Mix Live Blog: Minivan Madness

New York, NY (August 13, 2025)—One of the joys (not!) of doing a lot of fly dates is dealing with the issue of moving our fly gear from Point A to Point B.

Sometimes contracts are structured to include “promoter-provided ground,” meaning that the promoter of the show agrees to provide the ground transportation. Most of the time, this works out fairly well: The band doesn’t have the expense and hassle of renting cars (which makes getting in and out of the airport fairly painless), nor do we have to worry about navigating unfamiliar territory or negotiating road closures.

There are, of course, exceptions to the benefits of promoter-provided transportation, one of which occurred last week.

An irresponsible promoter hired an even-more-irresponsible “transportation company” that completely ignored our requirements and kept us waiting at the airport for two hours while the driver was sound asleep in their vehicle. They never showed, so the promoter ended up hiring a different transportation company for the two-hour trip from the airport to the venue. We were not happy.

Later in the day, the owner of Lame Transportation called me, apologizing profusely, asking to come see the band in person to apologize. I assured him it was unnecessary, and we agreed that the way for this not to happen in the A.M. for our return to the airport was that he would personally pick us up in an extended SUV with a small trailer for the gear and bags. He lied to my face.

The next morning, he was nowhere to be found, didn’t answer his cell phone and tasked the same person who fell asleep the day before with the pickup. Of course, she was late and had the wrong vehicle. It was a failure of epic proportions, and I was not the Happy Tour Manager. I will spare you the expletives that spewed from my filthy mouth and will no doubt make Father José very unhappy with me.  As a courtesy, I won’t name the moron and his transportation company, but I’m sure you can find the thread on Bobnet.

When we’re responsible for our own ground transportation, we typically rent two full-size cars and a minivan for the crew and the gear. The Chrysler Pacifica and Voyager are excellent vehicles for this purpose: The rear Stow ‘n Go seats fold under the floor, and the second row of seats fold independently under the floor so we can fold one and still have a seat for a third person.

The only drag is that if the Pacifica is a hybrid, the battery occupies the space where the second row of seats would have folded under the floor. The backs of these seats fold down but they don’t disappear into the floor, significantly reducing the amount of storage space. Also popular for minivan rental are the Toyota Sienna and Honda Odyssey, both of which pale in comparison to the Pacifica when it comes to the amount of gear they can haul.

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Anyway, post-Covid, the price of minivan rentals went through the roof. An average weekend rental for a minivan pre-pandemic was around $300 to $350. Post-pandemic, that same vehicle for the same number of days cost $1,000. The reported explanation for the increase was a “shortage of computer chips” used in these vehicles. Except that these vehicles were already built and had been sitting idle in rental car parking lots across the country while we suffered a Covid-inflicted work slowdown. Sounds like a gouge if you ask me.

Fast-forward to 2025, and we have another mini-van crisis that’s severely impacting our ability to haul our gear.

It started a few weeks ago with the recall of more than 250,000 Chrysler Pacifica and Voyager minivans (2022 through 2025) due to a potential issue with the airbags. Mid-July, we were able to get “executive class” SUVs, which have fold-down seats in the rear, can accommodate a fair amount of gear, and require a tugboat for assistance while parking. This week, we have not been able to get any sort of SUV, extended, executive or otherwise, no cargo van, you name it — they’re all booked (or more likely being held on reserve for VIP rentals).

We have a show tomorrow in the St. Louis area where we’re responsible for our own ground, but short of renting five or six full-size cars in which to pack gear, the only way we’re able to transport the gear is to ask the promoter if they could source a cargo van and a runner (whom we’re paying) to pick up our gear at the airport and take it straight to the venue, and then run it from the venue to the airport when we depart.

This is only the beginning of the aggravation that’s heading our way. We have a show in Albany in a few weeks, followed by shows in Chicago and Louisville. The plan was for the crew to pick up the fly gear and drive from NYC to Albany using a one-way minivan rental. Ain’t gonna happen. We’ve got a better chance of seeing Led Zeppelin reunite with John Bonham playing drums (rest his soul). The one-way minivan rental simply doesn’t exist right now, nor does it exist for any sort of full-size van, large-format SUV or a Lunar Lander.

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Adding insult to injury, we need to go from Chicago to Louisville, which presents two direct flight options: a 6:49 a.m. departure from ORD landing at 9:13 a.m., or a 10:45 a.m. arriving at 1:24 p.m., which is simply too late on a show day. If we take the 6:49, we’ll need to leave the hotel around 4:15 a.m. Yikes.

Mapping this out yields a drive time of around five hours. If you look at the time it takes to fly the route (drive to the airport, be there two hours ahead of departure time, add the actual flight time and then drive from the airport to the gig), it makes more sense to drive it, and we’d actually be able to leave later than if we flew. Nope. We can’t find a single, not one one-way rental vehicle to go from Chicago to Louisville. I guess my crew and I will be leaving the hotel in Chicago around 4 in the morning to get on that 6:49 a.m. flight. Fun times.

Anybody got a little red wagon they want to rent me?