darling, it's tour

In an effort to make my work more literary journalism-ish, I've absorbed alot of my reading to Rock n' Roll Culture. Last night I spent most of the evening in the basement of Bracken Library, looking at their music literature, old rolling stones, that kind of thing.
The most fortunate book that I came across was "On Becoming A Rock Musicia" by H. Stith Bennett. It's a How-to guide essentially, but its very proper and old-fashioned. He has notes on different gigs, how to pack a bus or transportation, developing an image for the band, doing covers, and how to have a good live performance. It's given me a good idea of how I want to structure things.
I've started several drafts of those quips, right now most of my energy is going towards "Washing Your Hair in a Truckstop Sink" which is a guide on hygiene upkeep on the road. I know that sounds weird, but showering was a stable thing for all of us, and there's something unique about having to wash up at a truck stop, in a public place. I want to write about the things that people don't tell you about on the road. People think about gigs, and boozing, and the glamour that is associated with rock and roll, but I want to debunk some of the mystique.
Another piece that I'm making progress is on homesickness and melancholy on the road, which is more memoir-ish, talking about the different ways that we handled being away from loved ones, specifically the contrast between the way Joey handled himself and the way that I did. I am researching the psychological effects of homesickness and melancholy, so that I can give it a more informative angle with memoir-ish quips. If that makes sense. In any case I am happy with the way that it is developing.
I also started developing my "Manifesto for a Touring Band" which looks like this so far:


Manifesto of a Band on Tour
We will complain about our self-inflicted poverty
We will sleep in parking lots, at truck stops, on couches, on floors of strangers
We will wash our hair, teeth, and faces in gas station sinks
We will always charge our ipods
We will not always charge our cell phones
We will overdraw our bank accounts for gas money
We will miss our loves the entire time
We will still flirt with members of the other bands
We will never see you again
We will break strings in the middle of a performance
We will play for audiences of no one
We will play for packed houses
We will pathetically ask for a place to stay from the stage
We will never see you again
We will shoot fireworks in your streets at three a.m.
We will eat your food
We will use your toothpaste, your shampoo, your face products
We will never see you again
We will get bruises from tambourines
We will take food from grocery stores
We will never see you again
We will abuse your free drink policy at the bar
We will not tip the bar tender
We will never see you again
We will barely eat by the end of this
We will spend the rest of our lives wishing to return to this
We will lose ourselves somewhere in between.



I'd like to have this closer to the beginning of the entire work, as kind of a preface, because it establishes the tone of what I'm doing pretty well. I feel it needs some editing, but it's a start.