Shoulder To The Wheel
We encouraged hardcore bands to "tour forever" and valorized their efforts with community respect. But what if we were actually fetishizing self-harm?
I.
I remember the tour posters we made because, in retrospect, they were peculiar. They were small, maybe 11x17, mostly in black and white, with a single spot color and a disproportionate amount of text. You would think that a tour poster should work to get you excited to see a band—with an oversized live action shot, perhaps—but in this case, we only had so much room on the paper. Because that year, the itinerary for Shelter’s summer tour would begin on May 15, and wasn’t scheduled to end until September 5. That’s almost four months. I call the poster peculiar because the dates alone take up almost 70 percent of the design. There were just that many of them.
The thing that this poster doesn’t tell you, of course, is that we were also scheduled to tour for an additional six weeks…