Mike Gordon and Leo Kottke – Car Carrier Blues – “I Don’t Like Driving, Take the Train If I Could Choose.”
My boss sent out an email a few weeks ago that said we had some extra travel money. As someone that enjoys traveling, I got excited. Of course, going places for work, is nothing like the joy of traveling to go see your favorite bands, but somehow I keep coming back to the analogy that I am about to go on Fall Tour. I can better understand the excitement and the reservations that extended travel can create for frequent travelers, like the bands I love to go see.
My observation is that bands and fans do the most amount of traveling in the summer. Hopefully that meant carpooling or some other sort of energy saving practice for fans and bands. Thankfully most of bands associated with this site; do not have separate buses for each member.
So as students go back to school, and band's go home to see family and friends, perhaps some people will make a more focused effort to stick around their local area to reduce their environmental impact caused by traveling to shows. I feel lucky being in DC that most of the places I want to go see music are within walking, biking, bus, train, or some other form of mass transit (I am still working on my non-polluting combination tele-port/time travel machine). It is also exciting to think that you might actually spend more time seeing music than traveling to see music. Don't get me wrong, road trips are fun, but it is kind of like driving an hour to enjoy nature by taking a 30 minute hike. To me that just does not add up.
So if you are lucky enough to live in a big music market, think about how you are going to get to your next show. More than likely you have some sort of alternative to driving, something to make up for all of the miles logged this summer. I will certainly be thinking about my travel impacts while on my upcoming work trips and maybe some of these will lead to ideas that could transfer over to traveling to see music.
