Publication:
MaximumRockNRoll

Author:
Felix Von Havoc

MRR #208 Code 13 tour diary
Before I talk about the Code 13 Pacific tour there is one thing I'd like to bring up. As anyone in America who drives a car knows gas prices have skyrocketed lately. For the benefit of you people overseas, US gas prices have doubled in the last years. I'm not going into the reasons why or political ramifications here, just one side affect. For bands on tour gas is the number one expense. The USA is a huge country and especially in the Midwest and West shows are frequently 500 miles or more apart. A lot of trucking companies these days are either raising prices or charging a "fuel surcharge" (an extra percentage based on extra fuel costs in the hope that gas costs will come down and regular prices be re instated) Now, I started going to shows back in 1983. In those days all punk shows cost 5$. Fast forward to 2000, still most punk shows cost 5$. The five dollar show is a sacred cow of the punk scene that must die. In 1983 I was working for minimum wage, 3.35$ an hour. Gas was around 50 cents a gallon. New LPs were 5$ and 7"s 2.50. My mom was renting out two of the rooms in our house for 100$ a month, etc. etc. Are we all in agreement that the cost of living has gone up, up, up in the last 15 years but the cost of shows has stayed the same. Maybe Black Flag and Seven Seconds could tour and break even at 5 bucks a head in '83 but I doubt most bands can now. In fact as long as I've been in bands we counted on the sales of records and t shirts much more than gig receipts to pay our way. If you tour in the summer you are playing with maybe three or four other out of town bands each night That leaves very little to go around. At today's gas prices, very little indeed. I think its time we accept the fact that 6-8 bucks is a more reasonable price for shows today, it sucks but its reality. See you at the gas pump.

In May and June of 2000 the band I sing for Code 13 went on a Pacific tour. We played the Bay Area, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and LA. Over the next month or two I will recount my experiences on this tour not so much as a tour diary, but as a practical guide as to how your band could pull off something like this too. I'm going to go into some detail and my personal observations about different countries scenes and societies will be mixed in. Keep in mind these are my personal opinions, not those of the whole band. Furthermore, I got a lot of flack for my observations of Europe last year. My point of view is distinctly American, Midwestern, Working Class and Punk. If you are not an American Midwestern Working Class Punk you will probably not see things the same way as me and disagree with some of what I say.

First, Code 13 is not the first band to try this sort of thing, we took our inspiration from All You Can Eat and Your Mother, who really paved the way for this sort of international touring. Devon and Craig helped with advice and contacts and most of all with inspiration and proving it can be done. That said, this is probably one of the first times a US hardcore band has attempted to tour the Pacific region as a whole in the same manner one would book a US or European DIY tour. Also world traveler Dumpster (aka Dumpy) provided some advice and guidance. You can read about some of his travels in his PE interview a few years ago.

Its quite popular these days to take a back pack and travel around SE Asia, or Europe. There are however, some significant differences between this sort of travel and touring as a band. As a backpacker you can take you time see the sites and most importantly adjust your schedule to take advantage of the cheapest possible flights, boats and busses. As a touring band you are on tight schedule and there is no excuse for not being in the right place at the right time, no matter what it costs. The tight schedules of touring mean you get to do very little sightseeing or relaxing. Mostly you just see the insides of vans and busses and tiny clubs. The advantages are that you have a source of income while you are travelling to help cover your expenses. You are generally hooked up with places to stay and you get to meet lots of great people and see lots of good bands. As AC/DC once said though "Its harder than it looks." There is a lot of frustration, lots of "hurry up and wait" time wasted. The strain of being with your band members 24 hours a day for two months in alien surroundings is pretty stressful.

One stereotype foreigners have of Americans is that we are all rich. While America may be the richest country on earth, most foreigners don't seem to realize that 80% of that wealth is in the hands of maybe 10% of the population. The remaining 20% is still a lot of wealth but we also have a sizeable middle class. While our standard of living is very high by world standards, I think its safe to say most punk kids are closer to the bottom of the scale than the top. As for the guys in Code 13 we are all from middle and lower class families and work full time to survive. Trevor and Mitch are cooks, Shane is a tattoo artist and I work construction and run Havoc records. Shane and I do alright as we are self employed but none of us are rich, or even middle class. People just assume that all Americans are rich kids with nice guitars, Cadillacs and credit cards, it just isn't always so.

How did we set it up? People kept asking me who organized the tour for us. As if there was some booking agent type who could book 28 shows in 8 countries and you just have to call them up and send a copy of your demo. It's all about contacts and the DIY network. Each country, like the USA has a network of punk enthusiasts booking gigs, setting up shows, and playing in bands. I contacted the right people in each country and pieced it together. I asked around a lot, wrote to people, e mailed, looked on the back of 7"s and mentioned things in this column. Where we wound up playing was where we had contacts. We didn't find out until after everything was set up that we could have gone to South Korea (sorry Korean kids!). We tried hard to find a contact in Indonesia but no one stepped forward. My priority in finding contacts was that they be 100% DIY punks, no rock business promoter types or anyone outside the scene. I think in some places we made a lot less money because of this, but I think in most places we played better shows and probably got better pay because the people inside the movement really care about the music. To me DIY is about doing it BETTER than the mainstream music business, because we are passionate about our music and culture so it is more than just a business to us. In a lot of places we went there were no commercial punk/alternative music industries anyway. I assumed that commercial/mainstream bands like Rancid, NOFX, Sick of it All etc. toured over in Asia all the time. Outside of Japan and Australia this was not the case. In fact some places like Malaysia and Thailand have a chance to organize a DIY underground scene BEFORE a mainstream commercial scene gets off the ground. Honestly I think in Malaysia they are already doing a top notch job. So I wrote, e mailed and faxed around the world and got a plan. I'll have to eat my words here again on the internet. I used to hate the internet and think it was for squares, but there is no way I could've set something like this up without the simple means of global communications the system has placed on my desk. The internet is helping connect punk scenes around the world to each other faster than we think. We are standing at the verge of a truly global underground culture. To those bands considering a tour like this. If you aren't already the kind of people who write to and trade records with people all over the world and have a lot of contacts, you this sort of thing is probably not for you. Another thing to keep in mind is that Code 13 has been touring, recording and playing steadily for six years. We are not on a big well known label, and have never released a full length. However, we are dedicated to our music and the kids who like it and we've been in the trenches playing gigs for nothing and putting out 7"s for some time. We had already done four US tours and Europe before attempting this. Also we put out a discography CD and locally dubbed cassettes in most countries in order to get our music out to people. I personally was somewhat known from my columns in MRR, PE, Heart Attack and Doll Magazine. Our 7"s have each sold between 5-7,000 copies, not to mention all the cassette versions around the world. This translates into a certain amount of name recognition and/or familiarity with our music in places we played. I wouldn't try to pull something like this off after putting out a 7" and doing an East Coast tour. Not only will you lose a lot of money, it simply isn't fair to the people who are going to bust their ass to set up gigs for you, give you places to stay etc. In a lot of places we played setting up gigs is significantly more difficult than in the USA and Europe and if you haven't paid your dues and built up a fan base you don't have any business going just because you can.

The nuts and bolts. This whole tour was expensive to set up. I spent about 11,500$ total. Luckily I've got good credit so I managed to borrow 6,000$ of that. The rest was money saved from putting in long hours of roofing houses and laying ceramic tile during the week and selling records and t shirts on the weekends. Our biggest expense was airfare. We traveled by air between all the countries (except from Singapore to Malaysia). It would have been possible to travel overland in SE Asia but it wound up costing the same to fly. Craig of What Happens Next (formerly of Your Mother and All You Can Eat) gave me the best advice in finding air fares. You should check the travel sections of newspapers from major cities such as NY, LA and SF. Look for ads by "consolidators" or "bucket shops." These specialize in "around the world" or "circle Pacific" fares. These are packages of one way flights with stops in major travel destinations. For example the ads will read something like NYC-Rome-Johannesburg-Delhi-Bangkok-LA 1400$. Most of these places have a web site too. Then look at travel web sites and read up on different packages. There are some sites dedicated to round the world and circle pacific fares. You can browse hundreds of possible combinations or talk an agent into custom building one for you. In the end that’s what we had to do, as none of the packages included the Philippines. I was however, able to find three different agents with similar prices and play them off against each other until I got the lowest possible price. This meant a lot of phone calls and e mails but I wound up saving about 450$ (remember I was buying four tickets) off the lowest quote I got in the first round, just by haggling. I had to pay cash to get the best deal. All travel agents of this type seem to charge a 2% more than the cash price for credit cards. Theroretically I could have charged this to several cards and hoped we made it back. Instead I paid cash up front and took out a personal loan to cover it at a much lower rate. Himsa is currently setting up a tour of Asia and Derek told me about a fantastic offer from Air Cathay Pacific something like ten cities in Asia for 1000$, I only learned this after I'd booked our tour but its also worth checking out. We wound up flying on several different airlines and many of our stops were technically extended layovers. The way it all worked out we had to pay a lot extra to go to the Philippines but got to stop in Thailand for free and so on. Our flights were out of LA so we had to also book flights from Minneapolis to SF, SF to LA and on the return trip LA to Minneapolis. This way we could play both the Bay Area and LA as part of the tour. We chose to tour May and June because this is the cheapest time of year to fly in Asia, I don't know why, that just what I heard. The total cost of the tickets was 8600$.

On top of the ticket cost were some other expenses. One was visa applications (we needed visas for Australia and New Zealand). Most of these countries allow Americans without visas, but you better check first. It is quite important to remember that we entered all of these countries except New Zealand as tourists. It is illegal for bands to enter most countries and play because this is technically "working" without a visa. As many of you may have heard Intensity from Sweden came over to tour the USA this spring and were sent back to Sweden from the Minneapolis airport after the immigration authorities determined that they were playing here illegally. New Zealand, was the exception, they actually gave us work permits to play in New Zealand and were nice about it and punctual to boot. All we took with us were our guitar, bass and double bass drum pedal. When questioned in immigration and customs we always said we were on our way to New Zealand to play and just stopping off in wherever as tourists. This worked for us every time but you never know when you are going to get the asshole border guard. We took a minimal amount of merchandise with us in our luggage. This was primarily because we were afraid if we were searched they would: 1. Find out we were a band playing illegally and 2. Charge us customs or import tax on the merch. (True story, Micha of Farewell records was following a band on tour selling records at gigs. At the Swiss border they searched his car and made him pay a tax on all of the records and CD's in his car, even though he only sold a little bit of it in Switzerland) As it happened we probably could have brought a lot more stuff with us in our luggage as the cops mostly seemed to be looking for drugs and weapons and paid little attention to CDs and t shirts. T shirts are very easy to smuggle as you can turn them inside up and mix them in with your own clothes. Records and CDs you can say are gifts for friends, or stuff you bought while travelling up to a point. No cop is gonna believe this story if you have say 100 copies of your band's CD. Therefore we had to send a lot of stuff ahead. Shipping hundreds of CDs, 7"s and T shirts to Japan and Australia was expensive. The cost of the shirts, records, CDs and shipping added up to another 2400$. Once again, for those trying to set something like this up, unless you own your label, you better be sure your label is behind you 100% on stuff like this because selling stuff at gigs is your bread and butter no matter where you tour.

We flew to SF may 5th and rented a van at the airport for the weekend. This turned out to be a lot more expensive than we thought. In retrospect we should have paid some local punk kid with a car to pick us up, drop us off and take us to the gigs. We played at Gilman St. May 5th with Vulgar Pigeons, Godstomper, and Abstain. USV from Wisconsin was supposed to play but their van broke down and they didn't make it. This wound up being a really great show and there was a special surprise at the end. Markstein and Cyber Nate both live in the Bay Area now so there was an impromptu four song Destroy reunion after the Code 13 set. Now all you jokers who yell out "ode to ramen" at Code 13 gigs have missed out a second time. Speaking of which, Destroy was around from 88-94 and did two US tours and put out an LP, a 7", two split 7' and comp tracks. We never got much support while we were together and only played a handfull of really great shows. Most of the time people stood with their hands in their pockets and waited for the next band. As Urban Dance Squad once said "you're famous when you're dead." So now six years after we broke up everyone is wearing our t-shirts and patches and our 7" sells better than a lot of new bands on Havoc. Code 13 sold a bunch of shirts and records at this show, which really helped with our expenses. The next day we played Mission Records with Falling Over Drunk, Antagony, and one or two others. It was brutal grind night and we played a raucous set to a small crowd of true believers. I'd like to Robert for setting this up and the Gilman crew for their efforts as well.

The next leg was Japan. Masaki of the band Power of Idea and Tribal War Asia record label had set us up a tour. Masaki is known in Japan for trying to bring the DIY ethic into a music scene dominated by more mainstream music business attitudes and practices. However, there is a push not to copy US and English methods but develop a whole new "eastern way." We flew from SF to LA and changed planes. Then flew from LA to Tokyo. Because of the difference in time zones and the date line we left SF at 10 am Monday and arrived in Tokyo at 6 pm Tuesday. We then had to take a train into town and go directly to a gig and play. Jet lag, culture shock. Despite our condition I still think we played a pretty good set at Watts. This gig was with Social Crime, Minds Continue and I think, More Noise For Life. The next gig was in Nagoya at the famous Huck Finn Live house with Rotary Beginners, Reality Crisis, Social Crime and Face It. This was followed by a gig in Minobe with Exhale, Violent Party, Bleed for Pain and Sounds Like Shit. This was the smallest but best gig of our whole tour. There were only maybe 30 kids, most of whom were in one of the bands. However, all the bands were awesome and the energy level was super high. One of the most fun gigs I've played in a long time. Next was Niigata at Woody with Age, Doctor Snitch and Deride. Then we played Oyama at CrossRoads with Contradiction, Hate Candy, Destruction, Screen Out and Mamashi. The final gig was a return to Tokyo this time at Warp with Slogg, Dot, Power of Idea, and Battle of Disarm. After this we had to take a bus all the way to Osaka to fly to the Philippines. This because it was the cheapest way to fly to the Philippines, we had no gig in Osaka.

Here then are some general observations of Japan. From what I was expecting the gig turnouts were pretty small. The Japanese scene is very factionalized and people don't mix scenes nearly as much as they do in the US or even Europe. The shows we played were oriented towards the DIY crusty punk scene. There were very few hardcore kids or spikey-haired punks at the gigs like you would see in the USA. We mostly played clubs (called Live Houses) which were generally really small. The gig turnouts seemed to be usually about 75-100 people. Although most people in Japan can read and understand some English, very few speak it well. In fact most speak very little so communication was often difficult. Luckily punk is a universal language so what we could not communicate with words we did with rock and roll. Only Yas of Devour Records who lived in Boston for years and Erica of Record Boy spoke really good English. This is a stark comparison to Europe and everywhere else we'd been where most people spoke at least some English. That said, America's second rate educational system barely teaches us any foreign languages at all. I think Spanish should be taught in schools from the beginning and other languages offered at a younger ages. I am the only member of Code 13 who studied a foreign language, Russian, which so far has been useless everywhere. Gig and sound checks in Japan are taken really seriously. Set times are strictly adhered too and the sound is perfect. The bands all have really nice gear, Rickenbacker basses and flying V guitars are very popular. Some of my favorite bands are old Japanese hardcore bands like Gauze, Lip Cream, Systematic Death, and Outo. But those bands are not too popular in the DIY scene today because most of them were on major labels etc. It was hard for me to explain when people asked me my favorite Japanese bands that I was just interested in the music from being a record collector and I really didn't know too much about the band's business practices and so on.

In general I'd say the average Japanese band is much better practiced, has better sound and equipment, and all around takes their music more seriously than most bands anywhere else in the world. The Japanese scene has been criticized in the past for being all style and no substance. That is Japanese bands copy English and American style blindly and have the look and sound down perfect but add little in the way of originality or social comment. I think this is true in a lot of cases. However, Japan is just about the only country in the world powerful enough to stand up to the USA in terms of culture as well as economics. Japanese hardcore has its own distinct sound and many of the bands I think are more talented and better rehearsed than the bands they set out to imitate. The result is of course developing and moving the sound forward. In the crust scene there is a very strong influence of late 80s UK punk like Antisect, Doom, Extreme Noise Terror, Amebix etc. This style and sound are prevalent although we did play with some bands who had either a more traditional Japanese hardcore sound or some that were totally unique (check out Rotary Beginners, a really cool sound and totally different). I was expecting to hear more "fast core" and "power violence" but actually saw very little of that scene. At the gigs in Japan there is generally little in the way of dancing and chaos, just people crammed in together clapping politely between songs, then total silence.

Everything in Japan is very expensive and crowded. The whole country is densely populated and most people live in tiny apartments. Seriously, typical Americans living rooms are bigger than most Japanese apartments. Japan is very clean, safe, modern and uptight. Everything runs on time, smoothly and by the book. There is virtually no crime or poverty. Like a lot of developed countries I've been to, people think America is a really rich country. While America is rich on paper, I think the average person in Japan has a higher standard of living in terms of health, and safety. Japan is very culturally homogenous, I saw only one or two white people in the country and they were at our shows. I know there are lots of Philippino and Korean workers in Japan but they seem to be kept well out of sight as all I saw was more Japanese people. I contrast this to my own neighborhood where Whites, Asians, Native Americans and Blacks all live alongside the Latino majority. Prices for everything in Japan are really high. Records are no exception, new punk 7"s are around 10$ each and Lps more like 25$. Our gigs were cheap DIY gigs and they were 25$ to get in. Lots of US bands tour here and charge like 50$ for the gigs. We sold our shirts and CD's for 13$ each and 7"S for 6$. Some of that reflected the high shipping costs but also just the high price of everything in Japan. At those prices our stuff was really cheap to most people and we sold an amazing amount of t shirts and all the CD's and 7"s we brought with us. This really saved our ass as far as the tour went as we made more than half of all the money we made on our whole tour in that one week in Japan. I noticed that T shirts sold a lot better than records or CDs. I brought what I thought was a good selection of records from the US and Europe as well as some rare stuff but most people passed it up for the t shirts. You can find just about every rare punk record you ever wanted at record stores in Japan but at three or four times the normal price. Japanese rarities are expensive but not as much as US and European stuff and I wound up buying a lot of classic 80's Japanese HC as well as all the new releases. Ironically most of these records cost about half as much to buy in the USA or Australia. In Japan records are more expensive in the same way CD's here are priced at 12 or 15$ when they only cost about 1$ to make. In stores the Japanese 7"s all cost about 10$ while the US imports are only 6$. Everyone charges more for Japanese records because they can and every one else does it. In fact all the vinyl is manufactured in the USA and England as there are no more record pressing plants in Asia. (one or two in Australia and they have a bad rep, most of the Australian labels also press in the USA). After the gigs we usually went to "parties" at restaurants. No one lives at a place big enough to host a lot of guests so restaurants have private rooms for parties. For about 20$ you get some beers and a little food. This is where most of the punks hang out together. There is a lot of "star treatment" getting you picture taken with everybody etc. Some nights we had our pictures taken for maybe 30 minutes solid with different people. The girls come onto you really hard but not looking for action, more like because its cool to get your picture taken with your arm around the guys from the band. Japan is totally non violent. I didn't see any fights, weapons or violence. This despite lots of beer at the gigs. There was no violence in advertising etc. a total change from the USA where you see billboards of gun toting action movie stars and heavily armed cops and security guards. I saw guys selling records at gigs leave piles of money on their tables while they went to the bathroom. We never worried about having our gear stolen out of the van like to you in the states. Most Japanese are short compared to us. Shane and I are pretty short and for once we were normal height, while Mitch and Trevor who are both over 6 ft. constantly had to duck to get in doors. Being a vegetarian in Japan is rough as everything has fish in it. I went to a big grocery store and stood in an aisle fifteen feet long with nothing but ramen. I asked my Japanese friend which brand of ramen had no fish. Answer, None! The scene is pretty male dominated though there were lots of women at the gigs and some involved in bands. Compared to the rest of Asia though it was a feminist paradise, as women are much less liberated everywhere else in Asia we went. In contrast to weapons and violence booze and pornography is totally accepted. Skin mags are sold on the magazine rack at convenience stores right next to news and children's magazines. Japanese porn comics are really graphic depicting rape, bondage etc. but it's all right there in 7-11. There is no drinking age that I know of, and if there was it would be unenforceable since you can buy beer at vending machines everywhere. Think about how long a beer vending machine would last in the USA. We got to do zero sightseeing or tourist stuff in Japan, just gigs, driving and some record shops. We did get a chance to go to a Japanese toy store where Mitch stocked up on Hello Kitty gear and Shane loaded up on Ultraman figures.

If you tour Japan bring lots of shirts, make sure to print mostly small and medium and do some in girly colors like yellow and red too. Bring lots of buttons and patches too. In Japan I don't think there is much of a concept of a "package deal" or "the more you buy the more you save" we sold shirts, buttons and CD's as a set for a small discount and people were stunned. When I tried to give free buttons and stickers to people who bought lots of stuff, they thought I'd make a mistake and wanted to pay more. Also if you tour Japan bring lots of extra t-shirts to give to the gig organizers and people who help out. Giving gifts is very important, in Japan people will give you stuff, make sure you have something to give them in return. The bottom line is that due to the nature of the Japanese scene you will probably make more money in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Masaki had expenses of about 1800$ for our tour and we made that back in four shows. In the end we covered all of Masaki's expenses and still made 1045$ from the gigs and 4070$ from merchandise sales. It would take you months of touring the states to make that much money. This really subsidized our whole tour in SE Asia and made the whole tour more affordable. I'd go back to Japan any day, the bands and people were great and hopefully their DIY scene will grow.

That about covers Japan, next month I'll talk about the rest of Asia and maybe Australia and New Zealand too.

Publication Date:
January 1, 1988

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