It was a foggy night leaving Denver. The tour was nearing its end with a few shows left until completion and six hundred miles and 8 hours’ drive to Kansas city, we didn’t have time to spare. This tour was a major landmark for me in my road dog years. I think I earned more than seven extra years on that tour in my experience and merit badge earning power on that tour, more than any other reason, I became a bus driver.

The fatigue with the tour was higher than some because the general experience with the band and crew was one wrought with bus issues and that night the universe stepped in to take the band bus out of its misery, and if we were not lucky the last week of the tour was slated to go with it.

Growing up on the road with family, I began to associate the tour bus and road life with family and extension of home. Music making is a wonderful thing, but if you are a performer (and even if you are not) the music profession often calls you to travel to places near and far. It is part of the job description, to have a job that cannot be delegated. You are the vacuum salesman, and the vacuum. Because of this strange vocation which requires so much travel, the tour bus becomes a piece of home and safety amidst a hectic life experience. Instead of hopping on a new plane flight every night with a rolling bag of your essentials and getting to a new hotel room in the next city, a tour bus is like a moving mini house full of the limited but essential elements of home. You may not have your bed but you have your bunk. You may not have a library of books, but you have a stack of your favorites. You may not have a living room with your favorite chair, but you have a lounge to feel at home and soak up a good movie or a show without packing up your things each night. Wherever you go, you take a little home.

After establishing this bond to the tour bus life while having the gift of music and touring during my teen years alongside my own parents and siblings, I continued the tradition with my own kids. I love being on tour, and my wife and I have always better together on the move. Over the past couple decades, we had done countless tours but the buses were always leased for each tour, I had never dared to consider purchasing one of my own, let alone driving one. On many tours I was the brother who opted to bring kids more often or even lease a second bus for longer to have family alongside me, but it was never quite enough. I just like sharing the road life and my little family unit grew up feeling that love while on the road. I didn’t want to do another major tour without a place that my whole family would feel right at home and it made sense to move past a lease and get one I could make my own.

A few months before the tour kicked off in 2022, I took the leap and crossed over to the other side, I became owner operator of 45 feet of sovereign soil, I bought a tour bus.

The street poetry of this experience driving and operating the bus has an entire books-worth of musing, so I’ll save some for the printed page, but the protagonist of this fated night in Denver was a tour bus that joined my family just a few months earlier in the summer of 2022.

The tour was nearing the end, which meant we had covered most of North America with over thirty concerts while supporting the Red Green Blue Tour. The tour was a great one but the theme of Bus travel was at the heart of the story for reasons both good and bad.

All tour I was cruising down the road like the partridge family in my vintage Prevost, but the band and crew were on their own adventure, carried down the road in one of the worst tour bus’s (and drivers) on record. Near the end of a thirty-seven concert tour could also speak with a small piece of authority regarding the factors which make you successful in moving humans and fifty thousand pounds of moving machinery down the road and I can say with a degree of confidence the tour bus and driver were missing a lot of the essentials.

The Tour bus driver is one that gets you from A to B, but most importantly that place is one that a group of people need to feel safe and comfortable and this tour felt like neither. Having followed the pandemic, every musician on the planet appeared to have gone on tour for the first time in a couple years. The problem with everyone getting on tour was that everyone was renting bus’s and that meant securing a tour bus for lease was nearly impossible.

The bus we were able to lease for the tour was a last resort leasing company which meant a bus in poorer condition and a driver with even poorer skills. I learned that from a bus length away as I was not traveling with them but the look on the faces of each guy told me everything. The air suspension on the bus which allows for a smooth ride and prevents the bus from feeling bumps along the way was low and throughout the tour the air ride failed. With no maintenance team available the air ride was left without repair. Amidst one of the hottest summers I can remember, the band bus lost power to the AC unit and multiple times the place of relaxation and respite because a hotbox of sweat and discomfort.

The incidents during the tour were becoming a cautionary tale for those who may become lessees of third string tour buses.

Underneath the Chicago House Of Blues where we have played countless times, the driver (who will remain nameless) woke the tired crew with a thundering crash as he pulled out at top speed and drove the bus into a proverbial sink hole left in the eroding gravel basement back of house alleys. While most the band and crew were tucked into their tour bus bunks the bus hit his pothole the size of a small car so hard that most the band came tumbling out of their bunks, dashing humans and liquor and pop cans to the floor of the hallway and up front kitchen in a sudden crash. The rest of the tour the bus smelled like a dive bar.

In Tulsa during a day off, the other tour bus (which was struggling with the air suspension already) had miscalculated its height and bottomed out the bus on a small sloping exit from a surface parking lot, requiring the entire crew to offload our traveling trailer and for the bus to be towed off the ramp with a semi-truck wrecker. The stories go on from there, but needless to say in order to make the point, this foggy night in Denver was the last dance for that particular band travel vehicle.

As I left the concert in Denver, I could remember feeling relieved to get into our drive cause I was actually looking forward to a longer drive across the country that would allow a bit of quiet for the busy brain that goes with the show day grind. The family were all settled in and I had grabbed a bit of rest post show before preparing for a long drive through the night to get to the next city. During any tour there are strings of multiple concerts in a row in different cities. In some cases, we could be in a different city every night for three or four days in a row without a show day break, but in most cases the locations we move to are only within a few hours. In this case we could not secure a concert date any closer than Kansas City so we had to make the eight hour and over six hundred mile drive that night otherwise we would not have a show. As the performer and the driver, that longer drive is a bit more of a stretch, but with a couple hours post show sleep and a lot of red bull I was good. Also, as much as I am accused of taking the crazy pills as a bus driver along with my own tour, I never allowed myself to drive when I was actually too tired. The joy of a tour bus is that when you feel tired, you find a spot to park and you lay down in your bunk. I was always able to do this as well because the band bus which was driven by the full time driver was carrying all our equipment so I always had a few more hours of time to get myself to the next city since I would not be the delivery vehicle of the band equipment which needs multiple hours each day to unload and set up for the show.

With red bull in tow and Willie’s “On The Road Again” playing in the cockpit I rolled down the misty night and a few miles outside of Denver I passed a large blue and red flashing lane. Surrounded by some construction and moving under an overpass, the wet night obfuscated the vehicles that were behind the flashing lights and construction cones but I noticed quite a scene in the far right lane as I cruised east towards Kansas.

Within just a couple minutes I got a message from our tour manager.

“hey”…”How far are you down the road”, the message read with an audio voice text broadcasting through my CarPlay app.

“Not far, where are you guys” I replied.

“We’re on the side of the road”, “We were hit by a truck”.

My stomach dropped. I have toured the world many times over the last three decades and covered thousands of bus miles. In all those years, we have never had a vehicle accident with a bus. Hearing the update that the bus was hit by a truck was like hearing an echo of something that was never supposed to even exist. It was impossible to have an accident in a bus, right? Thirty years of touring and no incidents. Yes, we might have had a scratch here or there on a downtown urban ally way or the poor driving record which bottomed us out on the parking lot ramp, but ‘hit by a truck’, this was scary.

I was reassured that everyone was ok. They were shaken up a bit but nobody had an injury, but the big update clear. That bus would not be leaving Denver.

I found the closest off ramp and turned around giving the family bus an update that we had just had a major incident. Knowing there had been other issues with that bus we first thought it could have been cause by malfunction of some kind but no, this was a full side swipe of the tour bus by a double length semi-trailer.

As I pulled up behind the tour bus, sirens and lights were spreading blue and red across the still very misty air and the construction area which they had pulled off near was blocking half of the highway already. I could see as police were gathered around the bus and in front was a double length semi-trailer and truck. It looked surreal.

I slid in directly behind the bus in my chariot and felt my heart racing, how could this have happened. Inside our bus the family troupe was preparing for anything. All the big kids woke up and began prepping to possibly bring the entire band and crew on to our bus in order to get off the highway and maybe directly on to Kansas City. How else would we get ourselves to the show without another bus. The other challenge in front of us was all of the equipment.

On a medium sized tour, we have limited production equipment so we don’t need a full semi-truck, so often we have a large trailer which is pulled behind our band bus. If we were going to perform the next day’s show, I was going to have to move that trailer on to my bus and get that gear to the next city and the clock was ticking. I parked the bus and locked in the parking air brake, threw on my raincoat and moved up toward the band bus to meet the band and tour manager. Moving alongside the bus I was in shock. The back windows of the bus were a spider web of shattered tempered class with a gashed side swipe streaking across the back left side. Moving down the forty-five-foot bus and to the front lounge and drivers side, the side mirror was taken completely off and the drivers window was also shattered. There was no way this vehicle could be driven tonight, even if the suspension and other elements were given a clean bill of health.

Walking around the corner to the band bus door I climbed inside to see a host of half pajamaed band members and crew in a stupor. Everyone was in a mixed state of shock, anger and disbelief. Thankfully the fact that everyone was ok allowed for the nervous laughter. Knowing that nobody was hurt, we had to laugh at just how insane the scenario was.

The collision could have been fatal but thankfully it was not. Apparently, the event that occurred was that the large semi-truck did not see the tour bus while merging into the foggy night and in an aggressive lane change sliced the tour bus nearly pushing it off the road and decimating the left side of the bus. As the truck slammed into the bus it shattered the back windows and drivers and to the team inside it felt like…well it felt like they were hit by a truck.

As we gathered our senses a new plan was forming. Firstly, this bus was clearly not making any more drives, so all of the band and crew began to gather their essential items and offload. The next question was whether they all had to load up on our bus in order to make it to the next city. The most critical logistical question was, can we get the trailer off the injured bus and on to mine. We determined in the hour plus since the accident that the remaining band and crew could get themselves to a hotel and find a way to fly to Kansas City just in time for load in of the gear, but there had to be gear there for them to load. It was time to get the trailer on my bus and for me to get down the road.

I have heard it said in sports that the axiom on performance is to recognize you are never 100% on game day. Game day is when you have to deliver and regardless of your preparation and training, once it’s time to deliver you just have to do it. In one other case I had loaded a trailer on to my bus but this time we were on the busy side shoulder of a highway, late at night in the fog and there was barely room to make the maneuver. Our bus driver was moving around the bus still in shock with literal duct tape attempting to tape the broken glass of his driver’s side window and a makeshift cardboard cut out to cover the space while the broken arm of the bus side mirror was mangled. He was not registering that the tour was officially over for that bus. Without a side mirror, the tour bus was able to pull forward on the shoulder and pull our twelve-foot trailer off the hitch leaving just enough room for me to pull alongside and then back up to re-attach to my hitch. I remember thinking to myself, this is really happening. I have no choice sort of a comedic “this is what I’ve trained for” came into my brain and a smirked to myself.

Outside the mood began to get a bit lighter as we had no choice to but to admit that the story unfolding was exactly that, a new war story from the rock n roll life. Outside my window Zac was documenting with his phone recounting the madness of the night. Knowing that the band was going to be staying a few hours in Denver before getting a flight that coming morning the remaining items on the bus that would have been moving down the road now had to find their way to my bus since they could not exactly take the coffee machine or the large cases of radios and merchandise which were under the tour bus.

The assembly line of our team slowly filed into our bus to leave the valuables which they could not fly with and the trailer was locked on to my hitch. Under the luggage bays we packed in any luggage we could and the remainder went to the van that was now roadside to pick up everyone and head to a nearby hotel.

Somehow, we had survived yet another potential set back on the open road, all we had to do now was head east. We had an 8-hour drive ahead of us, without stops for gas or any other interruption and approximately 12 hours until load-in at the next show.  

I pulled out from the wreckage of the bus and gave a silent salute and a relieved sigh. Playing in my head was the Star Wars soundtrack blasting as Han Solo shot into space from the blast of the Death Star in the distance. We had come through a close call and I had some driving to do.

The open road is a place I know well. It’s a calm before the storm; it’s a familiar place and forever new. As you roll out of never you quickly move from high elevations and mountain borderlands to an open midwestern landscape that feels like it may never end. Having lost an hour or so between the transition to our bus with gear and accoutrements I had little time to dally, so I put the blinders on and made our way east. We were now carrying the precious cargo (not just the family on board) but the fate of the remainder of the tour and I reflected in quiet just how strange it was to think that only a couple months before I had never driven a bus.

The drive was long that night.  With the mission known, I had a rotating circuit of the big kids popping up to check in on me and deliver a cold Dr. Pepper or a fresh coffee to keep us moving toward KC and before I knew it, I was watching the sunrise. As we moved toward the Midwest the rain died down but it was a big storm system so the air was still thick and the sky was grey.

 I’ll admit my eyes were heaving that morning as I rolled into the back parking lot of the theater, with about an hour to go until load in. I pulled into the loading area of the theater and was waved in by the couple production hands there already. Finding my way along the back of the theater I felt a soft relief, we made it. The show must go on.

The ritual of bus parking and setting up shop for a new day has many steps and by this point in the run I began to appreciate it sort of as a required relinquishing of the attachment to feeling rushed. Just like driving the bus, one thing that you cannot do is rush. You can drive with determination and focus and you can keep the pedal to the metal but you have to have your mind present and make each move with focus. Your head needs to be there in the bus. With bus parked I completed the parking ritual. Filing out, while the passengers were all still fast asleep, I moved around to the equipment bay. I unloaded the shore power cable which is the electric power extension that allows the engine to be shut off and the electric inside to remain on, like plugging the bus in to a power outlet. The large 50-amp cables are a bit of a workout to move but I needed the stretch after the eight straight road hours and 10 hours in transit. I hoisted the cables, switched off the generator and covered the front bus windows so the bus was now in parking mode for the day, we made it.

As I registered that I had a few hours before they needed me for soundcheck it occurred to me I actually could sleep but I was not ready. I stepped outside for a quiet reflection just to look at the back of the theater. As I looked at the parked bus and trailer, it began to pour rain, it was a downpour. I let the rain soak me, like a morning shower it felt almost like an exclamation point on the trip. We had road dust behind us and we were in our next destination, now it was time to clean up and do it all again. We found ourselves on the side of the road and decided to take the road less traveled (a road that continued), and that made all the difference.

-TAYLOR