Every horror story you’ve heard about tour is probably true. The drives are unbearable. You start to hate your bandmates. You spend most nights sleeping on hardwood floors—either shivering or sweating, depending on the season. The money is scarce and unpredictable. The “tour diet” consists pretty much entirely of energy drinks and gas station pork rinds (in that order). For a band that isn’t selling out stadiums, the entire concept becomes incredibly hard to justify. 

As evidenced by the lead single off the group’s latest LP, “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will,” the members of PUP are no strangers to the aforementioned lifestyle. Since releasing their self-titled debut in 2014, the group’s spent a majority of their time on the road—and their incessant touring almost resulted in a premature career death, when lead vocalist Stefan Babcock was diagnosed with vocal cord polyps from overuse. “The dream is over,” the doctor told Babcock, not realizing that she had inadvertently coined the perfect title for the band’s next record. 

Myspace recently spoke with PUP guitarist Steve Sladkowski about what he feels has been the band’s worst experiences on tour (so far). Check out his detailed accounts below.  

The Rotten Reuben 

One time last fall, we were on tour with Modern Baseball and were driving from Wyoming to Denver, and there was a snow storm on the way, so the gig in Denver ended up getting cancelled. We ended up in this shitty town in Wyoming, and I ate a Rueben sandwich and the meat was rancid—I spent the entire night vomiting, pretty much once an hour. That was pretty bad. 

The Black Ice Wipeout

One winter we were in Manitoba, and were about 50 kilometers outside of a town called Brandon, and we hit a patch of black ice. The van did a 180 on the highway and we went backwards on a snow bank. Black ice is just [the ultimate tour nightmare], because it’s so dangerous, and you need to cover a lot of ground, and maybe you’re going a little too quick—and there’s nothing you can do with black ice. It’s not like snow or rain where you can get tires that will help. You hit it and you either stay on the road or you don’t.

The Great Cancelled Flight Mystery

We were on tour in the UK, and we had to fly from London to Toronto to play Riot Fest, but when we showed up to the airport we found out that they had cancelled our flight…it just never showed up. And so we were two hours behind and just freaking out and trying to get in touch with our agent. We frantically had to switch our set time, but showing up to the airport with no advance warning that we would not be getting on our plane…definitely not a nice feeling on tour.

The Mobile Hot Topic

We did the Vans Warped Tour [in 2015], which was a really difficult experience for us. There were a lot of overnight drives and sleeping for three hours in Wal-Mart parking lots, and being in 100 degree heat for eight hours a day. We also did the Vans Warped Tour in a van, which is insane, considering most bands are in buses. We did that for a month, and it was very, very rough. People don’t understand [how much work the Warped Tour is]—it is basically like a mobile Hot Topic.

The Haunted Flophouse

Finally, there was this really bad time when we played a show in Portland. It was the first time we had played there, and we were on tour with this band from Montreal called Solids. This was in 2013 at this bar called Holocene, before our first record came out. This was before we knew anyone in Portland, and so we just sort of announced from the stage that we needed a place to crash because we didn’t know anyone. This dude who had sort of a nebulous connection to Toronto and smelled bad—and when I say “smelled bad,” I mean that I noticed it, not like an I-haven’t-showered-in-five days kind of smell, but a deeper funk—let us stay at his place, but he was leaving so said we had to meet him there, and that should have set off alarm bells.

If that would happen now I would totally say don’t worry about it, but we were desperate. So we met him after the show and got a beer at this bar, and hung out there and shot a game or two of pool, and then we went back to his house—and it was this unassuming, Victorian-looking house—and we came in and it smelled like industrial cleaner, like someone had tried to get a long-standing stench out of the carpets and hadn’t succeeded. Out of nowhere he was like, “So we have one empty room that we used to have a roommate in, so two of you can stay in that room and two of you can stay in the basement where my bed is,” so Zack [Mykula] and Stefan [Babcock] went with him and slept on a mattress while he slept on a couch, and apparently the mattress had these giant brown stains on it that weren’t discernible, and half-eaten subway sandwiches and just trash and all kinds of shit everywhere. 

Nestor [Chumack] and I stayed in a blow-up mattress in a room that had nothing in it, and as were setting up the mattress the guy was like. ‘Be careful, this is our old roommate’s room, and you should watch out for syringes.’ The only things that were in the room aside from the blow-up mattress were toenail clippings and cigarette butts on the carpet—so we realized we were just staying in this really awful flophouse basically. What I learned from that experience is that if you’re really motivated to leave a place, and if you’re frightened for your safety, the maximum amount of sleep you need to function is 3 hours—‘cause we went to bed at 3 and were out of there by 8.