle of the Indianapolis Zoo. There’s some debate in our collective memory as to whether we drove into the giraffe exhibit or the ostrich house. But if you argue too much in a band, nobody is going to want to be in a band with you. So let’s just say it was something with a long neck.

Paul Maroon is a composer. He scored the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary “Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405.”