Grease gets band where it needs to go

Constants tour in an old school bus that runs on recycled vegetable oil

By Barbara Mitchell

LocalNewsDaily.com, Oct 10, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Courtesy of Constants

Constants, a Boston-based band, have been able to tour longer by powering an old school bus with waste vegetable oil. They get the oil at restaurants along the way.

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It’d be a lie to say there’s never a dull moment on tour, regardless of what band you’re talking about. Boston-based space rock outfit Constants probably have fewer uninteresting moments than most, though.

That’s what happens when you decide to convert a 66-passenger school bus into a self-contained tour vehicle that runs on recycled vegetable oil.

“We’ve been yelled at, we’ve had dishwashers bring food out to us, we’ve had a security guard try to get us in trouble – even after we cleared (picking up used oil) with the restaurant,” laughs singer, guitarist, programmer and producer Will Benoit.

“We’ve sat around a grease trap and told jokes until we are in tears from laughter. We’ve been caught in dust storms, downpours and have sat in 110-degree weather. It’s pretty much something interesting every day.”

For Constants, the decision to tour in a reworked bus was pragmatic as well as ideological. They decided to buy the bus when their van died, leaving them without wheels to hit the road.

“We knew we could tour longer if we had beds and more space than a van,” Benoit explains, “and we knew the only way we could afford to run a bus was to convert it.”

If an indie band touring in a bus sounds posh, well, it kind of is. The Constants’ tour rig is outfitted with living space and a full kitchen (which makes it much easier for the band’s two vegetarian members to tour).

Touring in a bus that runs on waste vegetable oil also is hard work. As opposed to biodiesel, which is a combination of traditional diesel fuel and vegetable oil and is increasingly available at gas stations across America, waste vegetable oil is produced by filtering used grease.

It’s a far cry from simply pulling off the highway to fuel up when the gauges drop. Not only do you have to find the oil, you then have to filter it.

“Touring is hard, regardless, but this bus makes life infinitely more interesting,” Benoit says. “Right now our friend’s mom is stockpiling oil from the local Chinese restaurant in Great Falls, Mont., so we’ll have enough to get us through the long drives in the Northwest.

“Pretty much every day we talk to people at restaurants and will filter and store anywhere from 30 to 100 gallons of oil,” he says. “It depends on how far we have to drive. Depending on the quality of the oil, our mileage is slightly better than diesel, between 10 to 15 miles per gallon.

“Today we have the day off, so we collected about 12 cubies (the 5-gallon containers restaurants get their oil in) in Minneapolis,” he explains. “We drove to Milwaukee and have to get another five cubies so we can head west to Sioux Falls, S.D.”

Those difficulties have caused Constants to get creative. “We scavenge from town to town,” Benoit says. “We either Google high-end Japanese or Italian places and call ahead, or head downtown and just talk to managers, or in worst-case scenarios sometimes just go out after shows and find grease traps.”

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