Middle-Income Green: Blind Pilot, Cloud Cult and Eco-Friendly Touring on a Shoestring Budget

In 2006, folk-pop duo Blind Pilot pedaled its way down the foggy, twisting highways of the West Coast. This was no Sunday bike ride; it was the Portland band’s first tour from Vancouver to San Francisco.

In an industry where “on the road” often means cushy private tour busses—and, for the elite, even private jets—touring green defies rock ’n’ roll’s tradition of excess. And yet “green” doesn’t necessarily mean “cheap.” Although larger, more environmentally conscious artists like Pearl Jam and Jack Johnson can afford to fill mammoth vehicles with biodeisel and merch tables with organic Ts, non-headliners are often left in the middle-income dust. Some smaller groups, including Blind Pilot and Minneapolis fiddle rockers Cloud Cult, are trying to change that.

Cloud Cult frontman Craig Minowa challenges the notion that green touring and cost-cutting are mutually exclusive. When his band travels, it donates money to various wind-power organizations and American Forests, which plants trees to offset CO2 emissions. Though Minowa insists these efforts aren’t that expensive (“$1 per tree”), he adds “I guess it’s kind of like low-income college students somehow figuring out how to buy organic groceries; they’re not necessarily in an income bracket that could afford that, but they prioritize.” Minowa adds that Cloud Cult scrimps in other ways—buying groceries instead of eating out, finding cheap lodging and sometimes sleeping in the van.

“Saving money and touring green are both about efficiency,” says Blind Pilot singer/guitarist Israel Nebeker. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.” The band’s two bike tours, dragging along trailers for their instruments, testify to this. But sweating from venue to venue isn’t doable for everyone, and even Blind Pilot has had to resort to van travel for its 2009 tour, although this doesn’t mean they’ve thrown in the organic-cotton towel. The bandmates keep a gigantic cooler in the van, and fill it with purchases from local and organic grocery stores. They also store their recyclables in the van and toss them wherever they find a bin.

Blind Pilot has found that eco-conscious van travel is more comparable with biking, price-wise, than they originally thought. “On our bike tours we ended up eating about four times as much,” says Nebeker, “so we may not have saved money."