A Funny Clown {thanks, KARI ALTMANN}

The Baltimore Round Robin tour feels like a study on the social dynamics of traveling lunatics, with yours truly being one of them.

We have a pretty colorful bunch of performers here in Baltimore, and dropping 55 of them on an unsuspecting community can create some interesting results, such as performance artist/Wham City member Josh Kelberman, aka A Funny Clown, getting picked up by the Boston police in full medieval clown attire (above) as a result of multiple calls about “some guy in a clown suit chasing people.”

Besides unruly clowns, the two-week, semi-national tour (including a stop to Canada) offers up a representative from each Charm City genre, including rapper Height, political noise-makers Double Dagger*, dream-pop musicians Beach House and, of course, my Wham City compadre, Dan Deacon. For the uninitiated, the term “round robin” essentially means that you go to a show, stand in the middle of the performance space, and when a light goes on at a performer’s station, that performer plays one song.

This goes on for three-five rounds, and then you go home. However, actually engineering one of these bad boys, and putting it in motion across multiple state lines, is a whole other story.

Between color coordinating the equipment, delegating errands such as finding fuel for the veggie oil bus, setting up each performer’s stage and making sleeping arrangements things can get pretty darn hairy.

Wham City member/tour manager Rose Chase is at the helm of all this madness. Along with Deacon, Chase coordinates the unruly elements of the round robin tour into a cohesive organism that manages to stay afloat with few hitches. “I try and make sure that people are crying for all the right reasons, and if not, I smack them really hard,” says Chase, joking about the last part.

A sense of humor is certainly a good thing to have when crunched into tight spaces for hours at a time, followed by hours of lifting daunting amounts of gear.
Compensation is divided evenly among the performers, amounting to about $200 per person for the entire tour, not including individual merchandise sales.
I dare say the ultimate reward is seeing our passion reciprocated by new audiences.

“I would look up videos of Dan Deacon, and The Death Set [both on the tour,]” said 15-year-old fan Eastman Presser of Chicago. “It looked really crazy. I wanted to see other Baltimore bands, and I guess in a way … be part of it.”

At the end of the day, that’s what it’s really all about, folks.

Ed Schrader is host of “The Ed Schrader Show” and a member of the Wham City arts collective. His column appears Tuesdays. Contact him at ed@whamcity.com.

*Correction: The original text incorrectly announced that Double Dagger has been signed to a label. The group has not signed with any label.

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