12 dudes on a bus for 10 weeks… What could go wrong?  

Actually the better question is, what could go right?  A LOT!!

The simple fact that the 12 of us didn’t all kill each other and managed a considerable level of civility toward one another is a small miracle.  

Out here, the line between boss/employee, friend/colleague, room-mate/landlord can get blurred beyond all recognition.  We’re a group... but we’re not. Privacy is erased, the chatter constant.  From morning til night people are around you. And that doesn’t even include the fans that wait outside the bus at 9AM, asking for selfies, when all you want to do is take a shit after waking up.  

The days are long, the nights sometimes longer, you can be lonely and bored and sick of everyone around you all in the same breathe.  Exhausted but can’t sleep, happy but sad, high and low… all while you bounce down the road for hours on end, never really getting a deep sleep until you park at the venue.  

And everywhere you go people stare… cause they love what they think you are… or, cause they hate what they think you are.

Many of us sacrifice time away from our families, our kids, our girlfriends.  Relationships are tough out here.  The ones at home can’t handle the loneliness and uncertainty.  Is he cheating on me? Would he tell me if he was?

And it can be a grind…

Somedays the road just wears you down to the bone.

Somedays you cry for no reason at all.

You talk to strangers like they’re friends, trying to make a connection, but walk away feeling disconnected.

So you focus on the work.  The pride in your craft.

People die, people are born, people fight, people don’t speak to each other, people get married, and somehow you just tuck your chin down and keep walking through the hurricane.  

And it all leads up to (in our case) the 3 hours of music that makes every moment worth it.  180 minutes that most of the time makes life worth living.  Reaffirms humanity.  Shows that we’re nothing short of incredible, with fans so crazed, and loud, and passionate, we were often left speechless and a little verklempt.  Sold-out date after sold-out date, we hit or passed the 3-hour-mark regularly, the loudest sing-a-longs in history, the biggest merch numbers in history, best attendances of the last 10 years, and all without a package, just Machine Fuckin’ Head.  

In addition to the 18 “standards” in our setlist we rotated a whopping 32 songs in and out, making it our most diverse setlists in history. 

And the 8 guys that work for / travel with us, build that canvas for us to paint on.  Without our crew the show doesn’t happen, period. The workload on them is considerable.  These guys "make a dollar $ outta .15 cents" on the regular.  Machine Head is not a huge touring organization, they all wear MANY-hats.  What happens behind the scenes is often-times more important than what you see onstage.

Including the 7 week US run prior, we’ve been out over 4 months with a 9 day break in between.  Until you’ve done 10 weeks straight, you’ll never comprehend how hard it is.  

16 hour days, 3 to 4 shows in-a-row, we all eat dinner at midnight… the day ends at 2AM.  The crew get none of the glory, the perks are few (though weed and booze are plentiful, and the single-guys get most of the pussy), plus the local crew can make their day amazing or a disaster. 

Man... we had some damn good times on this run.

Some EPIC "Dawn Patrols” laughing our asses off, singing gloriously horribly into the wee hours of the morning (afternoon?).

Some of these guys have been with us for years, some are on their first tour.  We’ll lose some along the way, pick up others, but for these 10 weeks in Mar-May 2018, these 8 grizzled sonsabitches fucking KILLED IT for Machine Head, and for that we are SO grateful.

Massive shout out to Pot Rod, Ham Smasher, Pandoro Dudesky, Church, The 57th best Tour Manager in the world, Ma-Ha-Rog, new guys Junior and Bitch Tits, Volker, (plus Nikolas for the first 2 weeks, and a 13th bus-rider for a large chunk of it, Creepin’ Jern).

70 days, 44 shows, 120+ hours onstage, over 1000 songs played, and tens of thousands of Head Cases rocked.

Fuckin’ A… well done men.

Give these gentlemen a hand.

- Robb