Commoner - BUS INVADERS Ep. 2175

Everyone in the band, including our crew, they're big dorks. So a lot of the time we're either sleeping with gear or on top of gear. Two blowouts on this tour. Battery died, we've been stranded three times. I've maxed out my AAA account. Alright, what's up y'all? My name's Tyler, this is Roman. We play in a band called Commoner. We've been on the Keep It Quiet Tour for the past month now. We're in Chicago playing the Cobra Lounge. And we'd love to show you our band, so let's hop in. This is the driver's seat. This is where basically Tyler, Beto, and myself do some driving. It's pretty awesome. We've got the co-pilot situation right here. Rules are, if you're in this seat, you've got to stay awake. I've fallen asleep a few times, I get yelled at for it. So stay awake. No per diem if you fall asleep as a co-pilot. So if you want to get paid, you stay awake. We don't have a driver. We don't really have a crew aside from our photo guy, Sonny. So outside of the band members, we're not going anywhere. So when we're driving at night, from Kansas City to Columbus, we do that overnight. So when we're doing those, you've got to have someone locked in. Right now you can see outside. It's snowing, hail, sleet, everything. So if we've got one person up here at 3 in the morning, it's just generally unsafe. So we're big on music, podcasts. We're a big Softboy Underbelly band. We listen to a lot of those interviews on the road just because it feels like there's people other than us for talking to each other. And I don't know. Lately it's been a lot of, I don't know, man, honestly. Anthony Green hard lore podcasts. Yep, yep. Anything off of Rebirth Records from Philadelphia. All the new Straight Edge stuff has been a repeat. Shout out to Start Today. I don't know. The other guys listen to whatever, but I usually have my headphones on. So a couple different accessories we've got accompanying us. I believe this was purchased about 30 minutes ago inside of an outlet mall here in Chicago. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but he is inside. Aside from him, we've got this very sweet gift given to us by Caroline. She was a 3-year-old. She obviously didn't write this, but she did make this. It's like a little terrarium. We stayed at their place. This is my buddy Tim. Shout out, Tim, from Richmond, Virginia. This is his little sister, or no, it's his brother's daughter. Brother's daughter, yes. Gave us this little terrarium, and we treasure it and keep it in here for good luck as this band has already seen two blowouts on this tour. Battery die. We've been stranded three times. I've maxed out my AAA account. So aside from that, we need some good luck. Thank you to Caroline for that. We've got a lot of cards I'll let you speak on later on. I play a lot of Magic, as you can see. These are all bulk cards that we don't really care for because we didn't hit on. So, yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, we've been trying to play as much Magic on tour as possible. We've had some smaller green rooms, so it's been a little hard, but the chance we get an actual full table, it's been pretty good. So, yeah, running that. We stop at LGS's a lot along the way to a local game store for those who don't play cards. But everyone in the band, including our crew, they're big dorks. So we typically do try and open as many cards as we can on the road, see the new stores. Our manager, Tuck, he plays in a band called Fifth Root King, and he is also very much into cards, opens cards on the road. We've been into LGS's in which we'll talk to them about it, they know we're on tour, and they've already met Tuck and know Tuck and tell him to say what's up. So everyone here is a big fan. We usually try and play, like, we'll show you in a moment, but actually some of these seats spin around. We've got actual table setups in the back of the van. We've got our snack bin full of awesome treats. However, most of them are either bad or half-eaten. We've been trying to experiment a little bit. Got these beer cheese pretzel sticks. Not very good. Didn't like them. We've got pistachios. This is showing how healthy we've been eating. This is for my mom. My mom's going to watch this. Yeah, exactly. We got these at the beginning of tour one month ago. A lot of Whole Foods. Canned LaCroix. You know how it is. Stays cold. We've got toys. We just went shopping. Hit us up. Brand deal, not a plug, not a sponsor, but would like to be. Welcome to our van. This is where all the magic happens. You can see Roman chilling. This is typically 90% of the time. We've got at least three in the van at all times, behind driver and passenger. These are all captain's chairs. I'll give you a little bit of breakdown here on this van. Typical E250 from the outside. We'll give you a little walk around there. As far as the interior goes, it's been completely redone. Not by us. We purchased this van on auction. It was previously a NASCAR staging car. It actually towed some of the vehicles. In here was their crew. They would run diagnostics outside of the track. We saw this online. I had been looking for a van. I'm a very big car guy. I've always been that way. I've actually used this site to purchase personal cars myself. We've been looking nonstop. This van came up, and it made a lot of sense. A couple of the livability things. It came with a TV. That was huge, just given the HDMI setup. We are a big movie van. Especially on some of these long drives. If you are not front or passenger, we have a hard split through the roof. We can run audio into the back of the van. A lot of what we do throughout is... I'll show you right here in the door. We've actually got an Xbox. It's a little dirty. Sorry about that. We've got a cup holder right over the Xbox. A lot of coffee. We run that straight up to the TV. Diablo 3. A lot of Halo. We play parked a lot of the time. But when it comes to some of those 10, 12, 14... unholy hour drives, some of the people back here will run that just to make it feel a little bit more normal. Some highlights here before I pass it over to Roman. We always keep water in the van. Aside from the snack bin, that's essential. You don't always know if you're going to get your rider. So when you do, and you don't finish it, I strongly recommend any vans that are starting to tour, bring that with them. Bring any of the rider you don't finish with you. Because there are stints of 3, 4, 5 days where you're on your own. And a lot of the time, depending on the van setup, you're sleeping in the van and not a hotel. We are a van band. Unless circumstances suggest otherwise, as in it's below freezing. So, or below zero. We've got a mini fridge. And it's usually full of Zero Sugar Monster and whatever rider stuff we don't finish. Go ahead and give them a little highlight. There's currently some Zero Sugars in here. There's a bag of chips. Not exactly sure why that's in there. And then we've got orange juice. Oh! And some Reese's. We've got some Reese's in there. Electric. You know, keeping it slim. Keeping it healthy. Vitamin band. Big Elderberry band. Trinket band. Let's highlight some of these here. We've got a McLaren F1 car that I believe Matthew built. Our bassist. While driving. He wasn't driving. He was passenger. He went and built this. I think we did lose about half of the pieces. This guy doesn't have arms. Nothing's really complete here. You know, typical. Airborne. Everyone is fighting, getting sick. So we have been very focused on making sure we get our vitamins in. This is our first full U.S. tour. And especially the time we left. I think there's been a bunch of articles being posted about how this is like the coldest winter start or the earliest start to a cold winter. I don't know. Typical unlucky situation for a band like us out of Arizona. So we have all been sick and got better and got sick again in the last month. But we're holding out pretty strong. Everyone's been good. We run a vitamin check every day for the band when we wake up and get in. But yeah, I'll let you explain the situation for sleep. Check it out. This is the back here. We got the dead seat. This is where nobody is because we only have five people. So we keep our bags here. And it gets kind of crazy. I'm not going to lie. However, these seats fold all the way down. So flat like a bed. And then so does this. Like that. Kind of. So you can sleep like this. It's very nice. But yeah. I guess the main thing is in the back there is where our gear is. So we can't really lay this flat. So we have to move all of our gear onto this table. Which if you play in a band you know it's almost impossible to do that. So a lot of the time we're either sleeping with gear or on top of gear. He was sleeping with one of these the other day. It's pretty dope. Cut to the picture of me. Yeah. But yeah. That's the situation. We got little airplane cubbies up here. More magic by the way. And probably more magic up here. No. I don't know what that is. Clothes and sleeping bags. Let's take a look at more things. More magic. And candy. More magic. And vitamins. And more magic. So we play a lot of magic. It's pretty awesome. But yeah. That's the sleeping situation. The magic situation. Alright. So I would say a really big focal point of this van and this band thus far we are not running a trailer set up. As you can see our buddies in Fox Lake and our buddies in Greyhaven are both running a trailer. They have been kind to us. Kind enough to let us gear share throughout this entire month. Very sweet lads for that. Helps us with the drive. And to be honest with you we are about to kind of venture into that trailer world ourselves. But up until now we kind of got lucky with some of the back line opportunities. So we've got a kind of makeshift storage situation for us here. This van has about 4 feet of depth in the trunk for storage. That fits all of our music related gear. So all guitars, basses, my snare, pedals, cymbals all that fit in the back of the van. However, you have a lot of supplementary items such as your own personal bags, then your own personal luggage and merch. Merch is the big one. So when we are fully stocked this is a shameless plug for you to buy our merch. When we are fully stocked we sleep pretty much with the boxes of merch. So if someone figures out a way to make it semi-livable, for me I find that letting my feet go numb is better than letting my hands go numb. So I'll just let my feet get crushed by whatever if I need to when I'm sleeping in the van. When we sell our merch and we reduce the amount of boxes we're carrying in the van, we sleep better. We play better for you. We do our job better. Yes. Buy our merch. We've got this box to store all our personal belongings. This is basically an all purpose situation for us. We've got anywhere from two of these massive duffels. This looks like our photo Sunny and Matthew's bag right now. However, a lot of time we will store crates. So like merch boxes from Home Depot or our buddy Travis at Relentless sent us some and his boxes compared to some of the other companies actually fit perfectly. So we can fit two full boxes of what I would believe to be a decent amount of merch into this little guy. It locks. It has not been broken into yet. I'm not trying to put that out in the world, but it has been tried. Already we've found some jarring whatever. There's just malicious ---- going on all the time. Sorry, I don't know if I can curse, but people are interested and when this is hanging off the back of the van it's kind of screaming to be opened. It's like a little chest. So for us, we try to keep our least valuable stuff in there and to be 100% honest, a lot of people don't want clothes that say our band's name. So when it comes to that or like our laptop, we're going to put our merch in there. Because we'll open that up and we'll see 200 shirts that say Commodore. What the hell am I doing with this? You can't sell that. It's worth nothing. But it does. It works really well. It actually has like a pivot and I will show you how it operates. It swings out so when we load in, I'm not going to do it. It's very heavy, but when we load in these will fully extend. So it's very easy for us to set up like a great example is we just played a show in Mobile, Alabama for free at a skate park and obviously there's not a ton of amenities so kids were asking about merch and they wanted to buy some clothes and we're able to set up like a makeshift little store here. Just open the crate up, throw some hangers in the back of these doors and we were able to play that show without any sort of hiccups because it's a very self-sufficient van. For a little bit of context, we did buy this van almost immediately before this tour. This is our first run out with it and before that we bought a van that was owned by a van called Portrayal of Guilt. They've been on this show. I'm not sure, but I think our van's been on this show. Our old van and their even older van has been on this show. 300,000 miles. The brakes lock up all the time. We took that out when we were on tour with Split Chain. We've taken that out to everything we've done before the Keep It Quiet tour. This was a very due upgrade. We love it. We're very happy to be in it. It is awesome. It's wonderful compared. We've got a lot of buddies of ours that are bus touring or we know them. They're out with Wage War, Chelsea Grin, stuff like that. They've got their own bunks. I'm happy to have my feet go numb from the merch if it means we can get some... It's all good next steps for our van. We love this van. We do love this van. It's got a lot of character. It has a story. A lot of vans don't have a story. They came from Enterprise or whatever. We've got really lucky with our set ups thus far. We're pretty happy about how it's treated us. Knock on wood, we've got five more shows left at the Keep It Quiet tour. Then we've got a comically large drive home and once we get back to Arizona, we'll send you a note and we'll let you know if it stayed as strong as it turned out to be. If it turned out as reliable as we say. $140,000 on it, still kicking. Thank you so much for coming through a tour of our van. Hopefully we covered it to the best of our ability. I would say a lot of the fun that's had on tour is with your friends on the road. Obviously love playing the shows, love meeting the folks that enjoy our music. We'll soon become new fans of ours and we appreciate that. Having a home away from home is really important. I would say that this van has done a great job at doing that for us. I would say do it. Doesn't matter what kind of van you have. We did it before with 300,000 miles on that odometer. It's scary. You'll sit in a shop for eight hours when you need the fix. I wouldn't trade it for the world and I know that none of these other guys would. We've been Commoner. You can find us on Instagram at Commoner Dreams. We just recently signed to Pure Noise Records. We put out a single. It's called Breach. We play that first every single night. If you've seen us on this tour or you're going to see us on this tour, please learn the words. We appreciate it when you come up, take the mic. It's been dope. Thanks again, man.