5 Insane Ways Entertainers Survive While On Tour
When they're on the road, rock stars, comedians, athletes, or anyone else whose job description boils down to "go from town to town and entertain you for money" simply can't eat or exercise the same way we do. Long, irregular hours plus a distinct lack of salad bars and Planet Fitnesses at most highway service stations mean touring entertainers must either scarf Big Macs while doing pushups on the roof of their car ... or get creative.
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias, in his new Fuse series Fluffy Breaks Even, has discovered a touring regimen that works for him -- eat all the food in the world by day and exercise hardcore by night until every last calorie melts away like Wicked Witches in water. But not every entertainer has the time, will, or appetite for such a schedule. Others keep their bellies full and abs flat in their own weird way, such as ...
Alice Cooper's Blood Is 50 Percent Skittles And Red Vines
Despite how nowadays "I'm Eighteen" might as well refer to decades rather than years, shock rocker Alice Cooper continues to tour nonstop, because as long as there are kids fantasizing about never going to school again, Alice will be there to provide their anthem.
Throughout it all, he's remained stick-thin and in good enough shape to run around night after night, only briefly stopping to let some roadie chop off his head before moving right on to the next town. His famously non-ghoulish routine of playing at least two full games of golf per day is certainly a major reason, as you actually need to be quite fit to play the game well (John "Ol' Two Packs A Day" Daly notwithstanding). But unlike many fueled by such a physical hobby, road-tripping Cooper keeps his belly full with oodles of candy.
For decades, Cooper has made it a point to chow down on fruity candy before every show (maybe it's the fruit part that keeps him ticking). His pre-show meal was Skittles for years, washed down with bad kung fu flicks (fun bad, not "Jaden Smith wax off your childhood" bad). But not even that health kick can last forever, and for one big reason: Alice Cooper is damn near 70. And while that's practically infantile in "creature of the night" years, it's well into the second half of a long, mortal human life. So to keep rocking and keep living, he cut out sugar from his diet, which sadly meant Skittles had to go.
So what has Cooper replaced his beloved rainbow with? Vegetables? Actual fruit? Please -- he simply found another chewy fruity-ish candy: namely, Red Vines. Hey, it's strawberry-flavored, and there's a sugar-free version -- it counts.
Oh, and if you ever meet Alice and offer him Twizzlers instead, he might stick you in the guillotine for real. He adores his Vines and, because there's a difference, apparently, he has no interest in switching sides. "Be very wary of the Twizzler people," he ominously warns, officially making Vines vs. Twizzlers the Crips vs. Bloods of the fruity liquorice world.
Kevin Hart Runs A 5K Before Every Show (And Invites Fans To Run With Him)
When you think Kevin Hart, you probably don't think "running." Comedy, yes. Getting dunked on by the teensiest horse jockeys, sure. Yelling incoherently like he's forever auditioning for a reboot of The Fifth Element, absolutely. But definitely not running, and certainly not running for miles and miles on end, right?
You should -- turns out wacky little Kevin Hart loves to do the one thing even fitness freaks grumble about and desperately try to put off. He claims he's "not a big runner," but then in the same breath admits hitting the treadmill for at least two miles a day. That's like Keith Richards saying he tinkers around on the guitar sometimes but isn't too serious about it.
Just a chord or two here or there, nothing special.
He runs while touring too, throwing himself full-on into 5Ks -- races five kilometers long, or three miles for the few remaining backwoods countries that still haven't learned how kilometers work. He tries to run one in most every town he hits, because nonstop traveling and performing just isn't exhausting enough for some people. Lest he get lazy, he holds himself accountable by inviting literally everybody in the area to run with him. This started in June of 2015, when he used social media to organize a 5K in Boston in between film shoots. He credits his desire to motivate people to think healthy and start taking care of their bodies. At the same time, subliminally reminding thousands that Kevin Hart exists and has a movie and they should go see it doesn't hurt either.
until your eardrums explode.
Re-enacting the Drew Carey Show intro with fewer doughy people proved popular enough that Hart kept doing it. Now, he does it all the damn time -- whenever he's on the road, chances are good he'll tweet out an open invitation to meet him somewhere for a run. Typically, over a thousand people accept his invites and, unlike every Facebook invite you've ever sent out, they actually show up and run. And since nobody's been dumb enough to beg a sweaty Hart for an autograph because they loved him in The Wedding Ringer, we're guessing he'll be inviting his fans on fun runs for a long time to come.
State Champs Dine On Potato Chip Sandwiches And Have Candy For Dinner
Up-and-coming punk band State Champs, like many young musicians making their mark in the current "Buying Music Is A Sucker's Game" era, are on the road a lot, constantly touring and performing in the hopes of stumbling upon their big break. And since 5 Seconds Of Summer hogged all the seats on the "get mistaken for a cutesy boy band tour with One Direction and make all the money" train, the Champs will have to find their own golden path.
Or Simple Plan. Or Taking Back Sunday. Or ..."
Of course, when you're poor, unknown, and lucky to make $50 a show that all goes directly to petty crap like tolls and gas, you can't be too selective with the eats or you'll starve. But while many bands simply settle for making the president of McDonald's even richer than he already is, the State Champs choose to be more ... creative with their menu. Or disgusting, depending on your outlook. According to guitarist Tyler "we copy-pasted his last name just like everyone else" Szalkowski, a typical late-night band meal will be a sandwich and chips. That doesn't sound so weird until you realize the chips are the sandwich. "There's nothing like a Chilli Heatwave Dorito sandwich," Tyler insists, because actual chili is for sellouts.
they'll probably never notice.
Other days, they forgo actual foodstuffs and stuff their face with basically whatever. You know those Internet people who define adulthood as "I can eat junk food whenever I want"? These guys take that meme very seriously. If the only meal they can afford is a bag of candy, then candy becomes their meal. If food drops to the ground, that food gets eaten whether it adheres to the five-second rule or stays there long enough to watch every Ronda Rousey fight thrice over. Sometimes, when money's good and they feel like splurging, they ditch food altogether and simply drink beer for dinner. So in that one sense, at least, they're already the next Johnny Cash.
Maxwell Hughes Eats Packets Of Baby Food
Maxwell Hughes is a percussive slap-tap fingerstyle guitarist, which basically means he's a gatrillion times better than any frat boy stumbling through "Wonderwall" you'll ever meet. If you've not heard of him, listen to The Lumineers' debut album. There, you've heard of him -- while never an official member (unless "All The Lumineers And Their Friends" is him under the worst pseudonym ever), he played and toured with them for a year, helping to record their album before moving on to do his own, very-low-paying thing.
Unfortunately, despite playing in a Grammy-nominated band, Hughes is still hitting the road constantly and barely scraping by. For a while, this meant eating whatever he could get his hands on -- unlike the raucous lads of the State Champs, this survivor's diet brought him down terribly. So after his 2014 U.S. tour, he vowed to find a way to get actual nutrients, stop feeling like garbage so much, and not break the bank even more than he already was. He found his solution in, of all places, the baby-food aisle.
Yes, 30 years after he quit eating the stuff, and 60 years before he will have to start up again, Hughes downs packets of Gerber while on the road. He sticks mainly to the fruit-based varieties, insisting it barely even counts as baby food. "It tastes like a smoothie," he explains. "It's just blended fruits." So he downs his blended fruit packets, gets his fill of life-sustaining chow, and is ready to keep on playing nonstop forever, or at least until the public finally realizes this guy deserves John Mayer money.
He does have his limits: namely that he will not eat vegetable-based baby food -- to him, the feel of mashed-up veggies is "real baby food." That's nothing new, though -- we all have that mental block about eating baby food, even though it's nothing but mashed-up big people food. You like applesauce and mashed potatoes? Bam, you like baby food. So the next time you need to slash your food bill, don't settle for Ramen saltier than an MRA guy being wrong about anything -- hit up Babies R Us, stock up on Earth's Best, and open up wide because here comes the airplane.
The Rock Eats Over 820 Pounds Of Cod Per Year
He may be a multi-millionaire, but Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson still finds himself constantly on the road -- whether shooting big action films, doing press for said films, hitting local gyms, wrestling once a year and getting more cheers than 90 percent of the full-timers do -- clearly, Rock takes his job as "guy who could pants post-spinach Popeye, give him swirly after swirly, and then stuff him upside-down in a cramped locker" very seriously.
Unlike many roaming celebrities, however, Rock doesn't stay fit and healthy with hired chefs and assistants trolling Whole Foods for organic anything. No, his secret is far more basic and far more terrifying if you've got a sensitive nose and he breathes near you: The Rock eats cod. Pounds upon pounds upon pounds upon pounds of cod. All the damn time. He's like a picky kid who only eats peanut butter sandwiches, if that kid could also rip your legs off and do finger curls with them.
by a guy named Dwayne.
If Rock eats seven meals a day, at least four of them contain no less than half a pound of delicious(?) cod. On average, he consumes about 36 ounces of the stuff per day -- that's over two pounds of fish per day, or 820 pounds per year. And unlike a lot of people eating fish, he doesn't dress it up with mayo, cheese, sour cream, or anything else that mercifully doesn't taste like a damn fish. He just grills it up and eats it, clearly cool with the fact that he's probably shat out more fish then there are left in the ocean.
Obviously, Dwayne "The Gilly Gourmand" Johnson doesn't scarf down thousands of cod calories a day and then sit on his nuts watching Family Feud megathons. He works out like a man possessed (which, let's face it, he probably is), so everything quickly gets burnt and transformed into murder-punch artillery. So if you want to be like The Rock, expect to live in the gym when you're not living on the toilet. Oh, and save your money, because cod's around four bucks a pound if you buy it in bulk. More than $3,200 a year in fish might seem like a lot when you're making Not-Rock money, but it's absolutely doable if you cut corners on other, less necessary expenses. Like paying rent.
