The Troubles & Travails of a Travelling Accordion Player, Here Recorded For Your Amusement & Edification.

Set-pieces & Scene Reports.

11/5/08

10/23/08

Kiev Borispol Airport: the deadpan, shushing gurgle of throat-clearing slavic and the curt bark of its reply; an insinuating mutter with momentary harshnesses like slick craggy rocks in a rushing stream. the wet-sandpaper or mild steel wool of brushed hebrew from the sloppy american hasids on their stopover from tel aviv expanding to fill the physical and psychic space of the economy class with waves of children, hatboxes, and body odor. the shovingly impersonal rudeness a facade of tooth-and-claw efficiency over a blank-eyed inertia.

new york-bound departures has its own gate, set off by glass and another set of security - my third and the first that seems serious about its job in the way in which americans have become accustomed, profiled in our own way for the curious attention given the moving target by the nonpartisan bystander. stamboul, baku, tashkent, kursk, the old silk road glamour made low by demystifying proximity and the increasing certainty that one would only find there the same six stories of worried and slumping concrete with a prayer-wheel of drying underwear. the cold-eyed women, dark, sculpted eyebrows and long serpentine necks, roosting atop calf-high crushed-leather stalks. the sidewalk-nests of rattish young men with short, tight mullets. KCEROKC. NOTARIYC. PECTOPAH.

crimea is built of a dirty, dark-yellow brick that looks like dry sea sponge. piles of it are everywhere: tossed through windows of half-built tatar squats, windows also shaped from the same urine-hued block, acres of it neatly stacked on dried-thatch lands next to the industrial highways as a proprietary hedge in the event the owner-to-be discovers the time or the money to stack the first room of the new shelter. it doesn't look insulating and the concrete mortar is sloppy, but with an aluminum sheet-roof and storm windows it can be thrown together quickly and anchor a claim.

the drive to ai-petri where the high cliffs over yalta face turkey is like flipping through the oages of an atlas. the moody orientalisms of the bakchisarai valley, all tatar pillows and vinous sunsets, grunts upwards through a low-slung and claustrophobic climb through a new england forest that wipe-fades into low, rolling montanan buttes, one topped by mushroom-puffed white geodesic domes of some weather observatory or military installation rooted like a west texas wind farm. the precipice is mottled with gold-rush construction in primary-color metal and the ubiquitous spongiform brick; industrious tatars hawking raw shaslik and russian bulldozers. two bactrian camels with humps like deflated bagpipes ferry children to the electronic buzz of digital zoom and should seem bedraggled but retain a kind of fairy-tale dignity.

a gold-leafed Lenin strapped in to a scaffolding like Laika.

7/22/08

The Dresden Dolls & Franz Nicolay version of Johnny Cash's "Ballad of a Teenage Queen" will come out on Anchorless Records' All Aboard: A Tribute To Johnny Cash on September 9 on CD and four colours of vinyl. Other artists include the Bouncing Souls, Chuck Ragan (Hot Water Music), the Gaslight Anthem, and Ben Nichols (Lucero); and it's a benefit for a breast cancer charity. More info here.

6/17/08

Extraordinarily, i opened my eyes and found i was only thirty or so inches from the ceiling. the extraordinary part was that i was in my own bed, a loft in a windowless portion of a concrete bloc in industrial brooklyn. redefinitions abound: i had thought all along i was a performer, but it turns out what i am primarily is a traveller, occasionally in public. i'm not a particularly engaged traveller, when i'm without a specific assignment or appointment. i'll scan the used-book store or have a veggie burger and a beer in the outdoor seat. you'd almost think i'd rather be at home.

i'm about to move, which is as good a time as any to describe my home of the last two years. strictly speaking, the concrete block is my neighbor, a recently-erected structure of breathtaking literalism in the service of form following function; it is nothing more or less than a square, windowless cube crouched toad-like over two loading entrances. otherwise, there's the chinatown bus parking area, the armored-car dispatch center, a tortilla factory, and a long-shuttered storefront neŽ "Mr. Mushroom". it's not a dangerous area so much as simply deserted. mine is the only residential building for blocks around, a story-and-a-half of misanthropes, obsessives, and post-grad artists, with a tar-papered roof off the second floor that could comfortably host a mid-sized refugee camp.

my room is approximately eight feet by ten feet. it was sequestered from a proper apartment by my landlords, a lesbian couple of my college acquaintance, with all the permanence of a couch-pillow fort. one was going away for a two-year mfa program, and they took on boarders for the duration. i have a loft bed with a borrowed futon mattress, a battered spinet, a garment rack for the suits, and a wall of used school lockers that serve as a closet/book storage. there's a small window about eight feet up the wall. any light is blocked by the loft, but that's a moot point really; the window only looks onto the hallway. a storage space with a bed, really, but it may have ended up costing me as much as i saved, since whenever i was home, i went out to eat or drink as often as possible to get some fresh air and sunlight.

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i have shaved my head. the bathroom at the phoenix in san francisco looked like a crime scene. opinions are backhanded. a novelty-goth of my acquaintance asked, "have you lost weight?" "not particularly." "maybe it's the hair." "how much would you have thought i'd lost?" "a lot, like fifty pounds." "motherfucker, how big did you think i was?" (ask the nme about that shit.) jack:"i can't tell whether you look more like a 20th-century fascist or a 19th-century anarchist." sandra: "you look even more terrifying than before." i'd better, i feel like a neutered goat.

anyway, i'm moving to jersey city for a while when i get back from tour, back in with the old fire-breathing circus friend while his thai wife is in switzerland. it all sounds like a synopsis of a rejected tom waits song.

6/4/08

what i did on my winter vacation:

life would indeed be a treat if every year meant touring from april to november and recording from december through march. can we arrange for all the musicians to be on this schedule? then we can tour when it's nice out and hole up and make records when it's not. anti-social music, the hold steady, emilyn brodsky, the loved ones, the 241ers, the star fucking hipsters, jennifer o'connor, the max levine ensemble, the living end...let's all promise to write a book someday, ok?

and then go travelling. the inferno tour from san francisco to austin and beyond. mr. brad logan for a floor to sleep on, mr. biafra in sf, mr. john brannon with fucked up (and those raw food candy bars, whatever they're called), mr. webley and the slits on the same stage, ms. brodsky joining me for busking, a dozen bands that sounded just like choking victim, airport security in austin that made me throw out a sleeping bag that's seen me through some lean years.

through extraordinary kindnesses of praiseworthy people, i spent time in howard's place in najac, france; with road trips to lourdes and the dali museum in girona. you may never know the chagrin of realising you are that guy with the handlebar moustache at the dali museum. however, i am pleased to share that at lourdes, you may purchase a virgin mary barometer, who changes from pink to blue as the humidity drops, and a pen with the liquid bit so the maria can drop slowly into the grotto. the pen, however, does not write.

i went to ukraine, the borderland, the breadbasket of the east, fruit of taras shevchenko's loins or something approximate. the hold steady got me to london, claire and dexter got me through an extra weekend, the camden barfly got me a 30-minute set, a bottle of wine, and fifty extra pounds, which got me a new ryanair ticket (w!zzair, my revenge shall be swift, brutal, and delayed) after a night sleeping under the departures sign at stansted only to find i'd booked myself to fly the day previous, which eventually got me to rzeszow, poland; to negotiate a swift train to przemsyl (i now understand why the czechs and poles chose wisconsin, the scenery is identical), to negotiate a slow, overnight, 17-hour soviet-era sleeper car to kiev. my bunkmate oleg was helpful when the border guards were unamused by my beginner's ukrainian and barely-extant polish. success was mine, though, and i found maria in kiev, jumped in the dnieper, was gifted a few joints when she asked for cigarettes at gogolfest, vowed to get dakha brakha on a dresden dolls tour, discovered that georgian food was worth any price, didn't sleep on the train to l'viv or on an epic night of vodka toasts with the kurbas theatre folks (who put on the best performance of "symposium" i never understood a word of) or when i got my first proper marriage proposal, or on the bus to bukhovina, or drinking milk straight from the cow with the hutsul musicians, or negotiating cab fare to the polish border from "jerry, for americans" (for the record, "jerry", ya rozumiyo jaroslaw). in case this comes up for anyone else, the recommendation is, don't take public transport across the ukrainian-polish border: since everyone is presumed to be smuggling things into the EU, the customs stops take hours. we took this advice and took the pedestrian crossing. there is about a quarter-mile between the ukrainian exit border and the polish entrance border, a no-man's-land with duty-free liquor and a strong zloty vis-a-vis the hryvnia. result? a sunday-night stream of drunken border-pole cheap-booze regulars, elbowing, shoving, yelling, annoyed that two american backpacker accordionists were clogging up the works. przemsyl is a lovely city and has a museum of both pipes (the kind you smoke) and bells (the kind you ring) that someday i will actually get to see.

my ukrainian language skills, still limited, go on my list of summer tour projects alongside the banjo, that online business course so i'm not such a fool about money anymore, and the busking in (most) every city. see you there.

3/7/08

A friend recently identified los angeles as "the r. kelly of cities. It's fucked up and totally nuts, but on such a large-scale and committed way that you just have to accept and even admire it." I went looking for Durante's star, which, in a pleasing slice of cultural confluence, is near the corner of Hollywood and Vine. It's no small hike from the Knit, but I'm committed. Sadly, almost the whole of the 1600 block of Vine is levelled for construction, demapping both of the great Durante's stars.

2/4/08

I like making records. I like it so much I'd do it every day if I could. All day. And well into the night. We start mixing the Hold Steady record today. I'm tracking a solo record in two weeks, as soon as THS is done, with Brian Viglione (Dresden Dolls), Yula Be'eri (Nanuchka, ex-Inferno), and Jared Scott (Demander) as Major General. We're doing it out at Water Music in Hoboken. But before we do, while we have such an excellent band together, we're doing a show February 19 at Grand Central. It's a soon-to-be-disappeared all ages DIY venue from the people who brought you Death By Audio and the Silent Barn. I haven't fronted a band in nine years, and who knows when it'll happen again?

Speaking of the Dresden Dolls. The formidable David Bilmas asked me to submit a track to his Jonathan Richman tribute. I figured I'd do "New England", as a good New Hampshire boy. Figured hey, I should get some Boston people in on it, make it a local-pride thing. Amanda was into it. Comes this weekend, she says, "Hey, Brian's in town too, how about he comes and plays?" It was so much fun we did a Johnny Cash cover too; that'll be on a different comp in due time. I think we might have jinxed the hometown football team though, with all that "Spirit of America" and "Live Free or Die" talk. Sorry guys.

There's that song auction coming up too. Would it be wrong to put the first sentence of this in every press release I ever write again, ever? Would it?

The beard is coming in proper, thanks for asking.

11/8/07

It's business time...

For news, show announcements, inducements and entreaties, I have hereteofore had a ramshackle monthly hotmail bulletin. no longer. hotmail is an ass. to find out where i am in the world and with what band, why not join the mailing list?: franznicolaylist-subscribe@googlegroups.com

For Franz solo shows, announcements, and brand-new tracks: MYSPACE.COM/FRANZNICOLAY. The highlight here is "Jeff Penalty", the track I recorded at Don Fury's, with Demander charitably and ably playing the role of "the band". A true-life tale of opening for the reunited, Jello-less Dead Kennedys a few years ago, which will be available soon as the B-side of a split 7" with Mischief Brew.

Also! I've been demoing some songs toward an upcoming release, and in the meantime, if you're interested or curious, I'm making them available as "The Black Rose Paladins (Demos 2007)". Danger, solo demos! Approach with caution! Included are "Dead Sailors" and "Note On A Subway Wall", lyrics by World/Inferno's Jack Terricloth, refugees from only-ever-theoretical "Jack & Franz Sing Sad Songs of Love" collection.

I'll leave the store here and on the myspace until I find a better place for it. 99 cents each or $7.99 for all 12. Plus I'm making a limited run of 50 numbered, handmade physical copies available at shows (that's December 9 at Mercury Lounge, for all you slackers).

11/6/07

it was exceedingly strange to go to bed in frigid san francisco, in a scarf and gloves, and stumble out into sunny, warm los angeles staring down the barrel of some damn fine huevos rancheros. not that i'm complaining. i got some shiny new patent leather shoes, the fonda theater has a classily faded cerulean-and-maroon with gold leaf color scheme, and i don't recognize any of the names on the hollywood boulevard stars under the marquee.

by san diego i'd had three plates of huevos rancheros in thirty-six hours.

11/4/07

pulled over in belgrade, montana, at Sir Scott's Sports Oasis, Home of the Garbage Burger, on the occasion of a bathroom emergency. it is a rare joy to roll out of bed at 3pm, in front of a 4-regular bar in mid-afternoon suddenly confronted by 5 fellows in hospital scrubs, slippers, and wool hats asking for jager shots and bud bottles as an excuse to use the facilities. happy to brighten your day, folks.

speaking of time, i will say this has been a confusing tour, circadian-wise. notwithstanding i'm crawling in my sensory-deprivation bunk at 4am or so and rolling out ten-ish hours later for breakfast and a shower right before (afternoon) soundcheck, now we're hauling 14-hour days across the upper plains region and smashing through time zones. not to mention the ever-elusive daylight-savings barrier. the bus clock, computers, and cellphones all disagree. i predict the next bar stop: "excuse me, ma'am, can you tell us what time it is?"

the previous occupant of our tour bus was american idol longhair bo bice. our driver is a sturgis-bandanaed, mustachioed gnome named david, who was wearing an Eric Johnson "Ah Via Musicum" tour shirt when we met. he's been calling me "Harvey"; i can't tell whether it's a joke or whether he thinks that's my name. or maybe i do, in fact, resemble an invisible rabbit.

(n.b. turns out he thought it was "Javier", and was calling me Javy.)

11/3/07

i just passed something called the north dakota cowboy museum. it's 3:30 pm, i crawled out of my bunk in hospital scrub pants and the fuzzy slippers i made a special trip to buy at target yesterday in minneapolis. lost in translation is on and it goes rather well with a microwaved spinach-feta pocket, a corona, and a isolation pod barreling toward billings at 80 per. a little rock and roll domesticity is never amiss in this corner.

Missed the Inferno Halloween for the first time in eight years, but The Banditos recorded Halloween in Chicago for an upcoming live record. And in the most exciting news for me, I'm playing a solo show December 9 at Mercury Lounge supporting Danbert Nobacon, singer of the legendary Chumbawamba. Mischief Brew will be there too. Come!

10/4/07

Why is it that coming home is always so much busier than tour? Ah, the multitude of activities! Quick update: Played on the Star Fucking Hipsters & Loved Ones records, of which at least the latter is for Fat Wreck; went on tour with World/Inferno again (the new record "Addicted to Bad Ideas" is now available everywhere) and the Subhumans (playing accordion on "Work-Rest-Play-Die" again was fun but I wish they'd have given me a heads-up first); appeared as a panelist (on the future of physical retail?) at the Future of Music Coalition's annual Policy Summit.

Also I'm ramping up with my solo stuff. There are two shows coming up, one in Brooklyn and one in South Philly. I've been demoing for a record. And I'll be recording one song, with Demander kind enough to fill out the band, at Don Fury's for an upcoming split 7" with...well, soon enough for that.

And Hold Steady writing continues apace. More soon...

8/29/07

Bosnia-Herzegovina has two separate airlines, Air Bosna and BH Airlines. Seems excessive...

The hellish travel, in the end, was fully worth it to see the Stooges and, pleasant surprise, Kultur Shock. As Craig said about the Stooges, "This is what rock and roll sounds like." saw Iggy in the airport the next day rocking a vacationing-dad look: glasses, sandals, polo shirt, plaid shorts, knee braces.

8/27/07

The birthday odyssey: A play-by-play...

on the occasion of my thirtieth birthday i have celebrated by, much like every other night, playing a rock show and getting loaded. stick with what you know, right? and, now, getting up at 7:30am to board something called WizAir to zagreb, so if i fall out of the sky somewhere over Ljubljana tell the world i was once beautiful. the twenties were a hell of a lot of fun but i wouldn't have them over for a million dollars.

...did I say WizAir? I'm sorry, that should be W!zzAir, exclamation point definitely intended, fuschia planes not excluded but also not airborne. to the tune of a ten-hour engine-problem delay, so i'll spend my thirtieth drinking bloody marys and mojitos in a c-list airport north of london. luton rifles, luton rifles...

it all seems appropriate. for my twenty-first, i was on a family vacation in montana, on a day trip to yellowstone, and ended up in a dry town on the montana border eating a veggie burger with a french fry stuck into the bun like a candle.

a fun game for the truly rich and bored would be go to the airport and get a ticket for the first departure city you don't recognize. Dalaman? Faro? Katowice? Reus? Bourgas? Alicante? The W!zzAir board reads like a Kusturica shooting schedule. You can't trust these short-hop airlines anyway. RyanAir? Thompson Jet? EasyJet? I don't want airlines with a first name. Countries only. You need to have some accountability. Something goes wrong with Croatian Airlines, you know to call Zagreb. There's no Ryan embassy. "Hey Ryan, some guys are looking for you. And they're pissed."

Joke's on me, I am going to Ljubljana. Eventually. At 10pm I'm still sitting in the plane, while a member of a Russian rugby team who got too drunk to get on the plane is slapped around, hard, by his elderly coach and his bags are pulled off the plane. I don't speak Russian but "What the fuck is wrong with you?" is universal. So to Slovenia, with a connection to a bus across the border. The rugby players have commandeered the back of the bus, the rockers in front, we've got a bottle of Jameson; they've got Right Said Fred on somebody's phone. it's like sharing a bus with 15 Rocco Siffreddis. let the best men win. most memorable birthday ever. how often do you get on a plane and end up in the wrong country? but it's a full moon over slovenia and the Hip-Hop rest stops (really!) are shining beacons. Every day an adventure.

8/23/07

as i wander the aisles of a roadside marks & spencer, bemoaning the omnipresence of accurs�d mayo, that precedent clause pops into my head, in regards the search for a decent sandwich in this gourmet-forsaken country. i fell asleep on the ferry again yesterday (n.b. in my new life as a professional rock-and-roller, i am seeing far more of 5am as a time to wake up than a time to go to bed. i've been duped.), was smacked by a porter, played human frogger in lieu of an underpass; and spent an hour peering through the portcullis, roaming the grassy ramparts, and negotiating the moat of the 900-year-old carlisle castle (where it seems mary queen of scots was once imprisoned) with a russet tour manager named jess. i never stop getting a small kick out of staying at hotels with names like "the crown & mitre".

"tomorrow is going to suck. and the problem with tomorrow is, it always turns into today." - mcquiston

and so it was; a 7am wakeup call to drive eight hours to london, do a BBC radio interview, drive across town to tape an acoustic session for xm radio (including a cover of "dance music" which, in re: the accordion part, it amuses me to think of as "cajun dance music" - if only the recently-hyped band followed truth in advertising), then back in the van for a four-hour drive to leeds for the festival tomorrow. my reading light has inevitably died and thank god i downloaded all that stuff off archive.org or i'd throw a giant boredom fit. tonight montaigne is supplying surprisingly engaging diversion - like with melville, it always comes as a slight shock when canonic figures from the past turn out to be sympathetic, even fun, certainly recognizable as humans who might once have lived and you could have a drink with - though i still can't quite acclimate to reading books on a computer screen.

well, as always, it beats working, and a hallucinatory sleep-deprivation is sometimes interesting on its own terms. howard brought, in addition to more wine and bottles of 12-year-aged Jameson's than even this school of fish could swallow, another jeffrey bernard collection which i will make a point of enjoying in bite-size morsels this time instead of in one exhausting gulp. a shot or two of scotch is bracing and enlivening, twenty in a row less so.

8/22/07

Out here in the land of the broad majestic Shannon they're still gamely doubling the street signs in Gaelic. A girl in green velvet heels who won tickets to our show without having the foggiest idea who we were orders a vodka straight, adds Malibu rum from a fifth in her purse, nags Bobby to top it off with Jameson's, and falls over. No thank you. I will take that spinach and ricotta tortellini for dinner and "pear and cookie gateau" with Irish coffee for dessert, though. in belfast, where the dominant form of sidewalk life is sullen young men walking in pairs, and my new track-suit-top-plus-flat-cap look puts me smack in the mainstream. finally!

8/19/07

We opened for the Rolling Stones last night. It was the biggest show I've ever played but didn't feel like it, mostly because of the polite but unenthusiastic crowd (well, they did have other priorities, I suppose). The capacity at Slane Castle, a squat, squarish, easy-to-miss affair on a hill, is about 85,000, and while I don't know it was sold out, it was pretty close. It was dank and spitting rain all night, the keyboard was slick with water and I wished I'd had the accordion so I'd have something to play just in case the keys shorted out. The constant coming and going of helicopters made the whole scene feel a little "Apocalypse Now".

Since you're wondering, I did not get to meet the Stones, nor did we get to watch the show from the stage or any special vantage point. They let us into the "Golden Circle", which was the muddy area more or less in front of the stage, but far enough that the band looked like Ken-sized figurines.

In regards their show: Thank god for Charlie Watts. He is still holding it down solidly and with not a touch of flash. Keith Richards is barely playing. It's little commented upon that he is not actually the lead guitarist. Ronnie Wood handles the solos and sounds fine, and on the rare occasion that Keith took one it was largely a single repeated figure. He had a sozzled grin and took the sort of half-hearted swipes at his guitar I recognized from other too-loaded-to-play figures I have known and loved. Hm.

(While we were setting up, one of the Stones' roadies came up to another and said, "The boys have arrived...they're in very high spirits." Couldn't tell if that meant they were loaded or whether it was sarcastic, given that this was the last show of their tour.)

But an admirably simple stage show. About two-thirds of the way through, the band gathers on a small central portion of the stage, which glides into the middle of the crowd. Thus when the giant inflatable lips are half-heartedly unveiled back on the main stage, now more or less in darkness, the crowd's attention is focused a quarter-mile away, and the half-inflated lips shamefacedly retreat after one song, flapping a bit in the wind. Mick switched a light-blue three-quarter length leather coat for a red one. And that, apart from a bit of flame in the turrets of the stage during "Sympathy for the Devil", was largely that.

Also I couldn't help noticing that poor Darryl Jones doesn't get any Jumbotron time except by accident. Do you think this is an actual policy in Stonesland?

As for me, I drank two bottles of wine, manfully struggled to avoid vomiting on the ride back to Dublin, ill-advisedly answered some emails and gratefully passed out.

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The show at Barbes was a great deal of fun. I think I'll do more of them. If you're wondering what it is I'm up to on these things, try this blurb on for size: "days of wine and roses, full-throated songs and stories shamelessly strident, stentorian and more than a little sentimental, pitched somewhere between Mark Eitzel and Al Jolson, with a pit stop at Gene Pitney." And check out page two of this week's Onion.

somewhere in western pennsylvania, near exit 235 or thereabouts, there is a Love truckstop with an Arby's attached, and in it sits a man, not so young, early thirties perhaps, with a battered Guinness baseball cap and a look of slack-jawed focus. he has brought and set up a desktop gaming console and a standalone 17-inch monitor, a half-dozen cables connecting, and there he sits, headphones on, in an Arby's booth, with no Arby's food or food remains, grimly playing a driving game.

all i ever knew of ashtabula was "you're gonna make me lonesome", and all i ever remembered of youngstown was inferno playing there to the bartender after a packed bane show let out and the smoke machine residue cleared. i guess i can now add to that trying to find a hotel when everything for miles around was packed by the combination of a dog show and the Pony League softball national tournament. much tailgating outside rvs almost as big as their owners. parked like a hulking blacked-out UFO in the midst of all this is an adult superstore called club 76, offering everything from "skill games" to something called a "body shampoo" that you can get at the "club 76 spa", open 24 hours. in a rather endearing detail, i'm told that since the bar is so deep (to give the girls room to do whatever it is they do on the bar), the old lady bartender delivers your beers and dumps the ashtrays with a grabber. you know, like the deli guys use to restock the Charmin on the top shelf.

"Movin' right along, foot-loose and fancy free. You're ready for the big time, is it ready for me?" - Muppets

I wrote a piece for Blender for their feature on favorite records that get no respect. It's here in context, here unedited:

The Carpenters - The Singles 1969-81

When I tell people that I'm mostly into really depressing, emotional, and sentimental music, they get the wrong idea. "Oh, so, like Elliott Smith and Leonard Cohen?" No, not simply bummed. I'm talking about monumentally hopeless. Shamelessly needy. Orchestral cathedrals to self-pity: American Music Club, Red House Painters, Walker Brothers. You're not really wallowing in it until you've got a string section, full-throated operatic vocals, and the kind of lyrics a seventh-grader would be embarrassed to scribble in a locked diary.

And no-one wears their naked neediness and colossal co-dependency on their sleeves like the Carpenters. "I Need To Be In Love". "I Won't Last A Day Without You". Why do they keep hurting each other? They long to be close to you. All they got from love was a love song. When it's gone, it's just gone. But they just fall in love again.

I could make the point by simply reprinting the truly terrifying "Goodbye To Love": "I'll say goodbye to love. There are no tomorrows for this heart of mine. Time and time again the chance for love has passed me by, and all I know of love is how to live without it. So I've made my mind up I will live my life alone. Though it's not the easy way, I guess I've always known I'd say goodbye to love." Flow, my tears!

Even disqualifying covers like the devastating, sui generis elegy of groupie abandonment "Superstar" and the truly batty "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft", it's a devastating (and often harmonically surprising) catalog almost smothered by the worst kind of coke-thinned studio drums and milquetoast string arrangements, waiting for a Neil Hannon or Jens Lekman to bite.

About ten years ago, I found Richard Carpenter's only solo record, "Pianist-Arranger-Composer-Conductor" for sixty-seven cents at Sounds in New York, which plays like a demo reel for someone looking to score some movie or ad work. I'd be surprised if he needed the cash and it'd be a shame if he needed the job. Without his sister's pathology as a foil, it's simply easy listening with a few hey-what's-that chord changes. Somebody's gonna have to pull a Costello/Bacharach on him real soon. Hands up, who's in?

Two very nice things from Q magazine, the fine British publication. In the July issue, The Hold Steady is #8 in their 10 Most Exciting Bands In The World Right Now: "The Hold Steady are the best live band on the planet, no contest." And online, they've been kind enough to choose me for an ongoing "Heroes of Q" feature. I won't let you down, boys.

"Which is the right life? The simple life or the night life?" - Cole Porter

In lieu of owning a digital camera, or a camera of any tangible kind, I've been keeping a bit of a travel diary full of uninformed opinions and snap judgments. Anyone mind if I share? All capitalization [sic]. I know, I know...

guilfest was...family-friendly. heavy after-work crowd. i'm not quite ready for state fairs yet in my career. liv tyler was there, weirdly, with supergrass. latitude had tripod bugs, backstage ping-pong, more movie people (ian hart and james franco), don letts, paul simonon, girls on their boyfriends' shoulders, a giant banner that said "put me in the chillout tent". two more money-burning days in london, then home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

In other business, the new World/Inferno is available for preorder! "Addicted To Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century" is available on Chunksaah records August 31.

And, might I add, the Harry Potter seal of approval: "The best band for me this year, far and away, is the Hold Steady." - Daniel Radcliffe. The video interview is here.

Never thought it would come to this, but here's the claymation.

I saw three bands I particularly enjoyed on this past tour. They were Sweet Sweet Lies from Brighton (Stephin Merritt meets Nick Cave), The Rumble Strips from London (RIYL Dexys Midnight Runners), and Flamingo 50 from Liverpool (RIYL J Church and shout-along punk).

liverpool has many many roofless and boarded buildings, with wheatpasted signs reading "this property has been stripped of all valuables and fittings." arson might be a local specialty if appearances are any indication. baltimore or detroit style, though without the terrifying lowlifes on every corner. an admirable realism reigns in the local economy: "Not Drunk Enough - 24-hour beer sales" sits a block from "News & Booze", a local chain of off-licenses. "Bargain Booze - Making Life Richer For The Pourer." discount and charity shops and bookies. do not attempt to order vegetable lasagna in a local pub, nor veggie burger in the kebab house; the latter is deep-fried and the former still frozen in the middle and relying heavily on some sort of cheese sauce. there's a fellow dragging a suitcase next to the van who's a dead ringer for sebastian bach. "slave to the grind!"

stoke-on-trent is recently being referred to in the national press as "smoke-on-trent", due to this embarrassing happenstance: the local council, upon the lowering of the national smoking ban, neglected to vote themselves the authority to levy the 50-pound fine, rendering the ban unenforceable. it won't last, but for now, the forces of mere anarchy snicker and light up.

garnethill park in glasgow was created in 1991 by some august personage for a visit by the late princess of wales. i passed it just after seeing the piaf biopic. it is almost enclosed by trees and built on a small block of a hill. on first glance, the stone steps look crumbled. then you realize the crumbled parts have been artfully arranged to guide the water. but as you start to ascend the stair, you realize the stair itself is the stream, that the grass above the stairs is also sodden, that somehow the waterway means to drain through the middle of the park itself. a trio of middle-aged hooligans shares a bottle, a mother pushes a asiatic baby on a swing, and three arabic toughs in sweatsuits loiter on the corner. a boy with his arm around his little brother ascends the sidewalk.

"what was the greatest moment of your life?"
"the first time the curtain opened." - piaf, from "la vie en rose"

traffic sign driving north on the scottish coast: "haste ye back"

giant barren rock rising dead and tortoise-like out of the sea. i've found, online, the old nbc radio "big show" hosted by tallulah bankhead, with jimmy durante, ethel merman, milton berle, rosemary clooney ("a bright new singing star!") and anti-communist propaganda plays. shorn goats. rocky coastline dotted with gulls, distant isles, and rotting moss. ferns, heather, rock-hugging fuschia blossoms and queen-anne's lace. scuba divers 20 yards off the multichrome beach....then a beachfront community (ailsa craig) with weirdly floridian pre-planning, one groomed swath of grass but all the houses have gravel yards like phoenix. a shipyard though, a dozen fishing boats up on blocks and sticks like noah's ark.

another traffic sign: "! Otters"

eastward turn away from the coast and we're in and out of forests and overgrown sheep fields. looks like nothing so much as new hampshire, actually. specifically denley emerson's place up on the hill on the road heading to moultonboro. traffic sign: "[left arrow] maidens 2". really? left turn, driver!

for all these towns with such ancient, roofless stone churches and their (vastly more durable) graveyards, how come all the houses look like they were built in the seventies? ah, this one makes more sense. on the side of a long, sloping valley, so you can see a hundred miles or more of fields to the south. old men playing quoits in a square. the scottish evidence an admirable tolerance for allowing the multitudinous local weeds a loose rein in public spaces. two-foot clovers in the churchyard. our slow caravan of buses trundles on the winding two-laner as a grumpy renault tries to hopscotch forward. scenes that make me want to use the word "copse". and "gorse".

"Crematorium [right arrow]"

christmas tree farms.

glasgow's colors match the sooty sky - sodden tenements interspersed by the rather intimidating vintage "parliamentary" style - dirty, red, gabled and turreted, monumental in size. carling has an extraordinary promotion going at t in the park: warm beer amnesty. i.e., for similarly sooty and sodden festivalgoers whose sole comfort has grown stale, the corporate overlords will exchange any amount of unopened, warm beers for ice-cold carlings. which raises the question of whether ice-cold carlings are preferable to just about any other beer, even piping hot.

so here's what happened. we were up at 5 to catch the first ferry, but our set was at 1:45 and the ferry was delayed an hour. (another band-fest on the ferry: brian jonestown massacre, badly drawn boy, tokyo police club.) try as we might we didn't get to stage until 2, so jumped up with an accordion, acoustic guitar, and snare drum, played three songs, went and ate a huge lunch. still got paid. beats working. plus with gogol bordello out gallivanting with madonna i can now lay uncontested claim to biggest moustache and longest accordion solo of the fest. something called "veggie toad in a hole" - yorkshire pudding with embedded sausage, drowned in gravy. and so to glasgow, two nights.

hove, norway. on an island which was an immigration center and ex-nazi war camp. the killers' crew bus saves us when we are stranded at the airport with no ride by taking our gear. the band they work for, who walk on from their tour bus in matching silver lame jackets. janet weiss is so chill and basically cool it's almost intimidating. singer from the noisettes is a charmer who shares our dinner of steaks, potatoes, and a delicious couscous with raisins and roasted red peppers.

the driver to the fest had a whole spiel about how he'd taken time off to see us play, was really excited, &c, &c. after some back and forth on his walkie-talkie he asked, "you guys are tv on the radio, right?" oops. we commented on the extraordinary and extraordinarily consistent beauty of the norwegian women. "it's because we have so many different kinds of people, they all mix together." really? that's funny, cause i thought it was for the exact opposite reason...

kristiansand: seagulls, sailboats, shipping cartons, a statue of a bearded captain, heated bathroom floors, bloodshot eyes.

flying into stockholm: tall thin trees, little lakes, puddles really, but you can see the blue sky and clouds reflected in all of them as we fly by. where norway was rural to the point of seeming half-populated - 4.5 million people in a country with a 2500k coastline, enough that if you turned it upside down it'd reach to rome - sweden is industrial, corporate; car dealerships and stucco apartment buildings with chimneys and gables and a kind of two-tiered roof for which there must be some very particular architectural term. once again i hadn't really slept, so while folks went into town to get drunk and celebrate tad's 34th birthday, i conked out for a while and then set up the recording gear and went for it. now two days later we've got 14 new songs demoed. naturally i was so worked up about it i couldn't sleep last night either. and so to brussels.

get this: asleep at 4am. up at 5 and on the plane at 7:30. bought "never let me go" at the airport since i finished the eddie cantor memoirs and rustun's still got the w.c. fields. unfortunately i killed it on the flight. no use sleeping, of course - got to brussels at 11:30, to the fest at 12:30, drove literally right to the stage and on at 1:45. professional!

talk about a well-run operation. they'd basically built a small city, including promenades, showers, and cafes, backstage. there was a small french dr. feelgood who gave me a B-12 shot in my ass and a masseuse upon whose table i fell asleep. so it goes. sat onstage for amy winehouse's set. what a voice, but she sure doesn't look healthy. doesn't consume much except whiskey cokes from the look of it. plus she's got a voice to die for but doesn't do any of the work onstage. she could've whipped those 40k into a frenzy (sharon jones would've, that's for damn sure) but instead got polite, attentive applause for a series of midtempo jams. ah well. her fashion sense is unstoppable. now to drive to amsterdam, sleep, play tomorrow, then fly to london for a marathon day. halfway through the europe tour already. coins of many nations weighing down my pockets. astaire and rogers on the telly. they can't take that away from me...

it feels like a week since we got to london. there was the early-morn flight from amsterdam. the night before, i'd purchased some salvia divinorum from the "smartshop" ("when nature calls" - perhaps lost in translation) and lovingly prepared my nest for an intense ten-minute trip about which i'd heard so much. "light it hot and draw hard," the alarmingly fit man at the store instructed, "hold it for two minutes". i had four doses' worth. (the instructions that came with also said that for more hallucinogenic effect one could hold the leafy mess under one's tongue.)

nothing.

waited a few minutes.

this shit doesn't work, let me try some more (the greatest drug fallacy).

nothing.

damn!

in a cranky fury, i shoved the rest in my mouth. nope.

ah hell. i ate the entire chocolate weed muffin ("do you know the muffin man?") and went to bed. not even any interesting dreams, just half-baked sleep.

we were up at eight for the flight to london, which turned out to include inxs and their crew. the four original band members are well-tanned, relaxed looking pros in sunglasses, but their new singer looks like a mess: black knit cap, wraparound fly glasses, black denim jacket, smoking and wobbling through security, like a parody of a rock star. i end up next to their guitar tech, a pleasant-enough fellow who'd been with them for six or seven years (after a stint with savage garden). they've been on the road since september 2005 and are on the way to new york. pleasantries are exchanged about the respective bands. what do i play? piano. "yeah, i thought you looked like a keyboard player, but i didn't want to insult you."

i let it slide. so how's that reality show singer holding up?

"well, there were some rough spots. but he's adjusted pretty well."

as if on cue, he stumbles down the aisle mumbling something about looking for the smoking lounge. it's on the left, through the time machine to 1972.

as we disembark, their road manager strips him of his backpack, as he's weaving into both sides of the exit hallway, and frogmarches him to their transfer. it's 11am.

and so to the kwest hotel in shepherd's bush. this is a "modern" hotel interior-decorated to within an inch of its life, to the point of making it difficult to for example, sit properly at the hotel bar - there's no indentation for the knees, it would ruin the line i suppose. but let nothing stand between rockers and their bar, an awkward sidesaddle will have to do.

the empire is a lovely four-layer cake. the steers, opening band for the next week, are young, eager, and styled. but first we've got to be ferried over to the uncut mag tenth anniversary party. so get this - the party's at 7. we play a half-hour set at 7:30. our set time at the empire is 9, and it's a 45-minute ride. and there's photo shoots and halloos from the editor of NME and allan jones, the hogwartsian editor of uncut and, it seems, local industry legend.

so we roll back to the club at about 9:05 and bust through the stage door - whoops, right on stage in front of 2000 people. hey, what are you guys doing here?

the hotel bar afterwards is a schmoozy scene. i guess any hotel or short-hop plane ride in europe in the summer is pretty band-heavy, but this is ridiculous. interpol (and hurley, the teddy bear of a sound guy from brownies who's been out with them for years). little jack from the greenhornes and raconteurs, a lovely fellow with coke-bottle glasses. mr. steve strange, who turns out to have been the drummer for the metal band fastway, also notable as the career-kickoff of flogging molly vocalist dave king. eugene and the fiddler from gogol bordello, in town to play with madonna at wembley for the live earth show on saturday. jesus christ already. bright eyes are coming in tomorrow for two nights. black rebel motorcycle club. is this the scene?

but the next day is off, so the tube to victoria cross and rail to brighton to meet inferno. (against me was playing the 100 club, but i figured, plenty of time in the past and future to get drunk with them.) brighton is the only british town i've seen so far that i could consider living in. a low-lying seaside resort with a slightly down-at-heels boardwalk, there is a certain coney/asbury air to the edwardian hotels, midway pier with rides hanging out over the ocean, the ruins of what was clearly once a glamorous West Pier, and cramped, winding dead-end streets. no less than two stamp-collecting stores on the walk from the train, regarding which hess points out that seaside resort towns have a lot of seasonal business relating to old-man hobbies: stamps, coins, rare books.

the show is in a dingy basement club called the engine room, advertising a lot of metal and tribute-band shows, but with a pleasant fellow named buzz who brings in punk rock. the band is tired and cranky - they'd stayed the night in liege, belgium, with the aptly-named filthy phil. some had dealt with the issue of sleep at an all-time champion filthy squat by dispensing with the filth and staying up all night snorting speed with the host. plus, there were no sleeping accommodations in brighton. so - after a harrowing interlude of a bomb scare at the hotel next door, featuring men with the biggest guns i've ever seen - a few of us packed in the car and headed back for a punk rock campout on the hotel-room floor. bombs, floods, hailstones in london- it's an exciting time to be in old blighty.

little to say about portsmouth; another past-its-prime dowager of a resort town. the queen's hotel said to be haunted by two ghosts. club located usefully on a street with laundry, a bank, and a gent's hairdresser where i got my gent's hair dressed for a mere six pounds fifty.

"my day beats your week." - lou reed

the welsh coast, land of the double consonant, is vertiginous rocky cliffs plunging into the muddy, whitecapped irish sea. the odd castle overlooking stonewalled sheep, a through the looking glass timelessness about the towns. "heading to dublin?" said the lady at the esso. "you're very brave." choppy today i guess.

copenhagen turns out to be a nice, if sedate, old town slightly reminiscent of hamburg (blocky apartment buildings, conspicuous red light district). early show, no opening band, no pre-show music! hard to get excited. except about the inexplicable money with the holes in it. it's ok, i needed a slow night. i am running dangerously low on books though. the errol flynn memoirs - many swashes buckled, many damsels defiled - are sadly complete, and with only two books left i start to sweat and shake until i know what bookstore is getting my per diem next.

glastonbury a rainy, muddy mess. can this possibly be fun? where the american festivals put a premium on bottled water, here, they're selling galoshes (wellies, i suppose) for 15 pounds apiece. the show was a bit of a wild mess but the crowd - 5000 or so? - went nuts and the mc after our set said "ladies and gentlemen, the band of the festival - the hold steady!" that is, i can certify, fun.

in the name-dropping portion of our story, billy bragg came up to rustun, who was selling tshirts off to the side of the stage, and said how he loved the new record and "the band you're working for. that song 'first night' kills me. my name's billy bragg, i'm a songwriter." rustun told him he should go backstage and say that to the piano player, who would really appreciate it. wish he had. other things i appreciated were pints of pimm's cocktails at two pounds fifty and the 40-minute free massage for performers in the john peel tent, backstage left. the combination put me directly to sleep.

talked to carl newman and kurt (the drummer) from new pornographers as well. kurt has a wife and kids and a farm in saskatchewan and is the best smoker/drummer since bun e. carlos. our driver (in a benz!) was named tasar, and the route took us past an underwhelming stonehenge, which it turns out sits simply in the middle of a field by the highway. in fact no-one seemed ready to believe that it actually was stonehenge. shouldn't it be bigger? we stopped at it on the way back after the festival and it was more impressive in the dark and with a sole security guard wandering around. also there was some sort of bonfire and tribal drumming in the near distance. now that's the witchy ambience i'm looking for!

we got to east london at 12:30, napped at the hotel, and roused again by 4:30. ryanair is a discount flier to b-list european cities and so onward to bremen. liquor comes in individual servings of Bullseye Baggies, a plastic pouch torn and emptied into your mixer. i picture many angry alcoholics ripping too hard and ending up soaked in cheap vodka. ryanair, today, also featured a cranky, and who could blame him, johnny marr and other non-brockian modest mice.

the hurricane festival was equally muddy and rainy. though there was a proper backstage with couches and rugs &c. musical trash on display included incubus. not much else to say about that except this: we have a superfan who lives in hamburg and happens to be the head of jack daniel's in germany. thus we were able to watch the main stage from a faux southern "porch" with food, open bar, and other fine bourgeois amenities unsuitable for what appears to be the muddy norm of european festivals.

in a rather ironic turn, the hurricane festival's sister fest, southside, was cancelled due to high winds blowing down the main stage. so sunday off in bremen. world/inferno was playing in gottingen, 150 miles away. to the train! i packed a set of show clothes on top of the accordion, slung the whole mess on my back, and hit the rails. three hours and twenty euros down the line, i was wandering into the t-keller, a basement punk club below the cafe and arthouse cinema in the rather quaint german town best known as the intellectual homeland of the current pope.

the band had gone swimming at the local pool; i'd missed them by five minutes. i took stock of my physical condition while chatting up the germans and realized i'd slept something like 12 hours or less, cumulatively, since wednesday. in a ham-handed attempt at solving the problem without, you know, actual sleep, i downed two double espressos and three large beers, with the result my heart was racing but couldn't keep my eyes open. a poorly crafted, almost medical, buzz.

a pleasant greeting from old friends and i met the new drummer, hungry kevin. poor-quality vegan slop featuring the dickensian combination of boiled cabbage and cauliflower. ken taught kevin, raja, and i to play hearts while hess played scrabble on-line and skyped the wife. a local hardcore band with the ungainly name of shitfire. the combination of adrenaline and congenial doses of double jamesons, cider, and prescription energy-enhancement got me in fighting trim and the show was lovely. i had forgotten how sweaty the inferno shows get. no wonder i gained ten pounds when i stopped playing them regularly.

there was a private screening of a joe strummer documentary in the cinema upstairs and i stayed for a bit, but snuck out without saying goodbye and hopped the train heading back north. trudged into the bremeni hotel at 7:30am with 30 cents to spare and two hours to sleep before the bus left for copenhagen.

...which almost led to disaster in a sleep-dominated day. i crawled under the back seat of the van and slept until we got to the ferry. after choking down some inedible fries and half an apple, i found a cozy couch, curled up, and passed out there. awoke to a janitor poking me and saying something like "wake up! welcome to denmark" in what i can only assume was danish. the ferry was empty. slightly confused, i ran down the stairs to the carpark. the doors were locked. i hit a red button and they slid apart with a satisfying, ciniematic chunk. the carpark was empty. tractor-trailers were loading on for the return trip. had i been abandoned? i had the aforementioned 30 euro cents, a phone that didn't work, and an empty check card. i wondered how far a walk copenhagen was from the ferry (150 miles, i later learned). i began mentally composing a properly melancholy haiku for the cardboard sign i saw in my near future:

stranded musician
help me! (to copenhagen)
ticket, money, ride?

is there such a thing as a brisk trudge? dodging the mack trucks, i made my way down the gangplank to see the band's gold mercedes sprinter driving away. hey! hey!

denton is what i think of as a "courthouse square" town, like oxford and other antebellum university towns. the square flanked by a pawn shop, junk store, coffee-shop, used books, and the odd bar or two. wells fargo building the tallest in town, and the "fine arts" theatre with deco neon lettering organized in such a way as to prompt inevitable jokes. i slept like a stone but awkwardly so woke with a viselike pain between my shoulder blades and am walking like an unhung scarecrow with the sticks still in. the literary quiver was refilled with more vaudeville reminiscences: w.c. fields (by his paramour of fourteen years) and eddie cantor. one hopes in that sort of memoir less attempts at comprehensive biographical rigor than haphazard anecdotal casserole. less fiber, more flavour.

speaking of empty nutrition, denny's is "official restaurant of bowling". the pba, that is. sadly lacks any pithy menu tie-ins. ultimate bowl, anyone?

any middle-america chain food joint that advertises 24-hour service - well, you have to go in knowing what you're in for. out by the la quinta off I-35 in Denton, there are competing drunk-food options: a Whataburger to your right and a Taco Cabana to the left. Whataburger is the exclusive domain of the more overtly criminal element. in fact an armed security guard is behind the counter salting the fries. taco cabana, that oasis of take-out margaritas in a texas filled with 8-hour van rides, is the white-kid post-prom crowd, all backwards caps and sundresses. far more visibly intoxicated and blithe. one kid calls information asking for the number for the denton county jail, where he believes his friend to be after a PI bust. "can you text me the number?"

the various trappings of the truck cabin: a worn cardboard poster of walt frazier. magazine cutout of the johnny-cash-giving-the-finger picture, labelled "The First Punk! Never Forget". cruciform black gaff tape marked "Hit Head Here" in silver marker. bisoniform postcard from wyoming, marked same, unfortunately dues to its unconventional shape, you'd have to find an envelope of unusual size in which to mail it. a horse-head decal crowned by a horseshoe, in reflective blue and silver. assorted unpaid new york city parking tickets. a hold steady coaster. a picture of tad's daughter on a swingset (outdated). one baseball card of former red sox outfielder dwight evans: done in that dulled-cutting-edge format that shows a headshot from one angle and action shot from another. shiny picture, framed in cheap gold plastic, of an indian against a background of buttes, sitting sprinkling some kind of white powder on - well, on the universe, it looks like. suitable purchase for bored stoners on the way to some sort of outdoor festival.

norman oklahoma is a low, crumbling town in the middle of the prairie. it looks like a movie set: 'last picture show', or perhaps 'the outsiders'. there is a main street suitable for cruising, a cross street named for (one presumes) founder abner norman, a bisecting rail tracks, and james garner corridor, which crosses james garner street not far from - yes - a statue of james garner, accompanied by a plaque listing james garner's screen and production credits. thus i have deduced that james garner, legendary star of screen and screen, is a favorite son of norman. in a good christian town, main street is entirely deserted this sunday but for a few pickup trucks and the bud light sign on a windowless beer-only bar.

except for an unadorned box of a club/art gallery/would-be hipster haven called opolis, run by at least one guy from the starlight mints. the stultifying heat of denton and austin is muted up here - a quickie rainshower helped - and the backside parking lot is a healthy, Bud-fueled band hang. we're inaugurating an air-conditioned Airstream ('The Land Yacht') band room, a trend i hope takes the nation by storm. the bottle tree in birmingham still wins for having bunks in its Airstream.

but there's a borders by the fairfield inn by the highway and a hot tub in the fairfield inn so i've got the sunday times and the new yorker fiction issue, sitting among a handful of yelling kids in the hotel hot tub, reading the times. (The newfound availability of The New York Times at Starbucks across the nation, whatever my gut feelings about chain store proliferation, bolsters a tenuous but tangible psychic homing connection. when home is a cephalic storage shack instead of headboards and wallboards this comes in handy, like a "modern" theatre production in which the set is implied by a few choice props to save on construction costs. i once burst from a nebraskan gas station waving a copy of a two-day-old times at galen, yelling "look! civilization!") it's all part of my new bourgeois-rock lifestyle. it's nice after all those years in the viennese cold-water squats. someday i'll go back to that. unfortunately, then i'll know what i'm missing.

"roadrunner once. roadrunner twice. i'm in love with rock and roll, and i'll be up all night."

it wasn't until i got the headphones on that things got weird. thanks, baby pool and sun kil moon, i have a whole new appreciation for your stereo mixing

it occurred to me (i wrote, to my friend emily, later) that you're uniquely suited to appreciate that last night, after an absinthe and psylocybin cocktail, hallucinated (among other things) former new york met dave magadan as a godzilla-sized transformer crushing the urban industrial revolution.

"poets should neither be given money, nor money taken from them" - a victorian theatrical madam on why she let whitman into her establishment gratis

Beckett on the afterlife: "We'll all sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished we were dead."

pulled over in the northern AZ desert of US Route 93 northbound, at a yellow trailer hand-painted "All Mart" - and on the side, "Nothing, Arizona, Pop. 4". the air of equivocal welcome isn't buttressed by the addition hand-lettered signs reading. "Stay Out!" "No Trespassing -This Means You!" "No Entry!" all the other roadside traps sell turquoise and fudge.

incongruously, the master of this miniscule domain also seems to possess a boat on a trailer. i heaven't seen water in 500 miles at least.

it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland on a grand scale. you look over at the charred mountains, saguaros, piles of shattered rock and expect some half-man-half-beast horseback riders with crossbows, ready to shoot a flaming arrow into your gas tank and blow the whole thing to high heaven. not even a railroad track to break up the landscape. naturally, it's an indian reservation.

the other van's got a right front brake issue - pulling and smoking, somewhere on a different highway. guess we'll make it to vegas ahead of them by some distance. (some time later) - in fact they've broken down. blown tire too. we have to backtrack 130 miles and go get them. guess we're down a van for the time being. it's gonna get a little cramped in here.

one of the reasons i love musicians and touring is the characters, who'll never particularly make their mark in the public eye but are the behind-the-scenes stars. the inscrutable bobby drake is a great example. monosyllabic in interviews but endlessly quotable in private, with a politician's talent for making connections with strangers and a truly unique personal lexicon. one of the guitar players in the opening band (they're called illinois; they're from bucks county pennsylvania) is a frequently-shirtless, possibly pill-popping, redhead named drew, who travels with two vintage polaroid cameras, wears pink underpants, a knicks jersey, and a fedora, and is plowing through a duotone gold-bound edition of aristotle's "rhetoric" and "poetics". the rest of his band is golfing on their day off so he's riding with us. on the reasonable explanation of "why the fuck would i want to be out on a golf course for eight hours in hundred degree weather?" a tattoo on his left forearm reads "...it could always be worse" and he wears around his neck strings of the blue Turkish amulets to stymie the evil eye and around his left wrist, st. christopher and mexican marys. in vegas he got jumped by cane-wielding fifteen-year-olds.

i finished the lyndon johnson book ("master of the senate") today. i'm hooked, have to get the next volume. and now from hard-eyed legislative maneuvering to florid victoriana in the melodramatic melisma and shameless adjectival alliteration of the hearst papers: "good night, sweet prince", a memoir of john barrymore by the journalist gene fowler, whose author's note describes a career including stints as "press agent for queen marie of rumania and manager of assorted prize fighters and wrestlers". the crest of barrymore's hollywood crew, the Olympiads, is the serpent regnant, a coiled snake wearing a crown.

"the rain beats with the persistence of an unpaid madam at our door",

franz

tent city security station by hoover dam. a fridge, a fan, a generator and a can of Raid. the thermometer in the sun reads 120 degrees. a new entry in my "short plays about rock dudes", chronicling the choice bits of small wisdom that only come from dudes in bands and the people around them.

ps las vegas is for fucking assholes exclusively. it is a town most notable for people ignoring surgeon general's warnings. oxygen tanks, Rascal personal vehicles, awkwardly branded slots (Tabasco?). in most places, the handicapped stall is the most hygienic, but not here.

listening to bob wills and the texas playboys, 25 north out of denver to cheyenne, then 80 west to salt lake. overcast so no stars, but maybe by the time we get to the real country. cheyenne, the nation's most desolate capital. one crossroads and a few hundred trailers. the mormon temple genealogical archives are online? are my germans potential retroactive mormons?

my friend quoted thus: "i keep thinking i've met my soul mate, but they're all just another alcoholic who's good in bed." well, where else will you find that elusive combination of recklessness and sentimentality?

some girl referred to us tonight as "band-orable". better than "five relatively unattractive guys" (viz local free rag).

that look of calcified, slightly hopeless, automatic charm helplessly ignited in the eyes of a minor celebrity, recognized. turn it on!

they say, write what you know and write what you love. well, i always thought richard lloyd was on to something when he said "scotch & soda" - that is, put your preferred poison in a song so people will know what to bring you. in that spirit i'm working on a new song called "codeine & coffee".

centerra, colorado: creative mall-chitecture.

On the outskirts of Barcelona, a graveyard cut into the side of a cliff. Levels of crosses about twenty feet apart, with the faces between paneled with colored glass mausoleums, hundreds of them.

Spain between Barcelona and Madrid looks like nothing so much as West Texas from Austin to Albuquerque: rolling low hills with small, wiry bushes in neat rows - vineyards? Some kind of tree-based citrus? - punctuated by roofless stone outbuildings. Stone ruins for miles. All the buildings are made of the same stone as the hills; the most notable feature of the landscape for the past four days the contiguity of the buildings with the land. But then transitioning to hundreds of clicks of baked mesas; no wonder the Spanish took to Mexico and what's now the American Southwest. This is cowboy - cabellero - country. Or at least knights with sorrowful countenances. In fact, as if on cue, here's the sign for La Mancha, and a herd of ragged sheep storming down the hill.

200k out - a giant iron silhouette of a bull. More roofless stone outbuildings, each with a lone green tree next to them. What happens to all the tile roofs out here? Then a period of rapid transition through a "forest" over overgrown scrub-brush to over ten feet until finally expanses of deep-green grass of dubious usage that reminds me of the endless Midwestern expanses of Kansas and Nebraska. Trijueque, 77k from Madrid and perched on the edge of a plateau overlooking a vast farming valley. Guadalajara on a hill with development and stacked housing projects comes as suddenly as El Paso.

Well, I sang with Bruce Springsteen at Carnegie Hall. Let's not pretend I wasn't floating for two full days afterwards. Video here and here, in which you can kind of see me yelling into Hess' mike and cutting a rug stage left. And pictures. Though sadly, no record of my dancing with Ronnie Spector.

Best purchase of the time off: "Good Night, Mrs. Calabash: The Secret of Jimmy Durante". My style icon.

Old news lives here in eternity.