FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

NEW YORK - HOW TO NOT GET YOUR SHIT STOLEN


The first rule to thief-proofing yourself on tour is don't put your band's name or any stickers on the van. Basically you want to avoid looking like you're a band, aka four or five drunken 20-year-olds with a van full of pawnables. The corollary to this is, if you can, buy an old church-choir van or get some stencil that says West Louisboro First National Baptist Church. This plays into the mass conversion of dirtbags from metal to hip-hop in the mid-90s and with it their adoption of some mutant strain of "street Christianity" as a replacement for Satanism. So this is established road-lore and all well and good for safeguarding your junk, but it kind of kills the best part of touring, which is thinking about yourself as part of this marauding pack of derelicts with beer cans and cumulus clouds of weed smoke spilling out Spicoli-style every time you open one of the car doors. Most bands try to play up the "joke factor" of the church logo, but the only real solution we've seen to this dilemma is creating a band whose vibe fits both marauders and itinerant minstrels (but for drugs instead of God).