NEW GENERATION TOUR 1993
The Japanese tour for New generation was like no other. We had been there the year before and done a very nice 7 show tour, but this one was above and beyond. Prior to this we had been used to European tours where we sometimes sat on boxes in cargo vans with no seats or windows. We stayed in crappy hotels, played in shit hole venues and all the other things you would expect a band to do in their early days.
Upon arrival, they gave us a printed itinerary with every day of the tour accounted for.The whole day was all mapped out. We had a meeting with the Sony crew to meet everyone and talk about promotions that they had planned. Then we went to a rehearsal studio to test out the backline that they had rented for us. We set everything up the way that we wanted it and we never touched the gear again for the rest of the tour. They had a crew taking notes and marking how we wanted everything.We were not used to this. For example from that day forward, we would arrive at the venue for soundcheck and all of our stuff was all set up onstage just as we wanted it. There was no loading in or out (for us).
They had two vans for the tour. One van had us and two tour managers and the other van had our gear and crew.
Each of us had our own room in the hotels, another thing we were not used to and they were nice hotels.
We had a number of shows in the Tokyo and surrounding areas. During the daytime, we were doing interviews with magazines. Each magazine would bring their own photographer and they would request we wear different clothing than other magazine interviews so they would have different pictures. We also did a bunch of radio interviews and ID’s. I can’t remember what song we did but we played acoustically on some radio show, I wish I had a copy of that.
We did 13 shows from the top to the bottom of Japan. All of the venues were very nice. Before each show they would have us sign a bunch of tour posters.It was a great experience.
We really believed that this was the way it was always going to be going forward… :-)
