Tour Diary
Basim Usmani
The Kominas are a punk band. We started around 2006. Currently it’s me on bass, Karna on drums, Sunny and Shahjehan on guitar. We’re unsigned, unmanaged, but out of a sheer force of will, and thanks to our fans, we’ve toured the world and crisscrossed the USA more than a few times.
Being a punk band and touring is hard because you have to cover the expanse of the country, and that can mean spending days in a van. And who knows what to expect when you’re four weird brown dudes in a van, crossing White America. What follows are notes from two tour diaries I kept from 2016 through 2017, which chart the ups and downs of heavy touring, and my mental health. To kids just starting bands, or going on tour themselves, I hope this is useful to you.
August 6, 2016, Columbia, Missouri
We were on the eighth show of a twenty-city tour, and the van had become sort of a biome. We heeded warnings that there weren’t many gas stations for the seven-hour trek from Minneapolis to Columbia and stopped for gas at a rest stop outside of Des Moines. We’d learned to keep such stops brief. When you’re a bunch of shaggy brown dudes on tour, leaving the van can be a grab bag. Our only other stop was when signs on the interstate announced we were in Iowa, and all the cornfields in the state had gathered to receive us.
The only things that really change at rest stops are the slogans on the bumper stickers. On the East Coast, they’re pretty much all sports related. As you leave the coasts, they get more and more gun related. I remember trying not to chew fast food with my mouth open, reading bumper stickers like IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE IN RANGE or TERRORIST HUNTING PERMIT.
Back in the van, the ride felt dreamlike. I was nodding off in the back and getting woken up periodically by turbulent winds. I remember looking out the window into the vast flatness around us and feeling exposed. The landscape was disorientingly flat. No matter where I woke up, the view was the same. I rode in a permanent state of not feeling like I was going anywhere.
We arrived at the venue to find comfort of sorts in a BLACK LIVES MATTER sticker on the door.
We sound-checked and hung out with Soft Sculpture, a local seven-piece goth-experimental project. Their guitarist, Emma, had booked us.
The place was empty (and didn’t really ever fill up), but I never had high hopes for Missouri. It was cool hanging out with Soft Sculpture. The headlining band…not so much. The way each member walked in the door made it clear they weren’t happy to be there.
When the show started, Soft Sculpture and the Kominas were, more or less, the only nonwhite faces in the room, and the crowd was small enough for me to notice the faces in it. We were self-conscious when we played—I could tell. But the drums were really loud in that small venue, which is really important to me. When I feel the vibrations of the kick in my skull, it’s like a fix.
It takes me to a place where I stop thinking about the instrument in my hands; the bass guitar feels more like a piece of wood with wires in it.
It’s the beauty of playing basements and small venues, away from the self-indulgent monitor mixes.
I kept turning my back to the small audience to make eye contact with Karna. I never know when he’s going to run into the audience or jump off the kit and say something profound in the mic. Sunny sang a few more songs, and a small consort of superfans had requests, so we took them. We were just over a week into the tour, and there were moments that still needed tightening up. We got through it, though.
As Karna began unscrewing the nut to remove his cymbals, I could tell something was off. He waited until we had broken down our equipment before putting one fingerless gloved hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s go for a smoke,” he said. He wasn’t interested in watching the headliner. Outside, he turned to me and said, “That band’s singer was complaining about cutting their set short for that Muslim band, dude.”
I paced outside for a bit, not wanting to be inside while they were playing.
In the parking lot later, we walked by them as they loaded up their rental. I was still unpacking what they had said. We were that Muslim band. It brought up bad memories of the band’s early days, when no one knew who we were so headlines would refer to us as a “Muslim band.” We got in the van, followed Emma’s car to a punk house, and tried not to think about it.
The path from the front door into the house was obstructed by a couch that reeked of cat piss. It was like the occupants were trying to stockpile empty cans and bottles of beer. We greeted a white couple who were on a mattress, smoking weed and watching cartoons. Two more sofas were in there, which the more sensible among us claimed right away.
I lay down on the cat-piss couch, which I must have subconsciously decided to punish myself with, and rode out my remaining insomnia.
The highs and lows of that tour were very severe for me. It was our first long tour of the USA in a while, and this particular one was a slog because we had lost touch with so many contacts in the middle of the country. We didn’t know what we were walking into from show to show. We played for hundreds in New York City on that tour. And to a total of four people in Detroit.
On that cat-piss couch, I kept wondering what exactly I was doing with my life, what my goal actually was. When the band started out, it was a way of connecting with other quirky brown kids as much as it was about finally writing the kinds of songs we couldn’t when we were the only brown kids in bands filled with white kids. At the recent New York show, the audience was mostly desi with other POC. A brown high schooler wearing a rad patched-up denim vest came to our show with her mom. After we played that show, I learned her name was Suha. She said we were “cute, not really punk punk. More like Green Day. You could be popular.”
I lay there, laughing, thinking about this, and trying not to inhale too much cat piss.
August 14, 2016, Olympia, Washington
The promoter for the gig in Olympia said we could get paid more if we participated in a panel that was taking place a few hours before the gig. On the drive up, we tried to figure out what we were going to say. We ended up talking a lot about our early days and reflecting on our relationship with the media.
We were unprepared for the media attention we got when we first started playing out. The Boston Globe came to our second show ever. We were all highly opinionated punk kids, naively giving interviews about the Iraq War or the whiteness of punk. Often the early stories that would get published about us were from writers trying to make their own points about Islam, immigrants, and assimilation.
Between 2007 and 2009 we gave plenty of standoffish interviews with people who tried to peg us as some sort of exception to a rule. Wow, they’re not terrorists. We were trying to get our gig flyers out there and our music reviewed, and instead we were doing a lot of “Oh, you were expecting ISIS?”
We played punk spaces, but no punk magazines wanted to write about us. Some professors wrote about us from a distance, but they never entered the mosh. The brown kids who loved us, who ended up becoming journalists later, were still kids then. When we started, we wanted to be an angry sound. We became a footnote for some journalists’ “Look at these Muslims assimilating” narrative, and we unraveled.
Shahjehan once said that a lot of the words that come so natural to us now (like “microaggressions” or “gaslighting”) weren’t used that widely back when we started. The press we’ve gotten in the past few years is way less hazardous to our health. But sometimes I’m worried about the damage that’s already been done. I’m scared of what I may symbolize to people who don’t know me. I received a link recently to someone’s Instagram account: it was a picture of my face tattooed on their white, pasty arm. I wanted to ask why, but I just ignored it and scrolled down.
Olympia turned out to be cuter and smaller than I expected, in contrast to all the hard-core bands that have come out of it. It’s a granola vacation spot, and our show happened to overlap with an international metalfest. Just a few hundred metalheads were enough to overrun a small town like that. Headbangers, man. Everywhere you looked there were people in leather jackets, vests, with indecipherable logos. Sunny asked me to put on some music, so we decided to blast them with Beyoncé to see if they’d sing along. They didn’t.
The panel went down at a large coffee shop full of laptops and white people. We met a cool Iranian punk kid who went by the name Hell. She brought a friend with her to our show and they moshed furiously. The pit that opened at the basement we played in was so sick. It was a mix of kids, way more diverse than I would have guessed based on the people outside. It made me feel good, like we were some kind of flash point in a small town like this.
Then a bunch of lanky white guys began taking up space in the mosh pit, and Sunny had to say, “Bros, fall back,” in the mic. They refused, so we stopped playing, shouting, “Bros, fall back,” until they finally did.
“Yo, those dudes were in G.L.O.S.S. shirts,” Karna said as he got up from behind his kit and the rest of us were loading our stuff out.
“No shit,” I said, surprised.
G.L.O.S.S., or Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit, was a sick trans feminist hard-core band from Olympia that broke apart as soon as they began to get traction. I never saw them live, but all four of us were big fans. Unlike us, they strictly adhered to a hard-core punk sound, their unrelenting aggression paired with messages about taking space back and rage against misogyny made their purpose pretty clear. Seeing a bunch of lanky white dudes in their shirts take up space in the pit was disheartening. The last line of G.L.O.S.S.’s breakup statement really resonated with me: “Being in the mainstream media, where total strangers have a say in something we’ve created for other queer people, is exhausting.” They were a band for a certain audience, and once they became bigger, their fan base started to include those guys. Their decision to break up on the verge of some kind of band-career breakthrough made complete sense to me.
August 29, 2016, Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee
The trees along the highway in Tennessee are a shade of green too intense to describe. Asad Faruqi, a documentary filmmaker from Karachi, came along to chronicle the southern leg of our tour. He said the green was like nothing he’d ever seen.
We had booked the gigs in Tennessee when the tour was halfway done because we realized we should take a break from driving and find a way to stay somewhere cheap.
The last-minute show we got in Memphis was in a dive bar, and just as we loaded in, the sound guy walked up to us and told us, “There’s no bands booked tonight. It’s only an open-mic night.” Shahj quickly began texting the promoter and handling it. I walked to the back of the bar and pulled my notebook out of my pocket.
Sunny and Asad were filming funny videos nearby. I overheard some random guy say to them in a laughing tone, “I like to keep a watch around the neighborhood, and if you see something, say something.”
He smiled a really wide, melty smile.
When the band finally got sorted to play, we decided to play our song of the same name. We played a bunch of our most pointed songs, like “Pigs Are Haram,” “Sharia Law in the USA,” “Tahrir Square Dance,” to a bar full of random white people in Memphis. It was really weird. It was nice to yell those words at them.
I ended up crashing with a friend of the promoter. He had two options for sleeping places: his small living room, which was where he kept his extensive mannequin collection, or the hammock hanging on the balcony. I chose the hammock.
The next day our show was in Nashville. All of us were explosively tense with each other. The promoter said that the show was at a house party near the city, but we must have driven for maybe twenty miles, passing nothing but trees and tiny ranch houses set on vast plots of private land.
People were littered all around the single-story ranch house when we pulled up. Dozens of drunk and fucked up white kids lingered around. By this point, Karna and I had made a little game out of counting the white people with dreadlocks; I think we broke our record that night. As we lugged our gear to the living room, we guessed no one was going to actually come inside and watch us.
We were right. We were maybe two songs in when a few people filtered in. It wasn’t a lot, but fifteen is better than five. We had to interrupt the show again, mid-song, because some guys were getting too rowdy and obstructive for everyone else.
“We’re not going to continue playing if you guys are going to be assholes,” Sunny said.
One of the guys started saying “No” defiantly back at us and pulled a drumstick out of his backpack and began waving it in our faces like he was a conductor. We paid him no mind. I put a little more air time in my next jump when we started the song over, and watched him sulk into a corner of the room.
We were almost done with the last chorus when that same guy walked past Sunny and right up to me, waving his stupid drumstick. He walked up to Karna too. His eyes looked completely dead. I wanted so badly to stop playing and hit him, but I knew it was too risky to open up that can of worms in some random house in Tennessee where we were the only nonwhite faces for miles.
A guy who looks like me can’t go through America like Henry Rollins, fighting whenever provoked. It would be fatal. Brown punks get to do other things. In a recent interview, Rollins said he started traveling and making documentaries because “you can’t get to Morocco with just rock ’n’ roll.” We got to go to Casablanca once, with just rock ’n’ roll, and played one of the biggest festivals there.
August 3, 2017, New York City
We were preparing to hit the road again a month after Ramadan. I had just moved to a somewhat remote rural area in Central Massachusetts, where there isn’t any cell reception, and I felt profoundly isolated. My wife, Sidrah, who lives in Toronto, still hadn’t gotten her visa, even though we’ve been married since 2014. I was desperately trying to get my head clear. I spent five weeks writing a lot, biking around my suburb, and trying to avoid thinking about suicide.
I managed to curb a lot of my vices post-Ramadan, but my real vice at that time was anger. I was constantly angry. I fed it by reading things I knew would make me angry. I’d read a piece by Tasbeeh Herwees criticizing The Big Sick, and to some extent Master of None, for the way they adhere to the Americanized = good, traditional = bad narrative in their own way. She rightly pointed out how so many Muslim American guys incorporate shedding religion, eating pork, and becoming a “secular” Muslim in their narratives as a rite of passage. And it’s so easy for us. A big inspiration behind wanting to be in a band was looking up to my cousins Amna and Zainab, who had a riot grrrl band with their friends in Saginaw called the Suburban Nodnicks. Every lyric was a statement. I never got to see them play—I was living in Lahore at the time—but they brought me their one and only cassette when they came to the city for a visit, before they broke up the band and went to college.
I was probably fourteen at the time, and I didn’t really know punk music, so that tape sounded like something I’d never heard.
Going on tour or taking the band more seriously wasn’t even a thought for them. They probably personally couldn’t justify spending that much time on something that seemed so…indulgent. I had so much more leeway, comparatively, to disappear on my family and do my own thing. I’d reckoned with the ways it was easy to be unserious, but leading up to the 2017 tour, it was time to rediscover the intent behind my work again. Punk is supposed to be more than just “a way to blow off steam” or “recreational.” I started treating it more like a gift.
I stopped smoking cigarettes, drinking, and smoking weed (which I couldn’t keep up), and I got a lot further than I did when I quit for health reasons alone. For the next tour, I felt like I needed to go against the grain and play the bars completely sober. I remember poring through some of the letters and emails I’ve gotten over the years from kids discovering the Kominas. We don’t have a very “normie” fan base. When our fans come to watch a show, I look out at them watching us, but I can tell some of them are looking inward. We do something—we underline that it’s okay to be this fucking weird, and that respectability is a giant hoax. Our fans’ love of us is really personal; even if it’s a connection they imagine, it’s real.
All of my thoughts seemed gravely serious at the time. I kept having flashbacks to the worst moments of 2016 and dreading how I would react if the same shit that happened in Memphis happened in Nuremberg or Manchester.
In preparation for the tour, I did things I hadn’t done since my teenage days, like stitch up a punk vest, bleach denim, and tie-dye shirts in really dark colors. I biked around a lot and was making it a point to talk to Sidrah as often as I could. There was always some small issue with her spouse visa, like documents not being printed on the correct card stock, or being printed on the wrong size of paper, which forced us to ask for new documents, forever holding up the process. I felt really self-destructive at times. I tried not to talk too much to myself, but I didn’t know how to talk to anyone else. I began to realize how warped I was inside, and I started fearing that if I ever drank again, I would hurt myself.
My bandmates and I live in separate cities, and we barely have time to get accustomed to each other before we get done with rehearsals and leave for a tour. But our first show of the tour, at the Museum of Modern Art, went really well. Then we had to get ready to leave for Norway the very next day.
August 4, 2017, Horten, Norway
I felt like I was losing control in the back of the black cab on the way to the airport. I was scared about what could go wrong.
There was an absurdly long line to check in for our flight. I remember pulling my hoodie up nice and tight, trying not to accidentally make eye contact with anyone. Somehow I couldn’t properly explain my pain to my friends. I tried to do so with Shahjehan and it blew up in my face.
“We’re all making sacrifices to do this,” he said. “You sound ungrateful.”
I don’t know what was happening to us that year, but everyone was feeling defensive. I tried to bring it up again on the flight, but our conversation got heated. I ran out of words.
When we got to Horten, I had about an hour to sleep and another to eat with the guys. I quickly drew on my Kajal moments before walking onto the stage to play “Sharia Law in the USA” in front of hundreds of drunk punks at Kanalrock. Sunny trolled the audience with this incredible line: “So you think we all look the same, huh?” he said. People laughed. “We think you all look the same.” People got awkwardly silent. Then we launched into a song from our very first album, Ayesha.
We have a few fans out in Norway. Not as many Pakistanis come out to our shows in Horten as they do in Oslo, but Horten can afford to bring us across the Atlantic, which helps us tour Europe in the first place.
That morning before we flew to Stockholm, I went for a long walk along the canal as the sun rose. I sat by the banks of a fjord and resolved to come back with Sid one day.
I remember the first time the band played Horten years ago. We jumped in a fjord the first chance we got. It felt like the first and last time we’d ever make it there. Sitting just then, with my feet in the water, I couldn’t believe we had made it back.
I didn’t feel anxiety again until we were at the airport in Oslo. We’ve had bad luck flying out of Norway before. There was the time we got to the gate with our instruments and were asked to reboard and go through security again. Shahjehan said security took him aside and put their hands in his drawers. I was trying to take my mind off that memory while we waited to board the plane to Sweden. It was then that I was finally able to explain to Shahjehan how low I had been feeling. He hugged me, and we boarded the plane.
October 26, 2017, Chicago, Illinois
A radio DJ had recently asked us, “Are you guys actually friends? We’ve been hanging out with you for a week, and you’re so careful with your words to each other, you don’t seem very close.”
From the beginning of August to the end of October we had been touring continuously, save for a short break. We were haggard. That night would be the seventh show of a tour opening for the band Sinkane. The last two nights of shows, Toronto and Chicago, were back-to-back and an eight-hour drive apart. It had been nice to spend a night with Sidrah and, honestly, so brief it felt surreal.
I’m pretty familiar with crossing back into the USA from Canada, and I know that Customs and Border office at Detroit is filled with bastards. They have always given me trouble. The last time I crossed through there, in 2013, I was detained for four hours. I had been coming back from visiting Sid, and I got asked to leave the bus for questioning. They held me in a secondary screening room overnight while the bus left without me.
It could go shitty, but I was hoping it wouldn’t. When we were asked to leave the car and walk into the waiting area, I began to prepare myself emotionally. Me, Karna, Sunny, and Shahjehan all sat down next to each other in the customs office, and the officer called us up one by one, instead of as a group.
One thing I learned from being in this situation is that you never know whether you’re being called in for a quick question or if you’re being properly detained until you’ve been sitting and waiting around for over an hour.
Before the officer called me up, I had made up a strategy to be very dull.
“What do you do for work?”
“I’m a social media manager for a Public Radio show, like a journalist.”
“Social media manager? What is that, Facebook? Is that really journalism?”
Ah, a power trip, I thought.
I described in dull terms what my average day at the office looks like: “We start every day at the office with an 8:30 morning meeting,” I told him. And, “I have to double-check my facts just like the other journalists.”
He eventually asked me to sit down, but without handing me my passport. A subtle sign that this was going to take longer.
His interview with Shahjehan went on for a little too long, and when Shahjehan returned to his seat he quickly took his glasses off and began rubbing his temples.
He kept repeating, “This is not good. This is not good, man. I think I fucked up.”
Sweat began to bead up on his forehead.
“What happens if they ask me about what Imran’s doing?” he said, referencing an ex–band member who had left to become a social media manager for an Islamic university in California.
He was freaked out.
“You tell them Imran left to become a social media marketer for a university,” I told him quietly, though I don’t think it reassured him. I tried to remind him, “Dude, it’s not a crime to work at an Islamic university.”
The words didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though. He was talking like he was going to be arrested.
“The guy pulled up a bunch of Google Image searches of us,” he said, his voice shaking, “and got to the one of us using an American flag as a welcome mat, and was like ‘Is this some kind of joke?’”
Shahj got called up again, and this time two officers were talking to him. Karna quietly asked me what was up, and we both tried to have a conversation in hushed tones about Shahjehan freaking out but realized we were only going to look more suspicious, so we sat in agonized silence.
In the meantime, Shahjehan sat back down between us, and Sunny was called up.
One officer who had been behind the counter asked Shahjehan if they could speak outside, which seemed weird as hell, but it’s not like he had a choice in the matter.
It had been about ten minutes when Shahjehan returned and the dickhead customs officer at the desk handed us back our passports. It had been nearly three hours. Not the longest it’s taken me, but not the shortest either.
“He asked if we’re an antifa band,” Shahjehan said as we loaded back into the van. “‘Would you consider your band antifa?’” he mimicked in a dopey tone.
When we had gotten about a mile from the customs office, we pulled over into a rest area to smoke a cigarette and process what had just happened. Within seconds we were fighting with each other. We started nit-picking each other’s “performance” at the border and what the best way to deal with the situation was.
“Dude, you should just answer yes-or-no style,” Karna said to me.
“I’ve been stopped so many times, once you get detained, there’s no way they’re going to let you go until they take a few notes on you,” I replied.
“It’s not some game,” said Karna.
I didn’t have a response then, and to be fair, none of the guys have to travel between Canada and the USA as much as I do.
Once, I was crossing back to the States through Niagara Falls, after visiting family. My parents were driving and we were waiting in the middle of a long line of cars to present our passports. An officer walked up to our car, knocked on my window, and asked for my passport, before opening my door and ordering me to get out. I was handcuffed as soon as I stepped outside the vehicle. That agent shoved me awkwardly past the long line of waiting cars into the immigration office and sat me down in a dark secondary screening room. They asked me some pretty routine questions, like if I was traveling with any firearms or what the purpose of my trip was, but I stammered, handcuffed and sweating, fearful that something absurd would happen to me. Just like Shahj had been. At one point, the guy who had handcuffed me said something like “Why are you getting nervous? You watch too many movies.”
As he uncuffed me, I wanted to be like, Dude, uh, maybe you watch too many movies.
Eventually they let me out—it wasn’t long, maybe a few minutes, but it felt like forever. I was reunited with my parents in the waiting area, but they did not give back my passport. They kept me waiting for an hour, until I was summoned to a much nicer room in the building, one with a glass table. There, a redheaded Homeland Security agent asked me, “How Muslim are you? Like on a scale of one to ten?”
This was without knowing anything about me. When this guy found out I was in a punk band, he randomly hit me with “How do you feel about CBGB’s closing down?”
Sometimes they just want to fuck with your head a bit. If you’re a person of color coming to the USA for a visit or tour, it’s best not to come via road. Buy a flight.
Back in the van, we started to calm down.
“They asked me where my dad was from,” said Shahjehan. He said an officer had wanted to buy one of our “Pigs Are Haram” stickers.
That gave me the shivers. It was definitely going in some file on us.
He continued to recount what happened. “After paying me five for the sticker, he asked me if he was haram.”
“What did you say, dude?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know you, man,’” he said.
I don’t think I have ever loved my bandmates more than I did for the rest of that drive back.
We made sound check, and all the sound guys and staff at the club had heard what had happened and wanted to be kind to us. Loving, even.
When the show finally began, the place got pretty packed with the jam band/hippie crowd we had gotten used to while playing with Sinkane. It’s funny to think of those experiences happening on the same day. We ended up playing for two, three hundred people that night, and Karna even got behind the mic and told the story about what had happened to us. We put on an intense show.
At that point we just needed the release. We played that night for each other. Who gives a fuck about what anyone thinks.