There's One Thing You Cannot Do On Sturgill Simpson's Tour Bus

To be completely honest, it was like every other record I've made, even the ones that some of these guys have played on, it was much more of like I came in. You're the songwriter and like it's session musicians, you know. And then you go out and you're the commodity, you're the singing head, you're the star. And I think maybe around 2017 there was a big part of me that really rejected all that. The newness of it and like the responsibility of it. I just, all I ever wanted to do is play guitar in a band, you know, as a kid. And maybe I wanted to feel like a part of something that wasn't all about my fucking head. Right. I mean, and I realized like I was finally in the band. I'd always wanted to be in since I was 13 in my bedroom, you know. So like why wouldn't I make those records? Right. It's funny because imagine, I mean think about the first one that we made together. Right. Opposed to... Yeah, Bobby, I met, I actually met Bobby before I met Miles. Bobby played Oregon on my very first record. I'd never met him. He got called down by the producer. And we instantly, I was just like, okay, this guy's cool as shit. And then I think like we were hanging out for like a week and we were going out. We were both going pretty hard in the paint still back then. And like Bobby and I would go out drinking and then come home and wake my wife up at 4 in the morning, eat all the ice cream. And that was like... Yeah. And I think it was one night in particular in Nashville. I was working at a fucking grocery store. He was sleeping in his car. You know, we're both just like pretending we're not miserable and enjoying each other's company. We went out and got real shit face, man. And we were walking up to Mumbry and going to the only place that was still open to get some food at like 3 in the morning. So all these meat market bars are letting out. And we both looked like a couple of degenerate scumbags probably. And we walked by and there was this group of like four or five obviously Vandy fucking football players. Like just huge dudes, young men and pretty inebriated. And we're walking by and I hear one of them say, oh, look, it's the strokes. He's like, I love your records, man. You know, and I blew it off whatever I'm grown ass man. And I kept walking and then I got about 10 feet. I don't know why I could just tell Bobby wasn't with me anymore. And I turn around and look back to see this motherfucker standing in the middle of the circle of all of them, like literally eight inches from this guy's face with his hands on his hip wearing his leather jacket. Bobby's from Detroit, man. You don't fucking play, you know. And I look, I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm going to jail with Bob tonight. And I turn around and like kind of walk back over there. And about the time I get to the group of dudes, one of them was eating a street hot dog. I will never forget this as long as I live. Bobby like snatched the hot dog out of his hand and kind of crushed it like a paper wad and bounced it off his forehead. Oh, Bobby. And I was like, well, now I'm definitely going to jail with Bob tonight, you know. So Bradley Coopers and you get the Bradley Coopers. We call them Bradley Coopers because it's like this swarm of like dudes that had pink shirts on them. Like Bradley Coopers were surrounded. And I don't know. It was fascinating to watch them all immediately knew that they were dealing with something that they'd never experienced and they wanted fucking none of it. I was like, I think this is my new best friend. I'm going to be friends with God rest my life. This hot dog destroying man is not to be fucked with. This David Lee Roth organ playing motherfucker is all right. We were just walking, having a drink. Other than nobody. They were dicks. Total dicks. And then we went back and ate all of his ice cream out of the same container with it. It was disgusting. And now we sleep on a bus and have our own hotel rooms. The bus thing's got to be a trip, huh? It's a lot like a like being on a ship. Yeah, it's just like the Navy sleeping bunks and you wake up every day and wonder where you are. But no shitty on the bus, right? Can't poop on the bus. No, that's so thousand dollars. You pay a thousand? You can poop on other people's buses. You don't poop on our bus. Right. So what do you guys do? Just tell the guy to pull over to a rest stop. Yeah, you find a nice pilot somewhere in Omaha and shit on the toilet. The same 38 truckers have today. It's already warm. Whoo. Good old glory. It beats being in a van though, by far. Oh, for sure, right. So you guys listen to music, playing music. What are you doing when you're on the bus? Movies. Chilling movies. Movies or, you know, watching Chuck and Buck. Serial. Very few comics travel like that. Bert Kreicher is like one of the rare ones. He travels by bus with his face on it and shit. I mean, at the end of the day, we are very grateful. I want to touch on that. But like the bus thing, it's a quality of life issue, as you well know. Touring is all about quality of life. There's no way to make it not suck other than the shows themselves. Right. But everything else that 22 hours a day, it's like just trying to see if you can, one, some kind of circadian rhythm so you don't get all serotonin weird and shit. One of that nightly adrenaline blasts is the hardest thing on me, I find after a tour that I have to like figure out what's going on in my brain and not be, you get home from that after six weeks, I can't get off the couch for a week. It's like this weird, strange fatigue I've never experienced in anything else. But the bus, we kind of, I'd rather, like I said, I'd rather ride the bus for three days than go to an airport. Amen. Really? Absolutely. It's just, you're in a cocoon, it's your home. You're on the ground. It's familiar, it's a safe haven. We're all just chilling. Yeah, we hang out, we're all around each other more than we are our families most of the time. We're in this little motor home and if you get off, it's just like fucking Joseph Conrad, man. Don't get off the boat. If you step off the boat, that's when weird shit happens. Right.