A flat tire on the road to the next gig, an unsettling cold night spent shivering in the back of a van, a dinner of only condiments and a small amount of cash in return for playing a show with only a bartender listening.

The lifestyle doesn’t seem appealing, but all across the United States, bands are doing whatever it takes to fulfill their desires. It could be months or it could be years, but, if they’re lucky, these trials and tribulations will slowly start to fade. As a band ropes in more fans and makes a little more money, the backseat beds and ketchup dinners become things of the past.

Clearly, a little more fame can push a band toward a more luxurious lifestyle, whether it’s an upgrade to spending the night in a hotel, chartering a personal jet, having the money to afford new equipment or the pleasure of no longer having to hold down a 9-to-5 job.

“The four of us were living together in a house, would take time off from our shitty day jobs where we were making virtually no money, go out on tour for two to three weeks, make, you know, $50 a show, get a pizza, sleep in the van, drive on to the next show and barely break even – or not even break even – on the tour, and then come home and you have all these massive bills piled up,” says Jerry MacDonnell, drummer for indie rock band the Wrens.

A band since the late 1980s, the Wrens have had their fair share of beginner-band struggles. They have seen, however, a definite change in lifestyle since their first tour.

“Now we’re able to get all over the country and play these shows and be able to hop back on the plane and fly back home and go to work and then wait until the next weekend and do the same thing again,” he says. “So I’d say the biggest change in our lifestyle has been the ability to not have to go out for weeks at a time and be able to really focus on playing.”

But this change hasn’t occurred solely because of the Wrens’ success as a band. There is another crutch on which the members must lean.

“With us, it’s been our success and the change of our lifestyle that has really been brought around by day jobs and getting out of debt because of the day jobs, from all the years of touring making no money,” MacDonnell says.

For California band Rogue Wave, however, struggling to balance a day job with the band is a thing of the past.

“The biggest difference is I haven’t been able to work a normal job,” says Zach Rogue, front man of the lo-fi rock band. “So the 9-to-5 thing, at least for the past year and a half, has changed. And I can’t say if that has had a positive or negative impact on the music, but I can say that I’m not doing that anymore, at least not right now.”

Rogue says a new trailer and a sound engineer that tours with the band have been a few other major changes. The band has also been able to upgrade its equipment, including the purchase of a real bass rig and a real hardware case for the drummer’s gear.

“The thing is, when you’re first playing, you can barely afford to buy anything and, consequently, a lot of times things are always breaking down because they’re in such poor condition to begin with,” he says.

Bringing in the big bucks?

Getting to a different lifestyle – having the pleasure of purchasing a trailer to haul all of its equipment or the luxury of flying back and forth from home – has to be at least partly because of money. A change in lifestyle, however, does not always reflect a significant change in income from touring. For Austin, Texas, band Okkervil River, the mansion and yacht have yet to be purchased. Will Sheff, the band’s front man, says on the first tour Okkervil River ever did, the big bucks for one show equaled $40.

“You’d play the show and nobody would come and then they’d give us, like, $40 and we would try to find a place to crash and usually that involved, from the stage, being like, ‘Does anybody have a place we can stay?'” Sheff says. “So we were in sort of a grind, and then the money you’d make wasn’t enough to even pay for gas, so you wouldn’t have any food. You’d come back from the tour and everybody would have personally lost money.”

Okkervil River is no longer starving, but Sheff says the increase in money has not been an extremely substantial change.

“Basically, we’ve made enough money to where we were able to afford to buy a better van that’s bigger so we can carry more people,” he says. “The club usually gives us like $10 per person for dinner, so we get to go get some food and that makes things a lot better.”

For the Wrens, MacDonnell says the money is coming from touring, publicity and the Internet. The money from the Internet allows the Wrens to hire a booking agent.

This addition to the band translates into money because a booking agent equals better shows. Better shows mean the band can ask for a greater guarantee. MacDonnell says since the band’s first tour, its guarantee has significantly increased.

“It’s gone up probably 500 percent,” he says.

It’s not just national acts that have seen their guarantees rise. Iowa quartet the Nadas have been a band for 12 years and have seen a definite change.

Vocalist and guitarist Jason Walsmith says, however, that the band’s change has been very gradual.

“It was never a dramatic, all-of-a-sudden whole boatload of money was dropped in our lap, you know,” he says.

“[The guarantee] definitely increased over the years, but we still play for a wide spectrum of guarantees – it’s all about what you’re worth, how many people you can bring in and things like that.”

A change in record sales

Moving up in the cluttered world of music brings many lifestyle changes, but for a band, one of the most significant is seeing a rise in record sales. For Rogue Wave, the Internet has helped the band boost record sales.

“The paradigm is shifting a lot because of the Internet and things like iTunes and that sort of thing,” Rogue says. “Certain record labels take deductions for hard costs for CD production and vinyl and all that stuff, and when it’s all digital through the Internet or some distribution system where there are no hard costs of building an actual product that sells in a store, that deduction can be eliminated. So that can give a higher percentage, theoretically, to artists, which can be a really neat thing, but there’s the loss of people sharing it for free and all that.”

Although the Internet may seem like the best way for musicians to cut back on production costs and for fans to swap music, it also has its downfalls. For the Nadas, the Internet has had a negative effect on album sales.

“The industry has changed in a way drastically, where even though we have a way broader fan base and way more fans as broad numbers go, we sell fewer CDs then we used to,” Walsmith says. “Because when we first started making CDs, people couldn’t copy them.”

Personal lifestyle changes

A change in lifestyle certainly affects many aspects of the band. There are, however, numerous personal lifestyle alterations that come with success and change. Whether it’s a horrible feeling of homesickness, missing memorable family moments, the frustration of having to hold down a separate job or the painful toll touring can take on a body, one thing is for sure – no band can escape it.

Although the Wrens’ MacDonnell says the band has been able to get out of debt because of the members’ day jobs, the alternative occupations begin to become a stressful situation.

“The worst thing is we have to juggle that, because three of us make quite a good living with our day jobs and it’s a real, really f—ing hard struggle in our heads and in your heart to have to not be able to do music full time, knowing that you’re not going to be able to have the same lifestyle,” he says.

Rogue Wave has been faced with a few different personal lifestyle changes. For front man Rogue, the struggle has been with his body, which has taken a beating on tour.

“I’ve had two back surgeries and I just pulled a tendon in my wrist from overuse,” he says, “so when I try to play the guitar now, it’s really painful. It’s the tendon that when you pull your thumb back, and so it’s actually physically painful to play the guitar now, which is something I do every day and I know we’re going to be touring for, like, the next six months.”

Rogue says another very painful personal change has been his absence from home.

“The idea of being away, not seeing my wife and stuff like that, is just something I never planned on because I never thought I’d be in band that went on tour,” he says. “So it’s the alienation a little bit, of going away and then coming home and your friends and your family and loved ones – like, you’re out of sync with them. My nephew just walked for the first time about three days ago and I wasn’t there to see it, you know?”

Through the years, a band faces many changes, many challenges and many life alterations. When all things are said and done, however, the biggest and most significant alteration a band can envision is simply that of having someone hear its music.

“We’re not the biggest band in the world, but we have been able to play in certain places where there are people that will come and hear it, and that completes the circle,” Rogue says. “And that’s the biggest thing.

“And it’s not about popularity or anything like that, or about making money or something,” he says. “It’s about this feeling, like I say, the circle being complete. Like you’ve made this thing, like the whole ‘Field of Dreams,’ you know? If you build it, it’s the idea that that can actually happen. And knowing that it can, it’s a feeling of excitement that I hope doesn’t dissipate.”