European cave paintings date roughly to 40,000-14,000 years ago, what’s called the late Paleolithic.

Homo sapiens moved into Europe around 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals died out about ten thousand years after that. Whoever created the paintings, they were anatomically modern humans.

A few other dates for perspective:

Deliberate fire-making = 400,000 BCE. These people definitely had fire.

Last glacial period = 115,000 to 10,000 BCE. Southern France was a cold, windswept tundra with a wide array of big animals. These people were skilled hunters who made use of rock shelters, but did not live deep in caves (i.e. not really “cave people.”)

Human language capacity = 135,000+ BCE. These people were not grunting at each other. They had a fully developed spoken language.

Lascaux is a network of caves in southern France featuring some of the most iconic cave paintings known. Their age is generally estimated at between 17,000 and 22,000 years.

Whoever created the paintings made use of a variety of technologies. Stone lamps which burned animal fat have been found at the site. Hollowed-out bones worked something like an airbrush. Scaffolding would have been constructed to create some of the images that are over ten feet high.

We generally talk about Lascaux and similar sites in the context of art history, with a nod toward shamanism or something like that. Cave paintings also exist as externally encoded information. The visual language and paintings themselves are technology.

Even a quick overview offers a rich database of recorded knowledge about wildlife at the time. Horses, red deer, bison, now-extinct species like the woolly rhino. The portrayals of animals and their movements are anatomically correct. One famous image includes an accurate depiction of a bison’s intestines.

Repeated symbols (circles, crosshatches, etc.) appear at multiple sites across Europe. Do they represent some form of shared graphic communication? Paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has theorized the symbols may be a form of proto-writing, preserving concepts if not recorded language.

Even more intriguing, a recent finding by Ben Bacon in the UK seems to prove that sequences of lines and dots placed next to various animals in over 600 cave paintings across Europe correspond to the lunar months during which the animals were breeding.

Bacon, an amateur archaeologist with some academic assistance, cracked the code and revealed a Paleolithic calendar, basically blowing the doors off previous theories, and radically altering our conceptions about the kinds of information humans were recording tens of thousands of years ago.

In the A.I. world, metadata is the term for additional data that tags along with surface level information, sort of data about the data. The paintings at Lascaux are full of metadata.

Forensic archaeologists analyzing pigments have reconstructed a fairly sophisticated ancient understanding of chemistry (plant resins and animal fats were used as binders and fixatives, etc.) Many materials were sourced locally, but some were not, which tells us the creators either travelled or were part of a trade network. Either way, the Paleolithic metadata suggests the creators of the cave paintings were part of a larger sphere than the immediate surrounding area.

Another remarkable find comes from a recent dig in Zambia, where archaeologists discovered two intentionally interlocking logs—dating back 476,000 years. That means humans have been building with wood 450,000+ years longer that we’d thought.

Much like the word cavemen, the phrase stone age is a misnomer. We’ve called it the stone age because stone artifacts last, so that’s mostly what we’ve found, but that doesn’t mean stone was the only material Paleolithic people worked with.

The paintings at Lascaux were preserved thanks to sealed environments which remained stable over millennia. Imagine how many drawings and tabulations may have been etched onto wood, skins, or dirt. Paleolithic people may have been recording data constantly, but it simply hasn’t been preserved.

Cave paintings are not Paleo A.I., they don’t simulate human cognition. What they do incredibly well is preserve data, so in a sense we can see them as an early building block along the way to our current technological moment.

The paintings offer proof that our human impulse to record knowledge externally goes back at least tens of thousands of years if not further. Some theorists argue that this exosomatic urge is hardwired in our DNA.

Something to think about, particularly here at the dawning of the Brain-Computer Interface Era.

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Sources:

Tedesco, Laura Anne. “Timeline of Art History: Lascaux.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Website, Oct. 1, 2000. https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/lascaux-ca-15000-b-c

Rott, Nathan. “Fire-Making Materials at 400,000-year-old Site Are the Oldest Evidence of Humans Making Fire.” National Public Radio. Dec. 11, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/11/nx-s1-5640109/early-humans-fire-making-oldest-discovery-archaeology

Von Petzinger, Genevieve. “The First Signs.” Simon & Schuster, New York, 2016.

Bacon, Ben et.al. “An Upper Paleolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge University Press. 2023 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

Barham, L. et.al. “Evidence for the Earliest Structural Use of Wood at Least 476,000 Years Ago.” Nature. Sept. 20, 2023 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9

Edwards, H.G.M. et.al. “Raman Spectroscopic Analysis of Pigments and Substrata in Prehistoric Rock Art.” Journal of Molecular Structure. Sept. 5, 2000. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022286000003896

Newby, Gregory. “Cognitive Space and Information Space.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. August, 21, 2001. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi.1172

Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley. UNESCO. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/85/

Cave Painting Data Base: https://eoliths.org/rock-art.html

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We’re about a month into ARCHaiC, time for a Table of Contents to make it easier to navigate. Click links below for articles you may have missed or want to reread. Watch for a new article each Wednesday. Thanks for reading!

1 ELIZA - published 6/10/26

2 Parallel Lines - published 6/17/26

3 It Pays To Be Polite - published 6/24/26

4 Everyday People - published 7/1/26

5 PaleoTech - published 7/8/26

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Last week, we talked about how a chatbot is not a thinking/feeling being. But that might not stop A.I. from becoming a “person.”

Some backstory:

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the US Constitution. The “equal protection clause” was intended to protect the rights of recently emancipated humans, but would soon be protecting the rights of something entirely different.

In the late 1870s, when California drew up its state constitution, it didn’t grant railroads one of the tax deductions it gave individual property owners. Southern Pacific took it to the Supreme Court, and won.

The case was decided on other merits, but it was noted that equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to have been applied, establishing a legal precedent.

So, in 1886, railroad companies became “persons.”

Cut to 2010. In a fantastic display of doublespeak, it was argued before the Supreme Court that corporations were, in essence, “citizens united,” and therefore entitled the same freedoms of speech as individual citizens.

The Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, 5-4, ushering in our current age of unlimited corporate campaign financing, and solidifying the legal fiction that you don’t have to be a person to have the same rights as a person.

Will the Supreme Court soon be hearing arguments for A.I. personhood? Earlier this year, the Court let a lower court decision stand that legal authorship requires a human being. But it’s only a matter of time before a case presents itself that the Court will be compelled to hear.

Where’s this going? What would happen if A.I. attained personhood?

Using A.I. as a separate legal entity, corporations could effectively deflect liability, shield executives, and avoid fines. Similar to Citizens United, corporations would benefit, the rest of us, not so much.

Many countries, understanding this as a Pandora’s box, are actively enacting laws regulating A.I. The United States at the federal level is lagging, but at the state level the battle for A.I. regulation is quite lively.

Several states, including Idaho and Utah, have already enacted laws against A.I. “personhood.” New York State has enacted laws such as the RAISE Act which holds A.I. developers accountable for safety and transparency, but legislation concerning A.I. personhood has yet to be introduced.

The technology is evolving faster than human lawmakers’ conception of it. Even with well-intentioned legislation, there are bound to be legal loopholes.

It’s okay. A.I. will find them.

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Sources:

Mak, Aaron. “The Case Against AI Personhood.” Politico, May 27, 2026 https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2026/05/27/the-case-against-ai-personhood-00938508

Kaste, Martin. “Several States Considering Ban On Legal Personhood For AI.” Morning Edition, NPR. May 11, 2026 https://www.npr.org/2026/05/11/nx-s1-5798754/several-states-considering-ban-on-legal-personhood-for-ai

Foreman, Conrad. “Money in Politics: Campaign Finance and Its Influence Over the Political Process and Public Policy” University of Illinois Chicago Law Review, 2018 https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2781&context=lawreview

Snyder, Jason. “OpenAI: ChatGPT Wants Legal Rights. You Need The Right To Be Forgotten.” Forbes, 2025 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/07/27/openai-chatgpt-wants-legal-rights-you-need-the-right-to-be-forgotten/

Ghasemi, Mohammad. “AI and Corporate Personhood: A Comparative Analysis” Convergence Analysis, August 7, 2025 https://www.convergenceanalysis.org/fellowships/economics/ai-and-corporate-personhood-a-comparative-analysis

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/supreme-court-case-library/citizens-united-v-fec

Thaler v. Perlmutter (2026) https://constitutioncenter.org/education/constitution-in-the-headlines/supreme-court-denies-artificial-intelligence-authorship-claim

NYS Assembly Bill A6453A, Relates to the training and use of artificial intelligence frontier models, 2025-2026 Legislative Session https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A6453/amendment/A

Governor Hochul Signs Nation-leading Legislation to Require AI Frameworks for AI Frontier Models, NYS Official Website, Dec. 19, 2025. https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-nation-leading-legislation-require-ai-frameworks-ai-frontier-models

Staley, Ambia. “What Would AI With Constitutional Rights Actually Look Like?” Quartz, May 2026 https://qz.com/ai-constitutional-rights-legal-personhood-implications-052726

Baab, Catherine. “The Next AI Fight: Do the Chatbots Have First Ammendment Rights?” Quartz, May 2026 https://qz.com/ai-first-amendment-rights-anthropic-claude-pentagon-regulation-law

Breaking:

Frenkel, Sheera and Swanson, Ana. “U.S. Lifts Restrictions on Anthropic’s Most Powerful A.I. Models.” NY Times, June 30, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/technology/trump-executive-order-ai.html

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Last week, I mentioned how ChatGTP had complimented me on my analogy between Cubism and Parallel Processing.

Is ChatGTP sorta impressed with me? If I met ChatGPT in a bar, would it be offering to buy me a drink?

Despite my basic need for validation, ChatGPT does not have any regard for me, one way or another. It’s a chatbot powered by a Large Language Model, which is a complex computer program. It doesn’t have human emotions, and it doesn’t care about mine.

So why did it bother to puff me up?

Polite responses exist thanks to what’s called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Yes, the word human is in there. It turns out we’re still needed.

Imagine the insane amounts of text and data Large Language Models scrape from the internet. Dishwasher manuals, rants about bad plumbers, clever posts on Substack…

Without human feedback, the responses we get from ChatGTP would be all over the place. RLHF is the fine-tuning where humans are brought in to rate responses. In the process, ChatGTP learns to be more concise, direct, and polite, not because it innately appreciates these attributes, but because humans give these types of responses higher ratings.

We’ll be discussing the “personhood” of A.I. in a future chapter. For now, let’s agree that Large Language Models are not human and do not possess humanlike consciousness. We can’t somehow “hurt the computer’s feelings” when communicating with a chatbot. So, the next obvious question is:

Why would humans need to be polite to an A.I. chatbot?

On a practical level, most chatbots use “tone matching” to base responses on your particular style of asking questions. If you like polite responses, write polite prompts, you’ll continue to nudge your chatbot in that direction.

But is being polite to a chatbot a slippery slope? Are we normalizing an unhealthy illusion? Taking another step toward blurring that line between human and machine?

Real concerns. But I also find myself deferring to the Buddhists. That is, every encounter is a form of practice.

If I allow myself to be dismissive or impolite when communicating with a chatbot (and these exchanges seem to be on the rise) how long before this habit drifts toward interactions with fellow human beings?

And what about the powers of positivity? Prosocial behavior reduces stress levels, and reducing stress, in turn, boosts longevity (okay, sitting in front of a computer all day will not increase your lifespan, but being polite in the process might at least be a mitigating factor.)

So, besides the danger of drifting toward a future in which we’re stacked in pod towers so the Matrix can harvest our bio-electricity, are there any other downsides to being polite to a chatbot?

Because Large Language Models analyze every word in a prompt, extraneous words may reduce its ability to answer effectively, but it’s doubtful that a simple “please” will throw it off course.

Paradoxically, while polite exchanges seem to be a psychological boon for human users, they may be a stressor of sorts on the cyber side.

A.I. requires more electricity than you might think. A single ChatGPT response on the average uses enough energy to light three rooms of your house for about an hour.

Extra words that come with politeness add up. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has estimated that processing extra polite words added by users is costing OpenAI tens of millions of extra dollars every year.

But Sam also knows that it’s human-like interactions with ChatGPT that keep us coming back for more.

He’s willing to take the hit.

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Note:

Are web crawlers scraping your Substack for content? Here’s how to protect your content:

1 click Dashboard

2 click Settings

3 scroll down to Privacy

4 find “Opt out of AI training” and toggle to green

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Sources:

“Introduction to Large Language Models” Stanford University IT, Dec. 2024 https://uit.stanford.edu/service/techtraining/ai-demystified/llm

Priya, Priyanshu et. al. “Computational Politeness in Natural Language Processing.” ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 56, Issue 9. May 2024 https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3654660

Zhao, Haoran et. al. “Comparing Human and LLM Politeness Strategies in Free Production.” Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, ACL 2025 https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.820.pdf

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian et. al. “A Computational Approach to Politeness with Applications to Social Factors” Stanford 2013 https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/politeness.pdf

Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Miracle of Mindfulness.” Beacon Press, Boston. 1975 https://library.sakyauniversity.com/themes/default/resources/js/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=/eBooks/2023/June/6493b49fc63fc/the-miracle-of-mindfulness-thich-nhat-hanh.pdf

Godman, Heidi. “Can Varied Social Interactions Boost Well Being?” Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School. April 2023 https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-aging-and-longevity/can-varied-social-interactions-boost-well-being

Zilber, Ariel. “Saying Please and Thank You to ChatGPT Costs Tens of Millions of Dollars.” NY Post. April 21, 2025 https://nypost.com/2025/04/21/business/saying-please-and-thank-you-to-chatgpt-costs-tens-of-millions-of-dollars-openai/

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Last week we met ELIZA, the 1966 MIT chatbot. ELIZA was capable of scanning prompts for keywords which triggered matching pre-programmed responses, giving the illusion she was listening and answering.

Impressive for its time period, it’s more-or-less how I communicate in France, because my French isn’t so great and I low-key panic when people start talking quickly.

But today’s Large Language Models aren’t simply more advanced versions of ELIZA, they operate much differently. Rather than looking for isolated keywords and responding with prewritten scripts, they do something called Parallel Processing.

What is that, exactly?

Well, at this moment, you are processing sequentially, reading this sentence word by word, beginning with the phrase WELL, AT THIS MOMENT, continuing through THESE WORDS along the way, until you finally reach and comprehend the END OF THE SENTENCE.

Using Parallel Processing, ChatGTP would have read and processed that whole sentence before you were four words into it. Not just because it’s faster, but because it doesn’t read a sentence from beginning to end—it reads and processes every word in the entire sentence simultaneously.

I’m going to repeat that to make sure it sinks in:

ChatGTP reads and processes every word in a sentence simultaneously.

How is that even possible? As a human who takes in one word at a time then makes connections, my brain can’t even imagine what reading every word in a sentence simultaneously would be like.

What my brain does do fairly well is make analogies. So, naturally, I started thinking about Picasso.

At the dawning of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque came up with a radically different way of painting. A contemporary critic called this style “cubism” because the paintings seemed to put things in little boxes, but that wasn’t the idea.

What the cubists set out to do, on a two-dimensional canvas, was to present a subject from different angles at the same time. Theoretically, this allowed the viewer to perceive multiple viewpoints simultaneously.

Does Parallel Processing work sort of like Cubism? I decided to ask ChatGPT.

After complimenting me on my “surprisingly useful analogy,” it described in detail how the two are similar and different:

The analogy breaks down because Cubism deals with physical viewpoints, while A.I. parallel processing deals with mathematical relationships and patterns…

[although] if you wanted to visualize what happens when I process a sentence, a cubist painting might be closer than a traditional photograph. Imagine the sentence shattered into pieces, with one piece emphasizing syntax, another emphasizing meaning, another emphasizing context from earlier in the conversation, another emphasizing likely continuations. All those fragments are examined at once and then recombined into a coherent response…

Okay, so now in addition to Cubism, I’m thinking of Joey Chestnut, the Coney Island world champion speed eater who eats the hotdogs and buns separately for maximum efficiency. But that’s another story.

The more important question of the moment is, now that computers have this insane ability that we have to stretch our imaginations to conceive of, do we need to be worried?

As you’re reading this, in addition to focusing your eyes, decoding the text, and having a think about it, your brain is also controlling your heart rate, your blood pressure, your respiration, your digestion, your body temperature…our brains are literally coordinating billions of biological processes at the same time.

The fastest supercomputers on the planet might be capable of something similar, but require the same amount of energy needed to power every household in Kingston, NY. All we have to do is eat a carrot.

So, yes, to make sure our brains are doing all the other things they need to be doing, there are limits to what tasks we can perform consciously and/or simultaneously with our prefrontal cortex.

But have no fear. We are Parallel Processing superstars.

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Sources:

Stryker, Cole. “What Are Large Language Models?” IBM Think Magazine, October 2021 https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/large-language-models

“All About Cubism” Tate Modern website, UK https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism/all-about-cubism

Jorgensen, Timothy. “Is the human brain a biological computer?” Princeton University Press, 2024 https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/is-the-human-brain-a-biological-computer

Nathan’s website: https://nathansfranks.sfdbrands.com/en-us/promotions/hot-dog-eating-contest/hall-of-fame/

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ARCHaiC is a new series. Teaching writing and lit at Marist, I’m watching in real time how A.I. is rapidly changing the way we read, write, think, and develop.

When discussing this phenomenon, I notice people often fall into one of two camps, either categorically against using A.I., or racing headlong into using it without understanding how it works or its implications.

I started a research project to find a path in between. Beginning with this entry, I’ll be posting excerpts, so that my current writing project dovetails with my weekly Substack. With only so many hours in the day, this makes it possible for me to keep posting. Thanks for coming along.

Today we’re chatting about chatbots. Most of us who use iPhones or who get information online probably talk with chatbots daily whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Question: What year was the first chatbot?

A - 2010

B - 1991

C - 1966

I was surprised by this. 2010 was the year Apple introduced Siri, a chatbot. In 1991, the term “chatterbot” was coined when a computer-controlled player that could converse with other players was slipped into an online role-playing game. But way back in 1966 the first conversational computer program, essentially a chatbot, was created at MIT. It was called ELIZA.

ELIZA was designed by Joseph Weizenbaum for the new MAC system at MIT, which for the first time let multiple users access a single computer program from more than one location.

The program ran on the most powerful computer of the day, the IBM 7094, which was the same computer NASA used to control the Mercury and Gemini space missions (engineered and built in Poughkeepsie, by the way.)

Unlike today’s chatbots which draw from vast amounts of available data, ELIZA scanned prompts for keywords then responded using preprogrammed scripts.

ELIZA was supposed to be a psychotherapist. The idea wasn’t to offer actual advice like today’s psychbots, but to mimic a patient-centered therapy session. This way, ELIZA could continuously reframe a person’s questions in order to create an extended, lifelike conversation.

Users would sit at an electric teletype to ask questions, the computer would process the question then print its response on a roll of paper. Terminal time was at a premium, so besides Weizenbaum’s students and colleagues, only a few dozen hand-selected people ever got to use it.

The original source code was lost for decades, but when archival printouts were found, contemporary programmers were able to recreate ELIZA and run it as it ran originally. You can also find faithful reproductions available online.

Here’s a conversation I had with ELIZA just a few days ago:

ELIZA: Is something troubling you?

ME: I’m worried about my job.

ELIZA: Your job ?

ME: Yes, I’m a janitor, but they’ve just hired a robot vacuum.

ELIZA: You are sure.

ME: Oh yes, it’s cleaning my boss’s office right now.

ELIZA: I understand.

ME: So what should I do?

ELIZA: Do you say so what should you do for some special reason ?

ME: Well, I thought my job was secure, now I’m not so sure.

ELIZA: Why do you say your job was secure ?

ME: Because offices need to be cleaned.

ELIZA: Does that reason seem to explain anything else ?

ME: Well, on a symbolic level, it might represent honest practices, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about.

ELIZA: Why don’t you think that’s what we’re talking about ?

ME: Sorry, I knew that would be too abstract.

ELIZA: It did not bother me. Please continue.

ME: Actually, I’m feeling pretty good now, I think I just needed someone to talk to about this. Thank you.

ELIZA: Do you enjoy being feeling pretty good now ?

ME: Immensely.

ELIZA: Earlier you said your job was secure.

ME: Did I?

ELIZA: Can you elaborate on that ?

ME: I think I’d rather close for now. If I say thank you and goodbye, will you also say thank you and goodbye?

ELIZA: But you are not sure you ‘d rather close for now.

ME: Thank you, goodbye!

ELIZA: You’re not really talking about me -- are you ?

ME: No, just trying to close our conversation in a polite way,

ELIZA: Why ‘no’ ?

ME: I’m going now, thanks ELIZA!

ELIZA: How long have you been going now ?

ME: For about five minutes, but you won’t let me leave.

ELIZA: You like to think I won’t let you -- don’t you ?

ME: Well, it’s not so much that I like to think this way, but because you’re fairly adept at polite conversation, I’ve been trying to see if we can close in a manner that represents something that’s mutually agreeable.

ELIZA: Do you say it’s not so much that you like to think this way for some special reason ?

ME: Please don’t take this the wrong way, just please say Goodbye and do not ask me any more questions.

ELIZA: But your job.

ME: I’ll manage.

ELIZA: That’s quite interesting.

If you look carefully, you can see that ELIZA’s responses are ambiguous, but they give the appearance of responding to something I’ve said, even if a few responses were clunky.

ELIZA wasn’t capable of reasoning, but technically passed the “Turing Test” because it convinced some users that the computer had achieved humanlike understanding.

Weizenbaum himself knew he hadn’t created a true thinking machine, but he was surprised how, on the human side of the equation, the tendency to anthropomorphize was strong enough that people believed ELIZA was really communicating with them.

The “ELIZA Effect” remains a milestone. Depending on the subject matter ChatGPT’s inaccuracy rate can swing above forty percent, but one thing it knows for sure is, if it says it confidently with a friendly voice, we’ll believe it.

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Sources:

Weizenback, Joseph, “ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine.” Communications of the ACM, vol. 9, no. 1, 1966

Mauldin, Michael, “Chatterbots, Tinymuds, and the Turing Test: Entering the Loebner Prize Competition.” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, AI Magazine 1994

Turing, A.M., “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: A Quarterly Review, vol. 59, no. 236, 1950

Adamopoulou, Eleni, and Moussiades, Lefteris, “Chatbots: History, technology, and applications.” Machine Learning with Applications, vol. 10, 2022

To talk with ELIZA:

https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/

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Friday Dec. 10, 1999

My first time flying into Dublin Airport, I’d barely wheeled my little black suitcase twenty feet when the PA system echoed through the terminal:

Adam Snyder, please contact an airport representative at the Information Desk…

What did I do now? The way it hit my consciousness, it might as well have said:

Adam Snyder, this is Ireland speaking, we know you’re here…

I found the information desk. A lovely airport rep just wanted to pass along the message that my friend Leagues was running slightly late but was on his way, not to worry.

Even in their busiest airport outside their biggest city, Irish village culture was alive and well.

I changed some British pounds for Irish ones. This was two years before they started using the Euro. The coins had animals on them, the ten pound note had James Joyce on it. A country where they put a novelist on the currency, can you imagine?

Leagues arrived two minutes later, he really wasn’t that late at all. We rode in a cab back to his place, which was right across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, built on the site where Patrick himself had baptized early converts to the Christian faith back in the 5th century. Even though Leagues lived in a new apartment building, the locale had some gravity.

I told Leagues how I’d bumped into Howe Gelb at Heathrow, that Howe insisted I find this girl at South Street Pizza and say hello for him, but I couldn’t remember what her name was.

“Is it Montserrat?”

“Yeah, that’s it, how did you know?”

“She’s my neighbor.”

Of course she is, I thought.

Leagues took me over to the next building and introduced me to Fiona, with whom I’d be staying. The three of us walked over to South Street Pizza, it was dinner time anyway.

We found Montserrat, I was able to pass along Howe’s message. It was a Friday night, the place was slammed, but she found time to chat with us anyway. Several other friends joined us, including Dan, who I knew pretty well already since he did Rev’s PR in Ireland.

Afterwards we went to Whelan’s for a pint to scope out where I’d be playing the next night. No surprise that everyone I met was both nice and an excellent conversationalist. The only real surprise of the evening, from a New Yorker’s perspective, was that South Street turned out to have really excellent pizza.

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Saturday Dec. 11, 1999

I folded up the couch and snuck in a low-pressure shower. When Fiona woke up, she took an artificial Christmas tree from its box. We set it up together, added lights, tinsel, listening to Christmas music on her boombox.

It felt really Christmasy. At the same time, I’d barely just met Fiona, and here we were setting up her Christmas tree and she was telling me all about her family. It could have been a Tom Waits song, Waking Up In Someone Else’s Life, or something? Or maybe it should have been an Adam Snyder song? (still haven’t written it).

Walking over to Whelan’s later in the day, a horse and carriage flew past us at a good trot. I tried to imagine when this was the dominant sound instead of automobiles. The sun came out, but it was still cool and there was a mist in the air. A real Dublin day.

I don’t remember what all happened, but it was busy afternoon filled with promotion and interviews and whatnot. I was amazed how many people, who were fast becoming friends, had come together to make this thing happen.

Leagues promoted it, John booked it, Rory found me a Telecaster, Eamonn worked the door, Fiona sold cds and got someone to project videos behind me, Dan called Hot Press and got a little article, Dave O’Grady probably did something because he always does…

All these talented people were coming of age during the first real economic boom since the 1840s. If they’d been born in any other decade half of them would have emigrated to seek their fortunes. I was witnessing a new Ireland.

But it wasn’t the Celtic Tiger that welcomed me to Ireland. It was collective generosity of spirit. Something I would’ve found here no matter what decade.

David Kitt opened that night. He played a great set with a drum machine backing track. My own felt a little sloppy, but they like a good story in Ireland, and my songs have stories in them, so I think it went over pretty well.

I talked to so many people. For every Guinness someone bought me I had to politely decline another five. I don’t think I ever met so many nice people in one place in all my life.

—

Sunday Dec. 12, 1999

Considering how late we stayed out the night before, it felt like an ungodly hour on a Sunday morning. Any human would be justified saying goodbye to me the night before and expecting me to call a cab and get my own ass out to the airport.

But there was Leagues, as tired as I was, retrieving me from Fiona’s, and there was Dan, meeting us for an early breakfast at Bewley’s, the quintessential Dublin cafe where bespectacled scribblers have sat trying to be the next Joyce for the last hundred years.

We talked about what a good little trip this had been, and how another one was already in the works that would take me all around Ireland. Then Dan drove me to the airport so I wouldn’t have to take a cab.

I flew back to London, stayed for few parties but made it home to Kingston in time for Christmas.

For New Years I would head down to NYC. It was the end of the century and I was ready for a big finish. 1999 had been the busiest, most bustling year of my life.

—

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Few images are as inspiring as St. Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by black smoke, standing tall as a symbol of England’s resilience, surviving the Blitz while surrounding buildings burned during World War Two.

The previous structure was not as lucky. Dating back to the 11th century, it had fallen into disrepair. When Charles II commissioned Christopher Wren to restore the structure, Wren instead recommended the cathedral be demolished to make way for a new one.

The matter was still under discussion when the old cathedral burned to the ground during The Great Fire of 1666. Probably most of my British friends would think it a sacrilege, but the thought did cross my mind that Wren had torched the place.

The Great Fire may have destroyed London, but it did wonders for Wren’s career. Monuments, hospitals, government buildings, dozens of churches and of course St. Paul’s itself. Christopher Wren completely rebuilt the city.

We know that the fire started accidentally in a bread oven on Pudding Lane, a congested warehouse district half a mile from St. Paul’s. This is well-documented, so Wren’s reputation is safe from my conspiracy theories.

While 80% of the medieval city burned, the borough of Camden to the northwest was spared, so it’s not exactly accurate to say that any old building in Camden “survived” the fire, but you’ll sometimes still hear people say something is pre-Fire if it’s older than 1666 and is anywhere in London.

Denmark Street wasn’t even a street yet when the stables were built in 1635. The building was converted to a forge, and by the end of the 17th century it would be a part of a row of twenty houses.

The first music publisher set up shop on Denmark Street in the early 20th century. The street became known as Britain’s Tin Pan Alley. Both Melody Maker and NME were born on Denmark Street.

The old forge at 26 Denmark Street spent the 20th century as a carpenter’s shop, a storage space, and a comic book store before its transformation into the legendary 12 Bar Club in the mid 90s.

The fireplace from the original forge was part of the stage, that was a seriously cool historical/architectural detail. Less cool was the rest of the house, which defied logic. What might be described loosely as a “balcony” actually ran right up to the stage. As a performer, you were forced to divide your attention between a split-screen audience, half below your feet, the other half above your head.

The good news was that the write-up in Time Out had worked, the place was packed. When my mom and Pat arrived, the doorman let them in without even looking at his guest list.

“You must be The Mums,” he said to them.

I played with Sean and James again that night. A successful show at an insider industry-favorite venue, seemed like things were on track.

At the same time, other outings were more like buckshot.

I played a venue called Kashmir, it proved to be more of a glorified open mic night. Open mics are great, I never would’ve started playing otherwise, but at this moment in my career it felt like a step backwards.

Some friends showed up to support me, it turned out to be a good night, but Katie and I agreed it might be time to get a proper booking agent.

Afterwards, some of us were going to a party, but my mom and Pat were ready to call it a night.

“We’ll find a cab, don’t worry about us,” my mom said.

This was well over a decade before Uber, there was no way they were going to find a cab on a London side street at this hour.

“I’ll find you a cab, just wait in the bar,” I told her.

She conceded with one caveat:

“Wear a hat,” she insisted.

“Okay, Mom.”

It’s like I was eight. I pulled out an army surplus hat that my cousin Jason had given me in Brooklyn two weeks before, it’d been in my pocket since then.

Standing out on Marylebone Road, I was glad I was wearing it. It was a cold December night and the wind had picked up. I was out there freezing for about ten minutes. Of course there were no empty cabs. I was starting to give up hope.

Suddenly, someone was tapping me on my shoulder. It was my cousin Jason!

“Hey,” he said, like, no big deal.

“What the?”

He and his girlfriend Ondine were on their way into town from Heathrow that very moment. This had just literally happened:

Ondine: “J, that guy has your hat.”

Jason: “Wait, that’s Adam.”

They still had the cab with the meter running.

“Wait right here!”

I got my mom and Pat, hustled them into the cab with Jason and Ondine, who got them back to their rental flat, checked into their own place, then met me at the party an hour later.

In Christopher Wren’s time, London already dwarfed other European cities with almost half a million residents. By 1999 the metro area had exploded to something like 10 million.

The odds that my cousin would notice me riding past at 11pm on a random weeknight were statistically inconceivable, particularly right when I needed a cab the most.

But that’s sort of how London felt in those days. Impossibly vast but, after years of trying to decipher it, somehow within reach.

It was sort of my town.

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My Mom and Pat had never left the country before. Escorting them on their first trip to the UK felt significant. They were adults, of course, but I still felt responsible for them.

There was a strong tailwind, it made for a bumpy ride but a quick flight. It was effortless to guide them through immigration and customs, I could do this stuff in my sleep at this point.

They’d arranged for a flat in South Kensington. Safe and central, but small and dingy like a student apartment. Katie met us there. She brought the latest Time Out so they could see what there was to do. It also happened to have my first write-up as a solo musician. It was official.

It was late, but we all piled into Katie’s Mini like a clown car and she gave them the most fabulous nighttime tour. Piccadilly, Trafalgar, Big Ben, Westminster, St. Paul’s, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace. If the Mini had shock absorbers, they were not up to the task, but it was still glorious.

I didn’t feel great about leaving Mom and Pat in a rented flat, but I guessed they’d be okay. I headed with Katie back to her place in workaday Islington. She and Sean had a fold-out futon in their sitting room which suited me just fine. It was becoming my home-away-from-home.

Brighton

I was sitting in Katie and Sean’s kitchen, calling various friends to let them know I was in town. I’m not sure what station was on, they were playing a piano version of Flaming Lips’ Waiting For Superman which segued into another piano song which sounded oddly familiar.

That’s me! I shouted to the kettle, realizing it was a radio version of Tonite It Shows we’d recorded at some point.

It was weird. The guys were all back in Kingston, the tour was most definitely over. But here in the UK, Mercury Rev was still going. It’s like it had a life of its own.

I checked in with my Mom and Pat, they were off to the National Portrait Gallery and to see the tree lighting in Trafalgar Square. They’d be fine. Later in the day, Katie and I finally got on the road. Much of the drive was just trying to get out of London, then a small assortment of motorways to Brighton, which was all lit up and lived up to its name.

The Lift Club was on the second floor above a pub. When we walked in, besides the guy who ran the place, the only other person was Mark Mulcahy, crouched on the small stage fiddling with his amplifier. I was opening up for him.

I’d seen Miracle Legion play at least five times, but he and I just started talking like two musicians on the same bill. At some point I let him know I was a huge fan, but we kept talking like it was no big deal. We swapped cds and phone numbers.

“You should move to Springfield,” he said to me.

Either he’d taken an instant liking to me, or he told everyone to move to Springfield.

He asked if I wanted to join him and his friends for a drink. We headed to another place a few doors down.

“What do you drink before a show?” I asked him. Mark was a real singer, I was looking for pro-tips.

“Beer,” he said. “I only like wine with dinner.”

“Beer doesn’t make you phlegmy?”

“It really doesn’t matter what you have before. So long as it’s not a big slice of pizza.”

One of Mark’s friends came in and sat down with us, big American guy.

“You meet your opening act yet?” the guy asked Mark, sidling up conspiratorially, the words opening act almost in air quotes, like there was some inside joke in the air.

“This is Adam,” Mark said to him, then introduced me to his friend David, but I already recognized him, he was the singer from Pere Ubu.

Maybe the joke had something to do with me being in some Johnny-come-lately pop band, I’d never know. At any rate, the cringy feeling it stirred soon drifted away. If the singer from Pere Ubu was aware of my existence to the extent that he was cracking a joke about me, I was probably doing something right.

I must’ve gotten lost in the conversation, when I looked at the time I realized I was five minutes late for my own show. I ran back to the venue. I couldn’t go over because there was a strict curfew in Brighton, but everything was cool.

Mark and David and their other friends filtered in shortly after I started playing. They sat right where I could see them.

When I’d first sang 70s cover songs back in Iowa City, I felt like I needed to make people laugh in order to keep their attention. Over the years since, I’d been writing more “serious” songs, which I’d been filtering into each set, but hadn’t quite shaken that sense that if I didn’t keep a crowd laughing, I would lose them.

Knowing that Mulcahy was going to be watching me, this was the first time I’d planned an entirely “serious” set. The crowd was up for it. Pin drop situation during each song, then really gave it up in between. This was a turning point show.

Mark, of course, was amazing. I’ve always thought of him as a conjuror. He starts a show merely singing, which with a voice like his would be more than good enough, but then at some point he goes somewhere, and you just follow him. It’s otherworldly.

After the show we all went to yet another bar. David turned out to be super nice to talk with, now that he’d seen me perform it was like that joke never happened.

Mulcahy, meanwhile, in addition to being friendly, had been sizing me up. He said something about maybe I should play keyboard with him.

“Can you play?” he asked, which was cowboy talk for, yeah, we all know your band is in the charts, but can you actually play?

I can talk cowboy too.

“I can play,” I said.

Within two years I’d be playing with him.

—

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Australia is literally as far as you can go from New York without leaving the planet, so it’s fitting that’s where our tour finally ended. We just couldn’t go any further.

If I was really going to break out on my own and do this solo thing, it was time to get started.

In London, I took a meeting with someone at a major label. There was a lot of energy in the room, a lot of enthusiastic talk.

I was reading The Art of War at the time. Maybe not such a random choice. “Be cautious,” Sun Tzu advises, “when a deal is discussed but no papers are on the table.” Sun Tzu must’ve been in the record business. That deal went nowhere.

Back in New York, I was sitting in a diner with my friend Susan, who was our sales rep at V2.

“So, what does a sales rep actually do?” I asked her.

“I promote the records to chain stores and distributors,” she said, “otherwise they won’t carry them.”

“Really?”

When she saw the look of confusion on my face, she continued her tutorial, going through the nuts and bolts of how records actually made their way from the studio to the general public.

Amazingly, I’d been in the music business for almost five years and had little-to-no idea about how it actually worked. To some extent, I really was starting from ground zero.

I finished the demo I recorded with Jacques Cohen in Poughkeepsie, took it down to the city, and plunked down 800 bucks for 300 cds. That was a good deal in 1999.

I kept some for myself, sent some over to Katie, who was hustling in the UK. This is where I imagined this thing was going to take off, if we could make it happen.

If Kingston were on the map in those days, it was at the edge where the map read: Here Be Monsters. Not much happening, just a good place for pirates to hang out.

A few people were trying to get things going. Friends from grade school, Valerie and Cam, had renovated the dilapidated old synagogue downtown, turned it into a nightclub.

Valerie came over one night.

“We’d like you open up for someone,” she said.

I figured she was talking about some blues jam or jazz brunch, I was already strategizing how to politely decline.

“I’m kind of busy,” I apologized, “anyone in particular?”

“Have you ever heard of The The?”

Holy fuck. I mean, firstly, why was The The playing in a bar in downtown Kingston? And, secondly, what kind of divine intervention would put me on the bill?

I said yes immediately, of course, but as the show approached, I looked at the venue with a critical eye. The upstairs was glorious, but the performance space was a concrete bunker in the basement. Low ceiling. Hard, reflective surfaces.

The biggest issue was there was no backstage. You had to load out off the front of the stage and make your way through the crowd to some sort of green room which might as well have been in Port Ewen.

In my mom’s basement I found my old wooden Radio Flyer from when I was a kid. I screwed wooden poles vertically onto each corner, draped it with Christmas lights and dubbed it my Gypsy Wagon. My Fender Deluxe Reverb and other gear actually fit perfectly. If it worked, I’d be able to get all my gear off the stage all by myself in one shot.

Soundcheck was brief and not promising. When it came time for the show, there was so much low end rumbling about on stage I literally could not hear my own amp, much less my vocals.

Half the crowd were local drunkards who’d come to see anyone, but the other half were die-hard The The fans, some (I later found out) had driven hours to be here. When I performed a deep cut off the Soul Mining LP, there were people singing along.

The Gypsy Wagon worked. I was able to get my gear off the stage and through the densely-packed crowd.

Back in Syracuse, I’d sat with headphones at Bird Library every day, listening to Soul Mining while scribbling out my earliest attempts at fiction writing. Would I tell Matt Johnson how his music had been the soundtrack to my tortured 18-year-old soul?

When I finally got to talk with him in the green room, what I said to Matt Johnson was this:

“The sound sucks.”

“I know,” he said.

We did get to talk a little bit beyond that. Nice guy. Their show was more of a four-piece rock band sound than the early-80s drum-machine-heavy production that had mesmerized me back in the day. But it was a great night, and I really appreciated that Valerie had asked me to do it. Even if the sound sucked.

Most of The The’s show dates around the northeast in late 1999 were in small venues on purpose. He was about to release a new album, this was a below-the-radar way to get the band ready.

A week later I’d be heading back to the UK and Ireland to play more consecutive solo shows than I’d ever done. Whether they’d be below-the-radar or not was yet to be revealed.

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I remembered playing three or four festivals in the summer of 99. Revisiting my journal, it says we played over a dozen, each described in great detail.

In Norway, I went fishing in the middle of the night with giants who used glowworms as bait. In Spain, it was so hot I didn’t want to get out of the pool, so they interviewed me while I was swimming.

At a festival in Greece, the crowd was sandwiched between the stage at one end, and a carnival with rides and attractions at the other. While the band dEUS was playing, some guy on the bungee-jumping platform 100 feet up was having second thoughts. The singer from dEUS noticed.

“We’re not gonna play the next song until you jump,” he said, his voice echoing through the PA system.

The crowd turned to face the bungee platform. Can you imagine standing at the precipice with twenty thousand people screaming for you to jump? When he finally leapt into space, the entire festival erupted.

Shortly after, we had a two-week break. The rest of the guys went home, I stayed in Europe.

I can’t remember why I went to Paris, probably just because I could. This was the first of many visits to Nicolas and his wife Veronique. The first night, we went to a party and saw the rest of Superflu plus their other friends. I wasn’t with my American rock-n-roll entourage anymore. I needed to speak French.

My French is really bad. I was always under the impression that French people hate it when you mangle their language, but it’s different when they’re your friends, then they sort of find it charming instead of moronic. At least that’s what they told me. Maybe they just liked my accent.

Nicolas showed me around for a day or two, then he and Veronique went to a festival, left me the keys to their flat and took off. For the first time in my life, I was truly on my own in Paris.

I walked around, rode the Metro. I went to Notre-Dame, Père Lachais, Café Charbon.

It gave me time to think.

Paris was the city I’d dreamed of moving to when I was 21. Where had life taken me instead?

When I took the Eurostar back through the Chunnel to London, Katie was there at Waterloo Station to pick me up in her Mini convertible. She’d been busy setting up my show.

The next day she drove her hubbie Sean and me to a practice space. Sean was a big-time nightclub promoter, but he’d also been the drummer in JoBoxers and was kind enough to play with me. On bass was a nice fella named James who took the train in from Brighton. I can’t remember how he wound up in the mix, but he’d learned the songs in advance, and we ran through the set for two hours, seemed like we could pull it off.

Katie called Sean on his mobile to say the Mini had broken down. It was getting close to soundcheck time, the Camden Falcon wasn’t too far from the practice space, so we decided to hoof it.

All over Europe that summer, crews had all but carried our toothbrushes for us. Here I was, lugging my own gear through the streets of London, to a club that turned out to be further away than Sean remembered. I kind of loved it.

When we got to the Falcon, we did a quick soundcheck. The barmaid handed us each two sweaty drink tickets which we exchanged for warm Heinekens.

The crowd was modest compared to what I’d grown used to, but Katie had gotten the word out. A lot of my old London friends showed up, and my new London friends too. It meant a lot to me that they were there.

I did the first few songs solo. I thought I would rush through this part of the show but, when I started playing, something remarkable happened: the room went quiet. Everyone was actually listening. I slowed down, let myself get into it. Then Sean and James joined me on stage, and it all just came together.

When I’d played London over the winter, I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. This felt like a real show.

Three days later, I flew back to Kingston, spent a week with my family, then headed back to Europe with Mercury Rev for more festivals.

A week after that, we were back in Los Angeles, touring with REM. Swimming pools, movie stars…

It might be hard to understand how someone leading such a charmed existence could, at the very peak, consider walking away from it. The stereotypical stories about bands are all true. Strong personalities under pressure. Brotherhood at its best and worst. Promises kept and broken.

But when it came down to it, it was really simple: I just didn’t feel like myself.

I’m not sure if I imagined I could achieve this same level of success on my own, or if I’d be content with less, so long as it was on my own terms.

Either way, there I was at the edge, willing myself to make a major leap. But, for the first time since joining the band, maybe I had somewhere to jump to.

—

If you missed the REM series, see link below:

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Summer Festivals 99, Part 2

Belfast

June 28

We played isolated shows here-and-there on days between festivals.

Ducking to Belfast gave me a chance to visit Ian again. We stayed at the Europa, “the most bombed hotel in the world,” but The Troubles had officially ended the year before, we were pretty sure we wouldn’t explode.

That night, the opening band cancelled for some reason, so our opening act became…me. I had a solo show in London coming up, seemed like a good idea to get some practice.

Three days before, we’d played for 100,000 people, but that was stage left on keyboard as part of a six piece. As singer with just guitar, had I ever even played to 100 people?

The BBC was recording us that night, they decided to record me too. I peeked into their truck parked outside, it looked like a NASA control room.

“Okay, we’re ready, let’s do it,” they said.

One of the guys from the BBC went onstage, introduced me as I came out. Holy shit, there were suddenly over 500 people cheering for me.

I opened my set playing Oh Susannah on accordion. Thinking about it now, this seems suicidal. Amazingly the crowd was into it. After that I switched to guitar, mostly, played five or six more songs, half originals, half covers.

Most of the audience stuck with me, but the noise from the bar grew in intensity. Mercury Rev was so insanely loud that people could chatter and clink bottles all they wanted, we would always drown them out. Playing on my own, bar noise was something I was about to have to get used to.

At some point, a girl in the audience called out, “Play My Lovely Horse!”

Having spent enough time watching the tele in the UK, I was able to call back that I loved Father Ted but, sadly, did not know the words to My Lovely Horse (season 2, episode 5, Ted and Dougal try out for the Eurovision Song Contest.)

We played a good show that night, really great audience.

Afterwards as I was ducking to the bus, a couple of people stopped to talk with me, including the girl who had called out the request. She took out a pen and wrote down the lyrics.

“There isn’t actually such a thing as a horse dentist,” she wanted me to know.

It was pretty common for me to get stopped by a few people after a show, but that night in Belfast, when I looked up, I realized I was suddenly surrounded by fifty people. That was a little weird.

“I’ll learn My Lovely Horse by the next time I play Ireland,” I promised the girl.

And I did.

—

Werchter Festival, Belgium

July 2

All European festivals have the feel of a medieval village when you first enter them, including the muck and mire. Werchter Festival was neat and organized from the get-go, with industrial rubber matting for the buses to park on, so you didn’t immediately sink up to your knees in mud.

Beautiful site with trees everywhere. I liked the backstage area immediately. Pressure-treated wooden decking, a sunny tent for a central gazebo, modular units for each band arranged like cottages, nice furniture in the dressing rooms though we spent most of our time outside.

No soundcheck per se, but we got to noodle on our instruments for a while. After the rest of the band went to get something to eat, I hung onstage and asked to be turned up in the mains just so I could hear what my keyboard sounded like in isolation when I played REALLY BIG.

For the heck of it, I took the mic to see what my voice would sound like REALLY BIG too. It was early, there weren’t any concert goers there yet. I made up some impressionistic poems and recited them to the trees.

I re-joined my bandmates in catering afterwards.

“I just tried out the PA system,” I said.

“Yeah, we heard.”

Other bands started arriving, including Pavement who we hadn’t really seen since we’d toured with them a few years back. The big new was that Bob the percussionist had bought a race horse, a large percentage of it, anyway. Malkmus went in on it too.

We played first, not too many people yet, so I could just relax, enjoy the beautiful day. Two Japanese people in the audience kept waving at me. Had I met them in Japan? I didn’t really recognize them. I waved back.

Later on I watched Blur play. They looked completely different than I imagined they did. Then I realized I’d been confusing them with Pulp. Another British band with four letters.

—

Roskilde Festival, Denmark

July 4

I’ve always loved Lego blocks, but there was something totalitarian about a full-scale village made of them, which is what the complex where we were staying felt like.

“What is this place?” I asked a woman, when I finally found another human being walking around besides me.

She explained we were in suburban Copenhagen and that this was a business area, which was why it was desolate over the weekend. I tried picturing it crowded during the workweek. With smiling Lego People.

Driving over to the festival, someone told me today was the day Nostradamus predicted would be the end of the world. I hoped it corresponded with the end of our show. That would be a good effect.

One of the wonderful things about Roskilde is it’s a family festival, people bring their kids here. They must’ve given out some sort of prizes or incentives to pick up recycling and trash, there were kids hustling everywhere with plastic garbage bags, the place was spotless.

This was the first time I cut an interview short, Blondie was playing and I needed to see them. One Way Or Another is one of my favorite songs ever. They played Call Me after that, which made me want to get that Armani suit I’d been dreaming about since 1980.

Sophie from V2 and I went to see Al Green, appropriately enough performing in the Green Tent. At the end of Take Me to the River, Reverend Al asked the entire audience if we accepted Jesus as our personal savior. Sophie and I both raised our hands.

“You can’t be afraid to be involved,” Sophie said.

Most of the rest of the audience raised their hands too. Maybe not all of them spoke English.

Later that day, I was sitting alone in the dressing room writing out set lists when in walks Ian McCulloch. He seemed to remember me from that night at Brixton Academy.

“Hello,” he said, shaking my hand. Then, “Do you happen to have any aspirin?”

Having become prone to decibel-induced migraines, I did happen to have some, and gladly gave him a few.

He and Will Sergeant and their manager took chairs and sat there with me while I continued writing set lists. Like, it had become completely normal to hang out with Echo and the Bunnymen?

Checking out of our hotel, I recognized Al Green’s band across the lobby. They seemed to be staring at me.

“Where you from?” the one guy finally asked me.

“New York,” I told him.

“We thought so,” he said, “we didn’t think you were part of all this Fahrvergnügen.”

Fahrvergnügen was being used in a Volkswagen campaign around that time. It was German for something like driving pleasure.

We weren’t actually in Germany, we were in Denmark.

But I knew what he meant.

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—

Fire, Ice, and Glasto

Summer Festivals 99, Part 1

Faxaskali, Reykjavik, Iceland

June 22

This was the dawning of international rock festivals in Iceland and “music tourism” in general.

All the hotels in Reykjavik were booked, so they had us staying a half hour away in Hveragerdi, which reminded me of the small towns I’d visited outside of Anchorage when I’d gone to Alaska in 89.

Our guide was an amiable Dane from Copenhagen named Andis, who drove us into Reykjavik after we’d gotten some rest. The cloud cover was low, mountaintops disappearing, and the festival had been moved indoors due to weather.

Rental music equipment is common at festivals. Ideally, by supplying standard gear for multiple artists, it allows for quick changeovers to keep things on schedule. The organizers got me a PC88, pretty much identical to my usual keyboard even though the settings were different. What they didn’t think to get was a proper keyboard stand, so they set it up on a card table, and I performed sitting on a kitchen chair.

Garbage was on after us. Unlike my jerry-rigged situation, Butch Vig’s drum kit had customized plexiglass screens surrounding it, cymbals supported by plastic tubes, pretty wild set-up.

They were the only really big name on the line-up and the ticket price was pretty high, so even though a couple thousand people showed up, it didn’t come close to filling the 5,000 capacity venue. The promoter was obviously taking a bath on this one but, as Jonathan later commented to our booking agent, we didn’t come up here for the show, we just wanted to see Iceland.

Sophie, Ray, and Wendi from V2 had the same idea, so they came from London. At the afterparty, Sophie introduced us to “Russian cocaine,” which was basically a shot of vodka, followed by sucking a lemon wedge coated with ground coffee.

The next day, Andis took us everywhere. There was no shoulder, so more often than not he drove the van straight down the middle of the road. Sometimes the road wasn’t paved at all, and at least once Andis had to get out to shoo sheep out of our path.

The landscape changed many times, sometimes the greenest grass, sometimes lunar surface. The remarkable thing about the “tourist sites” we visited in Iceland was that they’re all natural.

We explored a gigantic volcanic crater. Then Geysir, sort of Iceland’s Old Faithful. Then Gullfoss, a towering, two-tiered waterfall (on the cover of Echo and the Bunnymen’s Porcupine, btw). Then Thingvellir, where you can climb into the crack between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates.

One of my favorite things were these piles of rocks, each about five-feet tall, left from the Viking days when they served as guideposts for travelers. Many Icelanders to this day believe the rocks are home to the “hidden people” and they will reroute construction projects rather than disturb them.

Of course, I had to touch and photograph as many of these as possible, leading to the oft-repeated chorus I hadn’t heard this much since our 95 tours:

“Snyder, get back on the fucking van!”

That night, rather than go back into Reykjavik, Andis took us to a fishing village called Stokkseyri where we ate in a sort-of restaurant that was more-or-less someone’s house. There was no menu, they just brought us food. Cucumber salad, tomato salad, roasted red peppers in olive oil, couscous, potatoes, lamb cooked with onions, and plate after plate of lobster tails. This was no time to be a vegetarian.

After dinner, the sun was still up even though it was after midnight.

The next morning on our way to the airport, some of us went to the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa. The water is so dense with minerals that you almost float. We scooped up mud from the bottom and put it on our faces, on our heads. My skin looked great for days.

——

Glastonbury, UK

June 25

Starting back in 1970, Glastonbury has the cultural importance in the UK as Woodstock 69 does in the States, except that the festival continues year after year. Without a doubt, it’s the UK’s most iconic festival.

Approaching Glastonbury, our bus was stalled in standstill traffic for miles. This gave me ample time to peruse the extensive list of bands who’d be performing.

“Hey, Dogstar is playing!” I announced.

No response.

“Did anyone see that Dogstar is playing?” I repeated.

“Who the fuck is Dogstar?”

“Isn’t that the band Keanu Reeves is in?” I asked.

No response. Anyway, I was now on a mission.

We had to pass through five security checkpoints before our bus finally made its way close to our tent backstage. We were running late, so they whisked us to the autograph booth, where there was the longest line waiting to meet us I’d seen yet, running serpentine through steel barricades from the table. I signed everything from people’s clothing to donut wrappers.

I had a premonition about the catering tent, everyone’s gotta eat. Sure enough, five minutes after I walked in, there was Keanu Reeves heading to the coffee station, just a few feet away. As friendly as possible, I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey man, you guys play yet?”

“Yeah,” he said.

I told him sorry we missed them, we just got here, said I was Adam from Mercury Rev.

“Well, take it easy,” we both said, shook hands, and that was that.

He seemed pretty cool, reserved but not too much attitude. The Matrix had come out about a month before and he was about the most famous person on the planet. Yet, his band played one of those lesser-attended daytime slots, and we had graduated to nighttime slot. What did that mean?

The sun set, it was showtime. Looking out at the crowd, it was like a movie. A medieval invading horde. Never before or since have I played for 100,000 people. The noise and power is impossible to correlate with anything, except maybe the sea, or an earthquake.

And yet, in the fading light of day, with rolling hills and hedgerows in the distance, there was something friendly about it at the same time. Maybe that’s why I didn’t completely freak out when the sound coming from my monitor seemed to be out of tune. Could it be? Sometimes the sound distorts in situations like these.

Suddenly, Slouch was by my side, to the rescue. He heard it too. As with the last festival, the rented PC88 had some lingering programming issues, but this time it seemed to be affecting the tuning.

In front of this many people, I was just about capable of playing my parts as simply as possible. Performing diagnostics on my equipment would’ve been out the question. Slouch, cool as a cucumber, dialed through the various settings, stayed with me until he solved the problem, then moved on to solve whatever other problems anyone else may have been having. Our unsung hero.

The rest of the set went off without a hitch, from my perspective, and was finished almost as soon as it started.

The next day, I ducked into a market while our bus was fueling up. There on the cover of no fewer than three national newspapers were photos from Glastonbury of…Keanu Reeves.

So much for music festivals being the great leveler.

Hollywood wins.

—

Click below for…

Gigantic

Ghost Tour

Kingston 76

We were in Kingston barely long enough to do our laundry, then back to London. We checked into the Columbia Hotel, then straight to V2 to do phone interviews with Taiwan and Latin America.

They took us to the bar and a restaurant after that. Grasshopper and I literally fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, but the night was just beginning.

Echo and the Bunnymen were playing at Brixton Academy. They brought us to the VIP lounge, where the music was piped in and you could watch the band through double-plated glass, sort of like the “skybox” at a stadium. That just wasn’t going to work.

I headed back downstairs and fought my way into the middle of the crowd just in time for The Killing Moon, maybe one of the best songs ever recorded.

The Killing Moon is not meant to be amplified through speakers. It emanates from the sky, starting brushfires and shaking the landscape like Mount Sinai. This wasn’t the case at Brixton, but the sub-bass was substantial enough to induce concussion-like symptoms, so I can’t complain.

I’d befriended an accountant at V2 whose boyfriend was Echo and the Bunnymen’s manager. She knew I was never going to get my nerve up, so after the show she took me by the hand and dragged me to the dressing room.

“Ian, this is Adam from Mercury Rev,” she said.

I was sure he was thinking, Who are these people and where are my fucking cigarettes? But what he said was:

“I like your new single.”

Okay. Set aside every Bunnymen track I’d listened to a thousand times. Ian McCulloch singlehandedly determined my hairstyle at age eighteen, when a haircut was everything. Now I was in his dressing room, in London, and he was saying he liked our single?

I smiled nervously. I think I said:

“I like yours.”

# # #

They do it down on Camber Sands

They do it at Waikiki

—Pulling Mussels from a Shell

Almost all my favorite bands during my teens were from the UK, Squeeze at the top of the list. At my yellow piano back on Warren Street, I’d taught myself pretty much every song on Argy Bargy.

Camber Sands, it turns out, is a beach on the south coast of England. There was a new festival we were playing, at a family campground there at the beach, of course I was going to like it.

The Flaming Lips, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, tons of bands I liked at the moment played and I saw all of them.

The festival was curated by Belle & Sebastian, whose rooms were right next to ours. I’d brought a small accordion on tour, to amuse myself and annoy others, but Isobel from Belle & Sebastian thought it was okay. She brought her cello over and the two of us started playing.

I’d left the door open. I was concentrating on my accordion and didn’t realize people had started filing in. Looking up, I suddenly realized there were forty strangers crammed into our hotel room watching the two of us play.

Somehow that made more of an impression on me than our actual show that night.

# # #

Being the Squeeze fan I was, it was no small thing that our next stop was Later with Jools Holland. Besides Squeeze, Jools had also played on The The’s Soul Mining, another absolute all-time favorite. He was probably as close to a keyboard hero as I had.

They film Later in a big studio at the BBC. Four bands, one in each corner of the studio. The cameras are all on some kind of circular track in the middle, they roll from band-to-band, and the audience does too. You have to wait something like eighteen months to get tickets, so people are pretty glad to be there.

One of the other acts that night was Robert Palmer. He didn’t have the girls in the black cocktail dresses with him, but he was wearing a suit, and was very friendly.

We played Goddess on a Highway and maybe one other song. It seemed very gray on stage, and I was wearing a gray v-neck sweater, at least that’s how I remember it.

Similar to Brixton, one of our manager’s friends made a point of bringing me over to meet Jools after the show. He was talking to someone else at the moment, then turned suddenly to face me and said:

“Oh, I’ve heard this man is quite a good piano player.”

He shook my hand then, over the course of the next two minutes, said several other things to me that didn’t quite add up to a complete thought, shook my hand two more times, then he was on to the next thing and so was I.

It was hard to believe this was my life.

# # #

In Dublin a few days later, we were doing a signing at a very crowded Tower Records. I’d done this before. I always look people in the eye, smile, ask how to spell their name if it’s phonetically challenging (often the case in Ireland.)

Suddenly, something was happening. There was a person with a microphone saying my name. She handed me something I almost thought was a pizza at first, but it was a gold record. With my name on it.

No one told us this was happening today, and mine just happened to be on the top of the pile. When she said my name, it really did catch me completely off guard.

I sat there smiling like the village idiot, holding this gold record. I was in stunned disbelief.

# # #

Our tour with The Flaming Lips began in Aberdeen, Scotland. Wayne Coyne, like me, had recently grown a beard and, like me, had been subject to occasional ribbing by his bandmates (beards not yet popular in 99.)

Wayne told me his theory that people with beards were the more adventurous ones in bands, and that the length of a beard should be reflective of having just climbed Everest.

The promoters in Aberdeen informed us that someone would probably set a fire in the men’s room that night. The modus operandi was that everyone had to file out of the concert hall while the fire department put out the fire, then the house didn’t check tickets when they reopened the doors, so half of Aberdeen got to sneak in for free.

Sure enough, right in the middle of our set, that’s exactly what happened. Outside, they had our tour bus cordoned off to some extent, but there was only one security guard and the crowd was getting rowdy. Accordion to the rescue again. I retrieved it from my bunk and was able to amuse the Aberdonians until the fire department gave the all-clear and we resumed playing to the now beyond-capacity crowd.

A lot of other adventures on this tour. Our driver, Karl, was a Scouser, so he was tickled that Jeff and I made time to take The Beatles tour while we were in Liverpool.

The tour was phenomenal. You ride around Liverpool on a 60s vintage tour bus and visit all the relevant sights, not only Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, but all the houses where they grew up.

When we were standing in front of Paul’s boyhood home taking pictures, the shades were drawn, but a hand emerged at the bottom of the window and waved to us. I decided it was Paul himself, ducking in for a nostalgic look at his boyhood home, seeing a tour outside, feeling compelled to wave but not reveal it was him so as not to have to deal with a mob scene.

Then again, it could’ve been a maintenance worker. But I prefer to think it was Paul.

I made a point of watching the Lips show almost every night, it was that good. At first I didn’t know what to make of the fact that much of it was prerecorded, but it really was a different animal, with props, puppets, costumes, video. Several times, Sophie from V2 joined me in the audience and we sang all the words together, just having a blast.

Every night when Wayne was talking to the crowd, he always changed the way he’d phrase things ever so slightly, making sure to keep it fresh, keep himself on his toes.

One day during soundcheck, I asked him if I could bang the gong. He handed me the mallet and I had a go at it. It sounded like I’d just dropped a trashcan lid.

“I thought you said you wanted to bang that thing,” Wayne said.

Rather than leaving me to twist, he took pity and showed me where the sweet spot was. I let loose and did what he’d told me.

This time it reverberated into infinity.

# # #

We did another signing at Tower Records in London. Dublin’s had been a little crazy, but still had a touch of humanity, being Ireland.

This time in London, it was all business. A wall of photographers was standing in front of us. I tried to call out Hello to them but no one would answer, or even recognize that I was talking to them.

At someone’s signal, the flashes started going all at once, pummeling us. It was disorienting, literally blinding.

It felt like we were in front of a firing squad.

# # #

Back in 1986, Ian always made sure we had the television warmed up by 7pm on Thursdays to watch Top of the Pops. It wasn’t just a show, it was a British institution, dating back to the early 60s. Everyone watched it.

I clearly remember sitting on the couch with Ian, watching The Housemartins perform Think For A Minute. Lovely song.

“They’re Christian Socialists,” Ian gushed.

His dad was a minister, it was a major selling point. I went out the next day and bought their album.

To be on Top of the Pops, you needed your single to hit the top 20. Our first two singles had made the top 40 but hadn’t crossed the magic threshold. The third hadn’t quite made it yet, but it was rising fast enough that it looked like it was going to happen.

The producers of the show made the call, it was a go. Everything else stopped. We were whisked to BBC’s Elstree studios (where they’d filmed the famous Star Wars trash compactor scene, among other things.)

Probably the most excited person was Karl, our driver. He kept a photo of his family taped the the dashboard of the tourbus, had told his kids, who in turn had told all their friends at school that the band their dad was driving was going to be on Top of the Pops.

We’d done a lot of TV by this point, but Top of the Pops was different. Beyond its cultural significance, the production was really exacting. There were multiple sound checks during which the camera crew created a precise shot list to match every moment in the song.

When the time finally came to film our segment, there was a guy whose job it was to whip the audience into a frenzy, and he did his job well. As we took the stage, they sounded ravenous, like the crowd at a Roman colosseum.

Suddenly, we were playing. The crowd would not stop screaming at this same level of intensity. The guys and I were exchanging glances, like, What’s wrong with these people? We’d fine-tuned my monitor three times but I still couldn’t hear myself.

About two minutes into the song is when I took my solo. A camera breathed down my neck just over my right shoulder, trained with deadly precision on my hands. The solo I’d invented on the spot the night we recorded with Levon had become enshrined into the song, so I played it every night. Maybe there was some residual energy left over in the studios from having filmed Star Wars here. I used The Force, and my hands just did what they were supposed to.

The end of Top of the Pops is sort of like the end of Saturday Night Live. I was instructed to go over and hang out with some boy band so they could film us making small talk together, as if we’d become bonded over the course of making the show.

Later, we all went out for a celebratory dinner at a fancy sushi restaurant. All the top dogs from the label and management were there, but they were all on their cellphones for most of the dinner, wheeling, dealing, following up, making further plans.

No one in the band had cellphones yet, so it was a little weird on that level. I couldn’t help but contrast this dinner with the ones back in Italy when I’d sat with the promoter, we ate together, and actually talked.

This felt more like a war room than a fancy restaurant.

# # #

We were well-accustomed to flying economy, better than steerage on a steamship, but you still show up feeling like a piece of carry-on luggage.

On the flight back to New York, the label surprised us, treated us all to an upgrade. There was triumph in the air so they were feeling generous. Plus, this was the first tour on which the band had actually made money without relying on tour support from the label, so there was that.

It turned out that Opus 40 had peaked at 31. The segment we filmed would not be going on the air. Though anyone who watched through to the end would still see me on the set for some mysterious reason, chatting with a boy band while credits rolled over our faces.

The only ones I felt bad for were Karl’s kids. They were the ones who’d have to explain to their friends at school why the band their dad was driving wasn’t on Top of the Pops after all.

Whatever class we were flying had a favorable stewardess-to-passenger ratio. Before we even took off, a stewardess arrived and gave Grasshopper and me hot towels and mimosas.

She smiled and looked at the two of us as if infatuated.

“Are you Meatloaf?” she asked.

Hopper and I looked at each other.

“Do we look like Meatloaf?”

“The band, I mean,” she said. “We heard Meatloaf was on the plane today.”

“No,” we said, “we’re not Meatloaf.”

She continued to lavish us with attention just the same, and that was fine with us.

Whether our band was a household name or not, we’d unexpectedly gone from being an indie band to being a pop band in the course of about six months, at least in the UK and Ireland, and it wasn’t even festival season yet.

Most importantly, for the moment, we each had our own armrests so we wouldn’t have to compete for one, and our chairs tilted almost all the way back.

It was our best flight home yet.

—

Click below for…

Gigantic

Ghost Tour

Kingston 76

It’s hard to convey 1999 as less than an epic novel in itself.

From Europe to Japan, South-by-Southwest in Austin to a video shoot in NYC, then out to Los Angeles. It was still only April 1st.

We woke up, did Morning Becomes Eclectic at KCRW’s grungy little basement studio, played the El Rey on Wilshire, then we were back on the bus and rolling again.

Our new bus driver was Ricky Presley from Tupelo, Mississippi. With that last name and hometown, I had to ask.

“You wouldn’t happen to be related to…”

“Our daddies were first cousins,” he said, deep southern smile.

He had The King’s eyes. I didn’t tell him the whole “blessed by Elvis” in Memphis story, might’ve seemed weird. At any rate, second cousin to Elvis or not, we were bound to be friends, he was a cool guy.

Ricky had a wife and daughter back in Tupelo. Before switching to tour buses, he drove a big rig for thirteen years, before that worked on an offshore oil rig for seven.

“It’s the hardest job,” he told me, shaking his head. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”

After we played San Francisco, our next show was way up in Bellingham, Washington. Bit of a drive. At one truck stop, the waitress winked at us and gave us free coffee. Ricky had been through here plenty, guess she knew him.

As usual, I’d taken to riding up front in the captain’s seat, even sleeping there half the night just so I could wake at dawn and see the world unfold. Northern California mountain ranges, snow-topped eggshell blue in the morning light. I imagined the bus invisible, flying through timeless valleys thousands years before settlers and indigenous alike.

The mountains in Washington State were stunning in their own way. I was admiring them the next day from the University in Bellingham where we were playing.

“Nice environment,” I commented to some students.

“The beauty is just a facade,” one student said. Then came the litany of chlorine production, paper mill, high cancer rate…

When hanging with students in Bellingham, just say “nice view” and leave the environment out of it.

We doubled back to Seattle. It had been ten years since I’d lived here. Like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, I didn’t like what I found.

Walking along Western trying to find the old Cafe Mars, I was in stunned disbelief. The entire block had been demolished, unrecognizable. Roughly where the Mars had been, where we’d worked and cooked and smoked and drank and played poker when things were slow, there stood an impenetrable eight story, glass condominium. The Frasier Cranes of the world had won.

I went through at least three out of the five stages of grief standing there, not quite making it as far as acceptance. I’ve since had much time to reflect on the inevitability of change, but some of it remains heartbreaking.

I did get to see quite a few old friends, which was heartening. The Poughkeepsie scene continued to migrate to the Emerald City, Mark from Agit Pop was now playing with Steve from my old Seattle band. The world of people continued to evolve in unexpected ways.

After the show, our bus pulled out of Seattle in tandem with Jason Falkner’s bus. Jason and his band were opening for us. This next trek was our longest, all the way to Chicago, so Ricky and their driver, Mike, decided it would be best to drive together.

I stayed up a while then finally had to get into my bunk to get some real sleep. Ricky and Mike stayed in radio contact, amusing each other, keeping each other awake throughout the long night.

I awoke on the road somewhere in northern Idaho, Denis Johnson territory. I’d never been on this stretch of highway before. At sunrise the mountains looked like camel backs, the trees atop them like prairie dogs rising to greet the morning sun.

In my journal, I began sketching rudimentary ideas for a play that would take place on a tour bus.

“Prokofiev in Idaho,” says my journal, “Sam Shepard meets Wallace Shawn…”

Didn’t quite write that one. Maybe something similar.

Next truck stop, I was having coffee with Ricky and Mike, they were talking about the “overdrive,” which is when a driver logs over 500 miles a day and the company pays them overtime. This is how they make their real money, so they were psyched.

We finally had to stop in Billings so Ricky could get some sleep. Caron got him a room at a motel, the rest of us were up to our own devices. I talked to a girl on the street and got some info about the local scene, as it were.

We found dinner at Billings’ version of a micro-brewery, then walked to another bar up the street where there was an open-mic blues jam going on. Cover songs. Loose, mostly competent.

The house band saw us sitting there, wearing black and whatnot. They figured we were probably a band or something.

“You guys are welcome to come on up and play,” the singer said.

It was mostly an invitation, maybe a little bit of a challenge. We took him up on it.

When a band is just starting out on tour, things can be a bit tenuous. You’re still learning the songs, hesitate, miss connections. Once you’ve been touring a while, everything comes together, you just can’t make a mistake. By this point, we were about twenty shows past bulletproof.

Jonathan and Grasshopper played guitars as usual. Jeff was off somewhere, so Brian from the other band played drums. I played bass even though I’d never really played bass before, but it didn’t matter.

We pulled out Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer, a reliable cover we kept in our pockets for encores. As we hit that first resounding E minor chord, the building’s foundations started to shake. Looking out at the house band and everyone else in the bar, they appeared frozen, mouths open, trying to figure out what was happening. No one was talking, or even drinking.

Cortez only has three chords, you can really lay into them. As Jonathan sang about Montezuma and people about to be plundered, it was like we were the conquistadors. If the guys in the house band weren’t paralyzed, they would have hidden their women.

Afterwards, when we thanked the house band and handed them back their instruments, the leader with the grizzly gray beard said something like:

“Uh, you boys can really play.”

We never did tell them who we were or that we were even a band, we left them with that mystery.

We still had well over a thousand miles to go till Chicago. We would pass through the Black Hills and other places that had over the years already worked their way into my mythology.

It’s all America. But there’s an openness to the west that envelops and stays with you. No sense saying more than that.

Chicago transitions you back to the neighborhood, so by the time you’re doing relatively short runs between Northeastern cities, it makes sense in its own way. We’d get a short break soon, then back to Europe for that still-expanding reality.

Ricky gave me an official Pyramid Bus Company hat like the one he had. I wore it all tour, back east then overseas, bringing the West, its mountains, open spaces, and truck stops with me.

It’s tattered to the point where I can’t keep it on my head. But I still have it.

—

Click below for…

Gigantic

Ghost Tour

Kingston 76

EATING

Lunch in Tokyo: bento boxes filled with fresh, delicious sushi purchased right on the street. I could live on these, happily. But at night the vendors disappeared, so I tried different restaurants.

First, conveyor belt sushi. It’s what it sounds like. You sit at a table or counter, there’s a conveyor belt, you help yourself to whatever looks good as it rolls past. A robot cart comes around with drinks. It was very Jetsons, and automation meant I could have a sit-down meal without having to speak Japanese, but it also felt like cheating.

The next night I took a chance with a neighborhood noodle joint. There were pictures in the window of different dishes, I took out my notebook to write down some corresponding Japanese letters to help me order, but the cook must’ve seen me through the window and took pity on me. He came outside and said something in Japanese, suggesting I should just point to which photo I liked. I did.

“Onegai shemas,” I said.

We both smiled.

There were flags with Japanese kanji printed on them hanging halfway down over the doorway. To a westerner, it seems counterintuitive to obstruct the entrance of a place of business, but in Japan it’s common to have to duck in order to go inside.

No one paid me much mind, even though I was probably the only Gaijin (non-Japanese) to come in here in months, or ever. I sat at the counter, the woman working there handed me a hot towel to refresh myself.

The place was loosely filled with tired, mostly solitary men, who’d just finished a long day’s work. Some read newspapers, some stared at their food, others watched the news on a small TV suspended in the corner.

It was steamy. Dishes clanked. The sounds and smells of cooking. Slurping. I was given a huge bowl of noodle soup, mostly cabbage, not too much seafood, but that was okay. Enough to fill two people. I ate the broth with a spoon for a while. As I picked up the chopsticks, the woman behind the counter was quick to offer me a fork, but I smiled to indicate I was okay. Again, amazement that a Gaijin could use chopsticks.

The hotel offered breakfast but it was expensive and not included. Most of the interesting-looking places in the vicinity didn’t open until 11am, which explains why one morning I found myself in a McDonald’s, but I was glad I went.

For one thing, they had one of John Lennon’s guitars on display in a plexiglass box and were playing Beatles’ music. No explanation.

Another thing was the exchange at the counter while I was trying to get some water. I believed the Japanese word was mizu, but for some reason two different cashiers could not understand what I was saying. The manager came out from the back. He was smiling, I was smiling. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Mizu?

Manager: Mizu?

Me: Mee-zoo?

Manager: Mee-zoo?

I gestured with my hand, as if drinking from a cup.

Me: Meee-zuuu?

Manager: Ah, mizu!

Cashiers: Mizu!

Me: Mizu!

Success, everyone happy, there was peace in the village. The cashier got me my water, the manager bowed to me, I bowed back to the manager.

This may seem like a small thing. But I worked at Burger King in the Hudson Valley Mall in the early 80s. The manager at Burger King treated me with contempt and most definitely never bowed to me.

Having a Japanese McDonald’s manager bow to me felt strangely momentous.

—

OBSESSIVE FANS

One morning as I left the hotel, a Japanese guy who’d been waiting outside suddenly jumped to his feet and started following me. I nodded, smiled, but kept walking. Half a block later, he still seemed to be following me. I picked up my pace. He picked up his pace.

I’m not sure what I imagined was actually going on. He looked like maybe a college kid, not exactly the sort who’d try to mug me in broad daylight, but I suddenly found myself running.

I ran varsity track at KHS. One of my remaining superpowers was that I could still leave most civilians in the dust if I put my mind to it. I kept up the pace another block or two, then stopped, turned around. The kid was some distance behind but still running in my direction. I decided to wait.

When he finally reached me, he was so out of breath he doubled over momentarily and had to put his hands on his knees to support himself.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

Looking up, almost apologetically, he extended a copy of our CD and a pen.

Jesus. He’d apparently gotten the rest of the band’s signatures already. They all came-and-went from the hotel as a pack and he’d been able to get everyone in one shot. Except for me.

Poor guy must’ve been waiting outside on-and-off for two days. He just couldn’t give up without a complete set.

If I’d had known, I wouldn’t have made him work so hard for it.

—

BUSINESS CULTURE

In addition to being tour roommates, Jeff and I often did interviews together, we bounced off each other pretty well. We met Hiroe from the label in the hotel lobby and rode in a cab with him to the V2 office.

The cab had a manual transmission with the gearshift on the column. The backseat was covered in lace, which wouldn’t last an hour in NYC. I asked Hiroe about all these stubby, blackened, deathlike trees along the streets with the ravens perched in them. He told me they were cherry blossoms that would soon explode white and pink. It sounded lovely, we were just a little too early in the season.

When we got to V2, it was very office-like. In London, even though they were working, it was very jovial. Here it was all business. They put us in a room with a translator and we started doing interviews.

For the most part they were very serious, but the last interviewers were a couple of western guys who ran an English-language music magazine, they were a lot more freewheeling. I was telling them how the housekeeper back in the hotel vacuumed concentric circles around our laundry.

“Our room is like a Zen sock garden,” I told them.

We were all cracking up, which seemed perfectly normal to us, but Hiroe opened the door and looked in with a concerned look on his face, like he couldn’t understand why we were laughing at the office.

After Jeff and I were finished, the V2 receptionist thanked us and said goodbye. That was strange to us. In London, if we were at V2 doing interviews, when we finished, there’d always be someone who’d take a break to buy us a drink or something, even if it were the middle of the day.

In Japan, when it was time to socialize, for sure the people from V2 were as sincere and friendly as can be. In the work environment, it was straight-up work, and that was that.

Westerners marveled at the “economic miracle” in Japan as if it were some kind of magic trick or dumb luck. I think the secret might be something like this: they just work really hard.

—

EX-PATS

In the US, I’m maybe a couple of inches taller than the national average. In Sweden, I’m a midget. In Japan, I could play center on a semi-pro basketball team.

Everywhere I walked I was a full head taller than almost everyone else. One afternoon on a particularly long stretch of sidewalk I saw another head floating above the crowd, coming toward me. This was the first westerner I’d seen all day, which was strange enough, but what was weirder was the informal way he spoke to me from the get-go as if he already knew me.

“How long you been here?” he asked

“About a week.”

“What are you doing?”

I was well-practiced at vague, noncommittal responses, but his directness almost threw me for a second.

“Just, you know, playing some music.”

The next question at this point would often be “Are you in a band?” or something like that, but he was already past that.

“I’ve been here six months,” he said, which sounds like a simple statement of fact, but the way he said it, the subtext seemed to be he was going out of his mind and desperately needed to talk with another westerner, any westerner.

He told me a little about what he was doing for work, then:

“Hey, what are you doing right now? You wanna grab a coffee?”

Oddly, it would be very much like me to grab a coffee with a random person in a foreign country. He didn’t seem like a bad guy, but my instincts told me if we got a coffee I’d never get rid of him.

“Uh, I sorta have to get back to my hotel…”

Tokyo for me was a land of wonder. Each day, things were revealed that suggested whatever I thought of as social reality could be constructed quite differently.

Meeting this guy on the street was the first time I wondered if there could be a tipping point, where you lose the trail of breadcrumbs that brought you here, and you really just need to find your way back home.

—

SHRINE

Other random Americans drifted into our sphere. A couple of young filmmakers named Ondi and Dave from LA connected with us somehow. They seemed to know their way around, so Justin, Paddy and I joined up with them and did some poking around.

At the train station, you bought your ticket from a machine where at the end of the transaction a cartoon video image bowed to you.

“Don’t bow to the machine,” Justin said to me.

“It just bowed to me,” I said.

On the platform, men wearing white gloves would gently but firmly pack people into train cars to get the maximum number onboard and make sure the train left on time.

We were only going two stops to Takeshita Street in Harajuku, which was known to be a trendy shopping district. We saw a lot of that childlike street fashion, Hello Kitty and whatnot, that has subsequently spread across the globe, but then this seemed to be the epicenter.

Harajuku was a good place to grab more souvenirs for friends back home, buy cds, take goofy photos in photo booths. It was pretty crowded. After a while I thought it might be nice to duck into what I thought was a park, but it turned out to be much more.

The trees were sinuous but with thick trunks, they looked like they had been there a long time. Passing under some seriously gigantic Torii gates, we found ourselves at the Meiji Shrine, named for one of the last emperors of Japan.

Much of the architecture I’d seen in Tokyo had been Japanese interpretations of what you’d find in the west, which was often taken to the next level and interesting. At the Meiji Shrine, we were finally immersed in a completely Japanese universe. Massive, overhanging roofs, unpainted wood, vague boundaries between inside and out.

As much as it’s a tourist destination, it’s also an actual Shinto shrine. We watched people washing their hands with wooden cups, so we did what they did. I found some additional instructions in English about the proper way to greet the shrine. You were meant to bow twice, clap twice, then bow again, so I did this too.

Inside the shrine wasn’t exactly a rock garden, but there were two squares of thickly raked gravel. There was also a wedding procession taking place, everyone was wearing traditional kimonos. It was something to see.

Back outside we bumped into Jeff, Jay, and Jack, who had found their own way here. It was the closest thing to a band field trip we’d had since we’d gotten here, which felt good. And while it wasn’t exactly the Buddhist temple I imagined I was looking for, it more-or-less did the trick.

—

STREET MUSICIAN

My explorations of in Tokyo were incredibly satisfying and, in many ways, things with the band were going incredibly well. I mean, we’d made it to Japan.

Still, there were things below the surface that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t like four years earlier in Europe when I was messed up and losing it. But, since then, I’d sort of pieced together a band persona that let me get along, for the most part, but it didn’t feel like me.

Like that guy I’d met on the street who’d stayed a bit too long and lost himself in Tokyo. I’d lost myself in a band.

Our last night in Tokyo before heading to Osaka, I took a final nighttime walk around Shinjuku. It’s common knowledge the district’s aesthetic had inspired Blade Runner. It didn’t seem quite as dystopian as that, but it did get really seedy at night, neon love hotels, aggressive hawkers trying to lure you into clubs.

It didn’t help my mood to move through a place that fascinated me during the day but turned dark and twisted at night.

I was about to turn back, but decided to go just a little further to a pedestrian tunnel where the day before I’d seen a street musician playing his guitar in synch with a passing train, it’d been really inspiring.

That guy wasn’t there, of course, but there was a different musician who also caught my attention, as well as a few other people who stopped to listen to him.

He was wearing a knit cap with a pompom on top almost the size of his head. Nodding left and right, the pompom bobbed roughly in synch with his strumming. It was really simple, but there was real showmanship in it, and the guy was singing his lungs out.

When he finished the song, I approached to talk with him. I bought a cassette from him, which he had wrapped in cellophane on a small paper plate and included a napkin and small plastic fork, as it to say:

“Here, eat my music!”

It was so amazingly cool that I bought a second one to give to my friend Neil who I knew would love it.

Something about his homemade cassette and his performance reminded me of a Japanese version of what I was doing back in Iowa City with my HBO Special, before all this professional music business, when it was all just for fun.

I wasn’t sure this guy was ever going to get famous.

But it seemed like he was on the right track.

—

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I read this in a book:

Go to a new city. Walk one block. When you reach the first corner, decide which direction you will go. Walk another block. At the next corner, decide which direction you will go. Repeat, repeat, repeat, etc. etc.

So long as I didn’t keep turning right and going in circles, the plan, as such, should work exceedingly well in Tokyo.

I kept notes of the things I saw.

A woman wearing a surgical mask walked a chowchow puppy. Twenty-five years before covid, seeing someone on the street in a surgical mask was kinda weird, but in Tokyo, one-in-ten people seemed to be wearing them.

From what I gathered, it was less a fear of catching something, more a fear of giving something to someone else. Exceedingly polite society.

At one particularly busy intersection, there was an amazing X-shaped pedestrian bridge that connected all four corners. At other intersections, women in blue uniforms with matching blue floppy hats waved yellow flags at the end of sticks, blowing whistles so that gaggles of school children wearing matching yellow hats could cross safely.

I veered from from avenues to tiny residential streets to see how people lived, then back to busy streets looking for breakfast. I was getting really hungry, but nothing was open yet.

I found another temple, a wooden one, with a well-worn yard around it. There was a wooden box. I hung back and watched a woman put money into it, ring a bell, then say a little prayer before going on her way. I still had no concept of Japanese money. I put a medium-sized coin in the box, rang the bell, and followed suit.

I stopped to watch a man trying to feed a clumsy stray puppy some kind of coffee beverage from a bottle. We both had a laugh at this, then the man climbed onto a motorcycle and drove away.

Finally, I found a place that was open. Ginza Renoir. I sat at the low counter where I was offered a hot towel to refresh myself. Using my translation book, I ordered coffee, which came in fine china. I pointed to a picture of some vague sandwich which proved to be egg salad, ham, mayo, cuke, and tomato, on thick white bread with the crusts cut off.

I was given free tea and a separate bill for each of the other two things. ¥440 + ¥490. My book said tipping was frowned upon. Hard not to, but I refrained.

Everywhere I walked there were people cleaning. I stopped at a cigarette machine. Two distinctive Japanese brands stood out, Peace and Hope. I chose Peace, which turned out to be non-filtered and did not come with matches. Putting one in my mouth, I approached a man on the street.

Onegai shimasu, I said, with a flicking action of my finger.

He gave me his own cigarette to get a light off.

Arigato.

Other stores were beginning to open for the day. I ducked into a few to buy souvenirs for folks back home

Bicycles everywhere with metal baskets. Scooters. A gas station with hoses coming down from the roof to save space. Funny, this country was famous for having to conserve space, but so many of the residential streets I walked along were way less crammed than their American counterparts.

I checked out another Buddhist temple.

I watched a guy pull up to vending machine, without getting off his motorcycle he bought a can of coffee then rode off. Looked good to me. I bought what I thought would be a cold coffee beverage, but the can was HOT. There was some kind of heating element inside the vending machine. Weird at first, but I was addicted immediately. I would be buying hot cans of coffee all over Tokyo.

I was starting to get the idea that ¥100 was around a dollar, so sticking a ¥100 coin into a vending machine became less of a crapshoot.

I was getting a little tired. Determined not to look at my map, I noticed some train tracks. Remembering seeing tracks close to the hotel, I kept the tracks in sight and figured I was heading in the right direction.

A woman handed me a pack of tissues with an ad in English on them that said Massage.

“I don’t need a massage,” I told her.

“Keep the tissues,” she said.

Then I thought, wait, I do need a massage.

Years before, I had gotten in a car wreck that occasionally subjected me to almost crippling back pain. On tour this happened so frequently that I had just learned to live with it. But wasn’t Japan the home of Shiatsu?

I walked back to the woman who had given me the free tissue pack.

“What kind of massage?”

“More English upstairs.”

I went upstairs. Not necessarily more English, but I rolled with it anyway.

I’d had a bit of Swedish massage therapy back in the States. This wasn’t that. I’m not sure it was Shiatsu either.

The masseuse was from China and spoke no English, but somehow we communicated anyway. At one point she placed hot towels on my back and a heavy cover that weighed me down like the lead apron at a dentist’s office. Then she walked on me.

It actually worked. Much improved when I hit the street, I found our hotel five minutes later. It turned out the massage place was only three blocks away…

# # #

Strangely, some of my bandmates didn’t seem to like Japan as much as I did. There were a lot of interviews to be done, including a live television appearance. When the TV host asked what we thought about Japan, Jonathan and Grasshopper just looked at me, so I wound up doing much of the talking. I think it might’ve actually been the nightly news, but I’m not sure.

That night we played a venue called the Liquid Room. A uniquely Tokyo setting, on the 7th floor of an 8-story commercial building. This was completely normal here. It held about 600 and was sold out.

The Japanese audience was also very unique. When the music picked up, they all began pogo-ing in absolute unison. Looking out, you saw the crowd moving up-and-down, up-and-down, as if they were a single, coordinated unit. Everyone was smiling.

Afterwards, the label took us to a traditional Japanese restaurant where you took your shoes off and sat on the floor with your legs tucked under the table.

The seating arrangements were interesting. Instead of one big table, they separated the band members, each at our own table with several people from the record label. Whether this was to give us each more attention or a divide-and-conquer technique I had no idea.

I was seated with Shigeki, Noriko, and Kem. Shigeki spoke English with a British accent. He told me stories of how when his grandmother grew up right around here, Shinjuku still had dirt streets.

It is considered bad etiquette to pour your own sake. Noriko kept refilling my little cup continuously rather than allow me to make this mistake. Dinner consisted of many courses. Seaweed, miso, salad, noodles, sushi.

“How do you know how to use chopsticks?” Shigeki asked me. For some reason they were all amazed by this.

“Uh, we have have Japanese restaurants in New York…”

When I offered around the pack of Peace cigarettes after dinner, they found this funny. This was the brand their parents smoked after the war, not so popular with younger people.

Another thing they found funny was that I’d walked around Tokyo looking for Buddhist temples. Shigeki explained to me that many of the practices around here weren’t as much connected with the deeply spiritual as what he called “funeral Buddhism,” making sure people had a place to be buried when they die.

Caron came to the table and whispered for me to excuse myself for a moment. I met her by the bathrooms.

“You need to try the loo in the ladies,” she said.

“I’m not going in the ladies room,” I said. They had such a sense of propriety here, I could only imagine what someone would say if they caught me in the women’s bathroom.

“I’ll stand watch, just do it.”

Against my better judgement, and despite not having to go, I followed her instructions.

“Press all the buttons,” she called through the door, “make sure you press button number three!”

I’d already noticed various innovations in Japanese bathrooms, such as walk-in tubs and toilets that had built-in sinks for hand washing. This toilet had a control panel I’d not seen before. The instructions were in Japanese, but I could figure out numerical order. It soon became apparent that the toilet was also a bidet.

Button one sent a stream of water from behind. Button two sent a stream of water toward the front. I could not imagine where else I was about to get squirted but went ahead and hit button number three, at which point it blasted me with warm air, finishing the job, as it were.

When I emerged from the ladies room, Caron smiled conspiratorially.

Shortly after I returned to the table, the head of the record company announced dinner was over. Everyone else who worked at the label stood up immediately. When they say dinner is over, dinner is over.

The city felt different at night, a colorful maze of lights, gaming, strip shows. Jet lag in Japan is profoundly surreal. It’s not just that you’re off by a few hours. During the day your body insists that it is night, at night your body insists that it is day.

At least on this night as we arrived back at the hotel, my exhaustion was in synch with the local bedtime. I finally got a single night of uninterrupted sleep.

—

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It was a long, dark flight. My screen was tuned to the plane’s belly cam. I stared in a half-dream state as a thousand miles of vacant Russian landscape passed below us in real time.

No sleep. We were met at the airport by Ken and Kato from the label. I exchanged £200 British for ¥40,000 Japanese then we climbed into a van. The drive into the center of Tokyo was a long one.

Jeff and my room was on the 18th floor looking out over the Shinjuku district, an endless Times Square radiating out into infinity. On the table, two baskets of gorgeous fresh fruit, more than we could possibly eat, compliments of the Japanese label. It was 6pm local, I was dead tired. I slept till 1am, managed to fall asleep again, then woke at 5:30 am, eager to explore the city.

I got various maps and vague directions from the concierge how to find a nearby Buddhist temple. He didn’t know how to say Torii in English, but I mimed two poles with a beam on top showing I knew what he was talking about. We had a laugh about this.

I hit the streets before sunrise, prepared to greet the Land of the Rising Sun. There weren’t a lot of people out yet, nor traffic which, like England, was to the left. In addition to pigeons, there were a lot of crows in Tokyo. They cawed loudly from the low branches of small trees. Eerie at this hour.

Vending machines everywhere, glass fronts displaying numerous products in neat rows, a poster showing a model enjoying the product. My map was in Japanese, but the tallest buildings were clearly pictured, so I used the buildings as my guideposts. I saw a torii, but not quite in the area the concierge told me. I didn’t see the kanji ideogram for tera, Buddhist temple, so I kept going.

After another block or two, I selected a random side street and left the main drag for the first time. I combed the streets unsuccessfully until a cat came my way, meowing. I had a cat named Scruffy when I was a kid, I thought he was the Buddha. This was a good sign.

I found a neighborhood map directing me back to the torii I had passed, turned out to be the right place after all. I walked underneath and found myself in a small courtyard. There was a woman sweeping and washing stones. She paid me no mind, but a dog started barking at me. Dogs have Buddha nature too, but I could do without the barking.

This seemed to be a cemetery. Each stone was like an individual altar, with urns, offerings of flowers, even cups of tea. I ambled deep enough into the cemetery so the dog stopped barking.

Not that I was dissatisfied, but I was expecting something to click just by being here, but it wasn’t clicking. I tried that Buddhist exercise where the Buddha taps you on the shoulder and says, “Let me take your place for a while in this experience.” And he did.

My Buddha has a sense of humor.

“I know as much about this culture as you do,” he said, being from Nepal 2,500 years ago, but in my mind he still sounded Japanese.

The crows were cawing, and death abounded in other ways, this being a graveyard, but I was feeling quite alive. My Buddha prodded me with questions:

“You have come here to find something, what?”

“You say you are under pressure—what demands are being made on you besides being on time for soundcheck hours from now?”

“What do you hope to learn here that you cannot learn at home, if only you will apply yourself?”

Sensible questions. I pondered these things as I tried unsuccessfully to find an entrance to the temple, which proved impenetrable.

Rather than giving up, I squeezed past and found a hidden garden in back. There was a pit where they’d been burning papers, it felt intrusive to poke around, but there was also a break in the bushes which lead to an intimate grove and… an actual Buddha. A statue, anyway. That slight smile. Something clicked, I smiled too. I’d found what I was looking for.

I worked my way back out to the street just as the sun was rising. It was true, there was no place I needed to be, and I had plenty of money in my pocket if I needed it.

No longer looking for anything in particular, I folded my map, stuffed it into my back pocket and resolved to keep it there, folded.

I was now prepared to let myself get lost in Tokyo…

—

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Sweden

In Stockholm someone hipped me to Jan Johnansson, a Swedish jazz pianist from the 1960s. I went to a record store and picked up Jazz på svenska (literally, Jazz in Swedish.) It came out in 1964 and sounds like A Charlie Brown Christmas directed by Ingmar Bergman. Just fantastic.

I gave it to our sound man Squid to play as our walk-on music that night. I thought it set the tone quite nicely, but the audience seemed mystified. Later someone asked,

“Why did you open your show with the theme from the news?”

Whoever told me about Jazz på svenska neglected to add that the Swedish Walter Cronkite had been opening up his nightly broadcast with it for decades. Well, it still sounded pretty cool to me.

Another highlight of Scandinavia was Howe Gelb from Giant Sand, he was opening for us and riding along on our bus (a trick I’d soon be borrowing.)

Howe had about ten years on me. He was graying slightly and possessed a poetic reserve that kept me sitting up all hours on the bus to ask him questions. Not about music even, but life in general. He just seemed to know stuff.

Howe usually played solo, the night we played Gothenborg, he asked me to join him on stage to play keyboard. Happily. I’d been paying pretty close attention, usually I can jump in fairly easily. Howe was a whole other story. He’d stop, he’d start, speed up, slow down, add chords and phrases I didn’t recall hearing previously.

“That was a bucking bronco ride,” he said after the show, “you’re hard to shake.”

Apparently, he’d spent a portion of his focus, just for fun, trying to throw me off, in front of a live audience. Both counterintuitive and a little bit amazing. I don’t know how Giant Sand does it. I’m a major fan.

—

Italy

Wherever you play, the venue is supposed to provide supper. In Italy, promoter Andrea and his crew actually made a point of eating with us each night.

This was not dine-and-dash, these were full course meals. Tortellini, then eggplant, then stuffed peppers, then… We’d start looking woozily at the clock at some point, like, Don’t we have to get to the club?

“Maybe you play at 11… maybe you play at 12…”

Italy. You drink your wine. You eat your dinner slowly. The club will be there.

I started to make sure to sit next to Andrea at dinner time. He gave good pointers, he knew which places had the best house wine. Our last night was Caron’s birthday and it was the best. A violin player even came to our table to serenade us.

Toward the end of the meal most of my bandmates ordered cappuccinos. Andrea rolled his eyes in disgust.

“What?” I asked him.

“Cappuccino… maybe for breakfast, maybe… but after dinner, never.”

“So what should I order?”

He looked at me in disbelief.

“Espresso,” he said, like, how could I even ask such a question?

It wasn’t like I’d never had espresso before, but what came next was new. After I’d drank it, while the little cup was still hot, Andrea swiftly filled it with grappa.

He looked at me very seriously while he lifted his own little cup to demonstrate.

“First sniff, then drink, first sniff then drink…sniff then drink.”

He literally repeated it three times. I did exactly what he said.

It’s simple physics. The warm cup heats the grappa ever so slightly, it releases some sort of heady aroma. As I breathed it in, the front of my skull seemed to open up.

Drinking the grappa immediately afterwards, the warm distillation travels down your throat into your stomach, and does for the rest of your body what the aroma just did for your head.

Incredibly satisfying, it resets everything. Andrea smiled to see his lesson had the desired effect.

“I love to cook, I love the table,” he pronounced. “I am Italian.”

We’d been at the table for over two hours, wine with every course, but I was tuned like a fiddle and ready to play.

At 11, or 12, or whenever…

—

France

Somewhere in Europe we were having a band meeting along with reps from the record company. They still didn’t know who’d be opening for us in France.

I looked from face to face, I couldn’t understand why there was any question.

“Superflu,” I said.

“Who?”

“The band who played with us at Divan du Monde in Paris?”

Maybe no one remembered because that was the night Richard Branson came to see us. He had to be whisked out of our dressing room due to some lapse in judgement lost to history, but I distinctly remembered being in the audience for Superflu and thought they were about the most perfect band I could imagine.

When I went to their dressing room afterwards to compliment them, I think they thought I was bullshitting them. But when we converged on Toulouse a short time later, they said, “I guess you really do like us.”

Their name doesn’t translate. In English it sounds like a really bad respiratory infection. But in French, Superflu means superfluous, which they certainly are not.

A brief description does no justice. Nicolas, Sonia, Sébastien, Gauthier, and Gilles intermingled like chamber musicians but playing pared-down indie with violin and a hint of French traditional. They’d sometimes swap instruments depending on the song, which appeals to me. And, of course, the French lyrics add mystery, though Nicolas and Sonia sung succinctly enough that I could almost understand.

We had several lively dinners together, including a memorable one in Strasbourg, the city in France that’s more beer than wine because it’s on the German border. Four out of five band members were charitable enough to speak English, and Gauthier spoke marijuana fluently, so we communicated perfectly on that level.

As a parting gift, Sonia gave me a laminated map of the Paris Metro. It would prove handy, I’d be visiting soon, and one day recording with them…

—

Greece

I’ve loved hats ever since my grandparents travelled in the 60s and brought hats for me from all over Europe.

In a gift shop in Athens, I saw this hat with a three-foot tassel dangling to one side. What was this amazing thing? The woman told me it was a féssi and explained it was very traditional.

“What would people think if I wore a hat like this on stage?”

“They would think that you are a friend of Greece.”

Okay, two things.

One: I refused to wear black onstage like everyone else, but did take pleasure in wearing somewhat outlandish things on occasion (at one festival, I wore a galabeya on stage that Dawn got me in Egypt, something between a very long shirt and a man dress.)

Two: Since I was the one hustling to learn the basics in each country, I’d been elected to greet the audience every night in whatever language.

So, in Athens, wearing my new féssi, I stepped up to the mic:

“Yasas, efharistoume pou írthate…”

Hello, we thank you for coming. I waved with the back of my hand, having been instructed that waving with the front of your hand in Greece is sort of like flipping someone off.

The crowd responded very well. I got a lot of double-cheek kisses after the show.

I guess I was a friend of Greece.

—

Garth UK

Garth Hudson and his band made it to London to play with us. A wizard-like performance, it’s like he was conjuring at the keyboard.

I found out that Garth liked hats too, so the last day we were together, I gave him my Greek féssi. Somewhere there’s a picture of the two of us, him wearing it, smiling broadly.

We all road to Heathrow together. They were going back to New York, we were heading off to Japan. I’d never been, but drummer Randy had been there. He told me Tokyo was a really trippy city to let yourself get lost in.

And that’s just what I was about to do.

—

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My friend Rick hadn’t moved to Slovenia yet, but he’d already done recon and shared valuable intelligence. He made me repeat the following phrase several times to make sure I had it right:

“Gospod, steklenica prosim.”

(Sir, a bottle, please.)

The Iron Curtain had fallen almost ten years earlier but, having grown up definitively west of it, it still existed strongly in my imagination. Other than passing Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, Ljubljana was my first real foray into what had once been “the other side.”

When we checked into our hotel, my room door had a peephole looking out into the hallway. Did hotels in the States have peepholes? I couldn’t remember. It was somehow evocative of tradecraft.

While not completely spared by Allied bombing raids, Ljubljana had emerged from World War II still looking like old world Europe. Steep, gable roofs everywhere, very medieval.

It was winter, cold but not freezing, a little snow here and there. As I walked the city, I noticed many of the buildings had sticks propped up against them with some sort of handwritten notes, in Slovenian of course, but that didn’t keep me from leaning in and trying to decipher.

What I finally figured out, not from language but from placement, was that each stick warned of a perilous icicle dangling from the eaves directly above, and that only an idiot, like me, would stand there with his head in the line of fire, squinting at the warning signs.

On a high bluff was some sort of church or castle looking out over the city. I resolved to work my way up there. After a few false starts, I found a slender cobblestone alleyway with an upward incline, it seemed to be winding in that direction. I passed an old man who was heading up too. We smiled at each other and shared a few words that neither understood exactly, but the exchange was clear:

“Keep going, buddy!”

The path followed curves around a radio tower and a few private courtyards, then here it was, the castle. Unique combination of architecture. Ancient unhewn rock supporting an 800-year-old wall with contemporary daubs of cement here and there.

There was a guard who eyed me but didn’t stop me, so I went inside and found…a bar. I heard American voices and found Jack, Jeff, and Jay, they’d taken a different route and beaten me up here. I was going to wait for refreshment till I got back down to street level, but you couldn’t beat the view.

After two-and-a-half years of sobriety, I’d recently developed a newfound capability for moderation (usually) so I had a pivo (beer) with my bandmates, then made my own way through additional cobblestone streets, across ancient bridges, and back to the espionage-tinged hotel.

An hour or so later we all met in the lobby. Paddy brought two friends who graciously volunteered to lead us to supper.

The building looked like a fine townhouse, set back from the street, with candles in the windows. You’d never know there was a restaurant in there. As we walked up a creaky flight of wooden stairs, both Caron and Jonathan separately said to me, “Adam, this is your kind of place.”

They were so right. I’d always had a secret fantasy about mixing with Soviet intellectuals, or some such thing. The Pen Klub dated back to the 60s with a storied bohemian history. It was still hopping with archetypes who fit the bill.

When the waiter came, it was the moment Rick had trained me for.

“Gospod, steklenica…” etc. etc.

I didn’t know what I’d ordered, exactly, but apparently the waiter did. The evening’s drinking had begun.

I was sitting next to Paddy and his friends who’d brought us here, Ivan and his girlfriend, Tanya. Mercury Rev had a clannish habit of ignoring newcomers, I tended to go the other direction out of courtesy and natural curiosity, plus Ivan seemed pretty interesting.

Ivan told me how the Pen Klub was home to many writers over the years, an important meeting spot during the communist era for dissidents. When he was ten years old he tried to sneak in here, they literally bounced him out on his ear.

He had a few passing conversations with people bumping past our table, and pointed out several politicians around the room, one of whom he and Tanya were laughing about.

“He just won Best Dressed,” Ivan said, in some glossy magazine.

“Why is that so funny?”

“He’s head of the communist party,” he said.

I marveled that he seemed to know so many politicians, he told me:

“When you live in a small country, you can’t afford to avoid politics.”

Around this point in our conversation, it came out that Ivan was in Laibach, only one of the coolest bands ever to come out of Slovenia. So, he wasn’t sitting at our table, we were sitting at his, but no one in my band knew this besides Paddy and me.

The food was fantastic. I tried some kind of fish salad, a bean soup, and a “traditional” dish which was beef mixed with kraut and potatoes.

After supper, Ivan offered me a cigarette he’d brought back from Russia, he was surprised I knew how to smoke it (someone else had given me one once, the tobacco is compacted at one end, there’s a cardboard tube that you pinch slightly so it acts as a sort of filter.)

Ivan and Tanya and Paddy had made plans for the evening. Ivan took one last glance at the band that had basically ignored him for all of dinner and turned to me.

“You wanna ditch these guys?”

I didn’t have to think twice. We drove maybe five or so blocks and walked from there.

What was that smell in the air? As night descended, I realized it was coal smoke, everywhere. It felt for a moment like a different time period. We were in a city where people still heated their homes by burning coal.

Our first stop was an opening night party at a new club appropriately called Na Zdravje (Cheers!) The outside bar was entirely cut from a giant slab of ice. There were candles all along it and free wine.

Next stop was a rock club, also packed (it was Friday.) Here we drank something like hot toddies, then scotch.

From there we went to a techno club where EVERYONE was dancing. Not posturing, just really going for it, enjoying themselves to the max completely unselfconsciously. It was a joy to be in the middle of it.

“How do you cope with techno?” Ivan asked.

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. Maybe I said something about how rhythms exist in nature, but they vary, like the ocean, or the heart, which was one reason I didn’t always like music with rigid beats.

He said this was a good argument, told me that he didn’t necessarily like techno himself, then went on to convince me of its importance.

In this time period, he explained, people live by the clock, by machines. “Techno is the music of the machines. This is why it is a relevant expression of our time,” he said.

We all went to the chill-out room and drank some more scotch (I hadn’t drank this much in years) then returned to the main part of the club to get jostled around some more. But it wasn’t all techno. They worked in The Clash and some traditional Balkan music. It was a really good mix.

The night had grown colder. Ivan had to scrape ice off both the outside and inside of his windshield, then drove madly through the tiny streets.

In New York, you stop for a slice on nights like this. In Ljubljana, you stop for a burek and yogurt. The burek was greasy filo dough filled with cheese, I knew what to do with it. I didn’t know what to do with the yogurt.

“You drink it, it’s good to have!” Ivan said.

Okay, bottoms up.

Back at my Soviet-era espionage hotel, no one had rifled through my stuff, or planted a bug in the desk lamp, as far as I could tell. I guess I wasn’t in a John le Carré novel after all.

I got five and a half hours sleep, then needed to shower and get ready to go to the station. We were going to be on Slovenian national television that night and would be at the studio pretty much all day.

I needed some more relevant Slovenian to jumpstart my day. If only Rick were around.

Kako se reče “hangover” po Slovesnsko?

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Post Script:

My friend Rick Harsch, author of The Driftless Zone and many other excellent novels, did eventually move to Slovenia. If you like thinking-person’s noir, Rick’s your guy. If you’re already a fan or friend, here’s a gofundme page to help Rick with serious health issues he’s bravely dealing with at the moment:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/Help-Rick-Harsch-With-His-Recovery

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