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WARNING
If you have plans booking a tour for or wanting to book a performance from James Hand and band, I’ll strongly ask you to reconsider, the following happened to me and others who tried to do so for April 2008.
From April 19 until may 5 2008 a tour for James Hand was set up. This tour was all but booked fully and airfare from Austin,Tx to Amsterdam (the Netherlands) was taken care of by one of the festivals.
This tour was to make the Band $16,500 guaranteed (some of the gigs had a door percentage as well), this is not counting merchandise which is (as everybody knows) very profitable in Europe.
From this amount van and backline rent as well as 3 or 4 nights hotel was to be deducted, but the tour would have brought the band well over $10,000. So there couldn’t have been financial reasons to cancel this tour.
All the booking was done by 2 European agents ,Bob Patterson agency for the UK and Belmont bookings for the mainland. I was hired as road manager to take care of travel arrangements , additional hotels , sell the merch, drive the van and to make sure everything went as smooth as possible.
During the course of putting the tour together James’ agent in the US resigned from his job . This is the mail he sent me on February 14:
“Regretfully, I announce today that I am no longer associated in any way with James Hand. My resignation is due to James Hand's lack of communication and extremely poor and unprofessional behavior.
I have turned over all the James Hand management and booking duties to the band since James Hand has no management in place”
Since he was only the go between the European agents and the band, and the fact that the tour was booked and everything was already in place, this would have made no difference. So everybody went along as planned, additional gigs were booked, hotels reserved and air tickets booked. Until February 19 came along and I received the following email from Will Indian, guitar player in the James Hand Band.
“After meeting with James Hand and the Band last night we have decided to just come over and play the Utrecht Festival. There are many factors involved in this decision including change of management , financial backing and scheduling conflicts. I know you've already done a lot of work .We will be releasing our new CD later this year and feel we need to wait for maximum impact. Will Indian speaking for the James Hand Band”
After this mail just about everybody including the Utrecht Festival (which also took care of the trans Atlantic airfare) pulled the plug. The reasons mentioned in this mail were, as I explained, not valid.
Cancelling this tour left everybody on the European end with debts due to money advanced to pay for airfare hotels etc, not mentioning the time and effort put in this enterprise.
I myself lost 600 Euro’s of my own money (yeah, I know ,stupid me), trying to get this money from the band has (until this moment) been futile.
I strongly advice everybody wanting to book this band to not do so. Upon request I will send you all and complete emails between, me , US and European management and the band , complete with data of the booked and confirmed venues (this includes all the fees involved).
Be wise and take my warning do NOT book this band
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