July 11, 2023 • 58 mins
This week in another installment of Road Stories, Matt and I regale you with tales of our best and worst lodging experiences from murphy beds to suites that made us think for a minute that we were rich!
To get transcripts, links, and details from each episode, check out the show notes. To continue your support of the podcast and my work, become a member of my Patreon community where you can get access to archived episodes, bonus episodes, and behind the scenes content. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter, for podcast clips, poetry quotes and random quips. For information on how to book me to speak or perform at an event, visit amenabrown.com. Thanks for listening and thanks for your support!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Hey, everybody, Welcome back to her with Amina Brown. We
deep in the summer streets right now. I hope y'all
are too. We're in the time in Atlanta where it's
starting to get.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Really really hot down here.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Some mussum usum.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, time very hot down here. We've had a couple
of kind of temperate days, but it is approaching that
time when it's two showers a day. If you can
pull that off, it's probably two showers a day. If
you went out twice in the day, it's very likely
that might be a two shower situation.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
We don't say Hotlanta, but it's hot Land.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
That might be the only time that is allowed. And
I'm going to tell y'all I'm going to try to
help y'all right now. I feel like we've spoken about
this on the podcast in the past, but just don't
say Hotlanta to anyone outside of a literal, funny reference
to how hot it is.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Otherwise, it's just it lets us.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Know that you either haven't been here, or you don't
actually live here, or you know. It just lets people
know some things. On your cool meter, if there's a
cool meter, it lets people know. Also, Matt is here
y'all in a living room. This is a Road Stories episode,
and thank y'all so much for listening in on our
Road Story series. We are winding it down, and that
(01:55):
doesn't mean it'll be the last time you hear Matt
here in the living room, but this will be the
end of our Road Story series, and we thought it
would be really fitting for us to wind the series
to its end by using this episode to discuss lodging.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Lodging is important, that's.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
A big part of the road and we'll have this
episode and then next week we'll have our last episode,
which is actually going to end on a really positive
and fun notes.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I'm looking forward for y'all to hear that episode two.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
All right, today we're talking about best and worst lodging.
And let me tell y'all something. When you're on the road,
you are at the mercy of the people who book you.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
You are on the road at the mercy of the
people who booked you. You're at the mercy of the
people who work at the places that the people who
you are at the mercy of who booked you, who
put you, and you are at the mercy of the transportation,
and you're at the mercy of complete strangers as you
(03:05):
are traveling to the place to be lodged at the
place that you are at, the mercy of the person
who booked you. There's a lot of.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
It's a lot of at the mercy, and none of
it is in a good way for the most part.
I mean, I will say, if I could overgeneralize for
people who book you, they tend to fall in two categories. Right.
You either have category one, which is people who are
like they want the best for you. They want you
to have the best hotel their town can give you.
(03:39):
They want you to have the best food available to you.
They really want to host you well and give you
a great experience. And it's always wonderful when you get those.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
People very nice.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
The other group of people are people who and really
on a level, it's like I can't fault them for
what I'm about to say, and on another level, I
completely fault them for what I'm not about to say.
But okay, is it is a combination of shade and
no shade. There is a little bit of shade here.
But the other group of people are people who are
(04:10):
really just trying to get by here. Okay, they are
trying to get you the cheapest flight they can get you.
They trying to get you in the cheapest hotel they
can get you. They're trying to get you to eat
as cheaply as possible. Like those people have no concern
for what the rest of your experience is like. And
(04:31):
the reasons why I, on one hand, can't fault them
for that is, you know, Matt and I both have
had experience planning events ourselves, and when you is working
on and event yourself, especially on a limited budget, and
you're trying to like bring in people that will give
your attendees a good experience, that that is a hard job.
(04:51):
It's a hard job.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
We've both been in that situation.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Expecting a lot when they show up to your event,
they are expecting a lot.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
You know, So you're you're there just trying to juggle,
like convince this person whose work you maybe really like
or really respect to come to your small town to
come to your unknown event or whatever it is. So
you do what you can to meet their contract, their expectations,
(05:18):
to meet the pay. But if you got enough money
pulled together to pay them, you may not have had
money to do the rest of it very well.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
And you know what that is. That is one thing
that would say. There are a lot of times it
works out one way or another where like we can't
pay you a lot, but we can feed you good
or here's this, here's here's what we can pay you
to do this. You're like, oh word, it's like but
you on your own with everything else, and you're like, oh, okay,
(05:49):
you know it is most times it works out one
way or the other. Yeah, but then there's sometimes where
it just ain't gonna work out because you know, and
I get it. We both work with large events and
sometimes inside of large systems or large companies or college
(06:12):
systems or whatever it is, and there's a lot of
moving parts. It's not just this person being like I'm
stingy today, you know what I mean, There's a lot
of moving parts and they may not be thinking about you.
I will say, specifically, on the DJ side of things,
we're usually the last thing that most people are thinking about.
(06:33):
Usually unless alcohol is being sold at this event, people
are not really thinking about the DJ. And then sometimes
even when alcohol is being sold at the event, they're like,
oh yeah, we got to entertain these people too. What
is the cheapest way we care, you know, those kind
of things, and so I get it man like by
the time somebody brings me in. I try to make
(06:55):
myself real easy to work with. What are we talking about? Like,
just go ahead and tell everything up front. But I
also understand that you may not think of everything. And
so doing this, after a while, we have learned. I've
learned definitely from traveling with you that hey, you might
want to ask some questions. Oh for sure, when I
(07:15):
get there, is there going to be a sound skes?
Do I need to bring a sounces? And when I
get there, whether it be equipped, would there be a
table for me to set up on, Will there be
a place for me to sleep? Will there be food?
Am I going to be fed? Not just will there
be food?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Am I going to be fed?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Is the question? Because there could be food, I get
to eat the food.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
It might not be for you, that's true.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
And I turned out the hard way at an event
that I went to where I thought they were sending
us to eat the food because the spread was laid out,
it was not in the general area. It was in
what would have been the green room area. And you
stick that spoon into that whatever that special type of
(07:57):
corn was and the beans and all the fixes stuff. Boy,
they came around that corner. It did not matter that
I was about to hit that stage. They were like
that food is not for you.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
I think this is a This is a very important
point speaking of very important because sometimes you come in
as the artist, assuming that the artists would be included
in the VIP and you quickly discover that the VIP
is not you, that there's another category where they put you,
but you ain't, that you ain't the VIP.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
I idly greeted you at the event, whoever your contact
was for that day and was like, we are so
glad you are here. Thank you so much for coming
and being a part of this. The person who is
at the VIP event that you're not supposed to be
at they are not also glad you're here. No, no,
they are not impresident there at all.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
We also had to learn on a business level, So
for those of you listening that are freelancing performing artists,
or even if like you perform as an artist as
a side gig, important things. There are things that we
had to realize over the years that may have helped
prevent some of these worst lodging situations we're going to
(09:09):
get to here. Number One, we have talked about the
fact that we travel to quite a few small towns,
and the truth is, when you're not in a major town,
you may not have a super duper nice hotel to
stay in, you may not have a direct flight that
you can book to get there, or you may have
(09:30):
to drive to get there, depending on the location. So
sometimes it can work better in those situations to do
a flat rate gig, right, And so we had to
discover this too, that sometimes you can be getting booked
by a certain organization or whatever company, and they may
have the money set up in a certain way that
they can book everything for you separately. They can book
(09:52):
your travel, they can book your lodging, they can pay
your rate and possibly give you perdum. But sometimes you
may have a gig that really they can't do that.
They may not have the staff to actually like handle
all those things for you. So they may say this
is me making up, like, you know, not real numbers
all the way, but could be real. But let's say
(10:14):
you get booked and you say your rate is five
thousand dollars, You're gonna get paid five thousand dollars to
go in and do whatever your performance is. And then
on top of that, you're asking the organization to book
two flights for you so that you and whoever you're
a traveling person is can travel there. They're going to
book lodging for you. They're going to book you know,
whatever your food situation is. Okay, But every now and
(10:37):
then they might be like, we don't have the budget
or staffing to handle you sending us back all those
receipts and reimbursing you and all the things. They may say,
can you do the gig all in at seven thousand?
Then it's up to you to decide. Now you have
two thousand dollars. First of all, it'll be up to
(10:58):
you to decide have you calculated correctly? Because it's also happens,
have you calculated correctly the cost of what it would
take to travel there, of how much food is going
to cost you per day and lodging? Right, Sometimes they
would say seven thousand doll in and I would be
so happy to see seven thousand dollars. I would say yes,
(11:20):
and then discover that it's too far to drive and
that the flights are going to be six hundred dollars
to get there because of the location being kind of
like not in a hub or something. So now I'm
twelve hundred in on flights. Now I got to decide
what kind of hotel am I going to stay in
(11:41):
and what am I gonna eat for the rest of
that Now, of course, there are a lot of like
budget ways you can handle this. I have some friends
who travel that'll be like, we don't really eat out
on the road. We pick the type of hotel that
has some something of a kitchen, or we don't do
hotels at all. We do airba or verbal or whatever
(12:03):
we need to do there.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
You do, do not make that pizza that's supposed to No,
do not do that that's supposed to be made in
the oven. Do not put that in your micro Do.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Not put that in the microwave, Because I will tell
y'all that that ends very bad.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
That episode back. You ain't saving money that way.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
That ends very badly.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But as far as people who like to cook on
the road, people who are like I'm gonna get fruits, veggies,
I'm gonna have oat meal or eggs or whatever. I'm
gonna make it myself, Like, there are budget ways to
handle this.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I carry a travel grinder because I'm about that with
my coffee, I'm gonna be grinding. I got the hand
crank in there in the mornings, grinding my coffee beans,
making my pour over. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
We are also people that will that will pull off
to a convenience store or a drug store wherever we
need to go and get jugs of water, and we
bring like our water bottles with us so we can
just refill water. You do all sorts of things, but
sometimes it's easier on you if you can do a
gig all in. If you're in a situation where you're
(13:02):
feeling a little questionable about if the people who booked
you are going to take care of you, then they've
given you the money so that you can handle all
of those arrangements yourself. So then in that sense, if
you end up on a hotel you hate, you just
have to take.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Responsibility for it.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
At that point, you can't say, ah, they booked me
in a hotel I don't like. So that's a little
tip for my artists listening. Sometimes you can go all
in on a gig. We have some friends, especially our friends,
who are trying to build their music careers, their bands.
They do all sorts of stuff to save money. They'll
instead of doing a tour bus, they'll do a fifteen
passenger van and people just sleep on that while they
(13:42):
drive overnight. They don't fly anywhere, they drive every place
because gas and a van would be cheaper than flying
six people wherever. You do all sorts of things, and
then of course you hope you get to a certain
point in your career where people have respect for the
career that you've built and they are like, yo, it's
(14:04):
important enough to us to do these things. Like Janna
Jackson obviously is not out here having to be like,
oh gosh, I got to figure out how to book
my own hotel and make sure it's not a motel
with the doors out front.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Could you imagine getting that phone call like, nah, you're
pranking me, hang up?
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Period, Like Jana Jackson is at a level where it's
like it's all VIP for her, for Beyonce, for artists
like that, but even for indie artists. You can get
to a point where you get to that love in
your career, but until you do mm hmm, you work
with what you got. Okay, we're gonna start with worst lodging.
This is I feel like I wish we had like
(14:42):
an award name, like I wish we had like the Lodgies.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
You logie are the bottom.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Instead of like the Emmys or the Grammys.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I wish we had like bottom Logie.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Yeah, because like, don't they give what they call?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I think they give like a worse I think it's
like the Razzies is like the movies that are the worst.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
So it would be dope if we could have that
for gigs, where it would be like these were the
best gigs and these guys were the worst. So worst Logie.
Worst Loggie Number one goes to summer camps, and we
talked a little bit about summer camps in the past.
I want y'all to know that we know lots of
(15:25):
artists that travel. Okay, we have seen on social media
our artist friends getting booked for summer camps, sleeping on
blow up mattresses in a gym. I've done it, Okay,
Like summer camp. The people who plan a summer camp
(15:45):
have so much shit on their minds. You being a
VIP is not one of them. Number one, Number two,
Number two. The thing about a summer camp also is that,
except for the one rich kids camp that we was
telling y'all about, except for that these are always in very.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Little bitty towns.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, these are in little bitty towns where you got
two and a possible hotel choice, and one of those
possible hotel choices has the doors on the outside, And you're.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Like, do you like the doors on the outside. I.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Y'all, that's one of my rules.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Like I'm sure my writer, my writer might literally say,
we talking about a hotel where the doors are not
on the outside.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, I can't.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I can't stand for the doors to be on the outside. Guys,
I really need I really, I really enjoy a building.
I really enjoy a building where the rooms you walk
into the building and all of the rooms are indoors.
I don't actually know if it really equals more safety,
but it's just the mental of me thinking that it does.
(17:08):
So I want you all to know that we did
a summer camp in I feel like it was like Kentucky,
Ohio area, and it was one of those times where
you know, we're juggling a lot of things with these gigs.
Sometimes you're like getting back from a gig, you get
(17:28):
home just in time to like throw your dirty clothes
out of the luggage, throw some other clothes in there,
and like ride out. Sometimes you're going from gig to
gig and I don't remember what happened here. I just
remember that we ended up having to get there very late.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It was dark.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
It was like nine or ten o'clock at night. I'm
going to tell you another thing about a summer camp,
especially church summer camps, is that they are mostly being
run by college students, and a college students level, oh okay,
we try to tell y'all so cool. A college student's
level of understanding of what it's like to be grown
(18:03):
is very limited. They have small amounts, but it's very limited,
and mainly because a lot of college students haven't really
experienced what it feels like to be bone tired. They've
been tired, they have some all nighters, some of them,
but they haven't experienced what it's like to be bone
tired like you can.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Be when you when you hit your thirties and your forties.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
So what I'm trying to travel can wear you out.
That didn't kick in until I was in my well
into my thirties. I would say I'm probably thirty mid
thirties where I started realizing why am I so tired.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Just to travel?
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Not even just the event itself, it's just the getting there?
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Did it used to wear you out? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
So we get there is night, Okay, we get there.
We do talk to the adult in charge because the
adult in charge had to hand us our check and
I think they had to and thus like money for
per dim so that we would have money for food.
And then they were like these two And there's normally
a term for these people, the college students. They're camp counselors,
(19:10):
their interns. If it's a very you know, scholarly situation,
maybe they say they're fellows. Whatever this is, they have
a term for them. They gonna send you with them.
They're like, they're going to show you where your lodging.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Is going to be.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Okay, So, for those of you that aren't familiar with
how Christian colleges work, first of all, there's a lot
about that we don't have time in this episode to explaid.
There's a lot about that that we can't talk about
in this episode, but okay, suffice it to say there's
a split on most Christian college campuses between married housing
and housing for the people that is not married, okay,
(19:50):
And typically the married housing be a little nicer than
the single housing. True, So a lot of these summer
camp will be hosted on the campuses of Christian colleges,
and we are being now ushered over to what is
(20:10):
the married housing for this particular campus.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
They tell you, like, we put you up in married housing, Like, oh, okay, cool,
we married.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
The way they said it to us was very like
we were about to experience something that was so special.
And y'all, when you walk into this building that looks
like a cabin kind of we walk in and there
is a television on the wall. I remember. I remember
(20:46):
that some of the windows did not have coverings at all.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
I I remember several situations like this. The one that's
in my mind. There was like a TV that wasn't
mounted on.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
The wall, that's the one.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, But it was like a random dresser's that was
sitting in the room.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
And the TV was on top of a dresser. But
that dresser might have been one of the only pieces
of I don't remember there being anything to sit on
in that room, that's true. There was just a TV
that I'm not sure was plugged into anything it might
have had, like a DVD player sitting beside it. I
don't all the way, but I remember being like, huh,
you decorated for us.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Then I remember the bathroom window did have blinds on it,
but the blinds were kind of diagonal across the window.
So if you but it's blinding, okay, because like if
you were in there to take a shower, like somebody
walk by, that'sh you naked, like we get that show? Yeah, okay,
So then we go into what's supposed to be the bedroom.
I want you to know that I'm doing my mom's
(21:53):
version of air quotes. And when my mom does air
quotes about something, it means she is disgusted about whatever
the situation is, and the small amount of movement of
her fingers is an indication of how much shade is
about to happen.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Here, how phony she feels you are this moment.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, So I want you know I'm doing my mom's
very minimal fingers here, very minimal air quotes to let
y'all know that we went to the bedroom. Okay, And
we get in there, and I'm pretty sure the bedroom
either had only one window or if it had two windows.
One of the windows had nothing on it, and there
were two beds that Matt and I are grown enough
(22:40):
to know were bunk beds, but they were just not
on top of each other. They were just bunk beds
that had been put on the same same level, side
by side. So we asked one of the college student
intern fellows. We ask them, is there other married housing
(23:00):
that has one bed? And those kids looked at us
and said, oh, no, you just push these together, y'all.
I just and Matt, and Matt is over six feet
I'm almost six feet tall myself. So these twin bunk
(23:26):
beds that were made for children, like, it's not just
a question of if it's wide enough, it's also a
question of because it's a bunk bed, it had like
the frame around, So it's not just is it wide enough.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Over No, you just ain't stretching all the way out.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
You really gonna be like pulling them knees together.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So at that point we have to make a decision,
and we decided based on where we felt we could
handle it to going and get that reservation at the
country inn in sweets.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Let's going to do it, which was the.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Equivalent of having anything close to a holiday inn in
that area, right, So yeah, you.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Do have to. I think that, Like, you know, you
go out on your first trip and you're like, huh,
that's a story from the road. What an adventure You
go on in your second, your third, you know, you
get out there a little bit and you're like, you're
still just happy that, oh my gosh, I'm getting to
do this and I'm getting to see all these cool
parts of the country and honestly, the experiences that you
(24:39):
get to have with people, and you have these moments
with people and as a performer that you know, this
thing I just did it worked in this town and
then also worked in this town, and those people really
loved it. This is great. And then you get on
the road a little bit more, and then you get
a little older and you're like, what am I willing
to put up with? Because I understand that you got
(25:03):
a lot going on, But I've got me going on,
and there's going to be a moment that the lights
come on and the sound is up, and I gotta
do my thing at what capacity do I need to
be in order to do my thing? What does it require?
(25:25):
What do I need? I think that's maybe that's an
interesting question though, you know what I mean, I don't
know that I ever had thought as much about you know,
growing up and you know, you grew up in a
family that's figuring it out, and then you get out
on your own and you figure it out, and then all
of a sudden you start realizing something here has got
(25:46):
me bothered. I don't feel good, I'm tired. I got
to get him perform. Then you start, oh, it's because
I'm a person that part I have needs. What do
I need? And so you get out there and be like,
you know what. I know this is going to eat
into my bottom line, but I need to be able
(26:07):
to sleep right.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I need to be well rested.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
It brought me here to put on a show, but
you didn't put no curtains on these windows, and that
is not the show I think you want me to
put on. So I'm going to need a place to
stay where there's a bed that fits the people who
are going to be in it, and curtains on the windows.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
And just privacy. Wow, you know, just want a little privacy, y'all.
That's all. That's all. So I do think, and I
also think a part of it is like when you're
first starting out, all of your travel gig experiences are
these one offs that you're doing, especially if you're still
like working, like you say, you have your day job
(26:51):
and then you're doing gigs on the side. Like I
could be at that time, I could be a little
more like lenient or kind of lap about certain things,
because first of all, I'm working a job I don't
like so that I can do this thing on the side.
So I'd be like, cool, whatever this hotel is, I'm
just happy to be here, you know, and not boy
(27:14):
they got Wi Fi, yes, you know, all those things,
and not that you lose like the gratitude for what
you're doing when you become full time, because you're still
I mean, even after all these years, there's still a
part of me as an artist that's.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Just like, somebody wants to pay me five dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Now, my second thought has to be like, now, girl,
we're not taking five dollars with things, okay, But there's
still a part of you as an artist's just like,
oh my gosh, somebody is like excited. Yeah, like somebody's
asked me to perform at this, you know. But after
you start doing this as a job. You're what you're
trying to give yourself is optimal conditions so that you
(27:53):
can give the people what they paid for. And sometimes
people are paying you to do a gig and it's
not occurring to them the other stuff you might need.
It's like it's almost like if you are a graphic
designer and people are thinking like, well, I should just
pay you by the hour for however long it takes
you to design. But it's not that you're paying for
(28:15):
the hours of design. You're paying for that person's training education.
You're paying for the experience that they've learned over the years,
which enables them to make your logo or whatever graphic
design you've asked for. Enables them to make it within
a certain amount of time because it doesn't take them
years to make it because of their expertise. And sometimes
(28:39):
as creative people, we're not we're not adding that in,
and sometimes the people who have the budget are not
adding that in. So they're like, I pay you five
thousand dollars, that should be enough, and you're like, but
you're also paying me that money to leave my home.
You're paying me to come and do something that I've
been doing for over at least one decade by that time,
you know. So there's a lot that like goes into
(29:01):
that that you don't always consider for yourself as an artist.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Like you were saying, Babe, because I think in line
with what you're saying, it's like you are being booked
to do a thing and the thing may only take
up this amount of time. Let's say, if you know,
if you're hitting the stage for an hour and this
event itself is only a three four hour event, you know,
(29:29):
Or I'm hitting the stage if it's a conference, I
may be doing an hour three or four times throughout
the day and be like, well, you just did three
hours of work for that much money, Like in my brain,
in my you know, go to my job, clock in
and clock out like I only work for this amount
(29:51):
of time. Then you realize, oh wait, I had to
get up go find a place to park for my
car part my car are or I had to get
up and get a you know, a uber lyft whatever
you use. Also all this gear, I'm carrying it and
painting it and I get there, am I bringing? Am
(30:13):
I bringing? Mind? That means that TSA is going to
go through it and my stuff. Probably something's going to
be broken by the time I get there. Now I'm
having to perform on broken equipment, or I had to
go to a place and hope they're reputable with what
I'm renting. I'm already and it's going to be raggedy
because the DJ before me does not care about other
(30:34):
people's belongings, right, whatever it may be. And so you
do all that and then it's like, okay, then I
also have to get to the hotel. We try to
fly in the night before, right, that way you don't
have to travel and then immediately jump up on say
so we fly in the night before, which, in order
to save money on flights, you fly at a certain time.
(30:55):
By time you get there in that small town, probably
all the restaurants are going to be closed. Where am
I now going to eat? I have to figure out
something because there wasn't good food on the plane. There
wasn't good food in the airport. So now I have
to drive a couple of towns over rights I can
find a waffle house or something open or something that
works within whatever the dietary thing that you're trying to
(31:18):
live your life and be a you know, well maintained adult,
you know, right, and then I got to get up
in the morning, figure out breakfast, figure out how to
get there soundcheck. Sound Check is never going to go
the way they said. Sound Check's going to go, No,
because again, you have all these moving pieces, and I
get it, You've got all these moving pieces, so it's
(31:40):
going to be a lot of hurry up and wait.
So by the time you actually hit the stage, you
have now had to work all of this just to
get there and you're not even done yet.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, that's that's a lot.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
It's a lot to consider in This brings me to
our next worst lodgie, which is the fact that.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
I need a graphic designer to come up with the
loggie what the LOGI Award would look like.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, we do need to.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
We do like a like a mock up so that
we can have an idea about this. But my second
worst lodgie goes to every hotel room that had gurgling
heat and AC And here's the thing, man, here's the thing,
here's the here's the unfortunate thing.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
People.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Man, you could do a thousand things of pre planning. Okay,
you could do the all in gig where you booked
the hotel yourself. You checked the reviews, you looked into
all these things. You could get booked by a company
or an organization that really wanted to take good care
of the artists and speakers, put you in like a
(32:48):
really nice hotel. But I'm gonna tell you what you
gonna come across, some gurgling, rattling heat and ace.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
In a hotel.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
And I'm telling you what else gurgles and rattles is
a refrigerator in a hotel room.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
People that refrigerator that like you hear it when it
kicks in there, y'all yikes. And we've been doing this
for a while together. And so we were traveling at
a time before it was like these cute little AirPod
pros that fit in your ear without cables that you
(33:29):
can put like some noise canceling on or something like
even you sleeping those over the Yeah, your Bo's headphones, Yeah, Bose,
if you want to send us.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
A pair, we would love to see.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
I know you're listening, but we come from we were
doing this in a time before where there was all
these you couldn't roll over because there's a cable attached
to something and you just it's just you and the noise.
In the room. That's it, and ain't no sleep and
whatever sleep you don't get it in this town. Boy,
(34:02):
Now you have to take that into the next town.
So even if it was well meaning people who put
you in this hotel, but that hotel got that. They
put you by the ice machine.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Or they put you by the elevator.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
So that now I need to bring an honorable mention
of worst lodgi is when you stay in the host
hotel at a youth event. Man, yikes, because now you
are in the hotel and the moment you get into
a good sleep is when the students are coming back
(34:37):
from whatever activity they went to do and you listening
to them in the hotel running around in the halls.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I mean, these are things that are.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Inevitable at a youth event, but when you're staying at
the host hotel, I'm telling you you can't control these factors.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Right here, let me tell you the worst kind of
those hotels. Now, if we're breaking it down to a
sub genre of the lodgies, it's the hotel that it's
a really.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Tall I know, the one you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
But in the center of all the rooms are around
the outside, in the center is just a big open space.
So let's say you're on the sixteenth, eighteenth, twentieth floor,
you're looking all the way down at the bottom, and
it's just a big open corridor, so that sound can
just a and other people's children running wild all the way.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
They are, unfortunately, all the way turned up at a
time that you would like to be all the way
turned down.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
And when you are at the event to be the DJ,
you got to be the cool guy. You know what
I'm saying, you here to turn the party up. It's
partially my fault that they're running wild. It's kind of
on me, so it feels hypocritical for me to go
down to the hallway and be like, would you hold
it down.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
I'm trying to sleep. And that's the thing. It's like
a life comes at you fast.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Because you know, you had a time that you were
in high school, even some of the like college conferences
we may have gone to you in your early twenties,
Like you had a time that you were walking up
in a hotel in the middle of the night, just
keeping a racket crack and had some person you know,
open their door and look out into the hall and
(36:23):
say be quiet. We're in here trying to sleep with
their sponge rollers and whatever, like old stuff you thought
that person was about when you realized that that person
is you in the hotel, when those kids go running by,
like when I really wanted to open up my hotel
and be like, y'all goes up keeping that noise out here,
and I was like, wow, I really turned into somebody's grandma,
(36:45):
like so quickly. Okay, our last worst lodgie. Okay, I
want to speak about a Murphy bed. I want us
to about being booked for a leadership event. Man, and
I'm still not sure how this happened. I'm still unsure
(37:08):
how this happened, but we were booked for a leadership event.
Now that I think about it, if I understand the
mechanisms of event booking, I think what happened is. Okay,
let me describe to y'all what Matt and I discovered
when we walk into this what we thought was a
traditional hotel room. So we were booked for a leadership
event and fly into the thing. This is what I
(37:29):
would probably say, what would be considered a three and
a half or four star kind of hotel, probably like
a four star hotel but older, right, But you got
all these different leadership people coming in from all across
the country.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
So we go in.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I feel like because of how we traveled in, I
think it was like we traveled in and had not
been in the room that whole day, hadn't checked in.
It was like we traveled in and everything just went
to run in life rehearsals and sound check and everything,
did the whole event, and then got back to the room.
So y'all, you know, we got our hotel keys, puts
(38:05):
our hotel key in the door, walks in and like,
we know we're in a hotel room, y'all, but there's
no bed. And then you know how when you're in
a hotel, they have like the door that could be
on the side, Like we opened that door actually because
we thought, oh, maybe it's a suite maybe, like but
those doors went into the rooms next door. So then
(38:28):
we're standing there like did they really like, did they
really give us a room with no bed? And this
this is two people who at this point are very,
very tired, Like it's.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Been We've already done a long day, traveled, did the
gig all in one day? We don't. We try our
best not to do that no more.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yeah, because of this reason right here, because of this
worst Lodgie award. So we call downstairs thinking maybe they put.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Us in the wrong room.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Surely.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
So we're like, hey, we think we're gonna need to
move rooms because we're in a room that doesn't have
a bed. The person at the front desk was like, Oh, no,
there's a bed in there. It's a Murphy bed. I
want to tell y'all right now, it's a grown person
in my thirties that I don't think I knew what
a Murphy bed was for real. Like I knew that
(39:18):
you could have a bed because I saw it in
like sitcoms in New York that you could have a
bed that you could put up into the wall.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
I saw it on the Three Stooges.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
And then you pull it down.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, okay, I understood that you in a like situation
where you're on the like started from the bottom.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Like I really really knew, and I didn't know the
term for it. I just knew that bed exists that
I just assumed, like it's a New York Boston, it's
like a North.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Whoever Murphy is based upon his bed. I don't think
it was a compliment.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
I think the same person that came up with Murphy's Law,
or that Murphy's Law is named after, I think that
person also is in relation to the Murphy bed.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
I think that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
So well, we know it wasn't Murphy Brown. No handless,
I enjoyed Murphy Brown. Two Murphy's that I don't really
rock with is Murphy's Law and a Murphy bed. Okay,
Eddie Murphy, I rock with Murphy Brown. Love to see
it Smurphy's dance, but that's smurfh. Never mind, that's that's different.
But Murphy's Law and Murphy Bed's yikes.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So we finally find the little latch where you're supposed
to pull this bed down. And there's a lot of
questions regarding a Murphy bed, and one of them is
do you know when the last time was the sheets
were changed?
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Oh? Because it unfolded with sheets unraveled.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
It wasn't even made. It was just like And now
that I.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Think back on this, the reason why this organization gets
the worst lodgy, Now that I think back on this,
I think what happened is they forgot and I think
they had that room that they had been using because
the conference had been going on for a couple of days,
and sometimes people who are like the organization leaders or
they'll have a couple of suites so that they can
(41:08):
have meetings or little meeting greets or whatever. Because the
room also had a very long farm table. It did
like where you could like like long enough that you
could probably see eight people at it. That's how big
the table was. So I'm like, I'm pretty sure that
they were using this room for meetings and all sorts
(41:28):
of things. And they got to the end of the
day and we were like, yeah, great, glad the gig went. Well,
we haven't had a chance to check into our hotel,
and they were like, oh shit, we forgot to book, so.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Go get the keys for we got a room for
you Worst Logie Award.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Matter of fact, one day you're going to be doing
a podcast and it's gonna be a great story to tell.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yikes.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Also, if I remember, I know somebody knew that. First
of all, I think what you're saying is correct. I
think that's absolutely right. And if I remember correctly, the
hotel because it wasn't a bad it was a nice yeah. Yeah,
And they sent like a cheese plate. That's right, they
sent us a cheese plate because they knew. They knew
(42:16):
it wasn't cool. They knew this situation was it was
being foul and so, but you want some cheese.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
I was like, I really want a different room, but
we could not get that going, so we had to
make it work in that Murphy bed. I can't remember
if we I can't remember if we ended up getting
them to bring us new sheets and we made the
y'all like all of that is like fuzzy down because
(42:44):
we were so tired. But worst Worst Lodgie awards go
to you can push the beds together, No, we cannot.
Worst loggie for all of the gurgling heat AC and refrigerators, Worst.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Logie, Worst Logie to the Murphy bed.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Okay, now I'm not going to engel on a worst
note because we have had some best Logie awards that
deserve to be given out.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Lives are full of ups and downs, and when you're down,
hopefully you end up back up again.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
So I want to give a best Loggie award to
the New York hotel that we stayed at where we
actually could see the Statue of Liberty from our window.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Man. That view incredible.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
I would also like to give a best Loggie award
to the hotel where we stayed at where we could
see down into the Cardinals baseball stadium. I remember this
one very specifically, definitely, because we had been on a
string of mid to worst Logie Award situations and every
(43:57):
now and then it would happen where you'd get a
really great eight lodging set up. And so we put
the keys in. This hotel's very nice, four star, fairly
new hotel, very nice. We put our keys in the
door and walk in and we're like, oh, this is nice.
And then we like put our stuff down and walk
around the corner. We're like, wait, there's more more. So
it was like a big old suite. I remember it
(44:20):
had two bathrooms in the same suite. To some of y'all,
you're gonna be like, yeah, that's standard for the hotels.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
I stay in. It is not standard to us.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Okay, two hotel bathrooms because in one.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
Room when we're at the house, there's two of us here,
so nobody ever has to wait to use the restroom.
You do have me your business whatever you're going doing there.
But when we're on the road, it's like, oh, yeah,
I got but you know what, No, you go first,
we take that none. Now I think I think I'm good.
I think you really got to go. But that one
(44:53):
had two.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Boy I'm talking about Matt and I ran around like
the two Pentecostal raised children. We are ran around like
we would shouting inside of that hotel room.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
It was so amazing.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
When you end up getting lucky to have a really
nice hotel, you can pull up Yelp and find restaurants
that meet all your dietary needs, all everything, and it's
all with them walking distance, and you're like this, I
could live my life like this, Like this is great.
You walk out and sure you may learn the hard
(45:30):
way in Chicago that's not Illuminatis pizza when you ask
the man at the door and he's like, sir, that
is lou mal Natti's pizza. But you're in a nice
hotel where they will break stuff down to you and
be like, also you make this left, this left down
there and you're gonna get there? Would you like a
car service? Now? I would like to walk, But that
(45:50):
I think that is also the benefit of like number one,
you don't have to push your beds together. Number two,
there's a working shower that probably doesn't.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
A working shower.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
The water is not rising in the tub and you're like,
let me shower quick because we're about to overflow. Things
are just working the way he's supposed to do. It's nice,
it's peaceful. And then also there are amenities around you,
and that is like also the thing that's like, okay,
I've had a string of like four stinkers of hotels,
(46:25):
like the logie list is growing, and then you get
to that one. You're like, you know what, I could
do this, I can keep doing.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
It's like you get a chance to, like, really, I
think honestly, you get a chance to live the life
that for a long time, some of our friends and
family thought we were living people. They're assuming you're on
the like if they've been on a vacation where they
stayed at like an all inclusive resort or they stayed
at a really nice property, they are assuming that when
(46:56):
we're on the road, it's us performing just staying in
hotels like that.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Every now and then you get to the airport and
it's the car service and the person's holding the iPad
with your name on it or the list or what
the document that is holding a sign that's got your
name on it, and you're like, oh, this trip's gonna
be all right, but the one before it and probably
the one after it, you're gonna pay. You're gonna pay them, dudes,
(47:23):
won't way Orno.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, these these best Lodgie Awards is what people think
it's like when you're on the road, and the road
is mostly not like that, but every now and then
you get one that you're like, oh, I get to
actually like maybe have nice room service, like we would
have every now and then if we got in a
really nice hotel like that, if it was an organization
or a company that book does, they would be like,
(47:47):
just you know, order whatever you want to eat. You
know we we we're not gonna do prettyum, but whatever
you want to eat, just charge it to the room.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Just charge it to the room.
Speaker 3 (47:56):
And their card is the card on file.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Not not us. Turning into Macauley Cochin that was in
the second home alone when he was home alone in
New York, Man, like, we would just run it up.
Whatever they had on the min y'all wanted to try.
They have two cheesecakes.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
Side note, if you are a young artist listening to this,
and you're like taking notes of what to do and
what not to do, or whether or not it's worth
it to keep doing this or not it is keep going.
But one thing we definitely learned the hard way as
two people who were building their credit when we first
started doing this and didn't have good credit, so we
(48:34):
didn't have credit cards. So when you go into a town,
whatever type of hotel they booked you at, they're going
to want your card when you get there for incidentals,
for if you break something, for whatever you charge the room,
and so if you go in there with your debit
carding on the hotel takes, they are going to put
(48:56):
a hold on your card. And depending on your finance
situation as an up and coming artist who might have
just quit your day job and are trying to do
this thing and you've got that one gig and you
hope you're gonna get that next gig and you're like, ah,
my bank account though, uh if you can get yourself
(49:17):
a credit card, because that's really going to help you.
If you can't be aware, Yeah, for sure, for sure,
that shock when you when you're having that shocking moment
standing in front of the person on the other side
of the desk at the hotel. It's now too late.
You got you got to stay somewhere, And it's I know,
(49:39):
for me, embarrassing is humiliating. You are like, you know,
you deal with yourself at that moment. But like I'm
just saying, b if you can get you a credit card,
if you can't be aware and think think.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
Ahead, right, No, that's a great point because you I
would like to also give an honorable mention worse lodgie
to the organizations who inevitably forget to sign the authorization
form so that the hotel can.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
Be charged to their cards.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
And you talking about getting into a hotel at eleven
PM after flight delays and whatever happened to you that
you got in so late. You're tired, You got sound
checks sometimes at seven point thirty the next morning, and
you get in there and you're like, yes, I'm checking in.
They're like, okay, we just need a card on we
(50:34):
need a card on file. No, it should be paid
for through And you say the name of the organization. Oh,
looks like they didn't sign an authorization form. And you
try to call this person at eleven o'clock at night
and can't get them. So now your choice is, are
you just gonna sit there in the hotel lobby until
this person wakes up in the morning to get your message,
(50:56):
or are you gonna have to use your business credit
card or Heaven help you, the business checking account, which
is a situation we were in a lot of times.
If you don't have a business checking yeah, then like
now you have to give them your debit card. And
it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the next day
the organization's like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I
(51:19):
got it all taken care of. Now the hold is there,
and now the hold won't be released for a certain
number of business days. And do they care about the
bills you have do in between the business days?
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Do not?
Speaker 1 (51:30):
So that was a thing we had to learn until
we were able to get a credit card for the business.
What we ended up having to do was keep a
certain amount of cash cushion in our business checking so
that if this type of situation happened, it wasn't like
holding up all the money. But y'all, I'm gonna tell
you some hurt feelings, some tears wanted to be shed,
(51:53):
regarding the hold on that and ren.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
A cars yikes. Please.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Also, as our last best Logie award, I want to
give a shout out to the hotel that I stayed
in in La for Makers in twenty twenty, which was
a month before the pandemic, y'all, before the pandemic tipped
in the US. This hotel was such a nice suite.
(52:19):
I almost walked in and walked all the way around
and was like, am I in the wrong word?
Speaker 2 (52:25):
I was like, surely this is not my room.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
I mean the whole beautiful view of Los Angeles. The
big old soaking tub. Y'all know I love a good
hotel tub. Okay, the big soaking tub and the shower.
This is when you're having like rich people problems, you
know what I'm saying, Because most hotels be like, you
don't get both of these, gonna you're gonna get all
(52:49):
in one, or you're gonna get just one. You're gonna
get just a shower and get a tub at your house.
We don't care. But when they're like, here in is
a soaking tub. We're three people could fit in this tub.
Here in is a shower where two people and a
possible could also fit in the shower. I want to
give a very special shout out to that. Did I
(53:12):
record a video of myself in the room justice send
to my family and friends? Yes, yes I did because
I wanted. I just wanted to be like, this is real.
It's not just me embellishing that. It's amazing. I did
a tour. I did a tour for the people. So
shout out to the lodging All.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
Right, I'd like to give two special mentions. After you
just gave our.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
Best Lodgie, our best Loggy awards, we're doing best and
worst lodgies.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
That's right, best LOGI So I like to give two
special mentions to two things that were cool experiences that
I don't know, you're going to find a lot of places.
One is a technology that was kind of popping up,
but I might's been unnecessary, but it was cool at first.
(54:02):
That was the hotels that started putting little many TV
screens in the mirror. Remember that the bad time. So
if you in the bathroom and like like you're watching
the game, you could go and and here it is.
We all have you know, phones and stuff on us
now and the Wi Fi and iPads and there's plenty
(54:23):
of what if you need to watch something entertain yourself,
however long you're going to be in there, whether you're
in the tub, soaking or handling your business, so pretty unnecessary.
But I remember at first being like, whoa look. I
remember taking like videos and pictures of sitting friends, like
look at this dude, And most of the time, it's
be honest, most time it didn't work. It was just
like fuzz right, that's true. It was like very cool.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
But then you're like that.
Speaker 3 (54:46):
Time is past? How come I so special? Shouts to that.
Also special shout out to the hotel I was at
in Montana. So in Montana that I went into that
the hotel was fine, it was just, you know, pretty
good little hotel. But in the bar, this is the
wildest thing I still think I've ever seen. In the bar,
(55:08):
they had what looked like a massive fish tank behind
the bar with people dressed up as mermaids and merman
swimming like just doing mermaid flips and swimming up to
the glass and the whole tail no feet. Wow, mermaids
(55:32):
and merman's. I guess that's I don't even know what
the right I was like, I don't know that you're
going to run into a franchise of these. I don't
know that you're going to be like, oh yeah, I
also saw this in Chicago, New York.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
The liabilities high, high liability on this.
Speaker 3 (55:52):
And that's a pretty specialized group of people. Need to
be able to hold your breath for a long time,
do something interesting enough in that point because it was fascinating.
They were artists, those people doing that thing. I hope
they paid those right right, but shout out today that's
something that I may never see again, but that one
(56:12):
time I saw it.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
WHOA, that was very cool, very cool. That was very cool.
Like when you came home and told me about that,
I was like, that is very cool. And here is
another theme in what we have talked about on road
stories that I feel as things have opened up again
and we've been able to now do some traveling, but
not for work, not for gigs per se. Sometimes we
(56:35):
travel just to go to a different location and work
on stuff for client things. But it really does make
a difference, like these types of experiences that you can have,
and I think what I've enjoyed even though we've been
on the road way less than we used to in
this other season of life. Now we get to pick
some hotels because they're designed really well, and we get
(56:59):
to go see like how they design this, how the
architecture looks, or if it's a historic hotel, all those things,
and sometimes we get to treat ourselves when we can,
which isn't all the time, but when we can treat
ourselves to just a nice hotel, stay where you can
have where it can sort of feel like somebody else
gets to take care of you a little bit. So
(57:20):
I do enjoy those aspects of travel still. But now
because we're traveling on our own reconnaissance, we get a
chance to pick and choose where we're going, the city
we're going to, and where we're staying.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
And when we're leaving. That's it, because let's say about
the ability to not take that red eye flight. Oh
no back home immediately after the gig. No like sleeping
in the next day getting up.
Speaker 1 (57:49):
Yeah, yeah, we're those people now, so Best and Worst
Logie Awards. We hope all of these places, even though
we didn't tell you the ex location of them, they
know who they are.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
All right.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
Tune in next week our last episode, we're gonna tell
you about what were our favorite gigs of all time
and what were our best gigs ever?
Speaker 2 (58:13):
So we'll see y'all next week.
Speaker 1 (58:24):
Her with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for
Sober Feed Productions as a part of the Seneca Women
Podcast Network and partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Hey, everybody, Welcome back to her with Amina Brown. We
deep in the summer streets right now. I hope y'all
are too. We're in the time in Atlanta where it's
starting to get.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Really really hot down here.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Some mussum usum.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, time very hot down here. We've had a couple
of kind of temperate days, but it is approaching that
time when it's two showers a day. If you can
pull that off, it's probably two showers a day. If
you went out twice in the day, it's very likely
that might be a two shower situation.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
We don't say Hotlanta, but it's hot Land.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
That might be the only time that is allowed. And
I'm going to tell y'all I'm going to try to
help y'all right now. I feel like we've spoken about
this on the podcast in the past, but just don't
say Hotlanta to anyone outside of a literal, funny reference
to how hot it is.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Otherwise, it's just it lets us.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Know that you either haven't been here, or you don't
actually live here, or you know. It just lets people
know some things. On your cool meter, if there's a
cool meter, it lets people know. Also, Matt is here
y'all in a living room. This is a Road Stories episode,
and thank y'all so much for listening in on our
Road Story series. We are winding it down, and that
(01:55):
doesn't mean it'll be the last time you hear Matt
here in the living room, but this will be the
end of our Road Story series, and we thought it
would be really fitting for us to wind the series
to its end by using this episode to discuss lodging.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Lodging is important, that's.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
A big part of the road and we'll have this
episode and then next week we'll have our last episode,
which is actually going to end on a really positive
and fun notes.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I'm looking forward for y'all to hear that episode two.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
All right, today we're talking about best and worst lodging.
And let me tell y'all something. When you're on the road,
you are at the mercy of the people who book you.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
You are on the road at the mercy of the
people who booked you. You're at the mercy of the
people who work at the places that the people who
you are at the mercy of who booked you, who
put you, and you are at the mercy of the transportation,
and you're at the mercy of complete strangers as you
(03:05):
are traveling to the place to be lodged at the
place that you are at, the mercy of the person
who booked you. There's a lot of.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
It's a lot of at the mercy, and none of
it is in a good way for the most part.
I mean, I will say, if I could overgeneralize for
people who book you, they tend to fall in two categories. Right.
You either have category one, which is people who are
like they want the best for you. They want you
to have the best hotel their town can give you.
(03:39):
They want you to have the best food available to you.
They really want to host you well and give you
a great experience. And it's always wonderful when you get those.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
People very nice.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
The other group of people are people who and really
on a level, it's like I can't fault them for
what I'm about to say, and on another level, I
completely fault them for what I'm not about to say.
But okay, is it is a combination of shade and
no shade. There is a little bit of shade here.
But the other group of people are people who are
(04:10):
really just trying to get by here. Okay, they are
trying to get you the cheapest flight they can get you.
They trying to get you in the cheapest hotel they
can get you. They're trying to get you to eat
as cheaply as possible. Like those people have no concern
for what the rest of your experience is like. And
(04:31):
the reasons why I, on one hand, can't fault them
for that is, you know, Matt and I both have
had experience planning events ourselves, and when you is working
on and event yourself, especially on a limited budget, and
you're trying to like bring in people that will give
your attendees a good experience, that that is a hard job.
(04:51):
It's a hard job.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
We've both been in that situation.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Expecting a lot when they show up to your event,
they are expecting a lot.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
You know, So you're you're there just trying to juggle,
like convince this person whose work you maybe really like
or really respect to come to your small town to
come to your unknown event or whatever it is. So
you do what you can to meet their contract, their expectations,
(05:18):
to meet the pay. But if you got enough money
pulled together to pay them, you may not have had
money to do the rest of it very well.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
And you know what that is. That is one thing
that would say. There are a lot of times it
works out one way or another where like we can't
pay you a lot, but we can feed you good
or here's this, here's here's what we can pay you
to do this. You're like, oh word, it's like but
you on your own with everything else, and you're like, oh, okay,
(05:49):
you know it is most times it works out one
way or the other. Yeah, but then there's sometimes where
it just ain't gonna work out because you know, and
I get it. We both work with large events and
sometimes inside of large systems or large companies or college
(06:12):
systems or whatever it is, and there's a lot of
moving parts. It's not just this person being like I'm
stingy today, you know what I mean, There's a lot
of moving parts and they may not be thinking about you.
I will say, specifically, on the DJ side of things,
we're usually the last thing that most people are thinking about.
(06:33):
Usually unless alcohol is being sold at this event, people
are not really thinking about the DJ. And then sometimes
even when alcohol is being sold at the event, they're like,
oh yeah, we got to entertain these people too. What
is the cheapest way we care, you know, those kind
of things, and so I get it man like by
the time somebody brings me in. I try to make
(06:55):
myself real easy to work with. What are we talking about? Like,
just go ahead and tell everything up front. But I
also understand that you may not think of everything. And
so doing this, after a while, we have learned. I've
learned definitely from traveling with you that hey, you might
want to ask some questions. Oh for sure, when I
(07:15):
get there, is there going to be a sound skes?
Do I need to bring a sounces? And when I
get there, whether it be equipped, would there be a
table for me to set up on, Will there be
a place for me to sleep? Will there be food?
Am I going to be fed? Not just will there
be food?
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Am I going to be fed?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Is the question? Because there could be food, I get
to eat the food.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
It might not be for you, that's true.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
And I turned out the hard way at an event
that I went to where I thought they were sending
us to eat the food because the spread was laid out,
it was not in the general area. It was in
what would have been the green room area. And you
stick that spoon into that whatever that special type of
(07:57):
corn was and the beans and all the fixes stuff. Boy,
they came around that corner. It did not matter that
I was about to hit that stage. They were like
that food is not for you.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
I think this is a This is a very important
point speaking of very important because sometimes you come in
as the artist, assuming that the artists would be included
in the VIP and you quickly discover that the VIP
is not you, that there's another category where they put you,
but you ain't, that you ain't the VIP.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
I idly greeted you at the event, whoever your contact
was for that day and was like, we are so
glad you are here. Thank you so much for coming
and being a part of this. The person who is
at the VIP event that you're not supposed to be
at they are not also glad you're here. No, no,
they are not impresident there at all.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
We also had to learn on a business level, So
for those of you listening that are freelancing performing artists,
or even if like you perform as an artist as
a side gig, important things. There are things that we
had to realize over the years that may have helped
prevent some of these worst lodging situations we're going to
(09:09):
get to here. Number One, we have talked about the
fact that we travel to quite a few small towns,
and the truth is, when you're not in a major town,
you may not have a super duper nice hotel to
stay in, you may not have a direct flight that
you can book to get there, or you may have
(09:30):
to drive to get there, depending on the location. So
sometimes it can work better in those situations to do
a flat rate gig, right, And so we had to
discover this too, that sometimes you can be getting booked
by a certain organization or whatever company, and they may
have the money set up in a certain way that
they can book everything for you separately. They can book
(09:52):
your travel, they can book your lodging, they can pay
your rate and possibly give you perdum. But sometimes you
may have a gig that really they can't do that.
They may not have the staff to actually like handle
all those things for you. So they may say this
is me making up, like, you know, not real numbers
all the way, but could be real. But let's say
(10:14):
you get booked and you say your rate is five
thousand dollars, You're gonna get paid five thousand dollars to
go in and do whatever your performance is. And then
on top of that, you're asking the organization to book
two flights for you so that you and whoever you're
a traveling person is can travel there. They're going to
book lodging for you. They're going to book you know,
whatever your food situation is. Okay, But every now and
(10:37):
then they might be like, we don't have the budget
or staffing to handle you sending us back all those
receipts and reimbursing you and all the things. They may say,
can you do the gig all in at seven thousand?
Then it's up to you to decide. Now you have
two thousand dollars. First of all, it'll be up to
(10:58):
you to decide have you calculated correctly? Because it's also happens,
have you calculated correctly the cost of what it would
take to travel there, of how much food is going
to cost you per day and lodging? Right, Sometimes they
would say seven thousand doll in and I would be
so happy to see seven thousand dollars. I would say yes,
(11:20):
and then discover that it's too far to drive and
that the flights are going to be six hundred dollars
to get there because of the location being kind of
like not in a hub or something. So now I'm
twelve hundred in on flights. Now I got to decide
what kind of hotel am I going to stay in
(11:41):
and what am I gonna eat for the rest of
that Now, of course, there are a lot of like
budget ways you can handle this. I have some friends
who travel that'll be like, we don't really eat out
on the road. We pick the type of hotel that
has some something of a kitchen, or we don't do
hotels at all. We do airba or verbal or whatever
(12:03):
we need to do there.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
You do, do not make that pizza that's supposed to No,
do not do that that's supposed to be made in
the oven. Do not put that in your micro Do.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Not put that in the microwave, Because I will tell
y'all that that ends very bad.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
That episode back. You ain't saving money that way.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
That ends very badly.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But as far as people who like to cook on
the road, people who are like I'm gonna get fruits, veggies,
I'm gonna have oat meal or eggs or whatever. I'm
gonna make it myself, Like, there are budget ways to
handle this.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I carry a travel grinder because I'm about that with
my coffee, I'm gonna be grinding. I got the hand
crank in there in the mornings, grinding my coffee beans,
making my pour over. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
We are also people that will that will pull off
to a convenience store or a drug store wherever we
need to go and get jugs of water, and we
bring like our water bottles with us so we can
just refill water. You do all sorts of things, but
sometimes it's easier on you if you can do a
gig all in. If you're in a situation where you're
(13:02):
feeling a little questionable about if the people who booked
you are going to take care of you, then they've
given you the money so that you can handle all
of those arrangements yourself. So then in that sense, if
you end up on a hotel you hate, you just
have to take.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Responsibility for it.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
At that point, you can't say, ah, they booked me
in a hotel I don't like. So that's a little
tip for my artists listening. Sometimes you can go all
in on a gig. We have some friends, especially our friends,
who are trying to build their music careers, their bands.
They do all sorts of stuff to save money. They'll
instead of doing a tour bus, they'll do a fifteen
passenger van and people just sleep on that while they
(13:42):
drive overnight. They don't fly anywhere, they drive every place
because gas and a van would be cheaper than flying
six people wherever. You do all sorts of things, and
then of course you hope you get to a certain
point in your career where people have respect for the
career that you've built and they are like, yo, it's
(14:04):
important enough to us to do these things. Like Janna
Jackson obviously is not out here having to be like,
oh gosh, I got to figure out how to book
my own hotel and make sure it's not a motel
with the doors out front.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Could you imagine getting that phone call like, nah, you're
pranking me, hang up?
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Period, Like Jana Jackson is at a level where it's
like it's all VIP for her, for Beyonce, for artists
like that, but even for indie artists. You can get
to a point where you get to that love in
your career, but until you do mm hmm, you work
with what you got. Okay, we're gonna start with worst lodging.
This is I feel like I wish we had like
(14:42):
an award name, like I wish we had like the Lodgies.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
You logie are the bottom.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Instead of like the Emmys or the Grammys.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I wish we had like bottom Logie.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Yeah, because like, don't they give what they call?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
I think they give like a worse I think it's
like the Razzies is like the movies that are the worst.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
So it would be dope if we could have that
for gigs, where it would be like these were the
best gigs and these guys were the worst. So worst Logie.
Worst Loggie Number one goes to summer camps, and we
talked a little bit about summer camps in the past.
I want y'all to know that we know lots of
(15:25):
artists that travel. Okay, we have seen on social media
our artist friends getting booked for summer camps, sleeping on
blow up mattresses in a gym. I've done it, Okay,
Like summer camp. The people who plan a summer camp
(15:45):
have so much shit on their minds. You being a
VIP is not one of them. Number one, Number two,
Number two. The thing about a summer camp also is that,
except for the one rich kids camp that we was
telling y'all about, except for that these are always in very.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Little bitty towns.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Yeah, these are in little bitty towns where you got
two and a possible hotel choice, and one of those
possible hotel choices has the doors on the outside, And you're.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Like, do you like the doors on the outside. I.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Y'all, that's one of my rules.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Like I'm sure my writer, my writer might literally say,
we talking about a hotel where the doors are not
on the outside.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, I can't.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
I can't stand for the doors to be on the outside. Guys,
I really need I really, I really enjoy a building.
I really enjoy a building where the rooms you walk
into the building and all of the rooms are indoors.
I don't actually know if it really equals more safety,
but it's just the mental of me thinking that it does.
(17:08):
So I want you all to know that we did
a summer camp in I feel like it was like Kentucky,
Ohio area, and it was one of those times where
you know, we're juggling a lot of things with these gigs.
Sometimes you're like getting back from a gig, you get
(17:28):
home just in time to like throw your dirty clothes
out of the luggage, throw some other clothes in there,
and like ride out. Sometimes you're going from gig to
gig and I don't remember what happened here. I just
remember that we ended up having to get there very late.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It was dark.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
It was like nine or ten o'clock at night. I'm
going to tell you another thing about a summer camp,
especially church summer camps, is that they are mostly being
run by college students, and a college students level, oh okay,
we try to tell y'all so cool. A college student's
level of understanding of what it's like to be grown
(18:03):
is very limited. They have small amounts, but it's very limited,
and mainly because a lot of college students haven't really
experienced what it feels like to be bone tired. They've
been tired, they have some all nighters, some of them,
but they haven't experienced what it's like to be bone
tired like you can.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Be when you when you hit your thirties and your forties.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
So what I'm trying to travel can wear you out.
That didn't kick in until I was in my well
into my thirties. I would say I'm probably thirty mid
thirties where I started realizing why am I so tired.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Just to travel?
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Not even just the event itself, it's just the getting there?
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Did it used to wear you out? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
So we get there is night, Okay, we get there.
We do talk to the adult in charge because the
adult in charge had to hand us our check and
I think they had to and thus like money for
per dim so that we would have money for food.
And then they were like these two And there's normally
a term for these people, the college students. They're camp counselors,
(19:10):
their interns. If it's a very you know, scholarly situation,
maybe they say they're fellows. Whatever this is, they have
a term for them. They gonna send you with them.
They're like, they're going to show you where your lodging.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Is going to be.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Okay, So, for those of you that aren't familiar with
how Christian colleges work, first of all, there's a lot
about that we don't have time in this episode to explaid.
There's a lot about that that we can't talk about
in this episode, but okay, suffice it to say there's
a split on most Christian college campuses between married housing
and housing for the people that is not married, okay,
(19:50):
And typically the married housing be a little nicer than
the single housing. True, So a lot of these summer
camp will be hosted on the campuses of Christian colleges,
and we are being now ushered over to what is
(20:10):
the married housing for this particular campus.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
They tell you, like, we put you up in married housing, Like, oh, okay, cool,
we married.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
The way they said it to us was very like
we were about to experience something that was so special.
And y'all, when you walk into this building that looks
like a cabin kind of we walk in and there
is a television on the wall. I remember. I remember
(20:46):
that some of the windows did not have coverings at all.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
I I remember several situations like this. The one that's
in my mind. There was like a TV that wasn't
mounted on.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
The wall, that's the one.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, But it was like a random dresser's that was
sitting in the room.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
And the TV was on top of a dresser. But
that dresser might have been one of the only pieces
of I don't remember there being anything to sit on
in that room, that's true. There was just a TV
that I'm not sure was plugged into anything it might
have had, like a DVD player sitting beside it. I
don't all the way, but I remember being like, huh,
you decorated for us.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Then I remember the bathroom window did have blinds on it,
but the blinds were kind of diagonal across the window.
So if you but it's blinding, okay, because like if
you were in there to take a shower, like somebody
walk by, that'sh you naked, like we get that show? Yeah, okay,
So then we go into what's supposed to be the bedroom.
I want you to know that I'm doing my mom's
(21:53):
version of air quotes. And when my mom does air
quotes about something, it means she is disgusted about whatever
the situation is, and the small amount of movement of
her fingers is an indication of how much shade is
about to happen.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Here, how phony she feels you are this moment.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, So I want you know I'm doing my mom's
very minimal fingers here, very minimal air quotes to let
y'all know that we went to the bedroom. Okay, And
we get in there, and I'm pretty sure the bedroom
either had only one window or if it had two windows.
One of the windows had nothing on it, and there
were two beds that Matt and I are grown enough
(22:40):
to know were bunk beds, but they were just not
on top of each other. They were just bunk beds
that had been put on the same same level, side
by side. So we asked one of the college student
intern fellows. We ask them, is there other married housing
(23:00):
that has one bed? And those kids looked at us
and said, oh, no, you just push these together, y'all.
I just and Matt, and Matt is over six feet
I'm almost six feet tall myself. So these twin bunk
(23:26):
beds that were made for children, like, it's not just
a question of if it's wide enough, it's also a
question of because it's a bunk bed, it had like
the frame around, So it's not just is it wide enough.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Over No, you just ain't stretching all the way out.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
You really gonna be like pulling them knees together.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So at that point we have to make a decision,
and we decided based on where we felt we could
handle it to going and get that reservation at the
country inn in sweets.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Let's going to do it, which was the.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Equivalent of having anything close to a holiday inn in
that area, right, So yeah, you.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Do have to. I think that, Like, you know, you
go out on your first trip and you're like, huh,
that's a story from the road. What an adventure You
go on in your second, your third, you know, you
get out there a little bit and you're like, you're
still just happy that, oh my gosh, I'm getting to
do this and I'm getting to see all these cool
parts of the country and honestly, the experiences that you
(24:39):
get to have with people, and you have these moments
with people and as a performer that you know, this
thing I just did it worked in this town and
then also worked in this town, and those people really
loved it. This is great. And then you get on
the road a little bit more, and then you get
a little older and you're like, what am I willing
to put up with? Because I understand that you got
(25:03):
a lot going on, But I've got me going on,
and there's going to be a moment that the lights
come on and the sound is up, and I gotta
do my thing at what capacity do I need to
be in order to do my thing? What does it require?
(25:25):
What do I need? I think that's maybe that's an
interesting question though, you know what I mean, I don't
know that I ever had thought as much about you know,
growing up and you know, you grew up in a
family that's figuring it out, and then you get out
on your own and you figure it out, and then all
of a sudden you start realizing something here has got
(25:46):
me bothered. I don't feel good, I'm tired. I got
to get him perform. Then you start, oh, it's because
I'm a person that part I have needs. What do
I need? And so you get out there and be like,
you know what. I know this is going to eat
into my bottom line, but I need to be able
(26:07):
to sleep right.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I need to be well rested.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
It brought me here to put on a show, but
you didn't put no curtains on these windows, and that
is not the show I think you want me to
put on. So I'm going to need a place to
stay where there's a bed that fits the people who
are going to be in it, and curtains on the windows.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
And just privacy. Wow, you know, just want a little privacy, y'all.
That's all. That's all. So I do think, and I
also think a part of it is like when you're
first starting out, all of your travel gig experiences are
these one offs that you're doing, especially if you're still
like working, like you say, you have your day job
(26:51):
and then you're doing gigs on the side. Like I
could be at that time, I could be a little
more like lenient or kind of lap about certain things,
because first of all, I'm working a job I don't
like so that I can do this thing on the side.
So I'd be like, cool, whatever this hotel is, I'm
just happy to be here, you know, and not boy
(27:14):
they got Wi Fi, yes, you know, all those things,
and not that you lose like the gratitude for what
you're doing when you become full time, because you're still
I mean, even after all these years, there's still a
part of me as an artist that's.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Just like, somebody wants to pay me five dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Now, my second thought has to be like, now, girl,
we're not taking five dollars with things, okay, But there's
still a part of you as an artist's just like,
oh my gosh, somebody is like excited. Yeah, like somebody's
asked me to perform at this, you know. But after
you start doing this as a job. You're what you're
trying to give yourself is optimal conditions so that you
(27:53):
can give the people what they paid for. And sometimes
people are paying you to do a gig and it's
not occurring to them the other stuff you might need.
It's like it's almost like if you are a graphic
designer and people are thinking like, well, I should just
pay you by the hour for however long it takes
you to design. But it's not that you're paying for
(28:15):
the hours of design. You're paying for that person's training education.
You're paying for the experience that they've learned over the years,
which enables them to make your logo or whatever graphic
design you've asked for. Enables them to make it within
a certain amount of time because it doesn't take them
years to make it because of their expertise. And sometimes
(28:39):
as creative people, we're not we're not adding that in,
and sometimes the people who have the budget are not
adding that in. So they're like, I pay you five
thousand dollars, that should be enough, and you're like, but
you're also paying me that money to leave my home.
You're paying me to come and do something that I've
been doing for over at least one decade by that time,
you know. So there's a lot that like goes into
(29:01):
that that you don't always consider for yourself as an artist.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Like you were saying, Babe, because I think in line
with what you're saying, it's like you are being booked
to do a thing and the thing may only take
up this amount of time. Let's say, if you know,
if you're hitting the stage for an hour and this
event itself is only a three four hour event, you know,
(29:29):
Or I'm hitting the stage if it's a conference, I
may be doing an hour three or four times throughout
the day and be like, well, you just did three
hours of work for that much money, Like in my brain,
in my you know, go to my job, clock in
and clock out like I only work for this amount
(29:51):
of time. Then you realize, oh wait, I had to
get up go find a place to park for my
car part my car are or I had to get
up and get a you know, a uber lyft whatever
you use. Also all this gear, I'm carrying it and
painting it and I get there, am I bringing? Am
(30:13):
I bringing? Mind? That means that TSA is going to
go through it and my stuff. Probably something's going to
be broken by the time I get there. Now I'm
having to perform on broken equipment, or I had to
go to a place and hope they're reputable with what
I'm renting. I'm already and it's going to be raggedy
because the DJ before me does not care about other
(30:34):
people's belongings, right, whatever it may be. And so you
do all that and then it's like, okay, then I
also have to get to the hotel. We try to
fly in the night before, right, that way you don't
have to travel and then immediately jump up on say
so we fly in the night before, which, in order
to save money on flights, you fly at a certain time.
(30:55):
By time you get there in that small town, probably
all the restaurants are going to be closed. Where am
I now going to eat? I have to figure out
something because there wasn't good food on the plane. There
wasn't good food in the airport. So now I have
to drive a couple of towns over rights I can
find a waffle house or something open or something that
works within whatever the dietary thing that you're trying to
(31:18):
live your life and be a you know, well maintained adult,
you know, right, and then I got to get up
in the morning, figure out breakfast, figure out how to
get there soundcheck. Sound Check is never going to go
the way they said. Sound Check's going to go, No,
because again, you have all these moving pieces, and I
get it, You've got all these moving pieces, so it's
(31:40):
going to be a lot of hurry up and wait.
So by the time you actually hit the stage, you
have now had to work all of this just to
get there and you're not even done yet.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Yeah, that's that's a lot.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
It's a lot to consider in This brings me to
our next worst lodgie, which is the fact that.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
I need a graphic designer to come up with the
loggie what the LOGI Award would look like.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, we do need to.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
We do like a like a mock up so that
we can have an idea about this. But my second
worst lodgie goes to every hotel room that had gurgling
heat and AC And here's the thing, man, here's the thing,
here's the here's the unfortunate thing.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
People.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Man, you could do a thousand things of pre planning. Okay,
you could do the all in gig where you booked
the hotel yourself. You checked the reviews, you looked into
all these things. You could get booked by a company
or an organization that really wanted to take good care
of the artists and speakers, put you in like a
(32:48):
really nice hotel. But I'm gonna tell you what you
gonna come across, some gurgling, rattling heat and ace.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
In a hotel.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
And I'm telling you what else gurgles and rattles is
a refrigerator in a hotel room.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
People that refrigerator that like you hear it when it
kicks in there, y'all yikes. And we've been doing this
for a while together. And so we were traveling at
a time before it was like these cute little AirPod
pros that fit in your ear without cables that you
(33:29):
can put like some noise canceling on or something like
even you sleeping those over the Yeah, your Bo's headphones, Yeah, Bose,
if you want to send us.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
A pair, we would love to see.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
I know you're listening, but we come from we were
doing this in a time before where there was all
these you couldn't roll over because there's a cable attached
to something and you just it's just you and the noise.
In the room. That's it, and ain't no sleep and
whatever sleep you don't get it in this town. Boy,
(34:02):
Now you have to take that into the next town.
So even if it was well meaning people who put
you in this hotel, but that hotel got that. They
put you by the ice machine.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Or they put you by the elevator.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
So that now I need to bring an honorable mention
of worst lodgi is when you stay in the host
hotel at a youth event. Man, yikes, because now you
are in the hotel and the moment you get into
a good sleep is when the students are coming back
(34:37):
from whatever activity they went to do and you listening
to them in the hotel running around in the halls.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I mean, these are things that are.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Inevitable at a youth event, but when you're staying at
the host hotel, I'm telling you you can't control these factors.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Right here, let me tell you the worst kind of
those hotels. Now, if we're breaking it down to a
sub genre of the lodgies, it's the hotel that it's
a really.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Tall I know, the one you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
But in the center of all the rooms are around
the outside, in the center is just a big open space.
So let's say you're on the sixteenth, eighteenth, twentieth floor,
you're looking all the way down at the bottom, and
it's just a big open corridor, so that sound can
just a and other people's children running wild all the way.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
They are, unfortunately, all the way turned up at a
time that you would like to be all the way
turned down.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
And when you are at the event to be the DJ,
you got to be the cool guy. You know what
I'm saying, you here to turn the party up. It's
partially my fault that they're running wild. It's kind of
on me, so it feels hypocritical for me to go
down to the hallway and be like, would you hold
it down.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
I'm trying to sleep. And that's the thing. It's like
a life comes at you fast.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Because you know, you had a time that you were
in high school, even some of the like college conferences
we may have gone to you in your early twenties,
Like you had a time that you were walking up
in a hotel in the middle of the night, just
keeping a racket crack and had some person you know,
open their door and look out into the hall and
(36:23):
say be quiet. We're in here trying to sleep with
their sponge rollers and whatever, like old stuff you thought
that person was about when you realized that that person
is you in the hotel, when those kids go running by,
like when I really wanted to open up my hotel
and be like, y'all goes up keeping that noise out here,
and I was like, wow, I really turned into somebody's grandma,
(36:45):
like so quickly. Okay, our last worst lodgie. Okay, I
want to speak about a Murphy bed. I want us
to about being booked for a leadership event. Man, and
I'm still not sure how this happened. I'm still unsure
(37:08):
how this happened, but we were booked for a leadership event.
Now that I think about it, if I understand the
mechanisms of event booking, I think what happened is. Okay,
let me describe to y'all what Matt and I discovered
when we walk into this what we thought was a
traditional hotel room. So we were booked for a leadership
event and fly into the thing. This is what I
(37:29):
would probably say, what would be considered a three and
a half or four star kind of hotel, probably like
a four star hotel but older, right, But you got
all these different leadership people coming in from all across
the country.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
So we go in.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I feel like because of how we traveled in, I
think it was like we traveled in and had not
been in the room that whole day, hadn't checked in.
It was like we traveled in and everything just went
to run in life rehearsals and sound check and everything,
did the whole event, and then got back to the room.
So y'all, you know, we got our hotel keys, puts
(38:05):
our hotel key in the door, walks in and like,
we know we're in a hotel room, y'all, but there's
no bed. And then you know how when you're in
a hotel, they have like the door that could be
on the side, Like we opened that door actually because
we thought, oh, maybe it's a suite maybe, like but
those doors went into the rooms next door. So then
(38:28):
we're standing there like did they really like, did they
really give us a room with no bed? And this
this is two people who at this point are very,
very tired, Like it's.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Been We've already done a long day, traveled, did the
gig all in one day? We don't. We try our
best not to do that no more.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yeah, because of this reason right here, because of this
worst Lodgie award. So we call downstairs thinking maybe they put.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Us in the wrong room.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Surely.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
So we're like, hey, we think we're gonna need to
move rooms because we're in a room that doesn't have
a bed. The person at the front desk was like, Oh, no,
there's a bed in there. It's a Murphy bed. I
want to tell y'all right now, it's a grown person
in my thirties that I don't think I knew what
a Murphy bed was for real. Like I knew that
(39:18):
you could have a bed because I saw it in
like sitcoms in New York that you could have a
bed that you could put up into the wall.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
I saw it on the Three Stooges.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
And then you pull it down.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, okay, I understood that you in a like situation
where you're on the like started from the bottom.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Like I really really knew, and I didn't know the
term for it. I just knew that bed exists that
I just assumed, like it's a New York Boston, it's
like a North.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
Whoever Murphy is based upon his bed. I don't think
it was a compliment.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
I think the same person that came up with Murphy's Law,
or that Murphy's Law is named after, I think that
person also is in relation to the Murphy bed.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
I think that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
So well, we know it wasn't Murphy Brown. No handless,
I enjoyed Murphy Brown. Two Murphy's that I don't really
rock with is Murphy's Law and a Murphy bed. Okay,
Eddie Murphy, I rock with Murphy Brown. Love to see
it Smurphy's dance, but that's smurfh. Never mind, that's that's different.
But Murphy's Law and Murphy Bed's yikes.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
So we finally find the little latch where you're supposed
to pull this bed down. And there's a lot of
questions regarding a Murphy bed, and one of them is
do you know when the last time was the sheets
were changed?
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Oh? Because it unfolded with sheets unraveled.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
It wasn't even made. It was just like And now
that I.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Think back on this, the reason why this organization gets
the worst lodgy, Now that I think back on this,
I think what happened is they forgot and I think
they had that room that they had been using because
the conference had been going on for a couple of days,
and sometimes people who are like the organization leaders or
they'll have a couple of suites so that they can
(41:08):
have meetings or little meeting greets or whatever. Because the
room also had a very long farm table. It did
like where you could like like long enough that you
could probably see eight people at it. That's how big
the table was. So I'm like, I'm pretty sure that
they were using this room for meetings and all sorts
(41:28):
of things. And they got to the end of the
day and we were like, yeah, great, glad the gig went. Well,
we haven't had a chance to check into our hotel,
and they were like, oh shit, we forgot to book, so.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
Go get the keys for we got a room for
you Worst Logie Award.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Matter of fact, one day you're going to be doing
a podcast and it's gonna be a great story to tell.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yikes.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Also, if I remember, I know somebody knew that. First
of all, I think what you're saying is correct. I
think that's absolutely right. And if I remember correctly, the
hotel because it wasn't a bad it was a nice yeah. Yeah,
And they sent like a cheese plate. That's right, they
sent us a cheese plate because they knew. They knew
(42:16):
it wasn't cool. They knew this situation was it was
being foul and so, but you want some cheese.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
I was like, I really want a different room, but
we could not get that going, so we had to
make it work in that Murphy bed. I can't remember
if we I can't remember if we ended up getting
them to bring us new sheets and we made the
y'all like all of that is like fuzzy down because
(42:44):
we were so tired. But worst Worst Lodgie awards go
to you can push the beds together, No, we cannot.
Worst loggie for all of the gurgling heat AC and refrigerators, Worst.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Logie, Worst Logie to the Murphy bed.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Okay, now I'm not going to engel on a worst
note because we have had some best Logie awards that
deserve to be given out.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Lives are full of ups and downs, and when you're down,
hopefully you end up back up again.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
So I want to give a best Loggie award to
the New York hotel that we stayed at where we
actually could see the Statue of Liberty from our window.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Man. That view incredible.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
I would also like to give a best Loggie award
to the hotel where we stayed at where we could
see down into the Cardinals baseball stadium. I remember this
one very specifically, definitely, because we had been on a
string of mid to worst Logie Award situations and every
(43:57):
now and then it would happen where you'd get a
really great eight lodging set up. And so we put
the keys in. This hotel's very nice, four star, fairly
new hotel, very nice. We put our keys in the
door and walk in and we're like, oh, this is nice.
And then we like put our stuff down and walk
around the corner. We're like, wait, there's more more. So
it was like a big old suite. I remember it
(44:20):
had two bathrooms in the same suite. To some of y'all,
you're gonna be like, yeah, that's standard for the hotels.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
I stay in. It is not standard to us.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Okay, two hotel bathrooms because in one.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
Room when we're at the house, there's two of us here,
so nobody ever has to wait to use the restroom.
You do have me your business whatever you're going doing there.
But when we're on the road, it's like, oh, yeah,
I got but you know what, No, you go first,
we take that none. Now I think I think I'm good.
I think you really got to go. But that one
(44:53):
had two.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Boy I'm talking about Matt and I ran around like
the two Pentecostal raised children. We are ran around like
we would shouting inside of that hotel room.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
It was so amazing.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
When you end up getting lucky to have a really
nice hotel, you can pull up Yelp and find restaurants
that meet all your dietary needs, all everything, and it's
all with them walking distance, and you're like this, I
could live my life like this, Like this is great.
You walk out and sure you may learn the hard
(45:30):
way in Chicago that's not Illuminatis pizza when you ask
the man at the door and he's like, sir, that
is lou mal Natti's pizza. But you're in a nice
hotel where they will break stuff down to you and
be like, also you make this left, this left down
there and you're gonna get there? Would you like a
car service? Now? I would like to walk, But that
(45:50):
I think that is also the benefit of like number one,
you don't have to push your beds together. Number two,
there's a working shower that probably doesn't.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
A working shower.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
The water is not rising in the tub and you're like,
let me shower quick because we're about to overflow. Things
are just working the way he's supposed to do. It's nice,
it's peaceful. And then also there are amenities around you,
and that is like also the thing that's like, okay,
I've had a string of like four stinkers of hotels,
(46:25):
like the logie list is growing, and then you get
to that one. You're like, you know what, I could
do this, I can keep doing.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
It's like you get a chance to, like, really, I
think honestly, you get a chance to live the life
that for a long time, some of our friends and
family thought we were living people. They're assuming you're on
the like if they've been on a vacation where they
stayed at like an all inclusive resort or they stayed
at a really nice property, they are assuming that when
(46:56):
we're on the road, it's us performing just staying in
hotels like that.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
Every now and then you get to the airport and
it's the car service and the person's holding the iPad
with your name on it or the list or what
the document that is holding a sign that's got your
name on it, and you're like, oh, this trip's gonna
be all right, but the one before it and probably
the one after it, you're gonna pay. You're gonna pay them, dudes,
(47:23):
won't way Orno.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, these these best Lodgie Awards is what people think
it's like when you're on the road, and the road
is mostly not like that, but every now and then
you get one that you're like, oh, I get to
actually like maybe have nice room service, like we would
have every now and then if we got in a
really nice hotel like that, if it was an organization
or a company that book does, they would be like,
(47:47):
just you know, order whatever you want to eat. You
know we we we're not gonna do prettyum, but whatever
you want to eat, just charge it to the room.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Just charge it to the room.
Speaker 3 (47:56):
And their card is the card on file.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Not not us. Turning into Macauley Cochin that was in
the second home alone when he was home alone in
New York, Man, like, we would just run it up.
Whatever they had on the min y'all wanted to try.
They have two cheesecakes.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
Side note, if you are a young artist listening to this,
and you're like taking notes of what to do and
what not to do, or whether or not it's worth
it to keep doing this or not it is keep going.
But one thing we definitely learned the hard way as
two people who were building their credit when we first
started doing this and didn't have good credit, so we
(48:34):
didn't have credit cards. So when you go into a town,
whatever type of hotel they booked you at, they're going
to want your card when you get there for incidentals,
for if you break something, for whatever you charge the room,
and so if you go in there with your debit
carding on the hotel takes, they are going to put
(48:56):
a hold on your card. And depending on your finance
situation as an up and coming artist who might have
just quit your day job and are trying to do
this thing and you've got that one gig and you
hope you're gonna get that next gig and you're like, ah,
my bank account though, uh if you can get yourself
(49:17):
a credit card, because that's really going to help you.
If you can't be aware, Yeah, for sure, for sure,
that shock when you when you're having that shocking moment
standing in front of the person on the other side
of the desk at the hotel. It's now too late.
You got you got to stay somewhere, And it's I know,
(49:39):
for me, embarrassing is humiliating. You are like, you know,
you deal with yourself at that moment. But like I'm
just saying, b if you can get you a credit card,
if you can't be aware and think think.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
Ahead, right, No, that's a great point because you I
would like to also give an honorable mention worse lodgie
to the organizations who inevitably forget to sign the authorization
form so that the hotel can.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
Be charged to their cards.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
And you talking about getting into a hotel at eleven
PM after flight delays and whatever happened to you that
you got in so late. You're tired, You got sound
checks sometimes at seven point thirty the next morning, and
you get in there and you're like, yes, I'm checking in.
They're like, okay, we just need a card on we
(50:34):
need a card on file. No, it should be paid
for through And you say the name of the organization. Oh,
looks like they didn't sign an authorization form. And you
try to call this person at eleven o'clock at night
and can't get them. So now your choice is, are
you just gonna sit there in the hotel lobby until
this person wakes up in the morning to get your message,
(50:56):
or are you gonna have to use your business credit
card or Heaven help you, the business checking account, which
is a situation we were in a lot of times.
If you don't have a business checking yeah, then like
now you have to give them your debit card. And
it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the next day
the organization's like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, I
(51:19):
got it all taken care of. Now the hold is there,
and now the hold won't be released for a certain
number of business days. And do they care about the
bills you have do in between the business days?
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Do not?
Speaker 1 (51:30):
So that was a thing we had to learn until
we were able to get a credit card for the business.
What we ended up having to do was keep a
certain amount of cash cushion in our business checking so
that if this type of situation happened, it wasn't like
holding up all the money. But y'all, I'm gonna tell
you some hurt feelings, some tears wanted to be shed,
(51:53):
regarding the hold on that and ren.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
A cars yikes. Please.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Also, as our last best Logie award, I want to
give a shout out to the hotel that I stayed
in in La for Makers in twenty twenty, which was
a month before the pandemic, y'all, before the pandemic tipped
in the US. This hotel was such a nice suite.
(52:19):
I almost walked in and walked all the way around
and was like, am I in the wrong word?
Speaker 2 (52:25):
I was like, surely this is not my room.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
I mean the whole beautiful view of Los Angeles. The
big old soaking tub. Y'all know I love a good
hotel tub. Okay, the big soaking tub and the shower.
This is when you're having like rich people problems, you
know what I'm saying, Because most hotels be like, you
don't get both of these, gonna you're gonna get all
(52:49):
in one, or you're gonna get just one. You're gonna
get just a shower and get a tub at your house.
We don't care. But when they're like, here in is
a soaking tub. We're three people could fit in this tub.
Here in is a shower where two people and a
possible could also fit in the shower. I want to
give a very special shout out to that. Did I
(53:12):
record a video of myself in the room justice send
to my family and friends? Yes, yes I did because
I wanted. I just wanted to be like, this is real.
It's not just me embellishing that. It's amazing. I did
a tour. I did a tour for the people. So
shout out to the lodging All.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
Right, I'd like to give two special mentions. After you
just gave our.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
Best Lodgie, our best Loggy awards, we're doing best and
worst lodgies.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
That's right, best LOGI So I like to give two
special mentions to two things that were cool experiences that
I don't know, you're going to find a lot of places.
One is a technology that was kind of popping up,
but I might's been unnecessary, but it was cool at first.
(54:02):
That was the hotels that started putting little many TV
screens in the mirror. Remember that the bad time. So
if you in the bathroom and like like you're watching
the game, you could go and and here it is.
We all have you know, phones and stuff on us
now and the Wi Fi and iPads and there's plenty
(54:23):
of what if you need to watch something entertain yourself,
however long you're going to be in there, whether you're
in the tub, soaking or handling your business, so pretty unnecessary.
But I remember at first being like, whoa look. I
remember taking like videos and pictures of sitting friends, like
look at this dude, And most of the time, it's
be honest, most time it didn't work. It was just
like fuzz right, that's true. It was like very cool.
Speaker 2 (54:45):
But then you're like that.
Speaker 3 (54:46):
Time is past? How come I so special? Shouts to that.
Also special shout out to the hotel I was at
in Montana. So in Montana that I went into that
the hotel was fine, it was just, you know, pretty
good little hotel. But in the bar, this is the
wildest thing I still think I've ever seen. In the bar,
(55:08):
they had what looked like a massive fish tank behind
the bar with people dressed up as mermaids and merman
swimming like just doing mermaid flips and swimming up to
the glass and the whole tail no feet. Wow, mermaids
(55:32):
and merman's. I guess that's I don't even know what
the right I was like, I don't know that you're
going to run into a franchise of these. I don't
know that you're going to be like, oh yeah, I
also saw this in Chicago, New York.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
The liabilities high, high liability on this.
Speaker 3 (55:52):
And that's a pretty specialized group of people. Need to
be able to hold your breath for a long time,
do something interesting enough in that point because it was fascinating.
They were artists, those people doing that thing. I hope
they paid those right right, but shout out today that's
something that I may never see again, but that one
(56:12):
time I saw it.
Speaker 1 (56:13):
WHOA, that was very cool, very cool. That was very cool.
Like when you came home and told me about that,
I was like, that is very cool. And here is
another theme in what we have talked about on road
stories that I feel as things have opened up again
and we've been able to now do some traveling, but
not for work, not for gigs per se. Sometimes we
(56:35):
travel just to go to a different location and work
on stuff for client things. But it really does make
a difference, like these types of experiences that you can have,
and I think what I've enjoyed even though we've been
on the road way less than we used to in
this other season of life. Now we get to pick
some hotels because they're designed really well, and we get
(56:59):
to go see like how they design this, how the
architecture looks, or if it's a historic hotel, all those things,
and sometimes we get to treat ourselves when we can,
which isn't all the time, but when we can treat
ourselves to just a nice hotel, stay where you can
have where it can sort of feel like somebody else
gets to take care of you a little bit. So
(57:20):
I do enjoy those aspects of travel still. But now
because we're traveling on our own reconnaissance, we get a
chance to pick and choose where we're going, the city
we're going to, and where we're staying.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
And when we're leaving. That's it, because let's say about
the ability to not take that red eye flight. Oh
no back home immediately after the gig. No like sleeping
in the next day getting up.
Speaker 1 (57:49):
Yeah, yeah, we're those people now, so Best and Worst
Logie Awards. We hope all of these places, even though
we didn't tell you the ex location of them, they
know who they are.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
All right.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
Tune in next week our last episode, we're gonna tell
you about what were our favorite gigs of all time
and what were our best gigs ever?
Speaker 2 (58:13):
So we'll see y'all next week.
Speaker 1 (58:24):
Her with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for
Sober Feed Productions as a part of the Seneca Women
Podcast Network and partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.