Ruby (band) - 2001 Tour

2001 Tour

Ruby's North American tour supporting Short-Staffed At The Gene Pool started off with a huge hitch: lost effects equipment for a group that uses only effects to perform their music live. Rankine relates the story in the same 2001 interview:

"Q: So I heard something happened to your luggage?

A: Yes, it’s awful! The skycart didn’t put a tag on one piece. There were 15 pieces of luggage that were sent with us to L.A., but only 14 actually got here. The one that didn’t get the tag is apparently still flying around out there somewhere, or tied up at a different airport or something. The airline says we have no real recourse, that we’re somehow just as responsible for the missing piece as they are. It’s ironic, because that one missing piece contained all our effects units, all of our keyboards and connecting MIDI cables and power cables, and basically everything we needed to run every instrument for the tour. If they had lost any other piece of luggage we could have still pulled the tour off. If we’d lost one guitar, we’d still have another, and same with the double-bass—we have an electric that’d work just as well. But because that one piece of luggage got lost, this tour almost didn’t happen.

"Q: Will you be able to replace all that stuff?

A: Yeah, we eventually had to go buy everything we needed. We had to run around to Guitar Center and Radio Shack and some other place and buy all new stuff, so now I’m up to my eyeballs in debt. The equipment is all insured, so eventually we’ll get the money back—but still, not the greatest way to start our tour. If the equipment hadn’t been insured, I would have just turned around and gone home."