Cleveland, early on a Sunday morning. I feel fully recovered and in denial that this is the end of the road. The final venue is another damn supper club, The Music Box. There is a decent looking Sunday brunch on offer there but distressingly this will be accompanied either by

Warrendale, PA Jergel’s Rhythm Grille might as well be located on its own planet. It is 28 degrees and getting hotter, but according to the locals it was snowing two days previously which might explain why the car park surrounding the place is lined with trees bursting with luxurious

After a long overnight drive from Boston the bus reverses directly off of a highway into a loading bay under the Empire State Plaza in Albany NY. There is breakfast at the venue so after Gary has docked the bus and connected the shore power Kris and I venture out

The Crystal Ballroom is a chic club above the Somerville Theater, a very chic repertory cinema. There are people living on the streets but otherwise pretty much everything in Sommerville, MA is chic. It is a beautiful day with cloudless skies and Davis Square fills up as the sun warms

A welcome day off before the last two shows, or at least a stop-over on the twelve hour drive from Atlanta to Warrendale. Summersville, West Virginia—this really is the back of beyond. According to Wikipedia Summersville has a population of 3,500. We are in a hotel just off

Atlanta, Georgia. I get through the night in one piece and as soon as we arrive I check into a hotel and crawl into bed in an attempt to shake off my indisposition. By soundcheck I have been sleeping pretty much constantly for the previous eighteen hours. I feel purged,

The World Cafe is surrounded on two sides by elevated streets. The stage door is under an elevated rail track and mile long freight trains with graffiti covered containers stacked two high on the flat-beds clatter past at walking pace fifty feet overhead. On the other side fifty-feet below street

Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Into the south, proper. North Carolina is lush and verdant. The skies are cloudless and the temperature is perfect. This feels like a different continent from Virginia, never mind New York. I set off from the strip mall where the Carrboro Arts Center languishes in the

Alexandria, Virginia. After the overnight drive from Manhattan we have half a day to kill here before the business of the day starts. The presence of a golf cart in a glazed porch lined with famous arrest mug shots of musicians—Elvis Presley, Willy Nelson, Johnny Cash—is unsettling and

Kris is very excited to be standing on the same square meter that was occupied for an hour or so by one Keith Richards on the evening of June 4, 1997 when the Rolling Stones decided to play an impromptu show at the Horseshoe Tavern during rehearsals for the Bridges

Another Sunday in a deserted city. The Fitzgerald Theater sits in the heart of downtown Saint Paul not far from the capitol building and everything around is closed. Even the venerable Mickey’s Diner open 24/7 since 1937 is shut. There are a lot of churches—God seems to

The indicators are good: one block off the main drag, just across from the Capitol building. Inauspicious looking, no view in from the outside. I head in and take the last remaining seat at the counter. Two types of ketchup, four different hot sauces and Goldy’s house seasoning are

The first mission of the day when Gary parks the bus in the morning, in fact the only mission of the day prior to sound check at 5 pm, is to find a good spot for brunch. Berkeley looks promising. I set off from the bus down Shattuck Avenue and

Sunset Strip seems to be on it’s uppers these days. Chateau Marmont is boarded up. It is hard to imagine the beautiful people of Los Angeles and environs on the corner of Sunset and Larrabee clamouring to catch a glimpse of Johnny Depp and company outside The Viper Room.

The driver that picks us up at LAX to deliver us to the hotel at Hollywood and Highland—the centre of very deepest circle of  Los Angeles—is a gentle spoken bear of a man named, appropriately enough, Virgil. He swaps his cowboy hat for an ominously Trumpian red baseball

Gary pulls the bus off I-10 to fuel up and the combination of jet lag and the cessation of the comforting sound of our wheels on the asphalt rouses me from my bunk. The sun is rising over the desert and the sky looks like a set designer’s painting.

In that weird liminal space—11 hours, 9000 meters above an ocean moving at nearly 1000kmh kilometres an hour in an intercontinental ballistic people carrier, after hours of waiting and moving through the non-spaces of airport terminals, now travelling back through the day to arrive not long after leaving, there

The nearest place to the hotel to eat is Mel’s Diner. Buddy, Brian and I drift down there in an effort to stay awake and head off the looming jet-lag as much as by a desire for a Mel’s 3-Deck Club Sandwich. Hollywood has fully mutated into a

There is a beautiful softness to the morning desert light. The Crescent Ballroom is on one of the few downtown blocks not sacrificed to developers and on a Sunday morning the anonymous corporate buildings are deserted. Without any human scale and modelled in the low sun the standard downtown vernacular