Top five tour essentials

It pays to be friends with the Black Lips and Deerhunter — not literally, but you do get to travel the world and see cool shit. Kristen Klein, aka den mother, has logged many long, dirty hours touring with the local bands. As a result, she’s collected five essentials necessary for a fun, semisanitary tour.

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1) Rap music: “When you’ve been up all day, and everyone else is passed out wasted, and you’re driving through Colorado mountains faster than you should, Crime Mobb, D4L and Project Pat get the job done.”

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2) Jokes: “Text messaging jokes back and forth is a good way to kill time. Also yelling things at pedestrians is fun. Our favorites: ‘Hey turkey!’ and ‘Who died?’”

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3) Febreze/hand sanitizer/Airborne: “Febreeze is for crusty socks and underwear. You can basically bathe in hand sani if you have to, and Airborne makes you feel like you’re being healed by a magical elixir.”

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4) The shrink from Metallica’s “Some Kind of Monster”: “That dude is amazing. I think Deerhunter and I have some kind of deep-rooted trauma we need to work out. Or, at least a dude that can write us prescriptions.”

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5) Tour book: “The tour book is like the holy Bible for me on tour. It has all of our directions, venue information, contracts and so on.”