August 11 - 17, 2015 BERLIN, GERMANY; COPENHAGEN, DENMARK; GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN; REYKJAVIK, ICELAND



It’s the last week of our summer roundabout. We’ve been away for so long that last May seems a lifetime ago, and yet the ports-of-call which once stretched so endlessly before us now seem over before we’ve begun. For those outside the projectile of a traveling band, ten weeks on the road might seem an extravaganza (and it is!!). But inside, much like the relativity of time as witnessed by a spaceship hurtling at the speed of light, things take on a continuum of their own. Claire Evans, of the group Yacht, captures this in a revealing essay synchronistically sent to me this ultimate week, and I’ll let her do the musing.

But even blurry vision is visionary. Our show in Berlin is at the Tempodrome, and it’s among the top five steamers I’ve played (number one: Hurrah’s in New York, 1979; seconded by the Warehouse in New Orleans in 1978; thirded by Zagreb, Croatia in 2009). Youuuu-mid. I don’t mind the swelter since inhibitions are loosened in both us and the crowd. More formal are the next couple shows at the Royal Theatre (Det Kongelige Teater) in Copenhagen, fitting since I get to meet and greet the royalty of Danish rock and roll backstage. Savage Rose were the first psychedelic band I was aware of from Denmark back in 1969, and here’s lovely Annisette; as well as Steen of the punk-rock Sods, who traveled with us to Lund, Sweden, in October of 1976; and Kira Skov, whose Cabin Project, a duo with Marie Fisker, has been my most charmed audio companion this year, one of the most haunting and ethereal albums it has been my privilege to hear.

In Gothenberg we have tea with Henning Mankel, who sends regards, and watches from side-stage as we play the Way Out West festival, rainy skies parting for our set. Across from us is Chic, laying to rest any hint of punk vs. disco confrontation. We all like a good booty.

A

nd, as a final stop, on to Reyjkavik, where Smutty Smif of the Rockats awaits in full rockabilly regalia. I have an afternoon off to fish and chip with Einar Benediktsson. Einar has traveled quite a temporal distance from his time in the Sugarcubes, though it’s not that far afield when he takes me on a side trip to see the rehearsal room where “Birthday” was conceived, right by the side of the harbor. Even closer to making a wish and blowing out the candles, in the last few years he’s served on the city council of Reyjkavik, shaking things up in the same madcap way he once did with the ‘Cubes; and now has branched into the world of illustrative art. Sometimes touring is about seeing old friends, and happy that they’re still here…or is it there?



Time to go home, methinks.

August 9, 2015 KATOWICE, POLAND



It’s Arto! And while this would not be an unexpected sight on the streets of the lower east side, or even Rio de Janeiro, where he now lives, seeing Arto Lindsay on a random thoroughfare in Katowice is so out-of-familiar-context that I wonder where I myself have wandered on this Sunday afternoon, looking for a plate of borscht. It turns out he’s here for the Off! Festival, which we’re playing later that night.

It’s a friendly festive. I arrive just too late to see the long-lived Polish death metal band Decapitated, which I regret; watch an intriguing group with an innovative drummer in Son Lux, who are from America; and catch the fascinating Buffalo Daughter from Japan in the Experimental Tent, which also is the setting for Arto’s band, with his opposites-attract blend of crooning bossa nova melodies and skronk-a-thon guitar. The audience at Off! is similarly eclectic and encouraging, totally still and attentive when we role-call the names of the departed in “Elegie,” and then flailing into a mosh-pit when “My Generation” starts running through its amped-up key changes. Run the Jewels gift-raps the stage as we depart the festival grounds on our bus, musically gratified and satisfied.

August 2 – August 8, 2015 LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA; WELS, AUSTRIA; PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC; LUHMUHLEN / DRESDEN, GERMANY

We move from the land of Romance languages to the more Teutonic tones of Easterner Europe. Awaking in Slovenia, we take a stroll by the river, where an antique flea mart is in progress. Having lost my watch in the river in Basel, I think this might be a good time to find a way to tell the time. A Russian Raketa with a futuristic face catches my eye. The minute hand is a silver circle representing the Earth, the hour symbolized by a golden globe that is the sun. The Copernicus (Kopernik in Russian) is the most unusual watch I’ve ever seen, and learning about it– a proletarian chronolog from one of the oldest watch factories in Russia (founded by Peter the Great in 1721 and making Raketas since the spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin 240 years later) - sends me on an internet search for its history and provenance. Fascinating, and hours of fun (literally) for only 40 euros.



The next off day is by Attersee Lake in the Austrian Alps, highlighted by a bracing swim and a visit to the cottage where Gustav Mahler composed parts of his Second and Third Symphonies, though the latter site – fronting a dock with sunbathers and children splashing in the water and surrounded by a vacation trailer park – is incongruous, to say the least. We continue onward to play our show in Wels, on the bus and thence to Prague, on the bus and thence to the Summer’s Tale Festival outside Hamburg, on the bus and thence to Dresden. Thencing along.



But while the traveling revolves in concentric circles, there is a step off the merry-go-round for a fascinating sidetrip to a castle in Miessen, some 45 minutes drive along the Elbe River from Dresden. There, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Bottger was imprisoned when the King of Saxony, August the Strong, demanded he use his alleged alchemical skills to transmute base metal into gold. When that failed, the king’s attention turned to figuring out how to make porcelain, then only available at high cost from the Chinese and often referred to as “white gold” by the nobility of Europe. Working somewhat grudgingly with a fellow chemist, Walter Von Tschirnhaus, Bottger found a method to produce a porcelain which is today regarded as one of the most desirable in the world. It didn’t help him escape his captivity; and taking solace with alcohol, he soon departed this mortal coil, leaving behind a strange tale, which I experience on an afternoon before playing a resilient GDR city renewed stone by stone.

July 27 – August 1, 2015 TURIN / GARDONE RIVIERA / SANTO STEFANO DI MAGRA / CODROIPO, ITALY

“I like to drink margaritas, but I’ve never had one on my pizza.” So says the woman at the table of American tourists at an adjacent trattoria table. We’re in Portovenere, on the western coast of Italy up near Genoa, eating anchovies with everything. The proprietor, well into the local vino, delightedly recognizes Patti, turns up Bruce Springsteen singing “Wrecking Ball,” and when we serenade him with “Because The Night,” me playing a guitar missing a string pulled off the wall, he hoists her up in joy. Only in Italia.



We’re having a quiet day off here between shows. Portovenere is a small seaside town with a castle up a hill that has been a setting for Game of Thrones. Lord Byron swam here, as do we, in the bracing harbor that ripples outside our window. It’s not quite a vacation for me, since I’m working on a story for Mojo called “How Horses Was Made” for their upcoming October issue. Deadlines are nigh, but after writing a few paragraphs, it’s a welcome break to stroll around the town, watching the blue moon come to fullness overhead.

The Italian audiences are embracing. We play Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s picturesque Vittoriale villa by Lake Garda again, feeling Il Fuoco di Amore, and watch as our steadfast fans (hey Paolo!) are drenched by a pouring rain at the even more sumptuous Villa Manin in Codroipo.


By the way, I meet a couple of really cute gals backstage.

July 24 - 25, 2015 LYON, FRANCE; NYON, SWITZERLAND

On and on. Ly and Ny. Ion.



The theme for these two days seems to be subterranean. In Lyon, I always make it a point to stop at one of Europe’s best record/comic emporiums, Boul’Dingue, run by my friend Serge Boissat. It’s on a side street in the Old City, a short walk from the Cathedral on Place Saint Jean. As I spend a couple of while-away hours browsing amongst his treasures, our conversation turning to old fifties’ horror comics and Johnny Hallyday disques, he asks if I’d like to see his storage space only a couple blocks away. Oui, I enthusiastically reply. He unlocks a heavy door and we descend into a musty stone basement filled to the brim with records and magazines. Ah, there’s the Coleman Hawkins’ ten-inch Vogue I didn’t know I was searching for, along with a lovely 45 picture sleeve of my brother-in-arms Johnny Thunders. That the concert the next night is at the Theatres Romains de Fourviere, a two-millennia old amphitheater built by the Romans, only adds to the ancient archeological feel of my excavations.



Then it’s fast forward into the future, as we arrive at the Paleo Festival in Nyon. A half-hour’s drive away is the CERN project, home of the European research organization where the world’s largest particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider – attempts to find the building blocks of the universe as they existed in the milliseconds after the Big Bang. We have been invited to tour the facility that houses the ATLAS detector, though because an experiment is ongoing, we cannot enter the 27 kilometers of circular accelerator housed in a tunnel one hundred meters underground that is dedicated to smashing protons. A crash course in more ways than one, especially for one unschooled in physics, the mind boggles at such concepts as matter/antimatter, the successful search for the elusive Higgs Bosum (a subatomic particle); and more practically, the global network of shared information that is centered at CERN. It was here, in 1989, that the concept of the World Wide Web was put into operation, which now allows us to check our email every five minutes and post selfies to perfect strangers, a human data base all the more remarkable for its global cooperation and idealism.

A different sort of particle colliding occurs when we play the Paleo Festival, which, like Horses, is now celebrating its fortieth year. Our slot is sandwiched between the sets of Joan Baez and Robert Plant’s Shape Shifters. Joan stops by to sing a chorus of “People Have The Power” with us, while Robert, ever the gentleman, remembers me from my days behind the counter at Village Oldies. Electrons all.

July 12 - 22, 2015 LORRACH / MUNICH, GERMANY; WIEN, AUSTRIA; SINGEN, GERMANY; BASEL / BERN, SWITZERLAND; KARLSRUHE / WINTERBACH, GERMANY

It’s not often a river-rat gets to swim two rivers in a single week. Especially on different continents. The day before I leave for the second leg o’ tour, I am in the Delaware, muddy this year from the rains, with small fish nibbling at my calves; and here in Basel I am swept along by the current of the Rhine, centigrade in the low thirties, supported by an inflatable bag that contains my now-soaked clothes and surrounded by a flotilla of downstreaming Swiss francs and deutsches enjoying mid-summer pleasure.

We bounce back and forth from Switzerland to Germany, with a side-trip to one of our favorite venues, the Arena in Vienna. The booths selling red, gold, and green paraphernalia may be gone from this abandoned factory site gone rock mecca, but the atmosphere is still incensed by collie leaf and counter-cult vibe. In Munich, we set up in an ecological theme park, Tollwood, located near the site of the 1972 Olympic Village. Here, where an emphasis on resource sustainability ironically leads to a champion wiener schnitzel backstage (care for your livestock and your livestock will care for you), positive environmentalism is on creative display.



Even more creatively displayed is the positive environment for art at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel. Prior to our acoustic show I walk the galleries. There’s Monet’s “Water Lilies,” set off by an outdoor installation of, yes, water lilies. There’s Klee(s), Mondrian(s), Picasso(s), Warhol(s); and Giacometti statues with which I feel ectomorphic kinship.



We spend a languid afternoon under the shadow of the ruins of a castle in Singen, originally built in the tenth century atop steep volcanic crags and destroyed by Napoleon in 1801. This may be impressive, but the fact that Chuck Berry played this selfsame venue in 1995, and Dizzy Gillespie in 1991, gives it more historical resonance for me. At the Gurten Festival in Bern, the dozen security guards in front of the stage do an impromptu choreographed side-step as we play “People Have The Power.”

But heat is starting to become a factor, the possibility of swelter mounting with the temperature. My white Agnes B. dress shirt has been shed for a J. Crew v-neck t-shirt, which I usually wring out after the show. We’re playing in tents, all the better to be enveloped by the radiant warmth of crowded bodies, as the humidity level approaches steam. Last night in Karlsruhe I felt cooked under the lights; now I’m taking refuge in the tour bus from the scorching sun outside, awaiting the show. “There’s nothing wintery about Winterbach,” says our tour manager Andrew Burns.

June 22 - 28, 2015 FRANKFURT / KOLN, GERMANY; WERCHTER / DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE / GLASTONBURY, FESTIVALIA

It’s a rainy Monday in Frankfurt, highlighted by a local laundromat and not much else. The simple joys of touring. A nearby red light district with equal parts topless bars and local junkies scarifies even my somewhat seedy self, and I spend the time before the show flicking the remote control in my hotel room. The next day I stay on the tour bus when we get to Koln, content to while away a quiet afternoon on the festival grounds waiting to go on. Sometimes you don’t want to be anywhere except on stage and then back into the band cocoon.

There’s a true day off in Brussels, where I make the rounds of the local record shops (you’ve heard this before), following a Juliette Greco inclination, and being unexpectedly charmed by a street singer singing her original songs just off the main square. Her name is Julie Jaevons, and the fingerpicked chordings and mellifluous melodies captivate me, as they might you. I support the cause by purchasing her cd, the appropriately titled Folk Vagabond, which only draws me further into her musical inclinations, encouraging further exploration:


The next shows are full-blown festivals that might be situated anywhere, even though we move from Belgium to Holland to England. These outcroppings of rural encampments spring up like tent cities, with roaming crowds migrating from stage to stage, a cornucopia of musical genre on display, and a sense of communal bacchanalia (I’ve been waiting to use that word for years). For a band like ours, it’s a chance to bring new fans and curiosity-seekers into the fold, as well as measure ourselves against the lineage of current au courant and the fine wine of vintage veterans, of which I like to think we’re both.



Werchter Rock is grand scale, and our tent doth overflow. Down The Rabbit Hole is a newish and smaller festival situated on the side of a lake, compact enough where I can take an afternoon stroll to watch the crowd intermingle and see who’s playing. Speaking of the Who, they top our bill at the venerable Glastonbury, and we doff our hat in respect by sending a salute in the form of “My Generation.” Midway through our set, Patti brings on a special guest who transcends generations. The Dalai Lama, accompanied by a birthday cake celebrating his 80th year, comes out to be serenaded by the one hundred thousand strong Glastonbury crowd. His message is one of peace, the power of friendship, and his pleasure at seeing these “white-haired musicians” be so energetic. When he comes over to clasp the hand of each band member, he takes a long strand of my silver-threads-among-the grey hair and playfully shakes it. A benediction like no other.




And then home, for a short break to catch our breath, divest accumulations, watch some fireworks on Independence Day, and ready for the next leg of Europa.




June 14 - 20, 2015 ROME / CATANIA / FIRENZE / VERONA / MILAN, ITALY

Pastahhhh.... In all shapes and blendings. The classic Arrabiatta or Bolognese. Porcino mushrooms. Sea urchins. Vongole. Lemon in a creamy cheese sauce. Parmesan and pepper. Artichokes. Truffle butter. Aglio e olio. Add a side of sautéed spinaci, and you gotta love Italia.



With the bouncy and irresistibly ingratiating “El Mismo Sol” by Alvaro Soler providing ambient soundtrack, following us subliminally over trattoria radios and local music video channels, I revel in Italy’s many delights and eccentricities, unsullied even by the waves of tourists (of whom, I must say, I include myself) thronging its cultural heritage. I try to get away from the beaten path. In Rome I take an opportunity between soundcheck and showtime to explore the surrounding working-class Testaccio neighborhood, and spend a quiet Sunday dusk in a park surrounded by families taking respite from the heat. In Catania, I drink a strange and refreshing concoction of frizzante water, salt and lemon from a kiosk as “Speak Softly Love” (better known as “Love Theme From The Godfather” - words by my uncle, Larry Kusik) reverberates from the blackened lava-stone buildings. In Verona, we are serenaded bel canto by a local restaurateur; before “Birdland,” we hear aviary cries from winged creatures circling the amphitheater, summoning the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet.

I have a special affinity for Florence. My father traveled here in 1928, when he was twenty one, spending several months as a representative of a U.S. import-export company specializing in animal skins. He lived at Via Solferino, 8, and I make a pilgrimage to his holy site, which still stands on a leafy street only fifteen minutes on foot from the city center. I imagine him taking a short stroll along the River Arno brandishing a walking stick, perhaps stopping for an expresso, thinking about growing the mustache he will wear for the rest of his life.



I haven’t much of a chance to indulge my passion for 45s, but in Milan there’s an antique shop near the hotel, chock full of the taxidermist’s art (I’ll take the stuffed cobra, per favore, or perhaps the peacock in full array), old typewriters, and a stack of 7” discs. One, “Quando Balli Il Surf” by a group called Les Surfs, catches my eye and consequent two euros. I’m hoping it’s a twangy instrumental band, but it turns out to be a family singing group from Madagascar riding the French ye-ye boom of the early1960s, finding considerable success doing foreign language versions of American hits like “Be My Baby,” “If I Had A Hammer,” and “Don’t Make Me Over.” Herewith, in the interests of pop archeology, from 1964, Nicole (soon to be joined by her sister Marie when the group moves on to become a Francophile Ronettes a few discs hence), and her brothers, stepping out on French television:


June 11 - 12, 2015 BERGEN / OSLO, NORWAY

It’s a mystery. When we land in Copenhagen, transferring to Bergen, the bag containing my guitar effects pedal board disappears from the trolley I’m wheeling through the airport terminal. I haven’t traveled more than a couple of hundred yards, and surely would’ve heard it falling off the bottom shelf. I retrace my steps; it’s nowhere to be seen, nor will it be lost-and-found over the next days of our Norway visit. I wonder whether to call in Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo’s fictional Norwegian detective, but I fear the resulting carnage will be too great.



My mood is lightened by the arrival of Jackson Smith, taking over stage right duties for the next few shows from Jack P. who has previous commitments. Jackson, aside from being an astonishing guitar player who delights in quoting my every solo cliché back at me, discovers his doppelganger on the wall of Garage, the rock club where we have a quick afternoon rehearsal before our show at Bergen Jazzfest. We’ve played this festival before, in a seafront town on the west coast of Norway, where gulls peck at your hotel window hoping for a piece of breakfast mackerel. Our mood is sobered by news of Ornette Coleman’s ascension, remembering that the last time we were here we witnessed Ornette live in all his poly-harmonic splendor.



I’ve cobbled together a new pedal board, adding a Barber ½ Gainer for extra crunch (alert the geek-tech media!), but if I could use the forensic skills of a police inspector who lunches and often drinks too much at Schroder’s (Waldemar Thranes Gate 8), here comes Jo Nesbo himself, joining us onstage at Oslo’s Norwegian Wood festivities. A member of a band before he began writing, Jo learns the chords to “People Have The Power” and “My Generation” and together we Stratocaster. I for one hope that Harry and Rakel finally get back together, that Oleg is saved from a life of crime, that Mikael Bellman, the corrupt chief of police, is unmasked, and that all the other characters that populate Nesbo’s fiction find their happy endings. I’m in the middle of Police, the most recent Harry Hole thriller; so don’t tell me what happens.

June 11 - 12, 2015 LONDON / MANCHESTER / GLASGOW, U.K.

On the cultural ricochet, we arrive in the You Kaye. Whisked off to the studios of BBC 6 Music for a guest d.j. spot, I spin a bit of this, a bit of that, opening with Hank Burnette’s “Spinning Rock Boogie,” segueing into Speedy West and the Yardbirds through the Velvets and the Weather Prophets and Joan As Policewoman and Willie Nelson and I. Roy and Budgie’s immortal “Guts.” I send out a tribute to Jean Ritchie, whose recent passing underscored the migratory ties of British balladry to our Appalachians, and how they returned from whence they came with Sandy Denny. I wind up on the molten shores of Opeth and the Melvins. All in the space of two hours, to be broadcast sometime in the future. I’ll let you know when.

I don’t see much of the U.K. except for the shows. In London we’re staying in King’s Cross, the better to be the near the train station, but not within my usual haunts. The only time I get out is when Andrew and Yuki and I watch Barca become champions of the Champion’s League against Italy’s Juventus, awarding them the triple crown of European football, though the experience is more staid in the local pub than a Barcelona bar.



But we save the true candle-lighting for Sunday, June 7, Tony Shanahan’s birthday. Field Day in Victoria Park is a glorious Sunday evening, the sun still high in the sky, the crowd stretching as far as the eye can see, all serenading Tony with That Song, sung the world around whenever wishes are made for an upcoming year. We close with “My Generation,” the b-side of our “Gloria” single which Arista UK marketed in a brown paper bag because of its swear words, reminding us of how those years pass and continue on, and how times do change.

Speaking of birthdays, I celebrate my 25,000th day on this Earth at the Manchester show, which means I begin my next 25k in Glasgow. Which should take me up to the year 2082.

June 1 – 5, 2015 DUBLIN, IRELAND / PORTO, PORTUGAL

It’s chill and rainy in Dublin when we arrive after a long airport day, and predicted to be worse on show night, with 100 kilometer winds (which sound more foreboding than 60 miles per hour). Though there’s talk of cancelling, the festival organizers move the event from the grounds of the Royal Hospital into a massive tent. A restorative Guinness at Grogan’s pub, and we’re ready to go on. Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine comes up to bark to “Banga” as the crowd howls along. We send out salutes to Rory Gallagher and Phil Lynott in “Elegie,” and bask in the Eire appreciation.



Not for long. The next morning we’re back negotiating airport security south to Porto – yes, home to port wine, and make mine tawny - another ten hours in the air, for the companion Primavera festival to the one in Barcelona. I spend most of the day before the first show, supposedly acoustic but ramped up to accommodate the huge crowd that appears before us, finishing liner notes to an upcoming Velvet Underground boxed set of Loaded. A writer’s work is never done. It seems even more so during soundcheck when me and da boyz piece together a Velvets medley for when we play a longer show. We start with “Rock and Roll,” adding “Run Run Run” (later replaced by “I’m Waiting For My Man”), and “White Light White Heat.” Looouuuuu....(not to mention John, Mo, Sterling, and even Doug).



The town is beautiful, with houses covered in colorful tile, and fried sardines galore. I take a quick walk before the night’s electric performance of Horses to get a sense of where I am, and find myself in one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, Livraria Lello, all stained glass and carved wood paneling. While the selection is nearly all new volumes in Portuguese, it is breathtaking to see this shrine to literature and the written word. Then it’s back to the festival site, to catch the appealing set of Howe Gelb’s Giant Sand, and saddle up for Horses. The next day American Pharoah will take home the Triple Crown. Equestrians everywhere.

May 29 – 30, 2015 BARCELONA, SPAIN

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder of a summer’s long European tour. Sitting on the plane on the evening of what would have been my mother’s 103rd birthday, with all last minute tying-of-knots finally half-hitched, I take a deep betwixt here-and-there breath and ready for what promises to be an intensive ten weeks. The itinerary is split in two, with a much-needed break in the middle; but we’ll be on the roadeo till mid-August, eighteen countries, forty five shows, many of them celebrating the 40th anniversary of Horses. Giddyup! Or, as the plane starts to rise, it’s a giddy up up and away!

There’s supposed to be a baggage handler’s strike upon landing, which promises to make the first show a challenge since our guitars are aboard, though it never materializes. It’s still too early to get into our hotel rooms, but no matter. Within moments of arrival I’m being whisked off in a van heading north to Gerona, where Gay Mercader is awaiting. In October of 1976, he was the promoter of our debut Spanish show, in Barcelona, quite a momentous event since it was one of the first rock and roll performances allowed in Spain after the death of Franco. Though today it seems amazing that large swathes of Europe were closed to us (it took until 1979 to get into Italy, and we were never allowed behind the iron curtain), it was a first for both Gay and the music we championed, and he wants to celebrate by having lunch at one of the most honored restaurants in the world.



El Celler De Can Roca is quite the culinary experience. Named the number one global restaurant this year (what, better than B&H; Dairy on Second Ave.?) by Restaurant magazine, it has three Michelin stars and a menu worth salivating over: mackerel with pickles and mullet roe, served with lemon, capers and chillies in vinegar; or perhaps the oyster with anemone; or the veal shin with saint George’s mushrooms; or the pigeon trilogy, or.... As each theatrically presented small tasting arrives from the kitchen, wherein thirty chefs perform their culinary miracles, there are many oohs and ahhs amid the sound of succulent slurping. I immediately resolve to upgrade my own gourmet cooking from that long cherished standby, spaghetti with gummi bears.



Our opening show is at the Primavera Festival, and it’s our chance to inaugurate this year’s ruby anniversary of our landmark debut album. It’s not as if these songs are strangers to us, but to perform them as a conceptual whole allows me to see just how unique they must have sounded then, and how resonant they have been over the intervening decades. Though a bit daunting for a first show to walk out on stage to 25,000 awaiting fans, it is a moment that even catches me up in its memory-laden emotion. During “Free Money,” as I’m singing When we’re dreaming, I unexpectedly tear up, realizing that this is the wish-fulfillment I could never have dared hope for back when I first picked up an electric guitar. And here I am, living dream-time.



There’s an acoustic show the following day, a cleanse of musical palette where we play nothing from Horses, and because it’s in the afternoon, I have the night off to head to our tour manager’s neighborhood. Andrew Burns is a rabid Barcelona football fan, and tonight they are playing Athletico Bilbao in La Copa Del Rey (the King’s Cup), a match fraught with non-sport subtext. Both the Catalan province of Barcelona and the Basque province of Bilbao want autonomy from Spain, and as King Felipe IV sits stone-faced in his seat, the playing of the Spanish national anthem is drowned out in whistling and catcalls. Next door to the bar where we’re watching is one of Barcelona’s cannabis clubs, and Andrew’s wife Yuki flashes her membership card to provide entrance for this appreciative guest. I choose a kush with a high sativa content and so am able to appreciate even more fully Lionel Messi’s first goal, a most beautiful and subtle weaving through five defenders that puts Barca on top, where it will stay. Barca Barca Baaaaaarrrrrrca!!!

January 29 – February 3, 2015 LOS ANGELES / SAN DIEGO, CALIF.

Duke’s is closed. The news – even though it dates back to 2012, which implies that we’ve hardly been around to lend our support to that venerable establishment – strikes nostalgically home. When we came to Los Angeles in November, 1975, playing the Roxy as Horses began its long gallop, we stayed at the justly-notorious Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. We knew it from Warhol films and general rock ‘n roll ribaldry, and even though we crammed four to a room at first, we felt we’d arrived when we walked past the black-painted swimming pool into Duke’s, their coffee shop, where I had my first taste of Monte Cristo.

The Trop is long gone, and Duke’s relocated by the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset in 1988. With the same ambience and seating arrangement and poster-encrusted walls, you could still go there to have a scramble and feel a sense of place. But after driving up and down the Strip several times in search of its whereabouts, I realized it was no longer there. Sigh…. Norm’s, on La Cienega, will have to do, at least until it too is turned into an anonymous high-rise. In the meanwhile, pass the steak and yeggs…..



What has been renewed, preserved and honored, is the former United Artists Theater, founded by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the klieg-lit year of 1927. Taken over by the Ace Hotel, restored in all its glory, with stunning rococo ornamentation and gothic lighting and beaux arts splendor, playing there is an immersion into Hollywood glamour as it morphed from the silents to the talkies. Two nights, each with their own atmosphere, a sprinkling of thespians in the audience. Many old friends backstage, many new friends out front. And a taco wagon treat after.



San Diego is sandwiched between our Los Angeles shows, with welcome visitations by songstress Cindy Lee Berryhill and engineer/producer Ed Stasium, and we take the opportunity to visit the ocean on Super Bowl Sunday. The Seattle Stoners, as I call them, lose on a last play that topsy-turvys their miracle of two weeks before, but there are other wondrous happenstances in store for me. Late that night, on a Bibliomancy whim, I open the Spanish language Bible in my room to see what it might randomly tell me. It is a passage from Jeremiah, a prophet I have not thought much about, and the verses are full of retribution against the town of Moab. Not quite the uplifting message I was looking for, but it comes more synchronistically relevant at breakfast the next morning far out on the Ocean Beach pier. I open the menu at the aptly named Walking On Water Café, and there is a quote from Jeremiah 29:11: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.’” Divine divination.

Back to L.A. for a wind-up club show at the Roxy. With the closing of Duke’s in mind, some things still resonate, and so we open with “Ask The Angels.” Standing on the stage, looking out at a visage that takes me back nearly four decades, I can savor the long path of rock and roll that has returned me from whence I came. Stars abound, from Morrissey to Pharrel to Jimmy “Shoes” Iovine to Rodney Bingenheimer, as well as trufans Karen and Kim and Adam who have hitched a ride on our west coast express. Later that night, we’re taken upstairs to a private room where Jack Nicholson and Lou Adler once secreted themselves, to tequila-toast a tour well-accomplished.

January 29 – 30, 2015 SANTA CRUZ / SANTA BARBARA, CALIF.



We are on El Camino Real, as my high school Spanish textbook would have it, heading sur. I’ve always felt a little out of my element on the west coast, almost as if it’s a mirror image flipped, the light in the sky shining from an opposite direction. Still, putting our bare feet in the cold ocean outside Santa Cruz, hearing the bark of seals as they sleepily while away the afternoon underneath the wharf, shooting the breeze with Sandy Pearlman visiting us with his wit and wisdom, and playing to the most pin-wheeled crowd so far, is psychically freeing. The Rio Theater also has the best poster on the tour, one destined for my basement wall.



Santa Barbara is our drummer Jay Dee Daughtery’s hometown. I can only imagine young’n Jay Dee coming to the Granada Theater to watch movies like West Side Story and Daktari, or seeing Van Morrison and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. We replicate that innocent moment of wish-fulfillment by inviting Michael Imperioli’s son David on stage to play guitar with us for the encore. He’s just crossing the border into his teens and he gamely hangs on to each power chord, holding down the rhythm while we launch into the clap-along section of “People Have The Power.” Showing us the power itself is the backstage appearance of Eric Burdon, who resounds in all of us. We work up “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” at soundcheck, but we’re too shy to ask him to join us. For me, playing “I’m Crying” in the Zoo (see Norton 45 092) was a rite of passage. Mucho respect, Eric.

January 19 – 24, 2015 SEATTLE, WASH. / PORTLAND, ORE. / SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.

We’re out of the gate, on the get-go. Landing in Seattle on a Sunday night, late enough to still feel the street tremors from the Seahawks miracle win over the Packers that gets them into the Superbowl, too late to find anything open to have a bite to eat, we’re at soundcheck on Monday at the Moore Theater almost before we have a chance to clock our jet lag. It’s going to be a whirlwind couple of weeks sliding down the western coast, playing historic theaters and venues, escaping from the frozen tundra that is the east coast at this time of the winter. A challenging tour, eleven shows in a fortnight, and I look forward to the immersion of live playing.

Seattle has those legal dispensaries; Portland has its book and record stores, as well as the venerable Crystal Ballroom; San Francisco is the Fillmore and Japantown. Old friends stop by (Hi Scott, Lily, Larry, Damita!) as well as new (northwest band La Luz), the shows stretch through two plus hours, and the familiar byways of these cities, so much a part of our band’s history – makes it feel like familiar territory. Whether eating kale for breakfast, lunch, and dinner or browsing in Powell’s or having curry katsu in the Kinokuniya mall or taking a day off to watch How To Train Your Dragon II with my daughter Anna and her new husband Frank and their dogs, Petey and Jax, it’s a smooth ride on the coastal roadeo.



Playing three nights at the Fillmore, as I explained back in October 2012 in these rambling pages, is quite a touchstone for me. The renaissance faire that was San Francisco in that Summer Of Love-In was the mecca I aspired to at a turning point in my rock and roll life; and perhaps, for my generation, a high point of optimism and possibility. I’ve recently read a book that illuminates its wonder, as well as its darker side, in a scientifictional manner. Lisa Mason’s Summer of Love, written in 1994, is a prescient look at future past, positing a time traveler from half a millennium hence visiting a site-specific chrono-zone as gleaned from ancient underground newspapers, a verité history even down to the Golden Gate wake for Hells Angel Chocolate George on August 26, where The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed. I was there, amazingly enough, coming down lithely from taking LSD the night before, truly “grokking” the wonder of it all.

So it is especially poignant when I send out a salute to Sam Andrews, guitarist of Big Brother and the Holding Company, who I dug on that day, and literally wanted to be, backing up the force of nature that was and always will be Janis Joplin. I met Sam back in 1994, and gave him a fan’s enthuse of admiration, gaining his autograph in the process. I was told after the first Fillmore night that he was seriously ill, and so I sent him a salute of healing energy from the stage before me and da boys did our Love medley. I hope he heard me. Sam passed on a couple of weeks later, on February 12; I will always remember the instrumental “Roadblock” that I saw that self-same week at the Avalon, witnessing the primal fury of Big Brother as a band, Sam hugging his Fender Twin to his chest and guitar, walking around the stage as it howled in protest, finally dropping it to the floor in a crash of reverb. One of my most favored rock and roll moments ever. Thanks, Sam, and here’s to the celestial feedback….


November 7 – 17, 2014 NEW YORK CITY / MILLHEIM, PA.

It’s something that’s as familiar to me as waking in the morning: the grasp of the hand on the neck, the microphone waiting for a voice, the restless, expectant crowd, the plugging in, and the first note. I check my tuning. Close enough for rock and roll.



Tonight it’s Hank’s Saloon, on Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn, not far from where I heard my first rock and roll songs as a pre-teen growing up in Flatbush. But pick any night in the past 50 years, and it could be anywhere: The Zoo, my collegiate band, at the Student Center, taking a stab at raga-rock after a set of Stax favorites. Link Cromwell, sporting a garage-protest moniker suitable for my debut as a recording artist, at the Barbarian Club, singing that non-hit single, “Crazy Like A Fox.” A bar in Block Island with Jimmy the Flea, a loose-knit collection of my friends who just show up and jam, get really loud, and are tossed off the island by the owner. A night at St. Mark’s Church in February 1971 accompanying an avant-poet and simulating a car crash on my Melody Maker. With the Connection during the new-wave eighties, sliding up the spine of the west coast, a tour notable for red ink and hijinxWith Jim Carroll, dodging stage-divers. Within a studio, behind the board, listening to a record grow before my ears. The dank rock clubs and the formal concert halls and the sprawling festivals, and most of all, late night when it’s just me and the guitar alone together, trying to find a song that needs singing.

I raise my glass to a golden jubilee I never expected, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of my first show with a band. To mark the occasion I have taken on a week-long assortment of random gigs that have come to me unbidden, without really trying to book a show or schedule some self-congratulatory after-party. I wanted to be playing. And almost without rhyme or reason, the week of my anniversary unfolded as these things do: better than I could have planned. Kind of like my life in music.

It was on November 7, 1964, that I first took a pick to the strings of an electric guitar and sang for an audience – which, at that moment consisted of drunk college students swimming in beer on the floor of Chi Psi fraternity at Rutgers. I was playing in a band called the Vandals (“Bringing Down the House with Your Kind of Music,” was what it said on our blue pearloid business card) and at that moment, we'd been working the two chords that comprise "Shout!" for 20 minutes. The song's lyrics kept urging us to keep going: “a little bit louder now / a little bit softer now…” Among our repertoire of Jerry Lee Lewis and the Kingsmen and “Harlem Nocturne,” we'd added a new song we'd heard on the radio, so we could be the first on our circuit to play it: “You Really Got Me,” by the Kinks. And then we segued into “What’d I Say,” with the lyrics skewed to suit our target audience: “See that girl from Trenton State / That’s where they teach you to masturbate….” College humor, for which the word “sophomoric” was invented. Fitting, as I was a sophomore in college. We played four sets and split a hundred dollars between five guys.

I never thought I’d be playing music for the next half a century, or – as I like to say – I would’ve learned to read music. But I did absorb the soundtrack of my time, using it to define who I could be, much like any other mutant teenager in the dawn of the mid '60s who saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. A year before, I’d learned my folk chords from a Sing Out songbook bought at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street. I began with the G chord, in hopes of being an introspective folk singer in the backyard, or maybe a tenor in a doo-wop group. But then everything changed.

It’s hard to measure the impact of the British Invasion on my musical imagination. Previously, the local bands in New Brunswick, New Jersey, were mostly instrumental, modeled on Johnny and the Hurricanes or surfer combos from California. The Renegades played smoky basement social clubs in the Hungarian section of New Brunswick; the Driftwoods over at the Linwood Ballroom in Edison at chaperoned teen socials. But the Beatles, and their subsequent seismic shift in role model, changed the game. I bought an electric guitar from a friend who’d only had a passing interest in learning – a cherry-red Gibson Les Paul Special, and a true-vibrato Magnatone amp of the sort Buddy Holly played (both then little appreciated in a world where Fender ruled) – and by the summer, I was playing along.

But who would have figured I'd be playing this long? I start lighting the anniversary candles at Hank’s Saloon, which is more than appropriate because it’s a downhome honky-tonk, just like I was promised when I began: nothing fancy, a place to play loud and louder. It’s a stopover on booker Frank Wood’s annual nine-day birthday party which runs a circuit through the underbelly of rock venues in New York. It's a tour itinerary about as local as you can get, just the way I like my live music. There are 44 bands total, and I’m headlining Friday night on my own, singing a smattering of songs from a body of work that stretches back to when I began. Looking out at the colored lights, the reflected faces, hearing the amp break up in back of me, I ride the dynamics of playing solo, adding the pleasure of a pick-up rhythm section for “You Really Got Me.”

Two nights later, I’m at Tom Clark’s Treehouse in the upstairs room of 2A on the Lower East Side. Tom and I go back a couple of decades, and our shared reference points always erupt in simultaneous hollering when the regular show ends and the jamming begins. We like to call ourselves Tom Collins and Slim Beam, and so we salute our forbears: Lefty Frizzell, the Everlys, Badfinger and Nick Lowe. He can always talk me into playing some Ricky Nelson, and I can always urge him to segue “Poor Little Fool” into “Coney Island Baby.” We play far too long into the night, which is the indulgent point, until only a few hardy souls remain to see us try to remember more than the first verse and chorus of any song that’s requested.

It’s only a couple blocks and a day later over at Joe’s Pub on Lafayette Street, but a world away in terms of venue and presentation. James Gavin has just written a heartfelt and lovingly-detailed biography of Peggy Lee, Is That All There Is, and for the book launch on Monday night, he’s organized a tribute with many stars of the cabaret world, including Barb Jungr and John Coltrane’s favorite vocalist, Andy Bey. I’ve been invited to back up Tammy Faye Starlite, who has channeled such icons as Nico and Loretta Lynn. As she sashays out into the audience for “Big Spender,” I twist my fingers to play the jazz chords on an archtop Epiphone 295, challenged by the meticulous musicality of the New Standards from Minneapolis, ex-punk rockers gone standard who serve as the house band for the parade of Lee wannabees. When Baby Jane Dexter comes onstage to do a sultry version of Lieber-Stoller’s “Woman,” my solo must beguile, just like the ineffable Peggy herself.

From the gal in the nightclub to the gals in the garage. Which leads me on Thursday to the Bowery Electric to whoop it up with the Cocktail Slippers from Oslo. They have an album produced by Little Steven and a stage presence that femme-fatales anything on Nuggets; I leap at the chance to join them for the encore. The tune is “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” a Rolling Stones song that I’ve never played, surprisingly enough, over 50 years. We follow it with Eddie Cochran’s “Something Else,” and for me, the very notion of 'something else' has provided motivation on my journey as a musician: Keep playing. That’s the way to do it.

No rest for the weary, or the hung-over. The next morning I set out for the wilds of Millheim, Pennsylvania, to headline the 7th Annual Harry Smith Festival. Smith was a 78 collector who curated one of the most important compilations of folk-and-related song in the late 1940s, singlehandedly providing the hymnal for the mid-century folk revival that would provide an entire cast of characters centered around Bleecker and MacDougal. I was too young to be involved in that scene, but its sense of tradition and heritage have always been close to my own philosophy of music-making,

Millheim is in the farmlands of Pennsylvania, midway across the Keystone state and far enough off I-80 that it is has the feel of a hidden Shangri-la. Amish buggies slow the pace of traffic. The town is nestled between ridges and hills where the songs collected in Henry Shoemaker’s Mountain Minstrelsy of Pennsylvania were once found in abundance. Dave Bialenko and Christine Smith of Marah, a band from Philadelphia, have relocated here, and recently made an album bringing those songs to life.

I ask them to provide the rhythm section for an impromptu Saturday night show at the Elk Creek Café. We take on some modern folk-songs: “For Your Love,” “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” a medley of the Boxtops’ “The Letter” into the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run,” and of course, “Gloria.” As we play, Amish teenagers gather outside to dance along.



For the festival itself, on Sunday, I choose to go even further back in time, to some of the earliest recorded examples of Appalachian music. The songs put me in touch with the long heritage I am privileged to share, and my own humble placement in the great tapestry of popular music as it unwinds through the past hundred and more years. There’s “Down On The Banks of the Ohio,” “West Virginia Gals,” a romping version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “John The Revelator” featuring 11 year old Gus Tritsch on fiddle that brings out the latent hip-hop feel of early blues, Bing Crosby’s “Where the Blue of the Night,” and to close out, “Will The Circle Be Unbroken.”

Around and around I go. Now for the next fifty.

August 14 - 17, 2014 AVENCHES, SWITZERLAND / TRUTNOV, CZECH REPUBLIC / WARSAW, POLAND

It's almost over before it's begun, this Euro trek moving ever deeper into eastern Europe. We spend a quiet day off by a lake in Switzerland, though any hopes of swimming are dashed by the rain churning up the water, and then proceed to the Festival Rock Oz' Arenes, held in an old Roman amphitheater. We supposedly played here in 2002, but I have no immediate recollection, the blur of festivalia and the road merging into sensory overload. Still, to return is to spiral the staircase of one's lifeline.



There is a long overnight ride to Trutnov, near the Polish border in the far northeast of the Czech Republic. It seems a town out of time, still very much imbued with the feel of the Soviet bloc. I find a swan on my hotel bed, a towel origami, and slide about on my satin coverlet. The festival we're playing is one of the oldest and most communal, with the air of a gypsy encampment. It reminds me that one of the few torches of freedom held aloft during the darkest times in then-Czechoslovakia came from music, brought home when a member of the Plastic People of the Universe visits backstage to wish us well. The group served as an underground beacon and rallying point in the years between the crushing of the "Prague Spring" in 1968 and the country's liberation from Russian colonization in 1989, and their example lends a sense of commemorative salute to our performance. After we play, the bus winding through mountain roads of Poland where ghostly towns emerge from the midnight mist, I ride shotgun and imagine the upheavals this part of the world has experienced, amid flashbacks of war and devastation, phantasms of conquering armies moving back and forth over haunted terrain, and the resilience of humankind to resolutely move forward.

I have the same sense of past-tense déjà vu in Warsaw, where the old section of town look likes it might have been there for centuries, but in reality has been rebuilt practically from scratch. More than 90 per cent of the city stood in ruins at the end of World War II. I stand in a square, looking at a postcard of the rubble before and after, seeing the same building restored, the only thing carrying over from then to now a section of door frame. If there is an air of a twilight zone theme park, there is also an impression of resurrection, of beginning again. And when I look at the youthful crowd that surges past the security guards at our venue, the Amfiteatr, many in their earliest twenties, I am made aware of that same spirit of regeneration, the anew that rock and roll offers in its insurrectionary outburst of rousing energy.



The beyond-the-present implication of this is brought home to me on the morning of our leave-taking, when I take a few moments to pay homage within the Visitation Sisters' Church of St. Joseph, fortuitously located a short walk from our hotel. There, in a loft above the entrance, is the pipe organ where the young Frederic Chopin practiced and played for the congregation, prior to moving to Paris and his oncoming immortality. The then is now that becomes the future, a loop of time transcending and transcendent.

August 9 - 12, 2014 HALDERN / MAINZ / MUNICH, GERMANY

A Supermoon hovers over this weekend, though the cloud cover shielding Germany keeps its glorious orb hidden from sight. Still, the rays of lunar attraction exert a powerful pull over our travels.

Haldern is a long-lived festival outside a small town on the western edge of Germany surrounded by corn fields, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year. We played here in 2003, and are spending a pastoral day, eating lunch in the catering tent, when a familiar figure and old friend comes up to say hello. It's Grant Hart, here presenting a semi-acoustic performance of his concept album, The Argument, based on Milton's Paradise Lost and an unpublished William Burroughs manuscript, Lost Paradise, which gives an insight into the galactic spiral of Grant's imagination. After catching up, we invite him to join us on "Banga." A cat fancier, he meows when the dogs begin to howl, cracking me up.



We arrive in Mainz, along the Rhine River, about dawn, in time to celebrate Jack Petruzzelli's birthday on the 10. At dinner that night, flagons of wine are hoisted aloft to celebrate his half-centennial (action photography by Andrew Burns). And many more, guitar brother. Jack proves the adage of "forties: old age of youth; fifties, youth of old age" by playing a dazzling solo in "Southern Cross" the next night, as Tony urges him ever on.

And thence to Munich. Always one of our most favored stop-overs, dating from the seventies when we used to head over to the Sugar Shack and disco down after a performance, it's the most intimate show of this festival-laden tour, a filled-to-the-brimming 1200 in the Kongresshalle. We break out some of our most abstruse material – "Tarkovsky" investigates the alleged murder and cover-up of Hitler's niece by her uncle – and dedicate John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy" to the passing of Robin Williams. To close out the German leg of our tour, promoter Berthold takes me to a local biergarten to partake of a giant glass of Augustiner, the Munich brew. We clink glasses and sit under the trees in the calm night air. Prost!

August 6 - 8, 2014 LOKEREN / BRUSSELS, BELGIUM



It's strange to think of what began here one hundred years ago this month. The battle of Liege effectively began The Great War, soon to have the numeral I placed ever after it, when Germany crossed neutral Belgium on its way to outflank the fortifications of France, and the continent plunged into the carnage that forever dashed the hopes of those who illusioned the twentieth century would be one of peace. And it's stranger to think of what's beginning, to hear those war clouds gathering in this century, the first of a new millennium. Or maybe it's always been so; human nature in conflict with itself.

I spend the afternoon of our arrival in a day room in a hotel next to a truck stop; could be anywhere. Music video television is on, its junk food mixture of pop hooks and chorus lines and catch-phrases and all manner of visual enticement; sometimes you can't resist, like that candy bar at the cash register. The same fifteen songs recycle, until even over the course of a few hours you can find yourself waiting for your favorite jingle, even if you've heard it all before, over and over and over, and are powerless to want to hear again. This time it's "Faded" by Zhu; as minimal as Detroit techno, the Belleville Three acid house of Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. Soon I'm on the download, and probably won't listen to it again until it comes up on shuffle and brings me back to a hotel room next to a truck stop; could be anywhere.



We get to Brussels late after playing the Lokerse fest – a big hey to the Intergalactic Lovers, whom I met there - and try to get a fractured night's sleep. The next day it's strange to think of what happened here, one hundred and forty three years ago this summer. Time moving backwards. Three days ago we were in Stuttgart, where Paul Verlaine sees Arthur Rimbaud for the last argumentative time. He leaves for Paris, carrying the manuscript of Illuminations with him. They will never meet again. The incident that sparks this final denouement takes place on July 10, 1871, in a street just off the main square in Brussels, approximately twenty five meters from our hotel door. After indulging in too much absinthe in a bar around the corner (now turned into a Hard Rock Café), Verlaine shoots Rimbaud in the wrist with a pistol. He is subsequently arrested, charges upgraded from assault to sodomy, and serves two years in prison, despite Rimbaud's efforts to tell the police that this is what A Season In Hell is all about.



Brussels has always been good to us, and the proliferation of collector shops – stamps, books, comics, and of course record emporiums – makes me feel at home. Even when the expanse of crowd stretches endlessly past the Royal Palais at the Summer Festival. After, seeking solitude, I repair to the Goupil le Fol, a favored bar on the Rue de la Violette with the candled glow of a French basement, a warren of rooms and wooden tables on which I can set a glass of Havana Club (unfortunately unavailable in America) and a schooner of Leffe, and listen to Serge Gainsbourg and Pierre Bachelet, feeling time stop, if only for a brief instant.

August 3 - 5, 2014 LUXEMBOURG / STUTTGART, GERMANY

My book of choice this tour is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, an interest sparked by John Logan's spookeroo Showtime series, Penny Dreadful. Though I've seen the various cinematic incarnations, I realize I've never actually read this classic tale of "A Modern Prometheus." Our show in Luxembourg is fittingly atmospheric, outside the battlement walls of the Chateaux de Beaufort, just short of a castle, complete with a disused distillery and what seems to be a well-used torture chamber on the premises. That the event is part of a Rock Classics series (also in concert this summer is Doro, the German metal queen, Ten Years After, Wishbone Ash, and a variety of tribute bands) makes it all the more steeped in medieval history.



Speaking of historiography, it's overnight to Stuttgart, where Tommes Records awaits on the Olgastrasse. It's always been my way of relaxing on the road, to delve into and lose myself in the many tangents of musical imagination, following random impulses and serendipities; and since this is my second visit coupled with a day off, I put aside a couple of hours to have a deep dig. My excavations unearth a hitherto unknown album by Del Shannon doing Hank Williams songs, a collection of pre-revolutionary Iranian pop tunes with an unreadable title, a modern Swede psychedelic group called the Soundcarriers, and a rare 1970 concert by Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Berlin. On the 45 front I follow a Francoise Hardy inclination, and to my surprise come across a single by the Sisters Grimm, who were on the New York scene in the mid-1990s, disappearing about the same time as Coney Island High closed. Happily, I now have vinyl evidence – the trash-strewn "I Hate My Boyfriend" - of their existence, because that's what makes a recording a record.




August 2, 2014 JENA, GERMANY



Weimar is the crossroads of literary Germany. It's where the Hotel Elephant is located, in some form or another, since 1696, and where, on its second floor balcony, a statue of Thomas Mann overlooks the Marktplatz Square, signifying his acceptance of the Nobel Prize. He set his novel, Lotte in Weimar, at the hotel, a stopover for many including Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Even A. Hitler made it a favorite domicile, and repaid the favor (as he did so much in Deutschland) by tearing the venerable old building down, replacing it with the modern structure that provides lodging today. It's a short walk to Goethe's residence, next door to the townhouse where his fellow poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller lived beginning in 1799. A taxi ride away is the Nietszche archives. But with only an afternoon before tonight's show to take it all in, we choose to sojourn in the early nineteenth century. A good time for weltanschauung.



Goethe's house is as much museum as living quarters; he was an inveterate collector of objets d'art, from classical statuary to minerals to coins. We stroll in his back garden, peek into his well-stocked library, and observe his writing studio, where Faustian bargains were negotiated, and erotic poems edited. There is a small anteroom off the workspace, so he might take rest after his writing and research, with a bed and the armchair in which he left this mortal coil in 1832. Then we walk across town to the humble St. Jacob's church and its verdant graveyard, where Schiller's remains are encrypted. A ghostly violin plays inside the church as we pay tribute.

Our show, in Jena, about a half hour from Weimar, is adjacent to Schiller's country home, where he lived for ten years starting in 1789, before he moved next door to Goethe. He too has a writing room, set in a two-story tower in his back garden; and though the town has grown around his residence I try to imagine the view as he once beheld it, at his modest desk, quill in hand, with rolling hills and a stream 'neath his window. And of course, I wonder what he would make of the racket next door when we start amping it up. Would he storm over and yell "I'm trying to work!" or join in the festivities, singing and stomping along? For a guy who once wrote "Lose not yourself in a far off time / Seize the moment that is thine," I'm willing to bet on the latter.

August 1, 2014 FULDA, GERMANY



A Hippie Festival in Herzberg. What more can this Summer of Lover want? Freak City, no sponsors, caravans and a community built on dis-organic truths of spontaneity and psychedelia. Wandering the grounds before showtime, with the sounds of Mali band Tamikrest providing the soundtrack, I feel like I've returned to where I first started, have never left. I pass a record stall, reach my hand into a box of 45s and randomly pull out a copy of Marsha Hunt's "Oh No Not The Beast Day," one of my all-time favorite discophonic discs, rare and one that I've just played at the Brooklyn Bowl for a guest dj set, talking it up to aficionados ever since. I have to buy it again, just for the zen of record collecting. In the moment.



It's Jim Carroll's birthday, and Mary in San Francisco has sent me a YouTube link of "Lowrider" in remembrance. It's from my time in Jim's band, a moment of brotherhood caught in Washington D.C. at the old 9:30 club. Touring up and down the west coast, remembering the time in Fresno when we stayed at a motel with a party of lowriders; or the outposts of New England ("Wicked Gravity" was a big hit in Boston), the long van drives and stage-divers. I joined his band just as Dry Dreams hit the streets in the spring of 1982. I had written a song with him for the album, "Still Life," and played on it. Jim's rhythm guitarist had just quit, there were four shows booked over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, and this was already Monday. Off we went, and on we would ever go. Doin' the Lowrider walk.


There's p.a. problems, and equipment fuck-ups, but none of it matters, given the set and setting. We rise ever closer to frenzy, in this festival is where "nothing is true…everything is permitted," Jim quoting Burroughs quoting the assassin Hassan I Sabbah, us quoting Jim in "People Who Died:" I miss you more than all the others / and this song is for you my brother...

July 30, 2014 GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN



There is something pyrotechnic about playing in an amusement park in full swing. The screams from the rollercoaster and the jangle of the fairway mingle with the applause of the crowd, near 20,000 strong, and the sense of electric release after a relatively peaceful summer – punctuated by a couple of Nuggets tribute shows at the City Winery in New York – has the band glad to be on-stage interacting together again. It's to be a short tour, only three weeks moving along Europe's northern territories, but it looks to be jam-packed with event and experience, as they all are.



We arrived in Gothenberg yesterday, minus guitars and luggage from a breathless change of planes, but that didn't stop a special performance that night by Patti and myself, visiting the great Swedish writer Henning Mankel at his home by the sea. In front of a few of his friends, including Krister Henriksson who plays Kurt Wallander in the Swedish version of the detective series (photo by Lina Ikse), we sing a few songs and enjoy a champagne toast to our presence in his domicile. He has been ill, but looks fit and hardy as he returns the favor by telling the assembled a story about a boy so poor that he had painted shoes on his feet. Then Henning takes me into his writing studio to show me a century old Stein and Day banjo he has acquired: the melody and rhythm within a sentence, the tale told within every piece of music.

The Liseberg Amusement Park was the scene of one of Jimi Hendrix' final shows, on September 1, 1970, shortly before returning to England and his untimely demise. During soundcheck Tony starts playing a slowed version of "Fire," Jay Dee hip-hops the beat, Jack takes the solo, and we each pick a verse to spark our own conflagration, striking the match that lights the fuse on this summer's Euro go-round.

April 11, 2014 TILBURG, HOLLAND


photo by JJ Koczan


It’s perhaps fitting that Tilburg is the boyhood home of Vincent Van Gogh, since I can only imagine what his missing ear would make of the amps-on-stun overload that characterizes the Roadburn Festival. I am here courtesy of artistic director Walter Hoeijmakers, and Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth, who is curating the Friday of this four-day indoor festival. The emphasis is on harder rock, presented to an ubiquitous sea of black t-shirt logos and long hair, but Mikael’s chosen artisans cover a broad range of styles, from the delicate acoustic-femme harmonies of Promise and the Monster to the prog-jazz of Magma to the doom-metal of Candlemass: kind of like Opeth’s stylistic outreach itself.

On the first night I wander from stage to stage, and hit a pretty good percentage of intriguing groups. Goatess, from Sweden, are riff-heavy and bang-heading, and I immediately go out to the merch tables to locate their CD. I catch the guitarist of The Anciients warming up with an Allman Brothers riff; that kind of melodicism leavens this Vancouver group’s crunch and burn. And over on the main stage, nearing midnight, Bong, from Newcastle, play what I might call droner-rock, except there’s very little rock in it, more like a protracted Ommmmmm with sitaresque squiggles punctuating the trance and meditative dance.

The next day it’s my turn to join the festivities. I’m publically interviewed about the hows and whys of Nuggets by journalist and fellow vinyl junkie, Robert Haagsma who also informs me that Europe’s biggest record flea market is coming this weekend to nearby Utrecht. So close and yet so far. Then it’s time to put the spirit of Original Artyfacts into action.

It’s described as a “west coast jam.” We’ve never met, Harsh Toke and I, but that’s what the spirit of a free-form, sixties-style freak-out jam is all about. The San Diego-area band will be playing their own show later in the festival, but right now we’re pleased to meet each other and agree on a key. A minor it is, one of me favorites. And so we begin, heightened by the beautiful red ’65 Stratocaster supplied to me by the backline tech and a friendly joint passed up by an audience member (photo courtesy www.theobelisk.net). Rising and falling, faster and slower. On and on. Negotiating an encompassing blur of sound churned out by the Tokers (“Harsh Toke Means Good Smoke” I sloganize), I slide in snippets of song – the Velvets’ “Run Run Run,” “Parchman Farm” (my take on it more Blue Cheer than Bukka White), Free’s “All Right Now,” even a verse or two of Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” given the country in which I’m hollering.
The greatest hits continue with Opeth’s headlining set that night, rallying the faithful while we await the release of their upcoming new album, Pale Communion, on June 17. On the way back to my hotel, I stop at a local bar for a nightcap, whooping it up when the disc jockey spins a trifecta of AC-DC’s “Thunderstruck,” Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.” Gotta love rock and roll.

April 8-9, 2014 MALTA



I have a Maltese dog – actually, it’s our second, and for visual proof of cuteness, do go to www.pattismith.net and look for Sylvie in the “Dogs” section – and so have more than historical and sightseeing interest in mind when I hear we are going to play this small island-nation fifty miles south of Sicily in the Mediterranean. That said, I saw no dogs of the Maltese persuasion anywhere on Malta, leaving me to explore this crossroads of many civilizations without canine perspective. Sitting late in the evening in the town square of the capital, Valletta, ghostly and deserted except for the splash of a synchronized fountain, having dinner with our bohemian promoters, I felt like I could be here in any century.



The fortifications surrounding the town are massive, perhaps defending Caravaggio’s magnificent “Beheading of St. John the Baptist” in St. John’s Cathedral. There is also considerable antiquity. We visit two prehistoric sites, both shrouded in the mysteries of the distant past. In the middle of Paola, on a residential block that looks like any other, we burrow deep into the earth to the labyrinthine Hypogeum, where the oldest levels date from 3500 B.C., cave-like burial chambers cut from the living rock. And though our regular show is at the local university, we also give a poetry reading on the megalithic site of the Mnajdra Temples, five thousand year old structures that are probably bemused to see us temporal humans singing our songs. It seems fitting that Patti and I present the first live performance of “Mercy Is” from the Noah soundtrack, here in the shadow of the Lower Temple, where the rays of the sun poke through framings of massive blocks of stone at the spring and autumnal equinox, marking each millennia.

April 4–6, 2015 LAUSANNE / ZURICH, SWITZERLAND



There are two Switzerlands, brought together by the lakes that make this land-locked country always one step away from a wet breeze off the water. Lausanne is in the French south; Zurich hearkens to Germany. Sandwiched between our two non-continental stops, it seems familiar, almost like home. Well, almost… On arrival night in Lausanne, with Tony and Gerard, our soundman, we take the Metro in search of food. I have a foie gras du canard burger, an interesting taste sensation far removed from a California variant. In Zurich, before we play, I have a chance to sit by the lake and relax with a currywurst and a beer. We break out “Tarkovsky” to celebrate the great film-maker’s birthday in Lausanne, and remember our first Zurich show in 1976 when clouds of tear gas heralded a riot outside. It’s a lot calmer now in Switzerland, as the cuckoo clock flies.

April 2, 2014 CASABLANCA, MOROCCO



After the long enclosed winter that blanketed the northeast, a resultant cabin fever broken only by endless rounds of snow shoveling, there is something exhilarating about boarding a plane for No. Africa. And though we’ll only be in Casablanca for two days to kick-off this short Patti acoustic tour with Tony Shanahan and myself as musical support, our spirits rise as the plane leaves JFK. To acclimate myself I watch an Egyptian movie called Al Shoug that in-flight entertainment has graciously granted English subtitles, which wanders me through the alleyways of Alexandria and the cross-cultural feel of the medina I will soon enter.

Jazzablanca is the witty name of the festival at which we’re performing, featuring a mixage of international musics spun through translation, homage, and genre-fusion. I meet Yacine Benhalima of the Blues Ramblers, with whom I’ve been exchanging e-mails since he saw us last year in Fes, and we talk those traditional 12-bars, even while the sound of the oud and la musique gnaoui swirl around us. On the square near our hotel, Othman El Kheloufi’s saxophone fronts a multi-percussive rhythm section that is as much Latin as traditional Moroccan, even while the muezzin calls to prayer from a nearby mosque.



Casablanca is a port city, more cosmopolitan and modern than the Tangiers and Fes I remember from our last year’s voyaging here. Perhaps its outsized familiarity to my western imagination comes from the iconic movie starring Humphrey Bogart; and yes, there is a Rick’s Café pointed out along our sightseeing route, of which I’m assured the interior is a faithful replica of the movie’s set. More impressive, however, is the massive mosque on the sea front built by Hassan II, an imposing edifice whose tower can be seen throughout the city. We pass it on the way to our show, located in a large grandstand on the grounds of a horseracing track.

The crowd is welcoming and enthusiastic. Though I break a string at the end of Tony’s furious bass solo in “Southern Cross,” causing me to hoof it all the way back to the dressing room to find a replacement, returning to the stage in time to play my own “Pissing In The River” place-and-show, we hardly break stride (enough equestrian metaphors?). During the encore I hear a strange sound emanating from the tin roof overhead, a roar that signals a veritable deluge outside. As we round the final furlong of “People Have The Power,” water pooling around the stage, the electricity suddenly goes out. Still, the audience continues to sing the chorus, a true manifestation of the song’s message.



After the show we have our own Bogartian cinematic moment. Tom Hanks is in town to film a book by Dave Eggers, and still damp from the deluge, both visit backstage. Dave remembers my production of James’ debut album, Stutter, and the conversation turns to vintage Schwinn bicycles, as time goes by and delightfully by.
September 7 - 8, 2013 DETROIT, MICHIGAN

On my basement wall are two framed photographs by the artist Rhona Bitner, from her commemoration series of sites where rock and roll made its stand. One is of the CBGB stage; the other is of the Michigan Theater, or what remains of it, the proscenium peeking over a parking garage, as if the walls still held their music, an ever-distant reverberation that still echoes in the heart.



Eating a hot dog at Lafayette Coney Island. Slathered in mustard, onions, chili. Some things remain eternal. Detroit may be undergoing economic hardship, but there is an element of returning home here for me and Patti, roaming the streets where the MC5 took the concept of high energy higher and highest; where Fortune Records once gathered its misbegotten doo-wop and blues and country and gospel artisans; where Creem magazine took literary liberties; and where Jackson Smith now lives, and will join us for these two very different shows, along with sister Jesse. Family, that’s what Detroit is about.

The rockist concert takes place at the Majestic, and Jackson adds the whine of a lap steel to our pas de deux in “Ain’t It Strange.” The second is even more localized, at Sindbad’s Restaurant along the Detroit River. A benefit for Covenant House, it’s an acoustic performance organized by Jackson, joined by Jesse and Patti, and myself, an honorary Smith on this occasion. In the audience are Jackson’s new bride Lisa, his in-laws, old friends and neighbors, and when Patti asks me to sing a song, she suggests “Love of the Common People,” which I learned from Waylon Jennings. It’s the perfect lyric for this occasion - “Livin’ on dreams ain’t easy / But the tighter the fit / the closer the knit… faith is your foundation…take ‘em in stride, family pride...”. Making you strong, where you belong.

The next day I return home. We’re off the road for a while, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the equinox has to offer.

Sept 4 - 6, 2013 OTTAWA / TORONTO, CANADA



I recently watched Festival Express, that time-travel psyche-documentary of a 1970 train excursion across Canada featuring the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, the Band, and many other drunken revelers, and so was primed to cross the border into maple leaf territory. Our trip into the Great White North was originally sparked around Neil Young’s Crazy Horse tour, but when guitarist Frank Sampedro broke his hand, it was like that moment when the magician kicks a supporting foundation away only to see the object of the illusion floating in the air. We did lose a day of Labor at the Capitol Theater in nearby Port Chester, New York, but the warmth and welcome of the Ottawa Folk Festival more than makes up for it. We are the welcoming attraction for the extravaganza, and I’m awarded “quote of the day” by a local Ontario newspaper when I compare garage-rock to Appalachian folk music before launching into our Nuggets medley.



And it provides an opportunity for us to travel to Toronto and play the fabled Massey Hall. It was the site of “the greatest jazz concert ever,” as legend has it, when on May 15, 1953, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charlie Mingus (playing under the nom du bass of Charlie Chan) and Max Roach joined together for the first and only time. Many legends have sprung up about the night, fraught with difficulties (Parker missed his plane, Powell suffering from mental problems, Mingus inaudible on the only recorded document of the evening, the promoters unable to pay) but as I learn perusing Massey’s downstairs wall of fame, it’s only a small sliver of the notable performers who have appeared in this hallowed space, beginning in 1894: Enrico Caruso, Paul Robeson, Glenn Gould, William Faulkner... An especial highlight was the appearance of a rag-tag New York band in the spring of 1976, visiting Canada for the very first time. Yes, we played here in the last century, and it’s good to closure the circle.

Toronto is a-buzz with the Film Festival, and on our off night we attend the screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. A vampire fable that avoids most of the genre’s readymades, it is a love story that encompasses centuries, set in Tangier and a nighttime Detroit, both of which look a-glimmer in supernatural light. With spectral performances by lead actors Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as the Type O - crossed lovers, a cameo by New York’s space-rockin’ White Hills, and a selection of vintage guitars during the opening scenes of the movie (Hiddleston is a disembodied rocker in this century) that should appeal to any six-string fetishist, it’s a grand piece of film noir and ahhhh... The afterparty has the Sadies providing sweeps of musical sturm und drang and performing their own Nuggetarian medley (whoops, there goes another version of “Psychotic Reaction”). Transfusion!


July 25 – August 1, 2013 MILAN / PRATO / VENICE / MACERATA /
TAORMINA / PALERMO, ITALY



Our week in Italia begins with puttanesca and ends with arrabiata. There are bests to be considered. The former arrives magnificently in Milan, the pasta sauce soupy and flavorful and making me want to lick my plate as it licks my palate. The Sicilian latter reminds of the spaghetti I had in the shadow of an erupting Mt. Aetna about ten years ago, still the measure of spice and piquancy. And while it doesn’t quite fulfill that particular expectation, I must say the ambient breezes wafting off the Strait of Messina only adds to the enjoyment.

It’s brutally hot in Italy, making soundchecks a hurried affair and movement slow during the day. There are other things to consider – the mosquito swarms during the Milan show, where I watch the little buggers alighting on my arm during a solo, and can only watch as they siphon large goblets of my platelets through the sleeves of my shirt. I come off stage full of maddening bites, exacerbated by the salted sweat that has pooled upon them. I’m wondering if they compare humans in the way I have just weighted pasta sauce – mmm, perhaps a bit more garlic in the bloodstream….



But as always, Italy is about the people, who have embraced us here since we visited back in 1979, in the final days of the Group. Then, playing a pair of soccer stadiums in Bologna and Florence, finally allowed into the country after years of political controversy, we still meet those who came to those shows and left empowered and inspired, as well as new fans who seem to ever renew our “My Generation.” For us it’s the same: concerts opposite duomos in town squares that have been gathering places for centuries (Prato), an outdoor opera “house” (Macerata), an island across from St. Mark’s Square (Venizia), an ancient Greek outdoor theater in Taormina.



It’s also the last week of our tour and I can feel the weariness of constant motion setting in. I’ve been lugging all I brung and all I’ve accumulated and all the memories attached for nearly two months, and I’m ready to go home, spread it all on the floor, catch my breath, and wonder if this magical go-round of Europa really happened. My Collings acoustic has a crack in the lower bout from an unspecified airline mishap; my beloved grey hoodie has disappeared somewhere along the Italian road; and my stage boots, so carefully conserved throughout these thirty one shows, are flapping at the seams.
Until the next….

July 22-23, 2013 CARCASSONNE / LYON, FRANCE



Back on the mainland. Overnight by ferry from Corsica, under a moon approaching fullness, sleeping with the thrum of the engines. When we get to Carcassonne, a four hour surface journey, it’s like a continuation of dream. Castle walls rising from a distance, the bus parking ‘neath a turret, cobblestone streets and winding alleyways. Though restored and a tourist destination – perhaps to a fault, looking a bit too spiffed and Disneyfied – the fortress does give the feel of what it must have been like in the 13th century when the Cathars held out here during the wars of the Albigensian Heresy, with the townspeople huddled behind their fortifications while under siege, dodging stray arrows and flaming cannonball. Or have I been watching too much Borgias? We set up on a stage built ‘neath the ramparts and participate in this setting redolent of the History Channel.

Lyon is similarly antique, our show part of a month-long festival held at the local Roman amphitheater. Called the Three Gauls, for the family that began it in the first century A.D., it’s not our first time here – I recall a show with Phillip Glass a few years back, and a band performance as well somewhere around the turn of the century…which is about the best way to measure the time-line of this venerable venue. There is a threat of storm in the air, and toward the end of “Gloria” lightning flashes dramatically across the sky; but the gentle rain that droppeth from heaven upon the place beneath only begins when we exit the stage, our quality of mercy.

July 20, 2013 ST. FLORENT (CORSICA), FRANCE



On the boat to Corsica, I can’t help but think of A.

She came into Marc Zermati’s Open Market on the Rue des Lombards in Paris in the fall of 1976, during our Radio Ethiopia tour. Dark unruly hair, an intense stare that looked into you, aura of mystery. I invited her to come see us at Les Pavillions, as well as an impromptu off-circuit club show in which kids crash through the dressing room ceiling to get in, the amps self-destructing halfway through our set, the electricity blowing.

A Corsican, and it is through her that I get a sense of the wildness and untamed otherness of this island that is part of France, part its own animal. She is a path not followed, though there are letters and visitations; but I always remember her feral spirit, and now I am going to where she’s from, where I’ve always wanted to go. The waters of the Mediterranean slide by on the ferry. I have my own cabin, enjoying the quietude, the spell of awaiting anticipation.

Corsica does not disappoint. If anything, it is even more breathtaking than I imagine. We land at the eastern port of Bastia, at the bottom of the peninsula that juts out from the top of the island, and travel 45 minutes by bus overland to the western shore, crossing mountains with winding roads and breathtaking vistas and finally coming to rest at a hotel along the beach. The water is clear, warm, and hardly stirring; and so immersion.

We’re playing a guitar festival in town – Michael Schenker will be here later this week – and I am interviewed by a French guitar magazine. Julien the journalist is knowledgeable, asking questions of technique and approach and why-the-one-pickup-on-the-Unicaster, making me aware of my long devotion to this stringed instrument and the ways in which it has illuminated my life. This summer, amazingly enough, celebrates the golden anniversary of when I shaped my first chords, painstakingly learning the G - C - D of “Gotta Travel On” picked out of a Sing Out! Folk song anthology, and has brought me half a century later to this moment today. And has brought me to Corsica, traveling on and on.

July 18-19, 2013 NIMES / VENCE, FRANCE



Our entrance into France is auspicious because the first show is opening for Neil Young and his Wacky Ponies at a coliseum/amphitheater built nearly two millennia ago, more recently utilized for the ole! of bullfighting. Though sightlines from onstage are reminiscent of the arenas we played last fall when we toured with Neil, a look up at the open sky above is enough to feel the galaxies whirling amidst the infinite reaches of universe. As does the version of “Rockin’ In The Free World” that Neil launches into as we witness from side-stage, every solo more frenetic than the last, each chorus releasing into a solar wind of feedback and howl. Neil exits when the last note is wrung from his guitar, and I catch a rare portrait of “Blackie” awaiting the next interstellar voyage.



And, ah, la cuisine. Before the show in Vence, about an hour north of Nice, we eat as only the French will, accompanied by a chill vin blanc and crudités galore, before a dish o’ fish newly scooped from the ocean. Then to the town square to swim it all off.


July 15, 2013 COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

“Do you remember when we were here before?” Patti asks the crowd prior to launching into a frenetic “Free Money” played at warp speed. Only it’s not the audience at the Falkoner Theater she’s addressing tonight. I’m listening to the bootleg I got in Brussels which captures our concert at the Tivolis Koncertsal on October 6, 1976. And as I always do, I share in the remembrance, because our show at Daddy’s Dance Hall, in May of that year, was our European debut. With last September’s performance at Vega in mind, and other notable occasions —a two-night stand in 2007 at the Grey Hall in Christiana stands out—to savor, it’s a pleasure to be welcomed back to Copenhagen. We dedicate a song to the Sods, who were our punk-rock compatriots then, and I’m glad to hear that Steen, their singer, is still a vox populi in Danish music.

Post-gig, as we ride back to the hotel, the driver points out the still-standing building where Daddy’s was, and in some evolved theatrical form, currently is. In the hotel bar, unwinding with our agent Andy Woolliscroft and da boyz, Tony streams the Rolling Stones concert from this year’s Glastonbury on his iPad and we watch along, marveling at their stagecraft and resilience, hit after hit. At that Tivoli show, we covered “Time Is On My Side,” which Patti introduced with a poem ending with the declaration “Fuck the Clock!” And so we have, relaxing in the afterglow of another memorable Copenhagen copulation.



July 11 - 13, 2013 RATTVIK / UPPSALA / GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN

Having lived in the same longitude and latitude my whole life, stepping away from its earthly orbit can be disconcerting. It’s midnight outside, the light just beginning to vanish. When I awake around three to answer nature’s call, the sun is rising. Coming out of a darkened auditorium after a show into daylight is even more surreal, coupled with the over-the-top gorgeous venues we have here. In Dalhalla, just outside Rattvik, we play in an old quarry, surrounded by cliffs of carved-out rock, separated from the audience by a moat. Both Uppsala and Gothenburg, picture-perfect in this heightened summer light, have their stages set in botanical gardens. The latter cause-and-effect is heightened by the opening set of First Aid Kit, whose twining female voices we first heard doing “Dancing Barefoot” at the Polar Prize a couple of years back. I listen to sisters Johanna and Klara warm up harmonies with Paul Simon’s “America” in their dressing room, and then, backed by a deft, nuanced drummer and the uplifting bar-slide of a pedal steel guitar, sing their own language as well as Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee For The Road.” Flowers to a garden.



July 7 - 9, 2013 HELSINKI / TAMPERE, FINLAND



Our venues in Finland are not the most rock-appropriate, symphonic concert halls built for the reverberations of acoustic instruments and thus requiring a constant inversion of electrical volume. So it’s even more welcome to have our most rockist visitors. In Tampere, about three hours drive from the capital, Markus Nordenstreng of Finland’s garage-ific combo, the Rainbirds, comes by to say hey. And in Helsinki, Michael Monroe (once of Hanoi Rocks) enjoys the show with bandmates Sami Yaffa and Steve Conte. We know Sami (who was born in Finland) and Steve (Jersey boy) from back home, where they’ve both been part of the New York Dolls as well as fronting their own solo projects (Sami‘s Mad Juana has one of the most unique musical blendings of instruments and approach you’re likely to see and hear, and please do). After the show, we head to Loose, a classic local rock bar named after the Stooges song, and surrounded by MC5 posters and framed photos of those who turn-it-up and upper, celebrate our transatlantic ties as the Koskenkorva begins to flow. Moving clockwise around the table is our lighting guy Pat Farr, guitarist Rich Jones, Sami, Tony, Steve, and meself.

July 4 - 6, 2013 LEIPZIG / HAMBURG, GERMANY



There’s not a lot of time in Leipzig for more than a cursory look around, and so I miss out on the church where Bach held forth and the café where he imbibed his drug of choice, coffee. But Hamburg gives me a chance to catch up on the household chores of touring (yes, a laundromat!), and it’s where I’m able to spend some quality moments with Richard Weize of Bear Family Records. For those with a historical bent, there is no greater reissue company than this far-reaching Deutschland archival label, with its massive box sets for completists and its scholarly encompass of vintage rock ‘n roll, country and western, and blues. I’ve written liner notes for their extensive reissues of pre-outlaw Waylon Jennings, and Richard asks me to do the same for an upcoming vinyl release documenting Waylon’s pre-Nashville work, including rare tracks from his stay on A&M; and recordings done with the Waylors in 1964 when he was a local Phoenix star-in-the-making. I ask Richard what’s up next for Bear Family and get a typically astonishing answer: a 44 CD set limited to 500 copies called Black Europe, chronicling black artists beginning somewhere in the late 1800s and going up to 1927; and a 10 CD scholarly look at the Spanish Civil War and its musical anthems. For further information and a wider look at their catalog: http://www.bear-family.de/ And to listen to what they’re about, check out Bear Family Radio: http://tunein.com/radio/Bear-Family-Radio-s141546/



When I get to the Stadtpark for our show, there’s Karen and Kim, front row friends and familiar faces from New York who have utilized their summer vacations over the past few years to follow us on the international road. Hi K and K!

July 2, 2013 BERLIN, GERMANY



A field of stones. We have a quiet day as we arrive in Berlin. With our storied hotel, the Adlon, having played host to artistic luminaries (Caruso to Mann to Dietrich) from its founding more than a century previous, a hostelry where Grand Hotel was filmed and where Michael Jackson dangled his young’un out the window in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, I explore the neighborhood. Quite unconsciously I come upon the Holocaust memorial—Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas—which I have passed in a car several times, seeing the tops of its grey stone stelae and assuming that it represents a cemetery. But on foot, walking inside its labyrinth, a downward sloping that soon finds me surrounded and dwarfed by these giant monochrome slabs, its depths unnerve me, as if I’m descending into the encroaching claustrophobia of nightmare. It is profoundly chilling and affecting. When I step out of its’ maze into the sunshine of a beautiful summer’s day and enter the park across the street, I feel—like Germany itself—that I have rebuilt myself from the ruins of war and carnage.



Our show at the Zitadelle goes well, and hearing the Mariachi-rock of Calexico opening us, along with their great version of Love’s “Alone Again Or,” is an especial treat. And I treat myself, apart from the currywurst stand across the street. On our day off I take the subway to the Kreuzberg district, with its artistic atmosphere and friendly cafes. By chance I wander into a music store with a Turkish spin, admiring the exotic instruments on display, when I spot an electric saz on the wall, also known as a baglama. A hybrid of an oud and lute, with a bowl body and a long-neck that divides its octaves into fifteen frets, all the better for microtonals, it amplifies three courses of strings (the lowest doubled) through two pickups and four tone switches. When the proprietor’s son sits down and dazzles me with its twang-and-clang, I start reaching for the euros. Welcome to my world, o saz.

June 30, 2013 OSLO, NORWAY



There was a time I wanted to be Eric Andersen. His 1965 debut album, Today Is The Highway, was a constant companion in my college dorm at Rutgers, and as I listened to it over and over, traveling to see him at the Second Fret in Philadelphia, it put me on the roadmap that I still travel. He was my kind of folk singer, imbued with a romantic sensibility and a gift for poetic imagery; and his evocative, yearning voice, especially on his second album, ‘Bout Changes and Things, highlighted by the twin classics “Thirsty Boots” and “Violets of Dawn,” surely resonated in the way I vocally phrased and melodically imagined. I later repaid the favor by reviewing his Blue River for Rolling Stone. Relistening to his body of works recently (an especial nod to “Miss Lonely Are You Blue Tonight”), after getting to know Eric over the past years - and last fall having the privilege to play on a couple of tracks on a soon-to-be-released album of his current work - I was amazed at how I knew each inflection and guitar strum, and how his songs still have the capacity to move me as they did back then.

When Eric told me he was going to be in Oslo, where he has family and once lived for several years, on the same day we were there to play the Sentrum Scene, it seemed a confluence of fate. He knew Patti in the Hotel Chelsea years, and so she invited him to join us on stage for “People Have The Power.” Circle unbroken.



June 24-28, 2013 BRUSSELS / BRUGGE / AMSTERDAM

The continental zigging and zagging that characterized the first part of our tour straightens out a bit when we get to Brussels. We arrive on a quiet Sunday, enough time for Jay Dee and myself to check out the local flea markets (amazingly both of us come home empty-handed), have a steak au poivre, and catch our collective breaths. In the evening, I sample some of the beer that Belgium is known for at Mort Subite, which features some of the wily mixtures brewed by those hopped-up monks; and hang with tour manager Andrew Burns and monitor mixer Daryl Bussino at a charming French-themed bar called Goupil Le Fol on the rue de la Violette, where the vintage jukebox pumps out Serge and Sylvie and Edith. With this vibe in mind, when I visit one of the best record stores in Europe, the Collector Record Gallery adjacent to the Grand Square, I find myself drawn to Johnny Hallyday, forever to be subtitled the French Elvis, and find a couple of quite delectable EPs.



Brussels, from the first time we were here in 1976, has always been one of our strongholds, and the show at the Ancienne Belgique is afire with enthusiastic response. Speaking of that Bicentennial year, when I stop to gaze into the window of another record store (just to look, mind you), this one called Elektrocution and specializing in metal and punque, Kirby the proprietor gifts me a bootleg LP called Electric Lady, which documents a show of ours at Copenhagen’s Tivolis Koncertsal on October 6, 1976, just a few heartbeats after the release of Radio Ethiopia. The way we were to the way we are to the way we will be. Our continuing journey.



Which continues on to Brugge, a beautiful town with canals and specializing in moules (or mussels, as they’re known in English). Bob and Elizabeth Gruen surprisingly cross our path, courtesy of his photo show opening in nearby Ostend, and we talk of his documentary recently shown on Showtime (spoiler alert: I reveal all the tabloid details of afterhours life with Bob) and mutual brotherhood.



And then, lovely Amsterdam, two shows at the vaunted Paradiso (foto: A. Burns) and all our favored stopovers. Sitting in my local coffee shop, the Dolphins, ruminating over a smoke and an Orangina. Stampotten and mustard soup. The Record Palace and some nice random soul finds, along with a beautiful EP of Maria Callas singing Medea. Rain on the Leidseplein.

June 22, 2013 ATHENS, GREECE



The Athens Festival is a relative newcomer to the Herod Atticus Odeon. Built in 161 AD, since 1955 the amphitheater has hosted a wealth of legendary acts, mostly drawn from the worlds of classical music, opera, theater, and dance. Performers who have appeared on its stage include Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Rudolf Nureyev, Marcel Marceau, Herbert Karajan, Nana Mouskouri, and Leonard Bernstein.



So it is with a great deal of respect and honor that we take our places on the proscenium, in the shadow of the Acropolis above, on a night in which the fullness of a solstice Supermoon rises behind us as we play. Though Greece is beset by economic trial, reflected in the many empty shops that we pass on our way to the gig, the audience seems unvanquished, eager to affirm their faith in a country that has stood for millennia as a symbol of democracy and resilience, as they rush from their seats to fill the semi-circle in front of the ancient stage and dance with us.

June 18 - 19, 2013 LONDON, ENGLAND



Coming to England after the exoticism of Morocco is strangely comforting, like waking up in your own bed from a particular phantasmagoric dreamscape. We’re staying out in Shepherd’s Bush near our venue, the Empire Theater, where we’ve played a few times before. In 1996 I remember taking a swing at my amp with my then-Strat and watching the head disconnect from the neck, a la Anne Boleyn. It’s a perfect setting for a band such as ours, holding about two grand worth of humans, small enough to be intimate, large enough to be grandiose, and we’ve sold out two nights. Each will be different, surfing the emotions of the crowd’s enthusiasm and the inspirations for the night’s journeying. Along the way, we commemorate the passing of guitarist Johnny Smith, whose “Walk Don’t Run” provided a starting point for many an aspiring musician in the hands of the Ventures; and salute Amy Winehouse each night with “This Is The Girl.” Our backstage visitors include James Williamson of the Stooges, Tim Booth of James, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, and Polly Harvey of P.J. Accomplices all.

A day off beckons. There’s an early English breakfast with Patti Palladin, after which we begin the crafting of a memorial song for our dear friend Abbijane, readying it for the fifth anniversary of her passing next year; and then, fortified with a bit of agricultural enhancement, I head toward Tottenham Court Road. Getting out of the tube station is disorienting, since there is a monumental tower being constructed across the road where I usually head down toward Charing Cross. For a moment I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp, a futuristic London – but then I remember a small alleyway of a street nearby that had a couple of record shops on it, and find memory working in my favor. In appreciation, and to keep up my tradition of supporting independent vinyl emporiums wherever I find them, I pick up a couple of copies of Pop Weekly from 1962 and 1963, the latter with the Beatles in small print underneath headlines for Cliff Richard and Billy Fury. The pre-Brit Invasion theme continues on Cecil Court, where I meet up with bibliophile Aaron Budnick and tour the old book and memorabilia stores. I had hoped for some vintage science fiction volumes, perhaps of the Gnome Press variety or some English variant, but there are none on offer. I do find a nice trading card outtake from Cliff’s Expresso Bongo session and a similar one of Johnny Hallyday, the French Elvis as he referred to in non-Francophone countries. Then it’s our traditional pub-sit with London Pride, and lunch at the Punjab, where the chicken madras does not disappoint.



I walk to Royal Festival Hall to close out the evening with the Stooges, who are part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown festival. Fortified by their rockin’ new album and with the Igster in ebullient form, the crowd overwhelms the decorum that characterizes the Hall as they join Iggy on stage for a romp. After the show James gifts me a custom wha-wha pedal, complete with a light to signify that it’s on, an idea that seems so useful it’s a wonder why no one has done it before. But then, that’s the shake appeal of the Stooges – never before, and never since.

June 12 - 15, 2013 NAPLES, ITALY / FEZ, MOROCCO

Sumer Is Icumen In, and so we begin. One moment I’m here, trying to fix that darn screen door, find the dvd’s of Sons of Anarchy I’m going to take along, and choose the initial round of literature (I’m rereading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series to write an appreciation of one of my favorite sf authors); then I’m here, walking down a Via in Roma on the way to band rehearsal, prepping the highlights of this year’s Euro excursion. We had originally been scheduled to begin our tour celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Parco de la Musica with an outdoor free concert; but an unexpected city denial of the proper permits has moved our opening show to Naples, where the stage is adjacent to the sea and our pre-performance repaste consists of many frutti di mare. Since I’m a Napoli supporter in the Serie A soccer league, I wear their scarf proudly, and launching into the formal debut of this year’s edition of the Nuggets medley (Music Machine to Richard and the Young Lions to Nazz to Count Five), the crowd roars allegiance.



The main attraction of these opening shows is our first band trip to the African continent. In April Patti, Tony and I played acoustically at a symposium in Tangier celebrating the life and art of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, tasting home-grown tagines, drinking coffee in the cafes that this writer’s colony centered around Paul Bowles frequented, and making a side-trip down the coast to pay our respects to Jean Genet’s burial site. But now, courtesy of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, we have been chosen to close out this very eclectic array of performers from all over the Middle East (Syria’s Assala Nasri and Lebanon’s Abeer Nehme will provoke further investigation) as well as western artists like the Spanish flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia, becoming one of the very few rock bands to play in this part of the world. Our venue is the Bab Al Makina, within the massive courtyard of a Royal Palace, and to say that the setting is overwhelming and inspirational is to hardly do its splendor justice.



On our day off we wander the Medina, trying not to get lost in its winding streets and overwhelmed by its sights, sounds, and pungent smells. We stop at a “bar” for a glass of sweet mint tea and a listen to the gnaoua music being played in an upstairs haven, amid the clattering of percussion on iron castanets (qraqab), drums, and the thrummings of the hajhuj, a stringed bass-like instrument. We are amazed at the intricate carvings and calligraphy on the wall of the mosque inside the Bou Inania complex, built in the 1350s. We bow and bob to Sufi chanting in secluded Boujloud Square long past midnight. And we listen to the birds of this beautiful city, alive with their sacred song.



May 2—5, 2013 NEW ORLEANS / MEMPHIS / ST. LOUIS

Up a lazy river, only at this time of the year, the Mississippi is hardly quiescent. Rain is following us from New Orleans to Memphis to St. Louis, and it makes the first two stops—the fabled Jazzfest, and a similar Beale Street Bluesfest—a mudder’s delight. Even the Kentucky Derby is describing its track as “sloppy.”



Arriving in New Orleans, there are beignets to be had at Café Du Monde, and then a trip to an out-of-Quarter neighborhood soiree straight out of—sorry, N’awlins natives for the obvious out-of-towner reference - Treme. Chazfest, as the party calls itself, is gathered in the back of a row of houses on St. Claude. When I walk up the narrow driveway to where a stage has been set up, I am greeted with dancing families, food and drink stands, and an amazing jambalaya of many local musicians. I was alerted to this function-at-the-junction by none other than Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner, one of my favorite folks in the universe, a performer who never fails to pull at my heartstrings, and who is playing a solo set this evening. Entering the backyard, handed a margarita or three by Dave’s wife and scarfing up a pulled-pork sandwich, I feel immediately at home.

At Jazzfest the next day, the rain comes and goes and comes again. I spend some quality hallelujah time in the Gospel Tent, testifying with the Bolton Brothers, and take a quick tour around the grounds to see the many marvelous musics on display. The heavens open about a half hour before our set, but by the time of “Southern Cross,” the sun begins to shine its’ everlovin’ light upon us and the crowd. Appropriately enough to the racetrack upon which Jazzfest sites itself, we saddle up and enter the starting gate of “Horses.”

Memphis is unseasonably cold and wet. I breakfast with Rob Jungklas, continuing the old-friends-like-bookends theme of this jaunt. We talk of the album we made together twenty five years ago, and the new album he is currently finishing, on which I guest-guitar on two cuts. A passionate, humane rocker who wears his heart permanently affixed to his sleeve, it’s good to see that the impulse to make music is ever flowing, like the river that currents alongside us during our set, an inspirational sight whenever I turn my head toward its inarguable majesty. It’s chill enough that I can’t feel my guitar pick, though again, as we round the last few songs, the sun begins to peek out. Speaking of Sun (Records that is), immediately after we finish we slop through the mud to the opposite stage in hopes of catching a glimpse of Jerry Lee Lewis, who, as luck would have it, is scheduled the same time as us. Arriving breathless, we find that his great balls of fire have already departed. No whole-lot-of-shakin’ tonight, though perhaps a whole-lot-of-shiverin'...



We don’t have a lot of time in St. Louis, but there’s always a moment to visit William Burroughs at his resting place in Bellefontaine cemetery.

April 30, 2013 AUSTIN, TEXAS

With a reformed Moving Sidewalks and Roky Erikson of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators playing on virtually home turf, how can I resist leaving a day early for Austin to attend the annual Psychfest? I was unable to catch the Sidewalks and their 1968 classic “99th Floor” (featuring a then-beardless and pre-ZZ Top Billy Gibbons) when they came through New York recently; and though I’ve often seen Roky howl, he surely is the essence of Texas lysergia. The festival was founded six years ago, spearheaded by the Black Angels, whose set betwixt the two Nuggetarians is incandescent and, yes, hallucinatory. I roam the grounds bemused by the longevity of this music that seems to ever renew itself, gratefully aware of its impact on my life, both fore and aft. At one point, someone comes up to me, gives me the secret handshake (thanks for the bone, man!) and asks if I thought a festival like this would be happening without the if-you-dug-it anthology I was blessed to put together lo these four decades past. I demur, in all honesty, knowing that the spirit of this music was on the cusp of recognition in rock’s genealogy, and I was just lucky enough to be given the keys to the kingdom. Still, the timeless fountain-of-youth that Psychfest celebrates is a contact high in itself, and so I wander into the nearby “Levitation Tent” to bathe myself in the cleansing feedback of Montreal’s No Joy.

One of the bonus beats of touring is meeting and greeting old friends. On our night off, Alejandro Escovedo stops by our motel to indulge in a Texas pastime called Truck Talk. We sit in the cab of his pick-up and shoot the breeze, remembering our shared circle of gals ‘n pals and the many times we’ve enjoyed each other’s musical experiences. Alejandro sets the time slide to the Whisky Au-Go-Go the first time we traveled to the west coast in 1974, when we were still an embryonic trio with pianist Richard Sohl, part of a small audience that included a couple of Stooges and the gang who would soon make up the Back Door Man collective. After, we go across the street to the Continental, where Gordie Johnson of cowboy-metal band Grady is playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on the lap steel, accompanied by a trumpeter and the drummer from Double Trouble. In Austin, music is always in the air.



Walking back from Guerro’s Mexican restaurant I hear someone call my name. It’s Whit Smith, fleet-fingered guitarist of the Hot Club of Cowtown! Whit guested with us on Gone Again (see “Dead To The World”) and so it’s only natural for him to join us onstage at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q for a couple of solos. Fingers still greasy from the pork ribs served right before we go on, we are ever mindful of the passing of George Jones, and in the midst of our Nuggets medley, Tony throws in a verse-and-a-chorus of “Why Baby Why.” For me, anyone who drives a lawnmower down the highway to get a drink is a garage-rocker f’sure!

April 10—14, ROME, ITALY



Our week at “My Festival,” curated by Patti and held in the tripartite theatrical complex known locally as the Whales, or more officially as the Auditorium Parco Della Musica, begins and ends with Francis. We arise early on our first day in town to attend the weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square, an experience in itself. Patti has been invited to be in the front row of the visitor’s section, while Tony, myself, and our promoter Rita Zapador, are a few sections back, watching the pageantry as the cardinals file in and Pope Francis enters in his Pope-mobile, taking a seat on a simple white high-backed chair instead of the more traditional throne. The square is thronged with visiting youth groups, and strangely, brides in full regalia awaiting the Papal blessing. After the prayers and invocations, the Pope moves along the railing, and in a photo seen around the world, shakes Patti’s hand. I’m able to get close enough to snap my own ecclesiastical souvenir.

After, there is a succession of events, reflecting the many facets of Patti: a Smith family performance with Jesse and Jackson; a screening of Pasolino’s astonishing Medea with commentary by Patti and Bernardo Bertolucci; a homage to Allen Ginsberg with Patti, Jesse, and Philip Glass; an art exhibit by Patti and Marco Tirelli; and a canter-through of Horses. As the finale, we celebrate our own homage to Francis, the simple monk whose virtues and homilies seem ever more relevant to our world, in the form of a rare improvisation on “Constantine’s Dream.”



January 31—February 2, 2013 FUKUOKA, JAPAN / SEOUL, KOREA



The body of water that takes us from one country to another is called the Sea of Japan on one side, and the East Sea on the other. Crossing it changes the channel of pop from J to K, and these days that does imply a difference. Has the balance of power in hit-making shifted? With the success of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” has come an interest in all things Korean, and I’m about to see its neighborhood up close, or at least as close as you can over a visit that lasts less than forty eight hours.

The last show in Japan is in Fukuoka, on the shore of Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s islands. We’ve been here before, and perhaps will again, with a sold-out crowd at Drum Logos, and a final toast to our Japanese promoters.



The flight to Seoul takes about an hour and a half, the same time it takes to drive from the airport to our hotel on the outskirts of Gangnam. The neighborhood, once you get off the large eight-lane avenues replete with all your well-known western chains, contains a plethora of restaurants and bars on its back streets. Since it’s pouring rain on arrival, I take refuge in a nearby mall, which could be a shopping plaza anywhere in the world. Fleeing in haste, I find the small barbeque restaurant on a side street in the shadow of the massive Seven Luck casino that initiated me into the local grilling customs the last time we visited, and soon I am happily carnivoraciousing.



I get my indoctrination into K-Pop much as the rest of Korea’s inhabitants, through glittery television shows which feature the acts cavorting in rapid succession. On this night, Music Bank provides a confectioner’s dreamworld, beginning with the current number one chart song, “Shower of Tears,” performed by Bae Chi Gi featuring Ailee. From its guitar introduction, which paraphrases “St. James Infirmary,” Bae Chi Gi’s rapping (“I should have known in the end that your selfish heart wanted a different fluttering”) and Ailee’s plaintive vocal chorus, I am intrigued by the mélange of influence and its easy translation to my own western ears. In fact, discerning any hints of traditional Korean modes and scales is impossible. Welcome to the world.

Crayon Pop sing-songs “Bing Bing,” 2Yoon hoe-downs (well, there’s hay bales amid the square dancing and banjos) with “24-7,” the Dolls (not the New York….) count their “9 Muses,” and Sistar 19 channel their inner J-Lo with “Gone Not Around Any Longer.” These are girl groups; the boy groups are similarly coiffed and bust-a-move energetic, rotating singers and personas: Boyfriend’s “I Yah,” Infinite H’s “Special Girl,” while Jeong Hyung Don’s “GangBuk Dandy” bears some passing resemblance in vocal register and approach to PSY.

It’s hard to say how K-Pop will play outside of the Asian market. In some ways its lightweight (there are no references to hard clubbing or coital hi-jinx) gossamer and language barrier will mean it will have to adapt, and perhaps change its very nature to succeed on the other side of the globe. PSY himself might be another here-today, gone the way of the Pony tomorrow (there are similarities in the dance step). That said, these songs are ingratiatingly appealing. Fighting it out for the top spot on Music Bank is Girl’s Generation with the theatrical “Papparazzi,” whose video references “Singing In The Rain” and Broadway musicals, of all things, and they hold the current number two song in Korea, the addictive “I Got A Boy.” They have signed a U.S. deal with Interscope, and if the Pussycat Dolls can have a succession of chart hits, why not this KoreAmerican dance squad?

But for my musical mojo, the triumph of CN Blue, a four-piece guitar band that—shock horror!—is playing their instruments and singing live on this television countdown, and whose “I’m Sorry” wins the night’s competition hands down, is perhaps a pointer that the K-Pop phenomenon won’t be as cookie-cutter as might be intimated. And when Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine come visit backstage at our show, following us at the same venue the next night, beginning a far east tour (and celebrating the release of their much-anticipated new album), I begin to fantasize what this sort of cross-pollination might do for Korea’s embrace and assimilation of UnPop.

On the way home, I have my own cultural pot-pourri courtesy of inflight entertainment. I watch a Chinese language detective film called The Bullet Vanishes set in the 1920s; a black-and-white documentary of Arthur Rubinstein playing a concert in Moscow in 1964 that leans heavily on Chopin; and The Master. So many forms of human expression; so little time.

January 30, 2013 HIROSHIMA, JAPAN



How can you imagine? And then you’re here.

There is the river, one of six that course through this city. As we walk solemnly over its bridge toward the Peace Museum, staring at the skeletal remains of what is now called the Atomic Dome in the distance, a sense of déjà vu permeates the air. The horrific scenes and their shock waves have been seared into collective memory. To know that this city was the first to witness warfare at its most destructive, to think of the poor souls caught in the inferno and ash, jumping into this river that flows so gently now, to understand that this entire vista was once reduced to rubble and ruin, is to once again shudder at mankind’s penchant for annihilation. In war, there is no moral absolution. No matter the cause, it is the innocents who suffer.

There in the museum are the scorched remains of a schoolgirl’s uniform. A watch stopped at 8:15 a.m. on an August morning. A little boy’s transit card, scorched and torn. The happenstance of weather, knowing that had there been cloud cover over Hiroshima on that sixth day of the eighth month in 1945, the target might have been nearby Kokura. Not that it matters. The Earth was about to enter the Atomic Age, wherever the chosen spot.

That night, as we play, the ghosts are dancing.

I wake early the next morning. Looking out my hotel window, off to the left, I can see where Ground Zero—directly over Shima Hospital, now rebuilt—was and ever will be. But if I look to my right, there is the soccer field of Fukuromachi Elementary School, where children are kicking a ball, surrounded by a city that has been grown from scratch over the ruins, an archeological layer of generational rebirth and remembrance.

January 28, 2013 OSAKA, JAPAN

Entering the world of Japanese popular music is like opening the gateway to an alternative universe. I wander the overflowing aisles of Tower Records (yes, still the major outlet here, with branches in many cities) and gaze at the myriad of singers, bands, idols and anti-idols. Every genre and moment in time seems to be represented. The sheer quantity and variety humbles not only my own inclination to figure out who’s who and where’s-the-hits, but makes me again rue the one-way street that is our cross-talk with other musical cultures. Everywhere I go in Japan I hear English-speaking hits of many eras—I am listening to Fleetwood Mac in a sukiyaki restaurant at breakfast, shopping to discoc familiars in a mall, or entering a collector’s store which specializes in American oldies (I find a copy of Jim Bakus’ “Delicious” and because it’s one of my all-time favorite records I can’t resist buying it in such an exotic locale)—knowing that except for the occasional “novelty,” none of the bands on display here could be touring America in the same manner that we are in Japan.



I don’t have to wonder, for instance, what Yeti vs. Cromagnon sounds like, since they resemble the Heartbreakers circa 1977 in their black leather jackets and guitarist’s yellow Les Paul Junior, just like the one Johnny Thunders played. Or the Neatbeats, who release vintage “mono” recordings that echo classic Brit Invasion groups. There’s lots of punk and home-grown reggae, and a 90s revival underway with bands like Guitar Wolf, the Blue Hearts, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, Number Girl, and Bloodthirsty Butchers having their catalogs hailed and highlighted. Two groups that pique my interest are Blankey Jet City, who broke up in 2000 only to recently reunion; and the more mod-ish Bawdies, whose 2012 hit single “Rock Me Baby” about says it all in the Japanese resurrection of classic retro sound.

But even these traditional guitar-wielding bands pale in the overwhelming multitudinous that is J-pop, which presents a vast array of girl / boy groups that dance, sing, and partake of the latest fashion / digital technology to create hits that are viral, colorful, and transitory in the most ingratiating way. The textures are futuristic, the production techniques state-of-the-art (the sound is future-now), and despite the lack of deeper meanings, they present a riot of motion and beguiling come-hither.

Of the girl groups, AKB48 is the largest, both in size (there are 48 members onstage, and another 39 “trainees”) and popularity. Conceived in the Akihabara electronics district of Tokyo, as much cheerleading squad as dance troupe, their intricate choreography and chant-along singles have spawned many sound-alikes in other cities: there are similar assemblages in Nagoya (SKE48), Osaka (NMB48), Fukuoka (HKT48), and even outside Japan, in Jakarta (JKT48), Taipei (TPE48), Shanghai (SNH48). One has to love pop’s ability to procreate. There is heated discussion in the newspapers about whether the chastity clause in the girl’s contracts that prohibits them from dating is legal, but this is hardly scandalous or even revolutionary in the world of manufactured teen appeal.



In the midst of all this, I find my own mash-up of idolatry. Baby Metal are three ‘tween girls who perform in front of a skeleton-costumed band doling out slabs of metallic genre signifiers, slashing guitars and crunching riffs and rat-a-tat bass drumming, skull-crushing readymades that are lightened by bridges that sing-song and dance routines that spin at a dizzying pace. Yeah, I know I’m being manipulated by someone’s idea of savvy marketing, but hey, isn’t that the point?

January 26 - 27, 2013 NAGOYA / KANAZAWA, JAPAN



The bullet train takes us west from Tokyo. Out the window Mt. Fuji gazes majestically upon us. There is progressively more snow on the ground. We are heading into Japan’s hinterlands, though only to us outerlanders. Nagoya is the fourth largest city here on the main island, home to one of the most impressive castles I’ve ever seen; and Kanazawa, on the west coast bordering the sea, has a similarly ancient feudal history, though the main building has had to be painstakingly restored time and again following devastating fires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.



But we don’t have much time on this trip to explore ancient Japan, since almost upon arrival in each town it’s showtime. The weekend means our concert starts early in the evening. We’re onstage by 6:00, off by 7:30, and at dinner in a nearby restaurant having chicken wings (Nagoya’s specialty) or slices of the freshest sashimi (Kanazawa) by 8. The early performance and the fact that Club Quattro in Nagoya is on the 8th floor of a department store only adds to our sense of dislocation. Not that the audience seems to mind. These are some of our most responsive crowds, only too willing to call-and-response the refrain of “Fuji-san” back at us as we scale that immortal mount in song.

January 23-24, 2013 TOKYO, JAPAN

Two nights, two shows, two very different venues. Though one doesn’t want to stretch an obvious touristic parallel, this is very much like the capital itself. Tokyo is a dizzying metropolis, pretty much newly constructed after the Earthquake of 1923 and then the cataclysm that was the Second World War, brimming with population and chaotic motion and flashing signage and loudspeakers urging commerce; and yet, there is an underlying sense of tradition and calming order. No one jaywalks, patiently waiting until a light turns green even if no traffic is in sight, and ritual courtesies are adhered to with decorum and politeness.



So it is in our performance spaces. Shibuya Ax, on Tuesday, proffers a rowdy stand-up audience that crowd-surfs and jostles each other in time to the music; Wednesday’s Orchard Hall is seated, and though the attendees attentively stand in place through most of the show, there is little stage-rushing or mayhem. As a special bonus, as much for us as the crowd, we’re joined by Noguzo, a ceremonial taiko drummer, accentuating the sonic booms of “Fuji-San.” (Thank you for the photo, Yoshie Tominaga). After, our backstage is graced with Sheena and the Rokkets, one of the longest-lived bands in Japan. I must say Sheena and lead guitarist Makoto don’t look a day older than when they first appeared on the scene in 1978, full of a belief in rock and roll’s transformative power. Seeing them reaffirms my own kneel at the shrine of feedback.

And then a day at liberty. I wonder where to start my roam, debating between the gizmo-tron and gadgetorium that is the “Electric City” of the Akihabara district; or Harajuku’s pop-culturati shopping labyrinths. I choose the latter, and soon find myself wandering the lanes of Takeshita Street, marveling at the many niches of fashion on display—here’s a punk store delivered whole from 1977, alongside a shop where Victorian meets Goth meets x-rated fairy tale. On the four floors of Kiddyland, there are trinkets galore, amid displays devoted to favorite cartoon characters. Speaking of which, I note the disappearance of the Beatles-only emporium that was here the last time I visited, and its replacement by many devoted to K-pop and J-pop idol singers of the moment.



But that doesn’t mean music’s charm is entirely transitory, beholden to the short attention span of generational allegiance. That evening I am graciously invited to visit the home of our promoter rep in Japan, Shinichi “Chris” Kurisawa. We had been talking about old ska records on the train, and now—a true connoisseur - he is ready to spin some of his rarities for our mutual delectation. He drops the needle on one of his two turntables, sends it through a vintage Ampex tube amplifier to a single mono 15” speaker; and yah mon, let the sound system begin. Our journey takes us through Jamaican masters like virtuoso guitarist Ernest Ranglin and the horned geniuses of Roland Alphonso and Don Drummond, moving us effortlessly into soul and blues (here comes Fenton Robinson!). Enhanced by copious cups of shochu, the potato-based distillation that seems to split the difference between sake and vodka, an irie good time is had by all.

And in a flash of record collector satori, we come upon the koan that provides the analog theory of relativity. Though it may seem anachronistic in this digital century, the revelation of its transcendent equation strikes us with the illumination of enlightenment. 33 + 45 = 78. Ah so….

January 22, 2013 SENDAI, JAPAN

I am sitting in Gas Panic, just off Shibuya Square in Tokyo, having an Asahi and toasting my return to Japan. The basement bar is loud with American hip-hop. I can feel the disorienting cross-cultural currents from the fourteen-hour plane journey, plus the time it takes to get from Nagoya Airport, and the five minutes walk from our nearby hotel. But here I be, at the beginning of a two-week Japanese tour for Patti Smith and Her Band, with a bonus beat of Seoul to cap our Asian adventure. Irasshai-mase!



I was last here in 2009, when we journeyed to the summer festival that is Fujirock, and before that in 2003, when our band circuited the island. There were previous visits—a solo show in Tokyo in 1989 backed by guitarist Go Ohgami, whose album I produced in the mid-eighties; a record release by Feed, another Japanese band who availed themselves of my studio encouragement in 2001; our debut Patti tour in 1997; and more Fujirocking in 2001 and 2005—but the fascination that this country holds for me is deep and abiding. My father worked for the Japanese megacorporation Mitsui in the 1960s, and early on I became intrigued by the artistic sensibility of this fascinating country, from the manga and anime that takes “cartoon” storytelling to new heights, to the ritualistic ceremonials of tea and sake, to the spirituality of zen’s sense of oneness with the universe.



After a day of acclimatization, we take the train north to Sendai. In March of 2011, the epicenter of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful in Japanese seismographic history (9.0!), and the resulting tsunami devastated the eastern shoreline on an imaginable scale. A half hour’s drive from Sendai shows a bleak landscape devoid of, well, anything. This closest metropolis has had to show remarkable resiliency in the face of catastrophe. The disaster inspired our song “Fuji-San,” and by starting our tour here, not a usual stopover for visiting American musicians, we hope to pay tribute to the indomitable spirit of those faced with the task of rebuilding and commemorating. Yuki, the wife of our tour manager Andrew, sets up a booth to accept donations and raffle off a band drum-head, and we donate our show’s proceeds to benefit a local orphanage. A small gesture, perhaps, but one that encompasses the Japanese bow of respect and honor, as the rising sun begins a day anew.

November 23—December 4, 2012 ON THE ROAD WITH NEIL YOUNG



“Being in your sixties is like being in the sixties,” laughs a friendly giant named Snow Bear next to me. We’re watching Neil Young from the side of the stage in a hockey arena somewhere in north Ontario (where, yes, there’s a girl) wrench the neck of his guitar and bounce around the stage and ride his Crazy Horse through all manner of feedback haze and distortion, and yeah, sure seems so.

We’ve been invited to open Neil on an eight-date Northeastern go-round. Ornery, embracing, and surely his own human, one can only respect Young for his idealism and sense of whom he needs to be. This tour—dubbed “Alchemy”—is no exception. The great slabs of long guitar jams and concentration on newer songs might put off some who favor Neil in more hitsville mode (there’s a moment during the night when he scrapes his pick along his strings and lets the time machine unroll, mentioning songs many in the audience had hoped to hear, bypassing them on his way to “Cinnamon Girl”), but for me it’s a delight to watch him play solo after solo and solo and take each one ever higher. It reminds me of the first time I saw him in person, at the Fillmore East in March 1970, with Crazy Horse backing him, and thinking this was just the kind of band I wanted to be in.

His theme these days centers on the promise of what the sixties tantalizingly held for those who followed its siren call; and lived through the realities of what came after, good or ill. Though references to Woodstock and “A Day In The Life” abound, his approach has less to do with nostalgia than self-reflection and not-so-gentle understanding. Along with his recent memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, and concurrent Psychedelic Pill album, his musings on where he’s been points him resolutely forward. Though the set list on his tour didn’t vary much—highpointing in a majestic “Walk Like A Giant” that had me whistling and stomping along—his intensity and concentration never faltered. I felt washed and renewed in his Magnatonal roar, and a kinship when our time came to warm the stage for him. Keeping the flame alive.

November 12—20, 2012 UNA SEMANA EN ESPANA



Huelga! Standing in the midst of a broad avenida in Madrid, as hundreds of thousands of citizens—students, families, office workers, unions—march peacefully, is to bear witness to an empowered people. We watch from the sidelines and then impulsively join the demonstration, which answers the call for a general strike that has been in the air for weeks, slowly winding our way through the grand plazas and tree shaded boulevards in a show of strength and resolution. The feeling of solidarity becomes diffused when, back at the hotel later that night, there is a sound of commotion from the street, where a gang of unruly troublemakers are smashing store windows and lighting cars on fire. It seems more adolescent prank than political action, and of course, the newspapers next day concentrate on these scenes of erupting violence, ignoring the massive call for action that the strike represents.



Despite economic woes and sense of crisis, our week in Spain seems to traverse the many facets of this inviting country. Our mode is acoustic. In Bilbao we set up in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum, near a winding Richard Serra sculpture, downstairs from Claes Oldenburg’s “Mouseoleum,” and opposite a room where an exhibit on pop art is being prepared: in a dark screening room, Edie Sedgwick looks out at me with her hypnotic eyes. Our show in Madrid is postponed because of the strike, and instead of the intimate theater originally scheduled, we play in what seems to be a disco. In Cartegena, we are in a modern theater, and later stand on the terrace of our hotel to watch seagulls wheeling over the water. Valencia is a rock club, pure and simple. In Barcelona, we play the magnificent Palau De la Musica, where “Mosaic” takes flight, and “Land” is spun by the statues of horses that adorn the upper balcony. Home in time for Thanksgiving.



October 7—14, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO / MONTEREY / LOS ANGELES / SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

That California trip. It’s more like eight days a week since we wind up doing a nonstop continual string of varied performances, each seeming to reflect another aspect of the set and setting that is our mirror-image coast.

It all kicks off with the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, a free three-day extravaganza held annually in Golden Gate Park. Founded by banjo enthusiast and billionaire investment banker Warren Hellman, who left a sizable endowment that will survive the gathering long past his passing last December, it is a musician’s musician dream. Within short order of our arrival I witness Steve Earle, a reunion of the Blasters with Phil and Dave Alvin, hear tell about a tribute to Doug Sahm led by Boz Scaggs, and stand backstage gawking at Dwight Yoakam’s spangled wardrobe while his country-billy blasts from the stage we will soon ascend. We played here a couple of years ago, but I’m still amazed by the down-home vibe and camaraderie; surely one of the most engaging events on anyone’s calendar. In honor I wear the cowboy shirt gifted me by the Lonesome Prairie Dogs when I played pedal steel during Tammy Faye Starlite’s recent Loretta Lynn tribute in Hoboken. Giddyap!



The next night is the Fillmore, one of my most sacred rock venues. The San Francisco scene in its ballroom heyday, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the most psychedelicious Quicksilver Messenger Service was a magnetic lure for me in the Summer of Love, and I have the Fillmore (not to mention the vaunted Avalon) posters to prove it. Standing where the immortal John Cipollina once stood can only spur me on to greater heights, and having family in the audience—my young’n Anna and her beau Frank, my sister Jude and her wife Linda, and my cosmic furry freak brother Larry, with whom I journeyed to San Francisco in that fabled August to find the gold o’ pot at the end of the rainbow—is inspiration at its heightiest.

On the morrow we journey overland to Monterey, where on this, John Lennon’s birthday, we salute him in song. At the venerable Golden State Theater, in our acoustic configuration, Jack gets in touch with his inner zen master with “Instant Karma,” Tony turns a whiter shade of green with “Jealous Guy,” Patti celebrates John’s love-of-his-life with “Oh Yoko,” she and I trade verses on “Working Class Hero,” and we all join in on “All You Need Is Love.” Jay Dee captures each Ringoesque drum fill to perfection. Yeah x 3.

Onward to Los Angeles. Our first showtime is a trip to Apogee Studio to record a live broadcast for KCRW, to be streamed (and presumably archived) on November 15. We set up on the small stage and I walk into the control room to see none other than Bob Clearmountain manning the board. I immediately know my guitar sound will be perfection, and am free to concentrate on entertaining the small crowd squished into the performance area. Since we are in the vicinity of Hollywood, luminary visitations begin: Tom Hanks and Tim Robbins are among the star turns dropping by to say hello.



On Thursday we set up in Amoeba Records on Sunset to give a short free show for the assembled fans and autograph seekers. I must say - formally and officially - that yes, “Amoeba is the greatest record store in the world.” You can quote me on that. Wandering around their cornucopious aisles, filled to the utmost with every manner of storage medium, overwhelmed is the byword. I’ve been given a gift certificate by Marc, Carol, and the Amoeba gang to free-lance shop in order to display my finds for their “What’s In Your Bag?” segment on the record store’s website. I hardly know where to start. I find a Dick Dale 45 called “Taco Wagon,” and even follow a “Together Again” theme in the country section: a pair of albums where Bob Wills reunites with Tommy Duncan, and Kitty Wells does the same with Red Foley. I add a Chet Baker biography, season four of Sons of Anarchy, and a double-CD collection of Cobra singles, one of the greatest blues labels of the 1950s. As an extra surprise, while we’re signing, the great Maureen Gray comes up to say hello to Patti. A veteran of the Philadelphia scene when she was hardly a teenager, singer of the divine “Today’s The Day” and “Dancing The Strand,” it’s as if the record section has come to life, which is what Amoeba is all about.

The show at the Wiltern is similarly star-crossed. We’ve chosen the date of October 12 to anniversary the arrival of Columbus in the New World. Accordingly, we premiere in our band format “Constantine’s Dream,” with Flea setting sail for the New World on bass. For the encore we’re joined by axe-slinger Johnny Depp, who recreates his guitar part on “Banga” and then lets loose on the fist-pump of “People” and the free-for-all that is “Rock and Roll Nigger,” society turning itself inside-out.



Onward, and at least compass-wise, downward. It’s a pairing of shows in San Diego, a “reading” with occasional strummed guitars at the Spreckels Theater, and a band show at the House of Blues. We’re staying in Ocean Beach, in a motel that reputedly was the scene of the first Iron Butterfly performance, in honor of which we attempt a ragged version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” OB, as it’s called down here, is my kind of town. Surfers ride the waves within sight of my room, the oldest head shop in California plies its wares, and the street scene on Saturday night is a roving mob scene.



But my trip here has a more spiritual mission. Paul Williams, who founded Crawdaddy! in the mid-sixties, was the first scribe I ever encountered who elevated rock “writing” to an art, immeasurably influencing the way I would myself experience the thought processes of interpreting music. That we share roots in science fiction fandom, and a brotherhood of appreciating the glory of sound-making, only makes my empathy with him the stronger. Unfortunately, Paul suffered a brain injury in a bicycle accident several years before, which led increasingly to an inability to connect his neural pathways, and he has now taken up residence in a care facility.

I have been friendly with his wife, Cindy Lee Berryhill, ever since we collaborated on her Naked Movie Star album. Their union of matched souls has always been one of the more star-crossed couplings I have known, and on Sunday we drive up the coast to pay him a visit in homage to his life and art. Though I know not what to expect, we make contact, and he nods in agreement as I touch on our shared heritage: obscure sf fanzines, the recent Beach Boys tour (Paul’s early appreciation and analysis of Brian Wilson’s genius helped me unravel the intricacies of Smile), and Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre. I highly recommend Cindy’s present tense “Beloved Stranger” blog about Paul... The best to you, my friend.

September 20, 2012 COPENHAGEN, DENMARK





Our very first show in Europe, back in the first week of May, 1976, was in Copenhagen at a club called Daddy’s Dance Hall. I remember looking out the window of the dressing room, seeing tram tracks and the ghost of Hans Christian Andersen, marveling at the journey rock and roll had taken me on, little realizing that the road would be as long as it has joyously become. So it seems fitting that we close out this long Euro summer in Copenhagen, at the Vega club. In the interests of this circularity, I dedicate our Nuggets medley to Savage Rose, the first Danish group I ever heard, and their name-check elicits welcome cheers. Always great to end on a high note: great show, great audience, great time.

September 19, 2012 MALMO, SWEDEN





Our show tonight is in Malmo, at the KB club, a proper rock and roll dive; but we spend the day and evening before in Ystad, an hour’s drive along the southern coast of Sweden. There we are immersed in the hometown stomping grounds of Kurt Wallander, the fictional detective creation of Henning Mankell, and the central character of a dozen books that, over the past two decades, have become a guilty-as-charged pleasure among Patti and myself, not to mention millions of mystery-loving readers. Ystad is smaller than I expected, a low-slung town (nothing seems over two stories) that has the air of a medieval village. We stay at the Hotel Continental where Kurt takes his dates when he wants to impress them (though his suit is always rumpled, and usually he can’t think of the right thing to say): have a cup of coffee at Fridolfs Konditori where he often stops to caffeine-up on his way to investigate another grisly murder; and take photographs of his third-floor corner apartment on Mariagatan. We are then driven a short distance along the breathtakingly lovely Baltic shoreline to the film set of the latest Swedish Wallander film to meet “Kurt” himself. That night we wear our “Ystad” t-shirts proudly.

September 17, 2012 MONTE CARLO, MONACO



There are Ferraris and vintage cars parked in front of the hotel, glittering baubles displayed in lobby cases, with the wide swath of the Mediterranean surrounding, dotted with yachts. As we walk through the lobby, you can hear the sound of roulette wheels spinning, the slap of playing cards on the table, dice rolling, slots machining. A casino and be-seen-oh, with a backdrop of Grand Prix and James Bond. The difference from the Paris show couldn’t be more marked. Instead of the proletariat slant of the Fete, there is an air of royalty in this small and sumptuous Opera House, a jewel-box that is all rococo gilding and ornate decoratifs. This is not just metaphor: we have been invited here by Princess Caroline and Prince Albert, the former of whom reveals that she is a devoted Horses fan. We play acoustic, adding a version of “Little Wing” to mark Jimi Hendrix’ day of passing, and though we’ve been led to expect that the crowd will be relatively restrained, the response is spontaneous and appreciative. But the real surprise comes after the show, when we get to meet Her Princessness. Making small talk, she asks where I’m from in America. Oh, I say, we live on the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, near a natural wonder called the Delaware Water Gap. To my surprise, she nods knowingly. “I went to summer camp at Lake Wallenpaupack,” she tells us, which is a very local blue-collar body of water about thirty minutes north, and a mapquest which I never would have thought to hear while sipping champagne overlooking the Mediterranean. Small world, indeed….

September 15, 2012 PARIS, FRANCE



The Fete de l’Humanite stretches as far as the eye can see from stage. I hear more than 100,000 are out there in the audience, but it’s impossible to tell. The annual event, organized by the French Communist newspaper L’Humanite, combines political education with musical acts from all over the world. Priced at a bargain 20 euros for three days of entertainment, more than half a million potential communards attend. Begun in September 1930, the festival has highlighted Francophone performers like Johnny Hallyday, Mirielle Mathieu, Eddy Mitchell, and Jacques Higelin. In 1970 Pink Floyd headlined, and over the years the focus has moved internationally with Deep Purple, the Who, the Stooges, and this year, us, in full flight. An amazing sight, documented here by Tony’s stage right camera, a night made for grand gestures and later for the subtlety. The previous evening was the flip side of the spectrum, a small acoustic performance celebrating the Smith family on the birthday of Fred “Sonic” in a beautiful and ancient theater along the Boulevard de la Chapelle. I had the rare opportunity of enjoying from the audience this commemorative salute to our honored comrade, president of the ConChords motorcycle club, one of my hero guitar players, and someone whose songs and anthems I am ever proud to wave a banner for. A highlight was “Wayfaring Stranger,” as delicately picked by Jackson and keyboarded by Jesse; and feeling like one of the Children of Paradise, we lit the candles and sang the classic To Youuuuuu….

September 13, 2012 LONDON, ENGLAND

Are we really here? Arriving on the bus from Brighton, into an anonymous hotel day room overlooking a parking lot where a stream of backhoes unloads stone fragments from dumpsters, off to the Troxy for a soundcheck in a part of East London that I only glimpse from the van that takes us backstage, and then into the bus after to cross the channel to France…I have no sense of being in one of the world’s capitals. That said, the Troxy itself, in a converted art deco cinema, is beautiful, and the crowd awaiting is almost more than we can take in revved-up energy and expectation.



Post-show I have a chat with Nick Zinner, guitarist of the Yeah-Yeah-Yeah’s and a fellow Lowest East Sider who tells me the group’s next album is awaiting mixage; and my old friend Yoshio Takeuchi, who asked me to produce Go Ohgami’s album (see production discography) back in the eighties, still one of my most favored creations, and then helped bring me to Japan for my first ever wide-eyed visitation. He is in the process of moving to London from Tokyo, is a fervid Chelsea supporter, and the fact that our friendship has lasted over the years is a beauteous thing. He takes the photo of us on stage, and it is heartwarming to see our long camaraderie through his eyes. Domo arigato!

September 9—12, 2012 LEEDS / CAMBRIDGE / BRIGHTON, ENGLAND



Live at Leeds to Quadrophenia, with a stop in the hallowed halls of academia, many strands of DNA intertwining. From the massive architectures of Leeds to Cambridge’s collegial and intellectual traditions to Brighton’s astonishing Royal Pavilion and rock-strewn beach, there’s plenty to take in, and we’re on the take.



Welcome to the delightful institution known as Pub Grub. I did have hopes of only eating Indian in Britain, but adrift in Leeds on a Sunday afternoon, Jack and I happen on the Victoria Hotel, which has been serving English fare since the mid 1800s. Lunch is fish and chips, drowned in malt vinegar, washed down with the local bitter. Later when I try to take Patti there for dinner hour, they’ve closed, so we go down the street to an Irish version called O’Neill’s where she finds her favored lamb shank. We’ve never played Leeds before, though its stopover on the Who’s itinerary on February 14, 1970 looms large in my rock hierarchy of classic moments, with great versions of “Summertime Blues” and those extended work-outs on “My Generation” and “Magic Bus.”

Our magic bus takes us to Cambridge, where we entertain the ears at the Corn Exchange, within walking distance of the Eagle Pub. It was there in 1953, a plaque informs us, that James Watson and Francis Crick excitedly announced their discovery of DNA to the assembled professors having an afterschool booze-up. “We have discovered the secret of life,” Crick is reputed to have said, and so we explore the double-helix of a platter of blue cheese, crusty bread, pickle, and thick slices of ham that has probably constituted workingman’s fare for the last several centuries.

The books are beginning to pile up. The Haunted Bookshop right near Cambridge’s Queen’s College is a treasure trove of children’s volumes and ancient poetics. Mostly I browse, content to imagine this first edition of Peter Pan, or that sumptuously illustrated Wind In The Willows, on my overloaded shelving. I find a two-volume History of the Jews written by Henry H. Millman in 1829 (revised in 1863) which attempts to historically and scientifically explain Biblical lore (Lot’s wife, for example, was turned to a pillar of salt because of the sulphur emanating from the fire-and-brimstone destruction of Sodom). Fascinating. Looking back over these installments, it does seem as if all I do when on the road is unearth books, records, and eating establishments. Well, what do you expect? Bacchanal?

Brighton is always wondrous to come to, especially for a rest day. My room at the Queens Hotel overlooks the beach, and imagining Pinky of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock walking along the strand, and mods chasing rockers chasing rods chasing mockers, gives me all the backstory I need. Jackson Smith joins our band here for the next few shows, and yes, more fish and chips as well as a classic English Breakfast at the venerable Regency Hotel.



Before our show at the Dome, I remote at the local BBC radio station to do an interview for a documentary on the Rolling Stones’ appearance at Madison Square Garden in November 1969. I was there, he ruminates like a grizzled war vet, covering it as a callow rock journalist for Changes Magazine, and I reminisce about it with host Paul Gambaccini, a type of recollection it seems I’m more and more called upon to time-slide these days. I’m not sure what this implies, but it seems to be put in perspective by a postcard from October 28,1904 I find in a local antique store. It’s of Jan Kubelik, a Czech violinist extraordinaire who set hearts a-flutter at the turn of last century. “Have you heard of him?” the anonymous sender asks a Miss Edwards of Cornwall. “He is coming to the Guild Hall Nov. 11. We are all going to hear him so I suppose it will be a treat.” The more things change….

September 5—7, 2012 GLASGOW, SCOTLAND / MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

You can feel the weight of these bedrock British cities, the grand architectures and storied histories. We’ve been at each of the venues before, familiarity making each somewhat homey, enhanced by the sold-out crowds and enthusiastic repartee Patti engages in with the audience. We don’t get to spend much outside-gig time in Glasgow, rolling in on the bus in the morn and rolling out after the show, but Manchester has a day off on either end, and we’re staying in the city “centre”.



I had been dreaming about the Rusholme district and its fabled Curry Mile for the past eons, ever since James took me there when we were in pre-production of their Stutter album back in the 1980s, just about the time the Challenger exploded. The restaurant we dined at then was about as ethnic as one could get, more Bombay than Mumbai, the Chicken Madras served without utensils, sopped up by Nan bread, mouthwateringly fiery and delicious. But I must say on this visitation I was a bit disappointed, perhaps a victim of my own expectations. Compared with New York’s E. 6th Street, a Curry Block if there ever was one, there were far fewer Indian establishments, and none seemed as beckoning as the kitschly-decorated spangles of home (though in truth, Manhattan’s row is more Bangladeshi than Indian). Still, a good glug of Cobra and a fine time was had by all.



I spend the off day absorbing musical media past and present. There’s an emporium near Piccadilly Common called Empire that is a jumble of vintage magazines, records, and toys, where I dig out a Bert Weedon EP and an original pressing of Michael Cox’s “Angela Jones,” produced by Joe Meek on his Triumph label and one of his first hits. The John Loudermilk song has always been one of my personal heartthrobs, first discovered on a version by Johnny Ferguson that I happened upon as a wee ‘un. The song’s sentiments are as innocent as can be—“I’ll meet you at your locker when school’s dismissed / I’ll carry your books home if you just give me one little….”—and I contrast its naïve charm with the current Top 20 I follow on the local video music channel. Whew, steamy: the number one is “Heatwave” by Wiley featuring Ms. D with its refrain of “Put your hands on my body” and shots of said bikini-clad bodies in full writhe, followed in rapid succession by Flo Rida’s “Whistle” and “Explode” by Cover Drive ft. Dappy. Thus the mating dance in full swing, a fine accompaniment to reading Lies On Girls, Vince Raison’s hilarious sexcapades of “one man’s journey from convicted bachelor to committed parent.” Shag-o-rama!

September 4, 2012 NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND

I’ve done my time in Newcastle. I lived here for most of a winter in 1992, working on a Martin Stephenson and the Daintees’ album, visiting the street of motorcycle parts shops (yes, I’ve also done time as a spark plug collector), strolling the quayside, and watching Kevin Keegan drop onto the St. James pitch from a helicopter to assume the coaching helm of the Magpies. Life in a northern town.



The show is at the Academy, once known as the Majestic. Upstairs in the balcony, while watching a Sunday tea dance in the summer of 1963 before their evening performance at the theater, the Beatles came upon the idea for “She Loves You.” As Jack Petruzzelli recounts the tale, they took it back to their hotel across the street to further hone the future classic, then played it for Paul’s father, who thought it should be “Yes Yes Yes” to make it more British.

The history lesson is in keeping with my sudden interest in the Shadows. I always think of them as a British Ventures, and many of their hits—such as “Apache,” or “Sleepwalk”—I tend to like in the original versions. But last night, spinning the radio dial, I came upon a BBC4 special about the group, interviewing all the various members, playing snippets of song, and highlighting their influence on the oncoming wave of British guitar bands. It was interesting to me to see how the personalities interacted—I must say aside from lead guitarist Hank Marvin and his way with a Fender, I never knew much about the group’s inner workings.



The day of our gig I wander past a record store (RPM Music in Old George Yard), flip through the singles, and find a clean copy of “Kon Tiki / 36-24-36” (how could I resist?). I wasn’t familiar with either, but both sides are really great slabs of trebly guitar in that moment just before the Beatles, from 1962. There’s a mistake in one of Hank’s double-stops halfway through “Kon Tiki,” strange to hear in a record that went number one in the Isles, but in a way it made him more human for me. The session time had run out, the take had the best energy, and in those days there was no digitalis. We all play clams on the half-shell, and it reminded me of some other cherrystones that found their way onto disc, engraved into history (the mis-entrance of the vocalist after the guitar solo in “Louie Louie” a primal example).
And speaking of On-Tyne, don’t even get me started on the Animals….

September 1—2, 2012 DUBLIN, IRELAND; NORTH DORSET, ENGLAND

Festiville. Despite the place names above, each gathering seems its own town. Take one expanse of rural field, preferably churned up by intermittent rains, add several stages and frolicking folk in various states of consciousness arousal, a swath of bands representing most of the musical spectrum, and a sense of random serendipity, and here you are.



I am walking through the grounds of the Electric Picnic, an hour and a half outside of Dublin, marveling at the sense of carnival that has come to these rolling pasturelands on the grounds of a once-grand estate. We have been traveling most of the day to get here, running on only a couple of hours sleep. I come early to the site to not only see if I can catch a random band, but to guest with my friend B.P. Fallon, who is appearing in the Body and Soul area, which features a Zen Garden, American Indian tepees, and small stages set up where idiosyncratic performers can contrast with the expansive acts on the other prosceniums. He’s brought along Aaron Lee Tasjan of the Madison Square Gardeners to play guitar and I jam along through their whole set. Beep recites the litany of rock and roll greats and their ever-influence, while I have a warm-up for our turn an hour later on the Crawdaddy Stage. When we get underway, despite the bass overtones from the adjoining shows, we play a sharp set encouraged by a uni-named member of U2 who cheers along from the sideline. We stick around long enough to hear at least half of the Cure’s three hour marathon, Robert Smith in great vocal form and the band abetted by Reeves Gabrels, who I run into backstage and have a quick remembrance of guitar times past.



Then it’s off to the southern coast of England for the End of the World Festival. It’s even woodsier than the previous fest, and Patti gives a reading on a small stage in the midst of verdant forest. There’s a great atmosphere here, a willing crowd, and we’re bookended by two excellent groups whom I’d never heard before: Graham Coxon from Blur, and Grandaddy, reuniting after several years.

Onto the bus, scrape the mud from our shoes, and off we go….

August 31, 2012 SIENA, ITALY



The moon is blue. Shining its glowing fullness over the ancient towers of this once-powerful Tuscan city-state an hour from Florence, narrow streets feeding into a huge plaza where every July and August horse races are held in honor of a medieval tradition, I watch the lunar orb (photo by T. Shanahan) cast its spell over an audience that fills even the farthest reaches of this Piazza Del Campo. The stage is set before a palazzo which once held the seat of government, in which works by Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti are fresco’d on the walls.



Il Palio, as the horse race is known, is staged by rival contrades, each named for a street and accompanying animal totem. I declare my allegiance by choosing a scarf celebrating the tortuca, the tortoise, and drape it across my amp. The race itself must be a wild affair, with riders allowed to not only whip their own horses, but other riders in the quest for the championship trophy, a banner affectionately known as “the rag.” When we pass a record shop playing Banga over its loudspeakers, it seems to become the soundtrack to a video of this year’s race showing in the window. We watch, fascinated, as the riders and their mounts careen around the plaza, knowing we will soon join them in gallop with the opening hoof beats of “Land.” We do know how to Pony.

August 28, 2012 VIENNA, AUSTRIA



The Arena in Vienna is one of our favorite venues in the world, an open air space built within an abandoned factory complex. The stage is built on what must have been a landing dock, and overhead, as we play, we watch the gibbous moon make its slow journey from stage left to right, the audience filling all the grounds in front of us and then surrounding on a balcony, so that you feel as if you’re enclosed by their warmth and desire. It’s rousing, and because we’ve been here so many times—I can recall at least four—it’s taken on a legendary aspect for us.

When we first came here, in ’96, there were hippie stands scattered on the grounds, where you could stock up on smoking accessories in red, gold and green, all manner of trinkets, and t-shirts featuring your favorite revolutionary idols. Che, anyone? Though these makeshift emporiums are long gone, after the show Andrew (who is the court photographer for this entry) and Tony and I repair to one of the bars onsite to mingle with the aftereffects of rock and roll in the air as the dj blasts Joan Jett putting another dime in the jukebox, baby… Arena more than lives it up to our expectations, and can’t wait to return.

August 25—26, 2012 LAUSANNE / ZURICH, SWITZERLAND



There is hardly any time to explore Lausanne, off the plane and on to the Noise Festival. It’s a smallish affair, as these things go, maybe three grand of audience, and the word is that it pissed down rain the day before, turning the field into a mudbath. But once again we’re in luck, as the steady downpour that goes on through dinner lifts once we get to the stage. After the show I spend the wee hours of the evening going through a collection of Fortune Records that has magically appeared on eBait. I’m especially attracted to a disc by the Magnatones, more for their name than either the A or B side; but the bidding soon gets out of hand. Two collectors are duking it out for Arthur Griswold’s “Pretty Mama Blues” which ratchets up Fortune 871 to the astonishing price of $4038.88. I’d rather visit Billy Miller over at Norton headquarters and ask him to spin it for me.

Speaking of Norton, the world of freewheeling independent record labels follows me on the train next day, when Jack lends me his Norton paperback of Nick Tosches’ Save The Last Dance For Satan. A fascinating tale, name-checking such semi-savory record-biz characters as Hy Weiss of Old Town, Morris Levy of Roulette, and Jerry “The Geator With The Heater” Blavat, one of the greatest dj’s ever to spin a platter, and shows off the seamy side of the music biz, which incidentally produced some of the greatest discs ever to grace a fingersnap. Highly recommended.

Our venue in Zurich is Xtra, a familiar joint that we’ve played at least once if not twice before, filled to the brim with howling fans and a great energy. It’s in a funky neighborhood that seems to feature a different ethnic group every block, and the bonus beat is that we get to sleep at the hotel over the club. The backstage area walls and ceiling are papered over with posters advertising groups past and present from the last twenty years or so– there’s the Stereo MCs! there’s the Hellbillies! there’s Gwar!—and we feel like a part of the on and on and ongoing saga of bands on the move, each a tale of its own, and a night to tell it.

August 23—24, 2012 STAVANGER, NORWAY; LOUISIANA MUSEUM, DENMARK

Back again. Were we really home for two weeks, just enough time to catch up on life and loves, divest accumulations and repack new ones, before returning to in-motion? These alternate and parallel existences, each seeming like a dream, only reinforces the Be Here Now to which Baba Ram Dass alludes.

An oil-producing town on the western coast of Norway, Stavanger has weather that seems like schizophrenic mood swings. It rains heavily for a few moments, then the sun appears, followed by more rain. Happily the sky clears for our show, and we pick up the set where we left off in Stockholm.



The next morning Patti and I travel to a literary conference about an hour north of Copenhagen, along the sound of sea that separates Denmark from Sweden. The Louisiana Museum is dedicated to modern art, with important works by Giacometti, Picasso, Warhol, Yves Klein, and Henry Moore among its collections. In the basement, on temporary loan, is an amazingly powerful installation by Ed Kienholz, not seen publicly since its only showing forty years ago, having been in the hands of a private collector in Japan. It is a searing piece of social commentary and nightmarish proto-realism, portraying the lynching of a black man by a gang of whites, illuminated by the glare of automobile headlights. It has a palpable horror, enhanced by the being-here-now aspect of participation in the scenario as one enters into the on-going action, becoming more than a dispassionate spectator, descending into the subterranean depths of the museum and the work’s unflinching depiction of human inhumanity.



Going out into the light of the pastoral surroundings is both jarring and welcome. We walk by the sea, meet Cesar Aira, the Argentinian author whose short works partake of surreal juxtaposition (see An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter) and re-meet Henning Mankell, with whom Patti has an on-stage conversation that illuminates both their processes and their mystery-laden works. There are readings, more q & a’s, and a short acoustic concert to welcome music into this realm of sculpture, pictorial representation, and literature: among the many ways of expression that conjoins our modern creative birthright.

August 3, 2012 STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN



All too soon, this date which once seemed so distant a month and a half ago, is here, exemplifying the true relativity of time. It’s gone by so fast, and yet, looking back over where we’ve been, seems as if we’ve been traveling for an eternity. Still, we’ve arrived at the last show of this go-round, until the next go-round. Round and round, like a record, baby….

It’s a tasty bill at the Stockholm Music and Arts Festival, which surely describes the featured attractions. Marianne Faithfull is her usual beautiful and courtly self before us. Anthony and the Johnsons, backed by a full orchestra, closes the show. A torrential rain in the afternoon clears the air, and the return of sun fading into dusk sparkles our proceedings. The audience moves through each song with us, excitable and encouraging, mimicking Patti’s hand gestures and singing along. It’s a grand way to end this first Euro leg.

Then home. Until we return to our home away from home.

August 1—2, 2012 OSLO, NORWAY



Fifty years, fifty songs. When Tony sees the ad in the paper heralding a Beach Boys concert in Oslo on our night off, plans are immediately put in motion for attendance. We share a promoter, we know their soundman (hi Mark!) and soon enough we, along with Andrew and Jay Dee, are perched in loge seats in the Spektrum witnessing history in the making, a golden anniversary for one of the most iconic groups in surf music, not to mention the entire ocean.

Tony and I had spoken of seeing the Beach Boys over the spring, having delved deeply into The Smile Sessions, knowing Brian Wilson and Mike Love were putting aside their differentials to celebrate a half-century of music making; but the opportunity to catch a show never came up. Now it’s almost too perfect that here, on a random night for both our tours, we will get a chance to help them light their candles and make a collective wish. The show is divided into two parts, and a look at the set list shows that nearly every song one could hope for will be played, with a first half that spins toward their surf-and-turf era, and a second that is a bit more Brian-centric. I like both their polar opposites, and when I hear “Wendy,” my sing-a-long from one memorable teen-dream summer, or “Be True To Your School” (ah, those baton twirlers….), it impacts me the same as when “Heroes and Villains” or a moving “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” takes them into post-adolescent territory. David Marks, rejoining the band after being with them early on, shows himself to be a romping guitarist, Al Jardine displays a voice that has always glued the band’s harmonies, and Bruce Johnston winningly cheerleads. The backing group is excellent, driven along by John Cowsill on Dennis-like drums, and the harmonies….well, let us say that for those who appreciate the sum of human vox intertwined, there are no other groups that attain the blend and resonance of the Beach Boys in full throat. With the sophistication of the Four Freshman and the keening edge of doowop “hitting notes,” they send shivers up and down my ooh-wha spine.

After our VIP passes get us backstage, where I unexpectedly shake Brian’s hand as he heads out the door, I have a fascinating discussion with percussionist Nelson Bragg on how Wilson utilized rhythm in his recordings. Since Dennis was such a rudimentary drummer, albeit one whose soulfulness was essential to the band’s character, he concentrated him on the most simple of patterns, bringing in other elements to fill out the drum kit, a la Phil Spector: shakers and tambourines to replicate the high-hat, kettle drums for the toms, etc. No cymbals. It is an insight into his production mode (amplified by the above-mentioned look behind the recording process that is the Smile Sessions) that gives me further appreciation of Brian’s undeniable genius.



It’s that kind of night. Back at the hotel, we run into Bruce Johnston in the lobby, who talks of his Bruce and Terry days and then launches into an explanation of how the Byrds’ twelve-string sound on “Tambourine Man” was overlaid and compressed in the studio. God Only Knows, but sometimes He/She gives a clue to how miracles were performed.

July 28 - 30, 2012 OSTERSUND, SWEDEN / TRONDHEIM, NORWAY

A day spent in airports lands us in Scandinavia, a climactic change that is refreshingly welcome. Everyone is hoping for a good night's sleep in Ostersund, but the hotel's placement overlooking the town square where the main stage of the Great Lake Festival is set up means we will be closing our eyes and ears to the thundering roar of Glasvegas. Still, it's nice to be where the action is, and after a burger in the bar - no pasta, please - the thump-thump-thump of the late night rave is actually comforting.

It begins to rain on our show day, and by the time of "Because The Night" we can see sheets of downpour deluging the crowd. No matter: they stay with us till the end, earning our grateful appreciations. After we play, there are fireworks, a speech by the local minister of the province, all to the accompaniment of a booming "People Have The Power" over the loudspeakers. Furthering the celebration, Andrew and I disco down at the afterparty, where the disc jockey plays garage-based hits (The Sonics!) and punque classics. At least once a tour you have to let it all out, and Ostersund's our night to howl.



Luckily, the three hour drive to Trondheim, across the border in Norway, gives us time to recover. The scenery is beautiful, wandering through mountain passes and river windings, the air refreshing, and when we arrive in Trondheim, it's as if we entered a pastoral Twilight Zone. There is a massive centuries-old cathedral dedicated to St. Olav, a smaller church that offers shelter to the homeless, and an air of renaissance fair in a courtyard where stonecutters, armorers, and archery aficionados have set up booths, along with steak that you cook yourself on a heated sandstone slab. We travel through time as well as space.

This Olavsfestdagene has a theme of blending spiritual with the secular, and features performances - such as hymnals to "Jerusalem" with period instruments and reconfigurations of liturgy by modern synthesizers - attempting to bridge the gap between earth and heaven. Kind of like the ground switch on an amplifier; leading to divine noise, which we happily make.


July 26, 2012 AREZZO, ITALY

It is Constantine's Dream's dream, returning to closure a circle where we once began an epic journey, much as Columbus made his way home back from the New World. The tale of our album track's inception has been told by Patti in the liner notes to Banga; but appearing in the church where Piero della Francesca put brush to wall, in the town where we overdubbed musicians from Casa Del Vento to amplify our basic foundational track, and to sing hosannas to the metaphysical power of art, imbues this morning performance at the Church of San Francesco with a special honor and significance.



There, 'neath the actual painting itself, with the accompaniment of musicians from Casa del Vento, we premiere the first live versions of "Seneca," and "Constantine's Dream". The church itself is modest, with an exterior of rough-hewn stone and an interior that preserves the battered and sympathetically restored frescoes of Piero. As you can see from the photograph from the local Arezzo newspaper, "Constantine's Dream" (the painting) is but a part of the overall narrative cycle of The Story of The True Cross, sitting modestly in the lower right tier of the back wall. At one point, as we are traversing the Tuscan terrain of "Constantine," I step out of the moment and imagine the church in Piero's time, with scaffolding obscuring all but the work-in-progress, and the great painter himself pausing to see if his brushstroke has created the right sense of perspective and light, that his recreation is true to history revealed and yet to come.



That night, we repay the favor Casa Del Vento granted us for enhancing our work by journeying to Montevarchi to join them for a few songs at their show in the town square. We are told that Amerigo Vespucci's mother was born here. Giving birth, that must be what this part of the world is about; and so we deliver.

July 23 - 24, 2012 MILAN / PERUGIA, ITALY



Villa-la-la-la... We go from the museum that is the Vittoriale to the ruins of the Villa Arconati, on the outskirts of Milan. Built in the 17th and 18th centuries, it is a huge estate, surrounded by farm fields and gardens, with a main house (a word that hardly describes its vastness) empty of furniture, with only the ghosts of paintings hanging on the walls, frescos in tatters, and room after room of uninhabitation. It is used mostly for bizarre ceremonials (weddings are popular upstairs) and as dressing rooms and a production area for the annual summer concerts. In 1627 Galeazzo Arconati brought here from Rome the statue of Pompey under which Julius Caesar was supposedly assassinated. It's that kind of spook-filled place. Et tu? We even meet up with our own phantasms, having played here in 1996.



The next stop, Perugia, is located high atop a winding hill in the mid-section of Italy. It's a beautiful town, though I mostly miss its sights-to-see since before and after the show I closet myself in my room writing liner notes for the 40th anniversary reissue of Nuggets to be released this fall. Revisiting that summer four decades ago when I was segueing the index cards of the chosen artyfacts on the floor of my West End Avenue apartment, thinking about who I was then and who I have become, here on the road living out all I could have dreamed when I first plugged in the holy fire of the electric guitar, is as much time-travelogue as the short break I take visiting the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in the town square, gazing up at its elaborately painted ceilings, knowing I have ascended the gateways to Heaven. Sent.

July 22, 2012 GARDONE RIVIERA, ITALY

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863 - 1938) was a poet and political provocateur who still has the power to create controversy in Italia. An ardent nationalist, he tried to annex Fiume in the wake of World War I, was shot down in a seaplane over the Adriatic, and was on speaking terms with Mussolini. But it is as a romantic writer and sensualist - especially his tempestuous affair with the great actress Eleanora Duse that he roman a clef'd in Il Fuoco (The Flame) - that he intrigued me; and his subsequent appearance as a touchstone in You Call It Madness, imagining Russ Columbo's afterlife and the parallels between their embrace of the erotic provided me with an insight into one of history's more fascinating and paradoxical artists.



His villa in Gardone Riviera, the Vittoriale, where he was put out to pasture by his political opponents, allowed him to invoke his fancies to the utmost. He might have chafed at his loss of influence, but surrounded by libraries of books, paintings, statuary, and all manner of oriental chinoiserie, on the shore of one of the most beautiful lakes (Garda) in the world, set within gardens and rambles, his penchant for indulgence was given free rein. I photograph his shoes, the collars his dogs wore, and imagine what he might have thought of us appearing in the amphitheater on the grounds that is used for summer shows.



We played here in 2003, the year I completed You Call It Madness, and though only a page or two of what I wrote about D'Annunzio stayed in the final version (tangents can tend toward the elliptical), it was fascinating to roam where his life unfolded its final chapter, to marvel at the unbridled accumulations of a discerning collector, and to visage a man so filled with his mirror image that he could view music from the other side of reflection: "The essence of music might not be in sounds at all. It is the silence that precedes sound and the silence that follows." In between the chords of our songs, there is Gabriele listening.

July 15 - 21, 2012 BOLOGNA / MOLFETTA / GIFFONI / ROMA / VIAREGGIO, ITALY



Within this week I swim in two seas. The Adriatic is choppy and windswept, with currents that shift temperatures in a matter of strokes, the beach a jumble of rocks and stones worn smooth by the waves. The Tyrrhenian is warm, shallow even as you distance yourself from shore, which is sand so fine that it forms a perfect cradle for your body.



The sea holds secrets as well. In Bologna, on an otherwise quiet Sunday away from the city center, our show is in a park containing a museum / art exhibit dedicated to a mysterious plane crash that took place over the Tyrrhenian Sea near Ustica on June 27, 1980. An Itavia airlines DC9 left Bologna for Palermo in Sicily, carrying vacationers and families, when it was struck down by an unidentified missile. Though the initial investigation was highly flawed, and a cover-up suggested, a likely scenario was that the plane was mistaken for a Libyan aircraft and shot down, with the parties responsible unwilling to take blame, the political demands of the Cold War further obscuring the facts. Nonetheless, the truth is that 81 people, including 12 pre-teen children, were plucked from their lives' flowering, and it is to their memory that this exhibit bears testimony. The pieces of the plane were laboriously raised from the ocean floor and painstakingly re-assembled, accompanied by 81 lights in the ceiling turning on and off. It is a powerful piece of imagery that brings home the reality of disaster and fate, the sudden turns our lives may take at any moment.



With two days off before a seven-shows-in-seven-days run, ramping down is a welcome respite. Molfetta is the perfect place for this, a town with centuries-old streets that are more like alleyways along the water and little to do but rest and eat the freshest of fish at the local La Tavernetta. Even a side-trip to nearby Bari for a record-signing seems a visit to an over-stimulated metropolis. Resuscitated, we cross the ankle bracelet of Italy's boot to Giffoni, south of Naples; play in Roma in the courtyard of the Cavea Parco della Musica, between the concert halls known as the Three Whales; and then take an unanticipated side-trip to Viareggio, up near where Italy's western coast curves toward Genoa, as an acoustic trio to perform a few songs honoring the memory of the singer Giorgio Gaber.

Come the morning we swim again, in the brine of the sea, from whence we emerged and so will return again.

July 14, 2012 BAROLO, ITALY

The lilting melodious sounds of two girls talking in Italian drifts in through the shutters of my room, closed against the bright heat of the day. Outside there are vineyards stretching up hills, narrow winding streets, and vendors setting up shop. All of Barolo is preparing for a festival, here in the Piedmonts; and the namesake family's ancestral winery is only a few meters away. Soon we will be in the dark and humid cellars where huge barrels of fermenting grapes are undergoing their metamorphosis into godly nectar. We will taste, and raise our glasses to Bacchus, and feel the warm glow of a single vintage, the after-notes of a blend, the finish of a grappa.... Ah, Italia.



The contrast after our week in Germany couldn't be more dramatic; perhaps, in the Italian manner (hands waving for emphasis), melodramatic. The Barolo festival began a few years back as a literary event, and there are still readings and q&a;'s of writers among its highlights. But with a ska band dressed in tutus versioning their take on Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" outside our hotel, things have definitely leaped off the printed page. Our show will draw some 8,000 folk to the town square; Bob Dylan is scheduled to appear two days later. No wonder Barolo has turned into an instant party.



We drink, we eat. In fact, we eat records, or to be more specific, mangiadischi. Checking out the market, I come upon a vinyl record specialist, and like any moth to a flame, leaf through his selections. He's playing singles on a portable player, taking a 7-inch disc and sliding it into a slot (much like a CD player in a car), which sucks in the record and puts the needle to the groove in surprisingly good fidelity. He speaks little English, but tells me it's called a mangiadischi. A web-o-net research reveals this to be quite the sixties' artifact, an Italo-invention on a par with the Farfisa organ and the Vespa scooter. I must have one, I decide (resisting the urge to have all four that he has on offer) and so purchase a Lesa Mady 2. Batteries included. Tony and I buy some required 45 software - I find an EP by Chet Baker, a hitherto unknown surf instrumental by the Denvermen from Australia, and familiar slabs by the Tornadoes ("Telstar") and the Chantays ("Pipeline). He adds a boxed set of Elvis' Sun singles and Talk Talk's "Life's What You Make It." We listen long into the night, a meal as delizioso as the scallopini we have had for dinner.

July 12, 2012 DACHAU, GERMANY

It gives me a start when I see the name on our tour sheet, not having realized it's a town as well as a place. Mixed feelings, a survivor's guilt. The it-could've-been-me's if my grandparents hadn't had the courage to get on a ship to America, wherever that was. And given the long history of man's quest for mutual obliteration, the realization that no races, creeds, or mythologies are exempt from carnage.

We visit the memorial site where the camp once stood, in Bavaria, a stone's throw from Munich. It is filled with hundreds of high school-age kids bearing compulsory witness to history; churches of all denominations hosting chapels of meditation, prayer, and remembrance, each architecture reflecting its place on Earth as well as its attempt to rise above it; an abbey of Carmelite nuns who greet us warmly; and two small girls, aged between three and five, playing in the no-man's-land where a prisoner would once be shot on sight, often choosing to end life in this way rather than suffer the unendurable.



Reclamation. I look down and see a heart someone has inscribed in the gravel where prisoner's barracks once stood. That night, in the town square, a mosh pit erupts when we amp up the action, scattering dust-to-dust in the air.

July 9 - 11, 2012 BONN / BERLIN, GERMANY

Overlooking the Rhine, I've spent the night in the hotel watching the Elvis '68 Comeback special on television, especially interesting to me since I've just completed liner notes for Sony Legacy's upcoming box set of his Madison Square concerts in 1972. It shows just how magnificent an artist was Elvis at this crossroads in his career, especially in the informal sit-around-with-the band sequences; though the production numbers, which are often overlooked, are quite riveting as well, his acting ability and choreography honed by his many cinematic forays and the karate moves that he executes with the same determined swivel as his early hip-shakes. It's followed by an artful documentary on All Tomorrow's Parties, a festival in England which we played five or so years ago. I don't know whether we're in it, and fall asleep before the closing credits, which I'm told the next morning backdrops us creating chaos with "Rock and Roll Nigger."



It may seem a long segue from that rousing chant to Beethoven, but indeed, it's only a five minute walk to where he grew up in Bonn. We eat lunch in a small cafe, where I have the first of what will prove to be many wiener schnitzels (this one with pfeffersauce, mmm....), just down the street from the church of St Remigius. Visiting it, to light a candle for my Dad's birthday (though the religious confluence might seem a bit strange), I discover that 10 year old Ludwig Van regularly accompanied morning mass here on organ. Since my Dad was a keyboard player (piano, accordion), I figure music's passion-play is the connective and transformative force. Stopping at Beethoven's birth-house, just around the corner, I see his smudged and messy manuscripts, his eyeglasses, a lock of his hair, his spirit hovering.



That morning in the Herald-Tribune I had been reading about the travails of Mali, in the grip of a civil war inadvertently fueled by the end of the conflict in Libya. It pains me to read of the destruction and refugee situation, especially since I am most fond of the musical largesse that Mali has given us: Ali Farka Toure, Amadou and Mariam, Tinariwen. Thus it is surprising when I go backstage and meet Peter Weber from Glitterhouse Records, who hands me a compilation titled Songs For Desert Refugees, from which all proceeds benefit the nomads and educational projects that develop cultural exchanges between the desert and Europe. The music is fascinating, showcasing younger Malian bands like Tamikrest and the Ibrahim Djo Experience. You can order the actual CD from Glitterhouse or the digital download from Amazon. Highly recommended.

Glitterhouse is also the label of the Walkabouts, who are opening for us tonight. In the early 80s I was playing CBGB when my amp started making odd eruptions. These self-same Walkabouts from Seattle were sharing the bill, and they generously offered me their equipment. It's nice to see their continuing story, and to toast the years between backstage.

In Berlin, our promoter Berthold takes us for a lovely meal at the Cafe Einstein, an old school landmark restaurant with a wiener schnitzel that brings out my camera. Care to share?

An aftershow bonus beat at the circus-like Tempodrome is the visitation of Steve Mass, whose Mudd Club on White Street in lower Manhattan was a memorable gathering spot of underground creatures of the night at the turn of the eighties. It was there in the fall of '79 that I met my bride-to-be, the luminous Stephanie, a memorable crossing of time and space. Steve tells me he now has a Mudd Club in Berlin, and seems a-twinkle as ever.

July 7 - 8, 2012 AMSTERDAM / WEERT, HOLLAND

Or the Netherlands, if you will. We wake next to the Paradiso, where we'll play, a short walk to the American Hotel, where we'll stay. There is an air of ritual coming to Amsterdam, the rounds we will make of bookstore and coffeeshop and wandering in circles navigating the canals. A day off in a favored city.



When we came here last summer, a mystical thing happened as Patti and I abstractly strolled at two in the morning trying to find our way home from the Bluebird. Earlier, at a local numismatist shop, she had bought me a Byzantine coin from the era of Constantine I, to commemorate our progress on "Constantine's Dream," then on its way to realization after the layering of its epic track. Without realizing, we found ourselves passing that same coin shop, and then, a few doors down, a bookshop where a volume in the shuttered window caught our eye. It was a biography (in Dutch) of Constantine, and on the cover was the Piero Della Francesca painting that began our pilgrimage in Arezzo. It seemed a sign as divine as the cross Constantine witnessed. Sadly (or did we dream it?) the book is no longer there when we return to the store this year, but we console ourselves with a massive platter of stampotten, the Dutch comfort food of mashed potatoes mixed with sauerkraut and a hunk of sausage at the Haesje Claes restaurant down the street: highly recommended.

The Paradiso - a landmark where we've been appearing since 1976 - is its usual embracing self. For the occasion, Tony suggests we don the suits we all acquired in Paris, in varying shades of grey except for Jack's boldly-striped special. After soundcheck I visit the Record Palace store across the street in search of a Tom Jones 45 picture sleeve that I hope to get him to sign when we share a stage at the Bospop Festival in Weert. It's an amazing emporium, with two floors awaiting inspection, though I only have a few moments to scan the selection. The helpful proprietor plays me some Dutch garage groups, and though I think I've heard it all before, a haunting slow ballad by Les Baroques catches my ear - "I'll Send You To The Moon." I add a bizarre reggae version of Sam Cooke's "Teenage Sonata" (my favorite Sam classic) with Cooke's own voice overlaid on a Studio One backing track that dissonantly hints at the changes. It's the only thing I'll get to keep. Tomorrow at the Festival, I'll gift the Les Baroques single to Mikael Akerfeldt, crossing paths with Opeth once again; and never get close enough to Tom to get his signature. Not that it matters. Just seeing his easy command performance from my vantage point on stage right, hearing that barrel-chested voice, his crack big band (horn section, femme back-up singers, amazing drummer) and hit after hit - from recent covers like "What Condition My Condition Was In" and "Kiss" to a jubilant "It's Not Unusual" - is enough keepsake for me.



But I do have my Hollandaise souvenir. Before the Paradiso show I stop at the nearby Wagamama for a quick dinner. There I meet ever-constant Euro-fan Evelyn Keyser's mother and daughters, and they snap a picture to send to Evelyn as she waits on line to get in front row position. It's great to be part of the family.

July 1- 5, 2012 ANTWERP, BELGIUM; LUXEMBOURG; FREIBURG, GERMANY; LIEGE, BELGIUM

Around and around we go, a circuit of distinct countries as geographically aligned as many states in the U.S., sharing if not common culture then a certain mélange feel. Not that I really get to see Antwerp. We pull in after our overnighter and I wake on this first day of the year’s second half in a beautiful park where the show is to be held. Trees, birds, a brief sun-shower. There is little reason to leave and we hang around until showtime, a Sunday in the Park with Noise. Our friend, the clothes designer Anne Demeulemeester, lives near here, and her radiant presence matches the sylvan surroundings.



There’s a day off in Luxembourg, the city as well as country; and after a walk through the picturesque Old Town, which feeds into a generic retail pedestrian mall that could be anywhere and everywhere, I opt to spend the day prone. I’ve just started reading Murikami’s 1Q84 and luckily the hotel television receives the Japanese NHK network. I move into the story of Aomame and Tengo to the accompaniment of the latest J-pop clips; and even my lodging seems to echo Haruki’s sense of dislocation. The shower is a glass-enclosed cube in the middle of the room; the elevator is a blast of white neon light. The rest day hardly does me well, however, since I wake the next morning with the top part of my voice turned froggy, leading to some problems approaching the microphone. Luckily, to make up for it, the feedback at the end of the “Pissing” solo seems to curl over itself like a spiral. We let it hang for just an extra moment to savor its whine and unwind before returning to the song.



Overnight again, waking in Freiburg to another surreal sight. Surrounding the ZMF festival site is an animal preserve, where the residents are given large enclosed spaces to wander as they might. There are buffalo, emus, and—my favorite—some particularly soulful camels. The show is inside a big tent and even at soundcheck it’s sweltering. When nearly three thousand excitable humans pile in, they put the hu- in -mid. Backstage the promoter has decorated the area with old radios and phonograph players, and speaking of such venerable sound machines, I am visited by the great jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson, who has been putting his freeform blessing on the ZMF festival for the past twenty five years. We talk about days in the early seventies when we played together in an “out there” improvisation group called Jimmy the Flea with Bob Palmer.



Overnight to Liege, where the Les Ardetes Festival is taking place. The town looks intriguing, with a couple of narrow streets filled with bars that by mid-afternoon are already blasting their music of choice, but we only have time for a quick lunch before heading to the site. Morrissey is headlining, and Patti sends him regards before “Redondo Beach,” which he has covered. Then it’s back on the bus, our dreaming hotel.

June 25—30, 2012 WOLVERHAMPTON / CARDIFF / BATH / KENT, ENGLAND

There is a welcome familiarity in coming to Old Blighty, whether it’s the shared language (“similar,” my Dad used to say, not the “same”), the comforting and slightly irregular food (beans on toast, bangers and mash, blood pudding, not to mention the omnipresent perfectly spiced Indian delicacies). On the Sunday night we arrive, England is playing in the Euro-champion soccer quarter-finals. When we pull into Wolverhampton on our newly-boarded tour bus, it’s like we’ve entered a ghost city. The streets are deserted, though fifteen minutes after we arrive at the hotel, they fill with disconsolate UK supporters, victims of a dreaded penalty shoot-out with Italy.

We’re steering well clear of the capital on this part of the tour, avoiding Wimbledon and the mayhem of the upcoming Olympics. We’ll be hitting the major cities when we return in September, but as a run-up to our Hop Farm Festival appearance on Saturday, we’re visiting places we might have otherwise missed, and sometimes never been. Wolverhampton, for example, turns out to be a friendly town with a great spirit, a church that’s been around for a millennium, and a packed Wulfrun Hall spilling out into the hallways. It makes for a memorable show, our first proper of the tour, and the wolf-howling that accompanies “Banga” makes us and audience all part of the same pack.



We played the Cardiff Coal Exchange a few years back. I remember the beautiful room covered in dark wood, and the local Brains beer from down the road (I still have their coaster decorating my desk back home). The Exchange was the site, I am proudly told, of the first million-pound business deal ever signed in Britain, as the twentieth century dawned. It’s like a sauna inside, helped along by the heat-lamp spotlight that Futz, our lighting designer, has aimed at the small of my back. I finish the set soaked to the skin, which, really, is how I like it.

It’s a day off in Bath upcoming, placing us in a lovely hotel (the Queensberry, should you be in the neighborhood), near the Royal Crescent; more importantly, a laundry, and a delightful old bookshop where I find a paperback of Clifford Simak’s City. One of science-fiction’s truest masterpieces, I first read it in Boy Scout camp in 1959, and it’s been on my mind recently since it posits a future history in which the Dogs have taken over the Earth, the follies of Man becoming the stuff of myth and half-forgotten legend. In this year of Banga, it’s all too perfect to gift to Patti.



Then on to the Hop Farm Festival in the southeast of the country. We were here a year ago as an acoustic trio supplemented by Patrick Wolf on violin. It’s his birthday on the day of the show, so we invite him to celebrate with us on the main stage. The weather is perfect in this, one of the most family-friendly (children are free, as they are) and idealistic festivals around (no branding or sponsorships). The atmosphere is that of a renaissance country fair. Before us, Sir Bruce Forsyth, 84 years young and a Brit institution, brings an orchestral flair to the proceedings, followed by Joan Armatrading, doing one of Tony Shanahan’s favorite numbers, “I Love it When You Call Me Names.” After our set, we stay around to catch Bob Dylan, who mumbo-jumbo’s his songs in a winning way (that is “A Hard Rain,” I’m sure of it), and even doffs his guitar to sing at the microphone a la Frank Sinatra. Then, just before he deconstructs “Like A Rolling Stone,” we head for our bus to make the Channel ferry and learn how it really feels.

June 23, 2012 BERGEN, NORWAY

I get myself in the mood for Norway by starting another Jo Nesbo crime thriller, The Redbreast. Just as the plane touches down outside Bergen, the town's name comes up in the paragraph I'm reading, a sign that I am where I should be. And I have been, once before, in 2008. The smallish city is as I remember, with an air of Sweethaven from Robert Altman's Popeye, a seafaring community on the west coast of the country that seems innocent enough until you realize that this is where an infamous extreme-metal church burning took place; the strange dark undercurrent that becomes the Nordic aesthetic.



And as luck would have it, my favorite Scandinavian iron-ore indulgence is playing on the night we arrive. Over the past year I have gotten to know Mikael Akerfeldt, the leader of Sweden's Opeth and a vinyl collector of no mean repute, interviewing him for eMusic about their latest and quite progressive new album, Heritage, and watching his band headline Webster Hall and share a bill with Mastodon at Roseland. Tonight they're over at the Grieghalle, in the aptly-titled Peer Gynt room, and he invites me over to catch the show and to celebrate Midsummer in the traditional Swedish way, with herring and Aquavit. I warm up on the festival grounds with a Daptone double-bill of Charles Bradley and the Extraordinaires (Andrew gets his bear hug from Charles) and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Though often referred to as neo-soul, I find these Brooklyn-based practitioners hardly post-modern. This is the real deal, tight ensemble playing surrounding lead singers who shake-it-up-baybee, and though there is a bit of incongruity seeing this music in the quite different demographic of Norway, I am soon up near the front of the stage working on my funky-butt moves.



I also make my way to the first few rows of Opeth's midnight show, surrounded by a sea of black t-shirts emblazoned with each fan's special band allegiance. The bottom frequencies thunder my chest, though the subterranean throb is leavened by Opeth's sense of dynamics and song structure, which abruptly shifts from earth-moving rumblings to delicate folk-based heart-on-sleeve melodics. Though the crowd devil-horns en masse, they seem willing to embrace Opeth's expansion of the black metal readymade. Backstage, we lift our glasses, spear those herrings, dip potatoes in sour cream, and sing a Svenska salute to the soul-stice. It's still light when I walk back to the hotel nearing three a.m., dusk shading imperceptibly into dawn.

June 20 - 21, 2012 PARIS, FRANCE



Ready to launch. We’re on the runway awaiting take-off. The intricate puzzle that is getting ready to leave home for the summer has been assembled, piece by painstaking piece: house chores completed, financial empire in order, guitars set-up, writings deadlined, books chosen, loved ones cherished. Sitting on the plane as it revs engines, I take a moment, as I always do, to wonder what is in store between now and the flight home, to savor the imminence of leavetaking and the anticipation of return, and all that will transpire. A breath of suspended moment before time starts a new chapter.

This will be a long summer away. Our first leg, now that a pair of French television shows have been added to prologue the actual beginning of the tour, will stretch nearly seven weeks. We’re back for two weeks in August, and then out again for a month, all in Europe; an ocean away from the comforting rituals of home and hearth, not to mention the 45 collection that still awaits sorting. It’s a rigorous schedule, but with Banga newly unleashed, and the camaraderie of a traveling band, one feels privileged to head out on this tour of endurance and endancing.

We head straight to the television studio after landing in France, on set within minutes with nary time for a café crème. The show is Le Grand Journal, and the director keeps changing the song order. We’re supposed to be playing “Banga” for the broadcast, and “Maria” for the web bonus, but when it comes time to roll the cameras, they are undecided about which to play first. I spend my time watching the old video clips they run of our past television performances—whoops, there’s the kimono I wore on Rockpalast in 1979, for which I’m still being ribbed by the band. By the time we finally get to the hotel, the show is ready to broadcast and we watch ourselves in the bar, barking along.

The next day is even stranger. The show is set around a dinner table, with about eight guests in attendance. Amidst what I think are culinary discussions, we are brought on to do “April Fool.” It’s over before we know it, and then, finally, we are able to unwind in the Parisian night. Andrew Burns, our tour manager, takes me and Jay Dee to a bar he’s discovered with an accordion player in full Français swing. As evocative as this is, I notice that in celebration of the summer solstice, all of Paris is filled with music, bands set up on streetcorners, in cafes, alongside the church of St. Germain des Pres. Such a clamorous Fete de la Musique makes a beautiful soundtrack as we toast this magnificent city, and an auspicious start to our imminent journeying.

Read Lenny's Tour Diary Archive.