Tour Life

I apologize in advance for this being a short novel :P

Who travels with the band?
Manager/tour manager - responsible for keeping the peace, going between the band and the venue, arranging everything, making sure the band meets for interviews/fan meetings/the concert. Can have a few assistants, if the band is popular enough and/or big enough.

Sound crew - one to three people, with one responsible for the sound out to the audience, one for the monitors and one on the mikes.

Roadies - might have specialized roles, at least one with particular knowledge of guitars, one with drums, might just be there for grunt work; carry item a to location b. Rarely the latter, and if they are, they are usually responsible for ordering around the local crew.

Girlfriends/wives/family - more rare, but not uncommon. Might be the major cause for drama on tour, might be what keeps the band happy. Most of the time if they are travelling by tour bus, the couple drive in a personal car behind the bus, both for privacy and to spare the rest of the band from luvvey-duvvey-talk.

Masseuse/hairdresser/chiropractor and similar - even more rare than girlfriends, but it does happen. There to do whatever their jobs tell them to do.

Personal assistant - about as rare as hairdressers and the ilk, the part of the job I've mostly experienced is to be there so the artist doesn't have to contact the local crew himself. This can be because the artist is a diva, because a medical condition makes him not want to talk to too many people or for a number of other reasons. Most of the time a tour manager has the role of personal assistant as well, but if the band is popular (making the TM busy) / the artist too demanding / a number of other reasons, and the band can afford it, they get a PA.
I have never experienced a normal rock band having personal assistants, it's usually reserved for singers with backup bands.

Travel:
There is a lot of it, and a lot of annoyances connected to it. Simply put: travel is hell.

For air planes you have delayed flights, concerts cancelled because of anything from fog to volcanoes... often the flights are extremely early, so they reach the next destination in time for get-in. The baggage lost is always your favourite instrument or something vital to the performance, and it's close to impossible to burrow or rent the right instruments in the city you are playing. Most bands don't have the funds needed to buy new instruments all the time, and in cases where their instruments are anything but standard (say a left-handed guitar or anything exotic like a citar, or even a mandolin) it might be impossible, especially with the time constraints.

Another popular way of travel is the tour bus. It is crowded, smelly and prone to every problem a car would have, plus some (flat tire, queue because of a car accident, wrong directions, low bridges, no gas station open at 5 a.m. with a 4 meter roof height). At the same time it can be more reliable than air travel, cheaper and easier on the instruments (even in flight cases, the rough handling at airports muck up a lot of instruments).
For a starting band, their "tour bus" might be a van and stone-scissor-paper on who gets to sleep in the front seats, for the bands with more means it might be as comfortable as a small hotel room. Many bands choose to sleep at hotels/hostels when they can, both to clean off tour funk and to get some space from their band mates. Tour buses usually have two drivers, so one can rest while the other drives, if the tour isn't planned so the bus driver gets his rest while the band plays. Bus drivers are generally always nice, and they are magicians when it comes to "band bus tetris", e.g. getting all the instruments in place in the baggage compartments, often leaving no room for anything else. The tighter it is packed, the better since the instruments won't be jostled as the bus drives.

Get in/sound check:
Get in is usually somewhere between 1 am and 3 am, depending on how big backline the band is travelling with and if they are travelling with their own sound crew or using the festival/venue's own. Sound check is usually between 2 am and 7 am, depending on whether they are doing a solo gig in a club, a concert hall or a festival, and can last for up to two hours, less if it's a festival. General rule is that the bands playing last have sound check first, since the other bands have to accommodate their wishes as to where monitors and instruments are placed, but that rule might be changed if they like to sleep in/have an interview at that time/can't be bothered to get out of bed. If they are famous, they will get away with this, if they are not, they will not get a sound check. Several famous bands choose to send the roadies to do the sound check, others frown upon this since it can be hard the sound guy to mix the sound perfectly without knowing the singer's pitch and their playing style (guitarists who dance all over stage will need another set up for monitors than the ones who are stationary though a whole gig, and sometimes even need a wireless connection to avoid tripping over the cables, which happens a lot and is not very rock and roll). If you are rich and famous, you have your own sound crew and equipment, since it makes sound check easier and the sound a lot more reliable than if you have a new brand of amplifiers every night (Orange sounds different from Marshall sounds different from Blackstar).

Get in hospitality vary a lot between venues and also depends on how famous the band is. Coffee is always found at a venue, and plenty of it. At daytime, the coffee is what drives the music industry (at nights it's beer). The taste is not as important as the amount of caffeine. The first venue I worked at was a student driven one, where we prided ourselves on treating the artists well so they would come back when they were famous. Because of this, they got coffee and lunch when they arrived at get in, and usually some candy to go along with the beer/other alcohol and chips they had on their rider. I have heard about venues who call the get in for small bands "let in" since all they do is open the door for them and, if they are feeling nice, point in the direction of the stage.

The bus drivers will usually park the bus and go to sleep, not to be disturbed before they are to leave the city some time after the concert. They have the opposite schedule of the band, who sometimes have just woken up when they arrive at the venue. If they did not arrive via a band bus, they have been up for a bit more, but most artists are a bit grumpy when the day starts. Coffee, food and candy is the well tested cure for this ;) (and bananas).

Catering:
Vegan/vegetarians and allergic members of the crew will always be accommodated in my experience, but if you want a particular kind of apple jam that has to be imported from France, you will either get regular apple jam and told it was impossible or regular apple jam in a bowl and lied to. The latter mostly happens if the artist is known for being a drama queen or is too famous to be told "suck it up". Same goes for ecological food.

Festivals have catering on the backstage area with one vegetarian and one meat version of dinner and no choices besides the two. If you want something else, you get it for your own money and on your own time unless you are a headliner or famous enough to demand take away. Then you might get something special ordered in, or might even bring your own kitchen (the latter is rare, but probably a good idea if you are travelling with a big enough crew). Festival food is a dangerous thing, and several bands have had to cancel gigs because of food poisoning. Besides stage injuries like sprained wrists and ankles, worn out joints and back problems, food poisoning seems to be the number one for putting a band out of action.

Living arrangements:
Most bands have hotel rooms if they can. Usually they sleep two and two in a room, with the manager/any female band members staying in a single. In Norway, the venue is responsible for sleeping arrangements, but I don't think this is the standard in the rest of Europe/the US. The more famous a band is, the more single room it gets, but the manager is always the first to get a single room, or share it with the driver, because their sleeping schedules don't match up with the band's. Dinner is often at the hotel or somewhere arranged by the venue. Sometimes they get buy out instead of dinner, a prearranged sum of money which they can use to buy their own food wherever they like. The venue is usually helpful with recommendations for a restaurants.

Backstage:
Most of the time, the backstage area is closed off. The band does not want any fans there before the show is over, and the venue would like to have as few people there as possible since friends/fans of the band are the ones most likely to cause trouble or be argumentative, not to mention drink the band's beer.

Before the show, their dressing room is used to change into stage clothes (when I started working backstage, I was told that the stage clothes of a proper touring band could stand on their own if so needed. This, unfortunately, is not a lie.) The stage clothes are rarely cleaned, sometimes parts of it is lucky (I have met artists with lucky shoes, lucky hats and lucky bracelets. No lucky underwear so far, though :P) and all of the time it is the coolest clothes they have. If they are the kind of band who uses make up, this will be applied here to a lot of giggeling and comments from other bands/band members/cruel band liasons. Time will be wasted drawing in the guestbook/on the walls/on each other, a few beers will be drunk and several cigarettes smoked. The time before the gig is usually pretty tense, even if the band is an experienced one. For some, this is just a job as any other, but for most of them this is where they have to prove themselves yet again. Yesterday's concert might be discussed, what went wrong and what was great. Some bands prefer not to think about the gig at all, others play/warm up (the drummer is usually the one warming up, since he is the guy most likely to get damage if he doesn't). Some band members might pick a fight with each other, others will put on music that they love or hate to dance and sing to. Some will play songs...

The pre-concert rituals are as many as there are bands. My favourite two were the singer who walked around in little circles, singing to himself, almost catonic from concentration, and the band who held around each other and sang old children's tunes as sour as they could until reaching a crecendo and high-fiving each other before running to the stage.

After the concert, they will bring in friends and girls, fans and their family, or just lie back and relax. Most bands prefer to be alone for the first half hour, then drink into the small hours of the night, or go to the hotel and from there out on the town. The bigger bands usually stay backstage/keep court at the hotel instead of going out, unless they like the attention (in my experience, few do. If they want to go to a pub, they usually do so during the day, when they won't be mobbed by fans). On their way out from the venue, they are usually met by fans who want their picture and something (usually body parts and tickets) signed. Some bands love this and spend a lot of time with the fans, chatting with them, others prefer to be left alone. The bigger they are, the more likely it is that they will want to be left alone.

I hope this answered some of your questions and wasn't too redundant, I just wasn't sure of how much you knew and how much was new. When I started working at venues, I knew absolutely nothing about the music scene, so if you knew all this from before, I apologize. If you have any more questions, I will be glad to answer, this is just what I could remember off the top of my head :P