Will Hoge

The backstage area at Raleigh, N.C.’s Lincoln Theatre is not unlike any other in a rock club of its size. White cinderblock walls decorated with magic marker graffiti from bands that have passed through over the years. A couple of dilapidated, cigarette-burned couches even the Salvation Army would turn down. A TV near the doorway tuned in to a Colts football game. The refrigerator in the corner littered with all shapes and sizes of band bumper stickers.

Will Hoge stands in the middle of the windowless, dorm-sized dressing room, his acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder. It’s just another night out on the road.

About a half hour before show time, doors to the venue open and the crowd takes its place around the stage. Behind the scenes, Hoge is calm and relatively quiet, strumming out a tune he recently penned. It won’t be long before he and his bandmates will be thrust into the spotlight. They have just 45 minutes to convince a room full of people to spend 12 of their hard-earned dollars to buy his record.

It’s the same uphill battle Hoge faces night-after-night, over 200 nights a year. Each time a different city, a different venue and a different crowd, but that same nondescript dressing room with the beat up couches and cinderblock walls.

Since signing with Atlantic in 2001, Hoge has been working hard to create a buzz for himself. He and band members Brian Layson, Tres Sasser, Keith Brogdon and John Lancaster have been touring in support of Hoge’s Atlantic debut, Blackbird on a Lonely Wire, since its spring 2003 release.

At a glance, it seems Hoge has the perfect job. He gets paid to travel around the country with his friends, playing his music for whoever will listen. But don’t be fooled. Most glitz’n’glamour rumors you’ve heard about the rock’n’roll lifestyle aren’t a reality, at least not for hard-working touring bands on the way up. There’s broken down vans, fast-food lunches, poorly promoted shows and the restlessness that comes from being in constant transit, locked in a strange, seemingly never-ending state of flux. Not to mention the omnipresent lack of cash flow. “People are still under this illusion that you sign a record deal and instantly everyone involved makes a lot of money and you’re famous,” Hoge says, “and it’s truly not that way at all.”

Hoge, 29, started playing music when he got his first guitar, a $25 Kingston he purchased from a friend’s dad just before graduating high school in the Nashville, Tenn. suburb of Franklin. During his second year of college at Western Kentucky University he joined a band.

“I knew right then it was something I was gonna pursue,” Hoge says. At the end of his sophomore year he left school to pursue a career in music.

“You come to this crossroads where you either do it because it’s something that’s fun or a hobby, or maybe you do it because you want to make lots of money or whatever,” he says. “Or you decide that it’s the one thing you feel like you should be doing, the only thing that makes you feel complete, and that’s what it was for me.”

Going Solo

After getting his feet wet with a few bands, Hoge decided to go it alone.

“‘Band’ is a jacked-up term,” he says. “Basically a band is one or two guys doing all the work and everybody else taking credit for it. You start to suffer from one person’s shortcomings holding everyone back, and you can’t say anything about it.”

So in 1999, Will Hoge became, simply, Will Hoge.

After independently releasing his first studio album, Carousel, in 2000, Hoge and the band were approached by Atlantic Records.

“We just made it a point that we were not going to be wowed by the rhetoric and the nice clothes and the big offices and the limos and all those things,” Hoge says.

However, not everything went according to plan.

“They flew us to New York and we were suckered in the minute that it started,” he says. “We just knew, we’re not going to buy into it, we’re gonna listen for what they’re really saying, we’re not gonna be wowed by all the flashy shit. And they sent a limo to pick us up at the hotel and we were like f---in’ The Beverly Hillbillies going to the office. We thought it was the coolest thing in the world and believed all the things that they said.”

But once the ink was dry on the contract with Atlantic, it was time for Hoge and the band to get back to work. “You’ve still got a shitload of work ahead of you,” he says. “It’s an endless struggle, really.”

No matter how big or small any band is, it has to constantly strive to keep its name in the public’s mind. If you’re not in the studio writing or recording an album, you’re on the road touring to promote the last one. Or you’re out shooting videos, doing radio spots and in-store promotions.

“The biggest problem with this whole thing is that it’s the music business, and those two things kind of really don’t go together,” Hoge says.

Hoge experienced this conflict of interests firsthand when he and his band went into the studio to record their Atlantic-debut, Blackbird on a Lonely Wire.

“The thing that we learned is you’re dealing with a major label and you’re dealing with someone who’s giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars to go make a record, and in some ways, the music is yours but the record is sort of theirs.”

Hoge compared the process to a painter or sculptor doing a work for hire.

“It’s a really strange process having to learn what battles to fight, and not everything goes maybe the way you want it to go,” he says.

But Hoge says when he and the band record their next album, they’ll have fewer battles to fight, having learned a lot the first time around.

“We’re gonna make a record that’s a little more us and a little bit more what we wanna do, kind of on our terms,” he says.

But once a record is finished and ready to ship to stores, a whole new battle begins. High sales figures are the fastest way to get a label’s attention—even after you’re signed.

“Major record companies want you to sell shitloads of product … and they don’t care for the most part what that product is as long as they can sell it,” Hoge says. “It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re constantly judged on the same sales figures as Jewel and Matchbox Twenty and Eminem. It’s all the same playing field and your sales are compared to what those people are doing. It’s strictly a numbers game. If you move enough product, you get to play again.”

Better Than Any Day Job

There’s one surefire way to move product: going on tour. Pick any day of the year, from the day after Christmas to the Fourth of July, and chances are, Hoge is on the road. But touring isn’t as simple as driving from city to city and playing a show. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of touring—if no one knows about the show, they can’t show up for it—and as Hoge says, it can be the most frustrating.

“You hear a lot of things of what people are going to do. ‘You’re gonna have’ or ‘we’re going to support you’ and then you show up and people have never even heard of your band,” Hoge says. “We’ve had in far too many cities program directors and people from radio stations come up and go ‘that was the best show I’ve ever seen … are you on a label?’ Not everybody is working as hard as you are. These people you’ve sort of trusted to fulfill their end of the bargain aren’t. And it gets really, really frustrating.”

Hoge recalls his worst show ever, one at which it seemed nothing could go right. The band drove nine hours from its home in Nashville to Madison, Wis. for a concert sponsored by a local radio station. The show was what Hoge calls a “one-off,” essentially meaning they'd made the trip for this show and this show only. The night was a disaster. There were equipment malfunctions and, after driving all that way, the band was asked to cut 20 minutes from its set. On the way home that night, Hoge was behind-the-wheel of the band’s massive green Dodge van while the band and their tour manager were sleeping in the back. Suddenly a tire blew on the trailer that held all of their instruments and gear—it was their fourth blow-out in eight days.

“I just completely snapped,” Hoge says. But he’s quick to add, “There are a lot of things that suck, but even on its worst days it’s better than any day job.”

Though touring itself may be better than most day jobs out there, the pay certainly isn’t.

“People assume that you’re in a band and you make tons of money,” Hoge says. “Nobody ever goes ‘wow, you make $300 a week apiece’ and nobody really understands that it’s hard for me to pay everybody $300 a week when we don’t make any money. It’s hard for Keith to raise a wife and a kid on $300 a week. I don’t think people really think about those things. People don’t think that we’re playing a show for $250 opening for Vertical Horizon at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh. The money we make in merch is really the only money that we’re making.”

But merchandise money, generated mainly by the sale of CDs and t-shirts after shows, can be hard to come by sometimes.

It’s happening to bands big and small across the country. Take, for example, the three girls who walked up to the merch table after a show in Raleigh. They looked over the CDs, picked out the songs they liked best from the night’s set and made the final selection, Hoge’s latest release. But only one girl pulled out her wallet.

“We’re going to share it,” the one girl said innocently as she handed over $12, meaning that instead of each girl buying her own CD, the one girl was going to burn a copy for each of her friends.

“It’s kind of sad,” Hoge says, “because I don’t think those people realize when they’re sitting there saying that, what they’re saying is—I’m going to not pay you what you kind of deserve for this whole thing.”

While the concept of CD sharing doesn’t seem like a big deal to some, Hoge says that when you do the math it becomes somewhat of an issue. Each album “shared” is lost profit to Hoge and any other band this happens to.

“The biggest thing I can justify is, if it drives people to come see us again it’s kind of a win-win situation,” Hoge says.

The mood and experience of an entire tour is deeply connected to the band you’re out on the road with. Not only that, but it can be a great learning experience for how, or how not, to act.

Hoge says that with the majority of the groups he’s toured with, it’s been a positive experience. He cites Midnight Oil as a valuable influence on how he and his band carry themselves on the road.

“The guys in Midnight Oil were constantly professional,” Hoge said. “They always made sure we were taken care of. That was a really big lesson for us, and we learned it early on. Even in the limited amount of headlining experience we get now, I think the bands that open for us realize that we’re a decent group of guys. I mean if you wanna drink one of our sodas it’s not that big of a f---ing deal.”

But to some bands it is. On a recent tour with rock group Vertical Horizon, Hoge and his tour manager were asked repeatedly to go out of their way to accommodate the other band’s needs. On several occasions, they were even asked to not come out and sign autographs at the merch table for fans after the show because it was “improper etiquette” to do it after another band’s set. At one show, to make the best of a bad situation, Hoge and his band moved their merchandise table to the sidewalk outside of the venue. To their benefit, they caught almost every person on their way out the door.

“When your career is on the downswing, I think you really start to hang on to things that really don’t matter,” Hoge says. “Like, this is ‘our’ dressing room or this is ‘our’ merch area. When your career is starting to flounder, you try to control things that really don’t make a difference.”

Fortunately, as Hoge said, most tours have been very positive.

While on tour with Charleston, S.C.’s Jump Little Children, Hoge and his band forged friendships that have lasted for several years .

“We were really fortunate, we all got along so well. And that was one I was actually really worried about,” Hoge says in retrospect. “From the very first show we did with those guys there was an instant respect. We were all sort of like long lost brothers. They became, really and truly, friends. In the business we’re in, you don’t have a lot of friends. Basically the five people you know best in the world are in the van you drive around all the time. You don’t have a lot of relationships outside of that. So when you get to meet people like that, that’s cool. That’s kind of what this is all about.”

A Career Commitment

Being on the road nearly non-stop, away from friends and family can be tiresome. Recently, two band members, Brogdon and Sasser, made the difficult decision that it was time for them to leave the band.

In a message to fans, Brogdon wrote, “I recently became a father and feel that I need to be around more and not miss out on my son growing up. You only get one chance at this sort of thing. Being in a working band takes a lot of dedication, both mentally and physically, and I can no longer give the 100 percent that the band gives and deserves.”

Similarly, Sasser wrote, “I consider the last 5 years with this band probably the best in my life. I have made so many friends and have had such cool life experiences that I would never trade them for anything. At this time in my life I simply feel I should move on. What does moving on mean? I don't know. I'm sure I will play music, I'm sure I will continue to write, and I'm sure I will definitely still be a fan of Will and this band. This is a hard decision, but one that is right for me.”

But no matter what happens, Hoge has proven he’s in it for the long haul. Over the years, band members have come and gone. In fact, Sasser was the only original member left.

In his own post on the band’s web site, Hoge told fans, “Don’t worry, John, Brian and myself are completely committed—probably more than ever. Things have really taken a positive turn for this band, both musically and on the road. It's been a rough year, but in the last 7 months, we can feel it totally turning around.”

Hoge’s passion for music and true work ethic are sure to keep him going.

“We haven’t had someone try and inflate our egos and make us think we’re the shit,” Hoge says. “So in turn we don’t think we’re the shit but it also makes us really hungry to be a better band and sort of prove to people that we are as good if not better than all those bands you’re reading about in the paper and you’re watching on television.”

“I really and truly think this is such a great band,” Hoge says. “I don’t think there is a greater rock’n’roll band in the world and I really and truly believe that. This is a career commitment for us. This is something we’re gonna do for a long time.”