Only touch it once. 

Okay, I admit. This is not always practical. I just moved an elder teen/young adult into college and I touched everything in that van about eight hundred times, but the principle remains. Even if it’s an ideal, a shimmering city on the hill that we will never get to, unobtainable and abstract and perfect, a mirage — like true love, or a literate and informed electorate — it’s important to still have goals and guiding principles. So the first principle: only touch it once. 

And by it I mean all of the crap that you are taking to the gig. A quick digression re that crap. And to be clear I am talking to you, dear reader, the gigging, semi-pro, weekend-warrior musician, and not the young adults who just embarked on the cruise ship of college. You don’t need all that crap. The less you take, the more fun you’ll have. It’s a spiritual-proportional riddle. As a professional told me once: at the beginning of the gig, you set up your stuff; at the end of the gig, you tear down your shit. This encapsulates the emotional Freytagian triangle of gigging. Those hills and dales will be lessened in their severity if you take less stuff. Sure, there is some back up stuff you reasonably might need, a cord, some strings. But you don’t need three electric guitars. You don’t need all those cymbals. Marie Kondo those artifacts into outer space and see just how little you can take and still be effective. It might even make you sound more interesting and it will definitely make the trip back to the car afterward more enjoyable. 

Second principle: only one trip from the car. Rarely do I get to park close enough to the venue to unload directly from the car, and I despise walking back and forth from the venue to the car with only armloads of stuff. It feels inefficient. I have a friend who transports all of his items in tiny hobbit bags, which means he takes 17 trips back and forth from his Honda to the bandstand. One trip. Put it on a cart with wheels. I use the RockNRoller Multi-Cart R6RT “Mini,” previously reviewed here. (Yes, every morpheme of that name is copyrighted.)

Now it would be nice if you could load the cart with the ingredients in order, so that you could take stuff off the cart and place it directly where it needs to go, like a snake sliding out of old skin. But stuff doesn’t go on the cart that way. You have to load the big box-like stuff on the bottom and the looser, more tote bag-like stuff on top, and that does not make for a snake-skin-shedding gracefulness when unloading. So the best next method I’ve found is going extremely slowly and not talking to anyone. I realize I sound insane, but when unloading/setting up my stuff, I keep my trap shut and I move slowly and with deliberation. 

It also helps to visualize. You need your bass amp near the drummer but on his left because he has weird issues when you set up on his right, but you’re going to have to steeplechase over the guitar player’s crap due east, as he’s diligently hunkered over his NASA-like pedalboard which, you guessed it, is giving him trouble again. Think before you shoot. Look at the field of play. Pretend you’re hosting one of those home redesign shows and you’re plopping down generic midcentury modern furniture blobs in the graphic user interface of your mind. 

Don’t chit chat. Don’t look at your phone. Don’t go get a drink. Slowly, with a kind of cud-chewing intensity that would alarm bandmates insufficiently acclimated to your level of dedication, vision quest where you’re going to put your stuff, and then methodically unload your items and place them accordingly. This means that at some point you’re going to have to unload an item that does not need to be placed in its final resting place yet. Simply put it on the ground next to your cart. Do not I repeat do not find another waystation spot for this item. Move it as short a distance as possible, i.e., right beside the cart. Don’t worry about being in other people’s way. It’s not like that guitar player has a leg to stand on. And the keyboard player is too busy playing with the Erector Set that’s supposed to become his keyboard stands. And the drummer is late, naturally, and will have to trebuchet his stuff over everyone else’s stuff. 

Once the items are unloaded, if there are bags, put the bags inside one another. It’s like coming home from Kroger. All the hobo bags go into one master hobo bag. Now you’re free to start hooking everything together. Place first, then do the cords. I like to have all cords in one bag, with the exception of powered PA speakers. I tote those in zippered bags that have pouches for their essential power cords. I realize this is a little bougie, but this way every speaker always has a cord with it. I never promised you this blog post would be entertaining. Otherwise, all other cords — extra power cords, ¼″ instrument cables, XLR cables — go into one rolling suitcase, so that I can flip the top and pull out what’s needed, and more important, so that at the end of the night, I can coil up the cables and toss them directly into the one dedicated bag without thinking. This is how the West was won. 

Then, the gig is over. Congratulations, you made it. Now comes the fun part. You’re going to power down the system, split the tip money, and then unplug everything. I try to make-up for my general Terminator vibe by splitting up the tip money as soon as possible. For some reason I find the mass unplugging part fun. Then, the less-fun part, you’re going to coil all the cables up and throw them in the suitcase. True, the individual speaker power cords can’t go there and will need to be coiled and placed on the floor immediately next to said speaker. I allow myself a little afterglow reverie chit chat during this portion, but not much.  

Then and only then you can retrieve the hobo bag collection and start to bag your speakers, including their power cables. Note: It doesn’t matter which power cable goes into which bag because they are all IEC C13 power cords now. The point is to prevent your future self from showing up to a gig with a powered speaker but no power cable. 

Now here’s where the snake-sliding part comes in. Put those speakers on the bottom of the cart and layer your lighter stuff on top of it. You are building a cake. Then wheel it outside to your van. You have a van, don’t you? Get a van. Or something that has a tailgate. I myself yearn for a small car, a cheeky little two-door, something that might be called “zippy,” but the problem is the trunk. You have to lift items over and down. Warning: this is a Back Risk. It’s better to place or slide items along the uniform plane of the truck, car, or wagon’s cargo space. (Plus, I got kids.) Unload the cart directly into the van with the lighter stuff moving back toward the center of the van and the last-unloaded heavier stuff toward the rear of the van, which means that, yes, that heavy, box stuff will be the first items out next time and can go directly on the cart. This is the Golden Ticket. 

One thing I’ve learned is that although the van is quite handy in terms of the amount of stuff you can fit within it, you don’t have to fill that guy up every time. If you are taking a full vanload of stuff to each gig simply because you can fit it in your car, that’s bad. It’s a freeway-lanes-increasing-traffic type of problem. Also, after moving myself and helping people move and listening to various old dudes pontificate on the proper way to load a moving truck, I have internalized the knowledge that the heavier items need to be loaded first and placed toward the front of the cargo bay. I still agree with this, but the van is different because hopefully you are not taking an entire van load of stuff and b) none of it is refrigerator heavy. Here in 2026 we’ve got dishwashers that text your phone and drones that deliver your pizza, so I hope you’re leaving the Ampeg SVT 8×10 cab in the garage where it belongs. So that means, don’t push the items into the van all the way unless you have to. Just place them halfway back, so that you can still grab them without crawling into the van on your knees. This is the Special Sauce, of which G Love speaks. Honda van, only halfway full. I hate having to crawl around on my knees. It hurts my spirit, and also my knees. 

Day after a gig I wake up thinking. How could that have been better? How could I make that easier? Part of this is the musical performance. But often this morning meditation returns to the logistics of the gig, because there aren’t really any good parts to that. I realize I sound insane, but it’s all room-for-improvement. It’s difficult because it’s physically difficult, and it’s tedious. It’s also where the physics of amplified sound, and the complications thereof, confront one’s self-image as performing musician. Of course the Marshall stack behind the guitar player looks cool. But setting aside the stage-volume concerns, that’s just a lot of lumber to fit in the back of the Jetta. So you’re always subdividing what you want to have by what you actually need and trying to make them reconcile. Some people online say they will take whatever makes them feel good in the moment while playing. Sure, yes, one wants to feel good. And maybe that feeling good is achieved by having that extra cymbal, those additional guitars. But there is feeling good and there is doing good, and by taking fewer items, moved through space with clear intention, you create less traffic on the bandstand for your mates, and you create less traffic for your later self, your actual self rather than your fantasy self, the one who looks cool. You have to remember the actual self, the tired and sweaty self, the one with physical limits, because that’s the guy you’re going to have to live with.