Photo by Sandlin Gaither
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to take Matthew Caws of Nada Surf on a tour of Columbus, Ohio’s record stores (a feature on that adventure is coming soon). After our excursion, Matthew invited me onto the tour bus where he introduced me to Ian Lee who, along with his wife Sarah Sargent Pepper, is the owner and operator of the bus, and who also happened to be opening the tour with their band, The Cle Elum.
This whole setup is a real family affair. Sarah has been selling merch for Nada Surf for years, and Nada Surf’s Louie Lino helped fill out The Cle Elum’s live lineup. But beyond the band, Ian and Sarah’s primary venture is Affordable Tour Solutions, a boutique company that offers not just transportation but also merch services and full tour management.
The Cle Elum came to be during COVID. When the tour bus business screeched to a halt, Ian, who had played drums in ’90s Chicago bands like Textbook, Woolworthy, and Not Rebecca, started writing and playing music with Sarah. Though she’d never been in a band before, Sarah did have a drum set she enjoyed playing. The Cle Elum’s sound is a clear homage to the Chicago scene Ian grew up in, and they even managed to get some special guests – Matthew Caws and Josh Caterer of Smoking Popes – to contribute vocals to their album.
After the Nada Surf show, Ian and I spent a good deal of time chatting about Chicago bands like Fig Dish, Triple Fast Action, Smoking Popes, and Menthol. We cooked up a plan to have an official conversation when Ian and Sarah had a break from touring. The following is the result of that conversation, which took place a few weeks ago.
You’ve got the tour bus company, Affordable Tour Solutions, and the band, The Cle Elum. It seems to me like the tour bus company takes priority.
IAN: It sort of has to because we’ve got to make a living. Being 50 years old and starting an indie rock band is the worst business decision you can make in your life. It’s ridiculous, really. Rock and roll is sort of for kids – building a band, going on the road, sleeping on couches. You get into your life and you have responsibilities and a mortgage. We don’t have kids, so we don’t have that piece of the puzzle, but we have a mortgage, we have a house, and we have each other. We’re responsible for each other’s safety and future.
You get to this age where you’re like, “How am I going to make a living?” I was in a band when Sarah and I got together 15 years ago, and it started creeping up on me, like, “Man, if this doesn’t work out … I don’t have a 401k.” We have a business that takes priority in a certain way.
SARAH: Our bus business has been going since August of 2014 when we officially started the company, and then January 1st of 2015 is when we became officially incorporated. So we’ve been doing that for a lot longer. The band thing is relatively new.
IAN: The record, It’s Ok If It Falls Apart, came out in August of last year. You’ve got songwriting that happens before then also. As far as excitement goes, we’re way more excited about playing in a band than driving a bus for another tour.
Ian, I know a bit about your musical experience playing in bands in Chicago in the ‘90s. Sarah, what’s your music background?
SARAH: This is my first band that I’ve been in. I’ve just been playing for fun. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I loved to play drums. I got my drum kit when I was in my 20s and was just playing for fun. When the pandemic happened, I don’t think we even set out to really be a band or try to start a band. We just kind of stumbled into making songs, which then kind of turned into a record. I don’t think it was anything that I was like, “Oh, I want to go and be in a band.” It just kind of happened, but it’s fun and I’m loving it.
I’m paraphrasing a bit, but when I interviewed Adam from The Mommyheads, he said something like if had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t start making music until he was older, after he was more mature, had more life experiences, was able to make better decisions. Ian, you started when you were young. Do you feel that same way, that maybe it’s easier to do now and there isn’t as much pressure?
IAN: 100%. It’s weird. There are certain records by bands that I played with where I’m like, “That really holds up” while there are others that don’t.
This is my first record that I wrote the songs on. I don’t know that I really had anything to say when I was younger. I don’t know what I would have said. A lot of artists are like, “We leave the interpretation of songs to the audience.” I don’t know if it’s because I’m older and I like the pressure of wanting to make something to save my life, but I really care about the ideas that are in my songs. I don’t think I had enough self-awareness when I was younger. I would have had a lot of songs about chicks and stuff like that or “You can’t keep me down.” I would have been in a punk band.
And to the other side of it, having a business, it’s stressful to not have a label and to have to put together a team out of thin air and out of our friends, or milk our connections. I like the fact that we can sort of fund our life ourselves. Our mortgage is going to be paid if we go on tour next month as a bus company, or if Sarah does merch for a band. We know we can survive. The buffer of that really allows me to be able to go, “Okay, what do I actually want to sing about? Is this song good? Does this song represent something that I want to put out into the world and be held accountable for?” Being older is hugely valuable.
There probably still are benefits to being on a major label but a lot fewer bands are being signed. And if you’re smart enough with your own social media, you can probably reach as many people as you could if you had someone at a label dedicated to that. What’s amazing to me is you could record something as soon as we finish this call and have it uploaded to Bandcamp in 20 minutes. The immediacy of technology blows my mind. The old model was you write, record, mix, master, turn it over to the label, the label puts together a marketing and distribution plan and maybe your album comes out two years from now, when it’s convenient to them. Now, as an independent artist, you own the plan, and the technology allows you to move so much faster.
IAN: I’m a little bit stuck in the middle of it. I’m sort of like, “God, I wish we had a label to put it out,” because I sort of wish we had a team. There was the era where Sub Pop and labels represented something and had a built-in audience. There’s a speediness to that which I crave and I hope we can find somebody that’s interested.
But on the other hand, when I think about talking to labels or that kind of thing, I’m like, “We don’t need money, we don’t need tour support. We just need partners.” We only care about people that are into it.
SARAH: There is a power in being self-funded, because we don’t necessarily need a label to fund our projects or recordings or pressing vinyl.
IAN: We have our own studio, so that’s really nice.
SARAH: It’s just getting the reach of what a label would have to offer. We have the reach of our Instagram and Bandcamp and things, but labels have a pulse on a larger audience.
IAN: We put our life into live music with our business. We’re very much invested in live music as the only counterbalance there is to all this stuff.
Getting likes and having some comments and all that kind of stuff just seems kind of unsatisfying to me. Unless you get out there and play the songs in front of people, you don’t really know what people think, even if songs go viral or get a bunch of likes. We did three or four videos for the singles that we released on the record, and they’ve got between 30,000 and 50,000 views. That’s significant enough in my mind but it’s not like people are calling out songs. When we played the shows opening for Nada Surf, which was our first real tour, you see somebody raise a hand and request a song in Columbus, Ohio and you’re like, “Holy shit!”
SARAH: That did happen!
IAN: There were these young kids at the first show in Atlanta, and they were mouthing the words to the whole set. It’s like, “That’s not possible! Those kids are like 22-years-old. There’s no way they’re following us on Instagram and then showing up to our show.” It’s amazing. There’s a value to playing a live show.
I’m not trying to say there isn’t value in being on a label or hiring a publicist. But, it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re up against so much competition. Friday is when albums get released so while I get a lot of publicist emails during the week, on Fridays I easily get over 60 emails announcing new albums, new singles, new videos, new tours. Artists are spending money on publicists and publicists are doing their jobs, it’s just that there are so many bands competing for attention all the time.
IAN: That’s an interesting validation because that’s what I assume. Everybody is just inundated, even professionals, with too much content. It makes it seem as a creator – I hate even calling myself a creator, I’m a musician, I’m a songwriter, I’m a drummer, or lead singer – that to have that standard of people’s attention being dwindled down to this constant overwhelm, I feel like the only solution is live. If the songs have something to say, that to me is the yardstick. If I listen to something and am just like, “Oh, okay, this is talking about whatever is the latest political thing,” I don’t have time for that. I want to hear something that speaks above that.
It’s nice that the band can be an outlet, can be your chance to be creative, can be fun, but that you also have something that pays the bills. I know musicians who have nothing to fall back on if a tour doesn’t do well, if they don’t sell a lot of albums. They don’t have another source of income outside of being a musician and I honestly often wonder how they can afford rent.
IAN: We made the record during COVID so we were against the wall with having invested a lot of time in building the business. Everybody was touring their butts off after COVID. There’s a thing in the bus business, it’s a very small niche industry, where a bunch of private equity guys have come in and bought up these bus companies. Any investment in music, even investing your life into a bus company, is still very stressful. Our fallback is still in the lane of live music.
Do you have tours booked year round with your bus business or are there times when work is slow and you have down time?
IAN: In general, we’ve been booked out for at least a year to 18 months out. Historically, the bands know what they’re going to be doing next year. They follow a timeline. They finish the record, then it goes to mastering. After mastering, the marketing starts and the tours get planned. We’ve been in business 11 years now, and we’ve got a very stable list of clients that depend upon us. So we know where everybody’s at in their record cycles because we’re kind of on their inside team.
We do have to think, what do we do if we lose a driver or if we have a mechanical problem. You have to kind of think about that kind of stuff. Drivers, for example, you go, “Well, this guy’s awesome and he’s loyal and he’s great, he’s having a good time,” and then all of a sudden he just burns out. Our drivers work 250, 300 days a year on the road. They’re on the road all the time. The infrastructure of the touring crew … Sarah, as a merch manager … there’s no 401k, there’s no health insurance. You’re eating in truck stops. We try to tour at a level with bands that have a budget for catering.
The bands that we like to tour with are bands that we like musically. That’s the other thing. Because we own the company, we don’t have to go after just any job. We have no aspirations to tour with Beyoncé or Taylor Swift. Nothing against them. I say that my standard of what I started the business on was like, “Is Guided By Voices going to be able to tour or are they going to get too tired?” They need a bus. Those guys tour in a van. They hit it hard.
Making sure Nada Surf gets a good night’s sleep, it’s literally how we think. And we kind of have to think that way because the bus business as a logistical business dealing with mechanical things and bus drivers and buses and parts and all this kind of stuff, it’s very, very unrewarding. I mean, it’s rewarding because we have a kind of a cool opening line, and we don’t work in an office. So that’s where we’re very proud and count ourselves very lucky to have the life we have.
SARAH: Sometimes it’s very rewarding, like when we’re at a festival watching bands side stage and pinching ourselves, “How the heck did we get here?”
IAN: She doesn’t order the parts, is what she’s trying to say (laughs). We’re partners in the bus business, but Sarah does the paperwork and merch. She keeps the books straight.
You have six buses. Does that mean the two of you are always on a bus?
IAN: One of the buses is specifically for us. We have one bus, our best bus and we get to choose our clients. That doesn’t mean we tour together all the time. Sarah’s going to Europe with Nada Surf in a couple of weeks. I don’t go over there. I think Nada Surf is the main band that she goes to Europe with. So when she goes over there, I don’t go driving a bus in Europe. Because of the logistics of it, we’re trying to not tour as much for the business. We’re trying to kind of keep ourselves available for Cle Elum touring to build the band, just because we’ve been at it for so long. I’ve spent 10 years driving down the road in the middle of the night with my headphones on while talking to a driver who’s got a problem on the tour they’re on. That is a level of stress that you don’t want to know about. We’re try to establish the next phase of the business, just kind of running it from home or running it from Cle Elum touring, and balancing the quality of life.
Sarah, was Nada Surf the first band that took you out on the road?
SARAH: No, but they are the first band that took me to Europe. And they’re still the only band that takes me to Europe. So therefore, they are my favorite. I’m not supposed to say that because I work for a lot of bands, but don’t tell anyone, or tell everyone.
Without naming names, if I ask you who the messiest or most unruly band is, does a name pop into your head right away?
SARAH: Messiest band? Yes. Yes. I know. The messiest band is not the most unruly band.
IAN: Messy just means they don’t put their food away on the bus. They don’t throw it in the garbage. They don’t clean their coffee cups.
SARAH: Incidentally, one of the bands that I’m speaking of is one of my favorite bands that I get to tour with. It’s not Nada Surf, but it is another band that I really love. And as far as troublemakers, we’re really lucky because the genre of musicians that I get to tour with are kind of ’90s indie rock dudes. These guys are in their 40s, 50s, sometimes 60s. They’re quiet now. They’re married with kids. They’re just out there doing what they do. So it’s not like I’m traveling around with 20-year-old guys that are crazy. They’re pretty mellow. We’re playing chess and going to art museums, FaceTiming the wife and kids.
I remember going backstage at a radio festival and going into a band’s dressing room expecting there to be sex, drugs and rock and roll. It was totally the opposite. It was just the band members hanging out, noodling on their instruments, eating fruit from a fruit tray.
SARAH: Everyone always thinks it’s going to be like the Mötley Crüe book, The Dirt. That’s so not the case. It’s a lot of hummus and sad vegetables.
IAN: Once in a while a guy will drink too much or whatever. Not getting crazy but more like, “I should have gone to bed an hour ago.” And that’s more talking about the bus. Backstage is just crummy dressing rooms and a little cramped space. We have a backstage on wheels, that’s what a tour bus is. And you think it sort of extends to that, but really it’s sleeping quarters. So there’s the interplay of the bands trying to take care of each other. Like Sarah said, a lot of our clients are guys that have been at it for a long time. So there’s the band dynamics of, “Okay, well, we gotta go to bed because we’re old,” or, “This guy always stays up.” Everybody knows all the different characters in each band and that is respected, or it’s not and the band is about to break up.
SARAH: I’m sure it would be a completely different story if I was on the Chappell Roan tour or some kid tour. It’d probably be like going out dancing all night.
IAN: We don’t typically do big, huge tours. I just got off the Metallica tour. That’s the biggest tour on earth. I was driving Suicidal Tendencies. We almost never do those kinds of tours. The logistical dance of how many things have to happen for those shows to get executed, there’s no time for messing around. With cell phones in everybody’s faces now and public media and public relations and cancel culture and all that kind of stuff, there’s no way that there’s going to be any of that kind of stuff seen by a bus driver. I had Rooney supporting the final ELO tour, and I’m a massive ELO fan, but Jeff Lynne literally, and same with Metallica, you think of 50,000 people in an arena with parking all around it. Jeff Lynne and Metallica literally, they walk off stage, they go into three black cars that are waiting, and there’s a police escort, and they’re out within 20 seconds of coming off stage. They’re out of the building. Or they’re going to be sitting in traffic for six hours. So it’s very not fun. That’s the dirt.
I experienced something like that, only it was an artist arriving to a show. I saw the 120 Minutes tour in the ‘90s with Public Image Limited, Big Audio Dynamite, Live and Blind Melon and was hanging out backstage. Johnny Lydon showed up to the arena about 5 minutes before Public Image Limited was about to go on. He walked in, grabbed his microphone, and hit the stage.
IAN: At certain levels, it’s to protect your sanity, so you don’t have to talk to every single person that wants to talk to you. I have no idea what that level of fame is like. I have empathy for it because we tour with bands where everybody wants to get at that guy, or everybody wants to talk to this person, or people have opinions about this person that they’re a certain way, or, “I heard that this guy’s a real this or that,” or whatever. And here we are living with them, and something happened in an interview 20 years ago that everybody thinks is true, and they’re like, “Is this guy a jerk? Is this guy a real hard guy to deal with?” And we’re like, “No, he’s beautiful, he’s wonderful.” “Wow, I tried to talk to him or get his autograph a couple days ago and he wouldn’t stop.” Yeah, his kids are graduating high school this week, and he’s away from them because he’s got to make a living. You get protective of the life. There are things that have got to be shielded for practical reasons, and just so people have enough quality of life to keep making music.
The Cle Elum really appeals to my early 2000s alt-rock sweet spot. There’s not a lot that sounds like that kind of music on the radio today but those songs, the ones from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, still sound so good and relevant to me. It feels to me like you weren’t trying to chase trends, that you were making music that you like and that is influenced by bands that were popular 20 to 25 years ago.
IAN: I played drums for a long time and always viewed myself as a drummer. This is Sarah’s first band and it’s the first band that I wrote the songs for. I wrote them because I was able to, because I knew that I wasn’t going to be the drummer. I picked up the bass and picked up a guitar or I sat behind the piano and Sarah just started playing drums. It wasn’t like, “Let’s start a band.” It was just, “Let’s see what happens.”
I played drums in a lot of indie rock bands in Chicago, in the types of bands you were talking about. I auditioned for Fig Dish.
You mentioned that when I met you. I met you as a bass player/singer and forgot that you got your start as a drummer. You told me you had auditioned for Fig Dish and, knowing that band personally, I was trying to figure out why you were auditioning for a band that seemed pretty set in the bass and guitar department. But then I remembered you were a drummer and that Fig Dish’s drummer left after the first album so it all made sense.
IAN: And you didn’t think I was a good enough guitar player to be in Fig Dish (laughs)
SARAH: When Ian was in Led Zeppelin 2 [a Chicago-area Led Zeppelin tribute band], my grandma would tell all of her friends that Ian was the drummer for Led Zeppelin, and they would look at her like, “That guy’s been dead a long time.”
IAN: And then they’d look at me and be like, “Sarah must not be very smart because he’s selling her a bit.”
IAN: Playing drums in a lot of bands in the Chicago world, I think that kind of influenced my idea of crafting songs. Sarah and I would play a part and she’d be like, “I got a cool drum part.” And I’d be like, “This is a cool guitar part, there’s something here.” And then I’d fumble onto some words. Then it’d be like, “We need another part. This needs to go somewhere.” Do you know the old joke, “What’s the last thing a drummer says before he gets kicked out of the band?”
Is it something like, “I’ve written some songs that I’d like to show you”?
IAN: “I’ve got some songs.” That’s the gag, right? I was very practical. I had to kind of quit Led Zeppelin 2. The band was doing really well, still does really well, it was hard to play to the schedule of that band. So, with The Cle Elum, Sarah’s my only band partner because we have the same schedule and we have both the interest of the company and the band.
I love all that stuff from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. There are certain touchstones that I have. Guided By Voices are my favorite band of all time. Maybe if Guided By Voices never happened, it would be Triple Fast Action. Those guys were just an amazing band. But what I love about Guided By Voices is the non-overthinking of just the writing. Like, “Okay, we’re just gonna put a song down.” It’s so amazing. And that opened up the idea that I could write in the first place or I shouldn’t overthink it or worry about perfect recording, gated snare drums, and all this kind of stuff.
The fact that they end up kind of being ’90s-ish is really because of my limitations on guitar and bass and piano. I’m not classically trained in any way, it’s just the combination of not overthinking it and knowing how to make a handful of chords like Triple Fast Action and Fig Dish and all those cool ‘90s bands that had the coolest hooks of all time. That’s what I wanted to get to.
In the ‘90s, the third track on a CD always seemed to be the hit. It was probably intentional sequencing by the band or someone within their camp. I’ve been paying attention to the third track of recent releases. On your album, “I’m a Robot” is the third track. It seems like an obvious single to me. Did you intentionally put it as the third song for that reason?
IAN: It was intentional. And, funny that you say that, because I kind of recently have been rethinking how we sequenced the album. We were like, “What’s the song that’s the opener that gives them a good set of who we are and then where do we take it from there?” so that the listener understands what this band’s all about. And then, it’s “BAM!” “Robot” was the song that, when we wrote it, we were like, “We got it. This is real. This is a great song.” Subjectively, I was like, “We just wrote a song that I think is a hit and it says everything I want to say.” It’s obviously about technology and all that kind of stuff. The way it got written is kind of funny. Sarah was playing the drum part and I was like, “The guitar sucks. What’s I’m doing is dumb.” And she’s like, “I’m not going to just play the song that you want to play. I’m not some fucking robot” and I was like, “Wait! Stop talking. I’ve got the song!” That was the spark. That’s how that song came about.
SARAH: After it was done, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And every single person that I played it for, they would text me or call me a couple days later and be like, “I can’t get that song out of my head,” including Matthew from Nada Surf, who sings on it.
IAN: It’s a slam dunk track three for sure.
Is there a song, album, or artist that reminds you of something very specific?
SARAH: I have a ton, but from childhood, it’s Heart’s “These Dreams.” It reminds me of being at home with my mom and our dog and hanging out in our backyard. Sometimes, if that song comes on the radio, if I pay too much attention to it, it’ll actually make me cry because it’s so nostalgic for me.
IAN: My dad passed away in ’93. He was a musician. My parents were divorced, and my dad had these huge PA speakers in the house from this jazz fusion band he was playing in. They were hooked up to our stereo and Saturday mornings, at eight o’clock, we cranked up Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson album and “Spaceman” was the song that we’d clean the house to. It was me, my brother and my dad – three bachelors. It was an amazing exercise. That song, really that whole album, to me is super special because it’s sort of a secret record. My dad died when I was like 18 or 19, so when I was 17 or 18, around the time he passed away, I was in a band and I could talk to the guys in my band about how my dad and I listened to Harry Nilsson together and they’d be like, “That’s a cool dad.” That’s carried through my whole life.
What does the rest of the year look like for you?
IAN: We’ve got a new single which is the first one off the new record. And then we’ve got two other singles that will be coming out over the next few months.
We’ve got some touring things for The Cle Elum that we’ll be announcing for the end of the year. And then if those don’t come through, we’re just working on another bus tour. Anybody who sees this, who needs a tour bus and an opening band, give us a call. Call Chip, and we’ll figure it out.
SARAH: We hope to have a new album out next year.
IAN: Sarah’s going to Europe with Nada Surf and then we’re going to be driving Bonny Light Horseman and Fruit Bats later this year.
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