JANUARY 2- FEBRUARY 5: D.C.to NYC
FEBRUARY 6 - FEBRUARY 15: D.C. TO Nashville
FEBRUARY 24 - MARCH 24: Mclean, VA - State College, PA
APRIL 28 - JUNE 3: Boston to Alexandria.  Ha Ha Ha tour!
JUNE 10 - JULY 8: Chestertown - New Bedford
JULY 13 - JULY 19, 2000: Arlington VA to Columbia MO
JULY 20 - JULY 27, 2000: Lawrence KS to Eagle CO
JULY 28 - AUGUST 1, 2000: Las Vegas NV to Los Angeles CA
AUGUST 2 - AUGUST 8, 2000: Monterey Bay CA to Eugene OR
AUGUST 9 - AUGUST 14, 2000: Seattle WA to Twin Falls ID
AUGUST 15 - AUGUST 20, 2000: Laramie, WY to Lyons CO
AUGUST 21- AUGUST 27, 2000: Cimarron NM to Grand Junction CO

JANUARY 2- FEBRUARY 5: D.C.to NYC

January 1, 2000--Washington, DC
At midnight this morning, Y2k happens. Around the world, at least, uh, a dozen or so people are in the grip of paralyzing fear. The rest of us are so burned out on the media hype that we actually hope the power will go off, at least long enough to give us a little rest from Y2k magazine covers and cable tv special reports. But, nothing happens, and the twenty-first century looks a lot like its predecessor. In Ringwood, New Jersey, however, planes fall from the sky, power plants explode, and computers turn into walking killer robots that devour people. Elsewhere, everything is calm.

We kick off the New Year with a gig at the Starland Cafe. Bill Danoff, the owner, is the composer of "Boulder to Birmingham", which he co-wrote with Emmylou Harris a few years back. He's a great guy, and the gig turns into a big jam session, with the audience dancing in a conga line that snakes around the club. This is our annual New Year's Eve bash, and tickets usually sell out about a month in advance, so the audience comes ready to have a good time, and so do we. Exhausted, but in the good way, we go home to begin preparations for Y3k.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
If you live to be a thousand
you will take Y3K right in stride.

January 11, 2000--Reston, VA
Our new album, Evolver, is released, to worldwide acclaim. Well, nationwide acclaim. Okay Restonwide acclaim. Look, it gets a lot of acclaim around our house, okay? The thing that we're happiest about is that during the last month, no one, like say, the Eagles or Oasis, has put out an album called "Evolver".

January 13, 2000--Arlington, VA 
Tonight we debut the songs from "Evolver" in concert. We'll be playing as a four-piece band for a few months, so that we can present an uncanny replica of the sound of the album onstage. In the bass position we have Steve Hansgen. Steve is a legendary guy around D.C., having played, as a teenager, with hardcore progenitors Minor Threat. His high school buddies were people like Henry Rollins and Fugazi's Ian Mckaye. Steve has the commitment and political awareness that typifies the D.C. hardcore scene, and like most hardcore musicians, he has really wide-ranging tastes in music. In the van, we have long trivia-fests about everything from modal jazz to Henry Mancini soundtracks. On drums we have Ron Campbell, on sabbatical from Baltimore folk-rockers Love Riot. Ron is easy-going, funny, the bands only sports fan--in short, a drummer.
 
The show is at Iota, our hometown gig, and the place is packed. We kick off with "Good Morning Groovy", and the jam section morphs into "Tomorrow Never Knows". We continue on with "Can't Kill Hope with a Gun", "Never Learn", "Keep the Place Clean", and "Down, Down, Down". We debut the Groove Wheel, a liquid light show that imparts a Fillmore-like vibe to the proceedings, and we close out with a very loose version of "And Your Bird Can Sing". It all sounds good enough to take on the road, which is fortunate, cause that's exactly what we're gonna do.

January 14, 2000--Baltimore, MD
In a savvy money-saving move, the owner of the club decides not to turn on the heat tonight. We sing to about a dozen brave patrons, with the words turning into clouds of vapor in front of our faces. A few people dance to keep warm. Afterwards, we nurse our chilled spirits over linguini at Sabbatino's in Little Italy.

January 15, 2000--Philadelphia, PA 
Tonight's show is a sellout, and we're suddenly transported back to the rarefied stratosphere of superstardom. At least in our minds. At least the heat is turned on. The show is really fun--Philly is always like a homecoming to us, cause we have so many old friends here. "And Your Bird Can Sing" gets replaced in the encore slot by the Handel aria that we worked up for the Bottom Line show last month.

January 16, 2000--Port Chester, NY
Another one of our favorite gigs, and it's right across the street from a Salvation Army thrift store! We spend the afternoon browsing in the used vinyl lp section, and Steve scores a Baja Marimba Band album--he collects A&M Records from the Sixties. We pass on a mint copy of Herb Alpert's "Going Places", cause it's by far the most common thrift store album in America. What does this mean? Why did millions of people buy this album, only to donate it, a few short years later, to the Salvation Army? Why did they all decide to banish the charming cheesiness of the Tijuana Brass from their homes?  Other albums showing up in the thrift store bins often enough to be designated "platinum" include Alpert's "Whipped Cream and Other Delights", the soundtracks to "The Sound of Music" and "The King and I", and, interestingly, Billy Joel's "Glass Houses", the only Eighties album to appear in our Hall of Shame. Lots of buyer remorse on that one, I guess.

The gig is really fun, but the fun is tempered by the news that the club will be closing down this spring. We sooth our saddened souls with a trip into Manhattan, where we go on yet another record buying spree, this time at Other Music in the Village. Following our typical routine, we stay in the city til after dark, then head down the Jersey Turnpike around the time Vin Scelsa comes on the air. We can dial him in almost down to Philadelphia. At the I-95 rest stops--The Maryland House, the Chesapeake House--we usually run into other D.C. bands coming back from the weekend in New York or Boston, and we exchange greetings over 4 a.m. coffee at Roy Rogers. This is how a typical Kennedy weekend comes to a close.
 

February 3, 2000--Syracuse, NY
Tonight we play at Happy Endings, and Maura's hometown crowd is out in force. Everyone's excited about the new album--many of these people know her as a neighborhood kid or a high school bud, and they can't get over the fact that she makes records--real things that you stick in the cd player, and her voice comes out. Little Maura! From down the block! It's really great to see their all-out enthusiasm, and it makes for an exciting show. We leave straight from the gig for New York City.

February 4, 2000--The Bronx, NY
Around noon, we go on the air on WFUV, one of the greatest radio stations anywhere. This station, under the guidance of Rita Houston, gives New York listeners the hippest, most intelligent programming on the planet. We squeeze the whole band, along with Rita, into a small studio and jam for a while on the air. We close with a medley of "P-Funk", "Thank You", and "Mr. Lucky Man". This funk jam seems like a cool thing to throw into the regular set list for a while, and this does, indeed, come to pass, giving some of our folk fans their first taste of George Clinton and Sly Stone. After the show we head down to the Village, for pizza and more record shopping at Other Music. We pick up cds by the great Brazilian psychedelic group, Os Mutantes, and French avant-crooner Serge Gainesborg, before calling it a day.

February 5, 2000--New York City
Tonight we play the Bottom Line, and the band is honed from all our roadwork. We're ready for New York, which is a good thing, when you're playing in New York. We think back to our first show here, when we definitely weren't ready! Without stylists, choreographers, or vocal coaches, we had to get it together by doing hundreds of gigs on the road, and now we know how good it feels to have a well-oiled machine running on stage. Instead of worrying about whether something will screw up, we just go out and have fun, with each other and the audience.
 
Before heading home, we hit a deli on Bleecker Street for our last New York street cuisine, as we head into the Holland Tunnel.

FEBRUARY 6 - FEBRUARY 15: D.C. TO NASHVILLE

February 6, 2000--Washington, DC
Tonight is the Wammy award show, and we present a few awards, taking the opportunity to make a short speech honoring Go-Go pioneer Chuck Brown. We also receive a few awards, and play a short set. In a crazy mood, we decide to play just the most obscure, psychedelic part of our show--the "Good Morning Groovy' into "Tomorrow Never Knows" medley--with lots of sitar, and the vocals drenched in echo. This confuses everyone who expected, well, anything normal, but it's really fun, and people get into the spirit of it all. Above and beyond the awards themselves, the show is a gathering of the clan, and we hear lot of great music, especially a great new D.C. band called Cecelia. We even enjoy hanging with the people who will later post complaints on the net that we win too many awards! Oh well, we're in this for the long haul...

February 12, 2000--Cleveland, OH
Tonight we play at the Folk Alliance conference, a huge gathering of musicians from around the world who, once a year, take over an unsuspecting hotel and fill it to the brim with music. Twenty-four hour a day music. Loud, boisterous, joyful music. The kind of music that keeps the guests in the hotel awake all night. The conference is held in a different city every year, because, basically, we know we'll never be asked back! It's way too much fun.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Too much music can cause lack of sleep,
but too little will starve the soul.
 
Our set is sandwiched between Irish rockers, Texas singer songwriters, Haitian voodoo conjurers, Scottish fiddlers, Argentinean tango meisters, and a vast array of musicians all drawing from the great well of world music, albeit with different buckets. As we leave the hall, we walk right into a jam session--a wonderful collision between a West African kora/percussion group and an old timey string band from North Carolina. All the musician fall right into a groove, and a couple of dancers clog along blissfully as Africa and Europe take up their centuries-old conversation once again, with music as the language of love. Then play on...

February 14, 2000--Memphis, TN
Early in the morning, after a long, snowy trip, we pull into WEVL (pronounced "weevil") in downtown Memphis, for an interview. These are the streets where Martin Luther King marched in his last campaign, the 1968 garbage workers strike, and the radio station is directly across the street from the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King's last words were a request to Jesse Jackson to have the band play "Precious Lord, Lead Me On". You can't drive down that street without hearing that shot ring out. But you also feel the joy and passion of all the music that has gone down in this cotton town. Beale Street is a tourist trap now, but at least it's got The Blues for its theme. Could be worse.
 
Our gig is at Otherlands, a really cool coffeehouse in the artsy midtown district. The band plays well, the coffee is good, and we drive all night to Music City.

February 15, 2000--Nashville, TN
Tonight we play at a large scale, well organized jam session led by ace drummer and scene Svengali Billy Block. Oddly enough, this self-proclaimed Music City has very little live music. The Bluebird Cafe and Douglas Corner are the reliable gigs for songwriters, but there was no place for rootsy rockers and "real" country artists to hang out and play, until Billy came to town. Now, his gig, one night a week at the Exit Inn, is the gathering place for everyone who can't stomach the corporate Garth Brooks phoniness that rules the business side of Music Babylon, er, Row. It's fun. It's real. The songs are written to convey emotions, not to create Wal-Mart marketing tie-ins. This is very refreshing for Nashville.
 
Anyway, ranting aside, we shake things up once again by asserting that spacey psychedelia is, indeed, a form of roots music. After all, it was invented by the Grateful Dead and the Beatles, two groups who certainly knew their roots repertoire. We know ours, too, but tonight we choose to trance out a little, and most of the crowd gets right into it, digging the difference. At the bar, a few cowboy hats are removed for a bit of puzzled head-scratching, but no one throws anything.
 
The act before us is a cool cat by the name of Bob White, who has reinvented himself as "Roberto Bianco, The Romantic Voice of Our Time". He's great! In this town of wishful Merle Haggard clones, Roberto has chosen to mold himself as a continental version of Wayne Newton. A crooning, kiss-throwing lounge lizard extraordinaire. In Nashville???

Yes! That's the best part. He has everyone so freaked out that our spacejams seem normal in comparison. Overall, it's a great night for a Music Row shakeup. We head home, satisfied that we've slung a few stones at the Goliath of conformist Top 40. That and a dime'll buy us a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, but it feels good, anyway.

FEBRUARY 24 - MARCH 24: Mclean, VA - State College, PA

February 24, 2000--Mclean, VA
Today we don a different pair of hats, figuratively speaking, as we set up and run the sound system for a show by the Nields. This is the first time we've seen Katrina and Nerissa perform as an acoustic duo, and it's really enjoyable. Although it's not as loud as their full band, the energy translates, and they have the crowd up and dancing from the first chords. After the show, we discuss the idea of a Kennedys/Nields tour in the Spring. It's something we've all wanted to do for a while, and now we're determined to actually make it happen. We part ways, promising to make the required phone calls to put the wheels in motion. Now we've got a fun project on the horizon.

March 1, 2000--Washington, D.C.
Today, we have a rare opportunity to be spectators/dancers/audience members. The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage puts on a great triple bill of dance music--The Thievery Corporation, The Hot Club of Cowtown, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Somehow, the evening segues seamlessly from Electronica to Western Swing, to Zoot-Suit Swing without a hitch. This is the kind of eclectic bill we love, and it was put together by our good bud, and producee, Garth Ross, who is a highly imaginative show promoter when he's not being a talented singer-songwriter.

March 24, 2000--State College, PA
We're spending most of the month rehearsing and organizing details for the tour with the Nields, which has now been dubbed the "Ha Ha Ha" tour, in tribute to our beloved buds "Cry Cry Cry". Today, we take a break and journey up to Penn State, for a worthwhile cause. The students here have organized a show that supports a number of positions that challenge corporate whiteguy America. Actually, they support America wholeheartedly, they just challenge the dominance of corporate whiteguys. We're down with this, and it turns out to be a really inspiring evening for us.
 
We love to see stereotypes come down, and every show we play on a college campus reminds us that the next generation comin' up is gonna kick butt. There is a lot more going on than the stage diving Limp Bizkit fans on MTV spring break shows would indicate. There is a real, viable underground of idealistic, informed college kids who do believe that they're in line to change this world for the better. They totally grok "Life is Large" and "Can't Kill Hope with a Gun", cause they know that we gotta be a loud singin' minority to make stuff happen--even if it happens after we're gone. The important thing is to be heard--if you're afraid to speak up, or sing out, then you're part of the problem.
 
There's a diversity of ideas here tonight--no one's expected to get in lock-step with anybody else, and lots of opinions are heard. Lots of diverse music, too. The band before us is a great hardcore band from Pittsburgh, Aus Rotten. They really have their politics together, and they know the issues of which they sing. They are also super nice guys, and we consider it a great double bill. Afterwards at the diner, we're charged up about the young organizers of this event, and we're psyched to hang with them--they've got a vision, they've got opinions, they're not afraid, and they love music. Despite the Wal-Marting of America, there's still definitely hope. We just gotta keep singin', louder than the TVs, to paraphrase Phil Ochs.

APRIL 28 - JUNE 3: Boston to Alexandria.  Ha Ha Ha tour!

April 28, 2000--Boston, MA
The shows are booked, the bands are rehearsed, the tickets are sold--tonight the "Ha Ha Ha" tour begins! The tour will take us, and the Nields, all the way down the East Coast from New England to Florida.
 
The Nields will be touring all summer as a full band--they include two married couples, plus a "single guy" drummer. They are a tight unit, as musicians and as people, and their show has the energy of a family coming together. The club, Karma, is packed, and the vibe is great. Our pals from Rounder Records are in attendance, and it's like old home week. There's lots of sitting in and general stage mischief, as the two bands start to blend together into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is something that we know will grow, organically, over the next few weeks on the road.
 
Afterwards, we find a late-night barbecue joint near Fenway Park. We've toured down South too much to put much stock in northern barbecue, but the Boston baked beans are fine.

April 22, 2000--Northhampton, MA
Tonight is Katrina Nields' birthday, we're playing in their hometown, and there's a full moon. At least, it feels like there's a full moon. There's an atmosphere of wondrous, unhinged craziness in the Iron Horse tonight. During the Nields set, all four Kennedy band members (drummer Ron Campbell has left the tour to pursue his solo career. His replacement is Baltimore lounge/free jazz stickman Zack Fusciello) come out on stage wearing outlandish feather boas. Steve actually looks good in his! Zack and I look like Vegas fringe-culture freaks, and Maura adopts the persona of a sophisticated, mysterious Bond girl. Katrina, who already has the persona of a sophisticated, mysterious Bond girl-next-door, is right on our wavelength, and soon the stage is awash in flying boa feathers.
 
Crazy dance routines occur spontaneously, and the lido deck seems to have been commandeered by lunachicks, but the harmonies are glorious, and David Nields and I clown around a lot, playing the same guitar (at the same time). No one wants the night to end, but eventually we're all partied down to the ground, and both the megaband and audience agree to do it again whenever the stars are aligned this way.

May 24, 2000--Birmingham, AL
After shows in New Jersey and Philadelphia, the tour wends it's way southward. Tonight, at a club called Zydeco's, Maura declares that we should run onstage during the Nields' song about superheroes, and that we should be clad in appropriate dress. Superhero costumes are hastily assembled. Capes are improvised, and a two-foot tall "'B-52's" style wig comes into play. The wig is pink. The bit works, overall, with some audience members actually understanding what we're doing, and the rest just going with the flow.

May 26, 2000--St. Augustine, FL
The Nields retaliate by coming onstage during "Girl with the Blonde Eye", our ersatz spy theme, portraying sly, slinky Bond girls. They skulk around the stages pointing imaginary derringers and assuming dramatic karate poses. The ante has been upped.

June 1, 2000--Chapel Hill, NC
The penultimate gig on the tour is at a legendary club called the Cat's Cradle. It's been around since the early Seventies, but the strongest vibe is from the db's/Mitch Easter/early R.E.M. days. Tomorrow is Nerissa's birthday, a night off, so we celebrate tonight. During "Girl with the Blond Eye", David Nields dons Maura's pink "B-52" wig and plays the role of the Bond girl. Thespian that he is, he plays the role admirably, and the wig fits perfectly on his shaven cranium.

We maintain a running list of potential band names, just in case we ever need an alias. "Hollywood Booty" and "Bulk Mulch" have already been used for "secret gigs", where we play covers or try out new material.

June 3, 2000--Alexandria, VA
All good tours must come to an end, and tonight, the "Ha Ha Ha" juggernaut rolls across the finish line, to mix metaphors in a colorful and hopefully entertaining way. The entire cast is psyched, cause this is the real hometown gig. Like me, the Nields were born and raised in Northern Virginia, so the audience includes many old friends and family members.
 
Everyone in the crowd is in "final gig" mode, so there's a lot of electricity in the air, mixed with that bittersweet "last day at summer camp" feeling. Some people in the audience have been with us for most of the tour, so it's a shared vibe. Everyone knows that tonight will be a real celebration, not only of a successful tour, but of the friendship between the two bands and the fans who have traveled with us.
 
All the stops are pulled out tonight, and the show is a compendium of all the joyful craziness that has happened on stage over the past month.  Wigs, boas, superhero capes, and leopard-skin whatevers go flying. During the funk medley, the Nield sisters break into a perfectly choreographed dance routine, as if they've been doing it all they're lives (they have, no doubt).
 
Since tonight also marks the winding-down of the four-piece road band for us, it's an ending on several levels, but we also know it's a beginning, as well--the beginning of an even deeper musical relationship with the Nields, who have been generous enough to share their fans and friends with us, giving us the chance to enlarge our extended family of the road. Can't thing of a better way to spend a Spring on the East Coast, as the new century kicks in, in fine style.

JUNE 10 - JULY 8: Chestertown - New Bedford

June 10, 2000--Chestertown, MD
Tonight is our first duo gig in awhile, and we remember how magic it really is. Whenever we've played with a band, the musicians have always been great, and they've always been wonderful guys to hang out with. Yet, somehow, the duo is the real thing. It's what we did when we sat at the picnic table in Austin and wrote "Day In and Day Out", it's what we did in the back lounge of Nanci's tour bus, rehearsing for hours to get our opening act together. It's what we did in the little dressing room on the top floor of the old Olympia theatre in Dublin, where we wrote a lot of our songs. It's what we do. There's a certain spark, a certain chemistry, and an un-rehearsable spontaneous combustion that happens when the two of us are alone onstage.
 
Maybe it's because we've put in so many miles together, maybe its because we played the five-set gigs at the Roundtable together, maybe it's because we know so many songs together, and can launch into any one of them at any time. There's just a feeling everytime we walk out on stage that this is the moment we've been waiting for, this is the night that our message is gonna break through, this is the night when people are gonna leave feeling like their lives are changed, and ours will be, too.  When we play with band guys, we don't expect this level of commitment. It's just a gig for them, and if they don't like the pay or the hotels, they lose interest quickly. That's okay. They have lives, and the next Kennedys show isn't the main goal that they are working toward. It won't be a high point in their lives, no matter what happens. But it will be for us. That's why the duo will always be the real Kennedys. Tonight we rededicate ourselves to that ideal, and we have a great and joyous gig.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Bands can make a big bang,
but the magic of the duo sings loudest.

June 17, 2000--Reston VA
This weekend is really different for us. Instead of traveling somewhere to do a show, we stay home and conduct a two-day, intensive guitar seminar. Students come from as far away as Chicago and Los Angeles, and they come ready to immerse themselves in the instrument for a weekend. What a fun thing--hours and hours of talking about the guitar, and playing, searching for new ideas. It’s a great experience, and the students, in their dedication and eagerness to learn, put us on a new level of enthusiasm about this great instrument. After a lifetime of study, there's still a lifetime of study left, and the guitar rewards you by always showing you more as you go deeper. Everybody at the seminar shares this feeling, and the nights are full of high-spirited jamming. At the end, we visit our friends at the kabob house up the road, and as we leave, a double rainbow appears in the sky, a sure sign that the Muse stamps her approval on the weekend. Can't wait to do it again.

June 24, 2000--Ashburn VA
What do a bunch of internet software engineers do to relax on their weekends off? Don't know what they do the rest of the year, but today they're tasting beer. Here at the site of the massive A.O.L. business campus (legend has it that fifty percent of the nation's phone traffic passes through Reston/Ashburn, the Silicon Valley of the internet), software jockeys are swilling their way through a wide range of microbrews. Sure enough, the longer they taste microbrews, the better we sound, and by the end of the show, the pleasantly sloshed audience is chanting for more, their HTML and Cisco certifications momentarily forgotten.
 
The other band on the bill is Last Train Home, one of our favorites. Their originals are great, and, like many country rockers, they realize the entertainment value of an occasional cheesy 70's cover. They throw in some Herb Alpert (yes, they have a trumpet player), and a great Barry White tune. After the set, Eric Brace, who leads the band and writes their songs, suggests that Maura and I learn their material, so that we can be bench-warming auxiliary band members. We don't have time to be in a band, but we like being ringers now and then, so we agree to the idea, cause it sounds like fun.

July 8, 2000--New Bedford, MA
Here in this old whaling and fishing town, we find ourselves in another megaband, "Kennedy From Ohio". The festival has deliberately booked us and Eddie From Ohio on the same stage at the same time, hoping that both bands will throw up their hands and say, "Hey, let's just make one big band". This is exactly what we do, and it's fun. We boom in on some harmonies on their stuff, and they put cool and unusual instrumental touches behind ours. We really come together on some covers, including "The Weight". Somehow, we segue into "The Jeffersons" theme, and we realize once again the 70's sitcom themes are, indeed, the stuff of folk music.  After the festival, we take Monday off to eat seafood in Provincetown (at the Lobster Pot--the best), and go on a whale-watching cruise to the Stellwagon Bank, about fifty miles East of Boston, in the North Atlantic. We spend a really pleasant afternoon in the company of a pod of seven humpback whales. This will be our last view of the Atlantic for the rest of the summer.
Dashboard Buddha Sez:
If humpbacks lived on land,
why did they return to the sea?  Ponder this.
 

On the way home from New England, we listen to some great African music. One of our favorite African styles (there are hundreds of them) is Soukous, from Zaire, a highly danceable, joyous form of guitar music. Our favorite artist in the genre is a guitarist named Lokassa Ya MBongo. You can tell when he's on a record, because the singer will always shout "Lokassa Ya Mbongo!" whenever he plays a solo. We even impersonated a Soukous band once--under the name "Orchestra Manga Manga", we released a cover of one of Lokassa's tunes on a U.K.compilation. Suffice to say that we're big fans.
 
Anyway, as we arrive back in D.C. in the early morning hours, we stop by Bias recording studio, to pick up a tape of some new material--an early draft of our next album. As we walk into the studio, we hear the unmistakable sound of Soukous. Several musicians are standing around, listening to a playback, and we greet them and tell them excitedly how much we love this music, and how much we admire Lokassa Ya Mbongo. We are stunned when the producer points to the man to my direct right and says "This is Lokassa". This is like meeting Hendrix or Clapton to us, and here he is, in our own hometown, at three o'clock in the morning!  Our jaws are on the floor, to the amusement of the musicians, who ask if we would like to hang around and watch them record. Well, we can always sleep, but we can't always watch master musicians at work, so we settle right down in the couch. They are magnificent improvisers, and the joy in their music is really infectious. We go home around dawn, tired, but energized by the great music and the open, generous vibe. We take this chance meeting as a good omen for our upcoming cross-country trip, which will take us out on the highway for the rest of the summer.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Learn all night from the African masters.
They draw from the deepest well. 

JULY 13 - JULY 19, 2000: Arlington VA to Columbia MO

July 13, 2000--Arlington, VA
Tomorrow we leave on a two-month national tour, so tonight’s gig is designated as our official going away party. It’s at IOTA, one of the coolest small venues in town. We’ve invited a lot of our friends to come down and sit in, but there’s been no rehearsal or advance discussion about what’s going to happen. Maura and I are going to do the “opening act” as a duo. The second half will be a parade of folks getting up and fronting the band on whatever songs they choose. The first rule is that the songs must be easy enough for everyone to fake, simply by watching the leader’s chording hand. The second rule is that everyone has to play cover songs--no “here’s one from my latest CD” tonight.  The fun part is that, as we all get up onstage, we have no more idea of what’s coming than the audience does. It’s a good-sized crowd, and they all know the deal, so we just count it off...
 
Maura and I get the show going with a loose, up tempo version of the Johnny Cash classic “Big River”, and then it’s time for some guests.  First up is the duo of Rip and Ruby, aka Mark Noone and Ruth Logsdon. Mark fronted the Slickee Boys for many years, and Ruth is the leader of Ruthie and the Wranglers, one of DC’s top roots bands. They kick off with the Buck Owens classic “Tiger by the Tail”, and Mark follows up with a couple of rockabilly flavored originals. We’re encouraged by the fact that our guests are already breaking the rules.
 
Next up is Carl Straub, the frontman of the Graverobbers, and one of DC’s best songwriters. He and his partner, Lee Wilhoit, kick off with the Louvin Brothers “I Wish It Had Been a Dream”, a lovely ballad from the period when Chet Atkins was producing the duo--classic stuff. I play tremolo electric and Maura is on bass. They close with a hilarious original called “Don’t Take Advice From a Songwriter”--good advice in itself.
 
In quick succession, Julie Sanderson (“Mellow Yellow”) Niki Lee (“These Boots are Made for Walkin’”), and John Wicks of the Records (he does his own pop classic ”Starry Eyes”) take the stage, and, as everyone who performs stays up to sing backup, play percussion, or grab a guitar, chaos begins to set in. Maura and I take the helm of the ship as it turns beam to the waves and spins out of control--”Sin City” is rough-edged but heartfelt, sounding like the congregation at a little clapboard church down in Carolina somewhere, and then we lurch into an “E-chord/Bo Diddley” jam. Like the perfect storm, the elements are gradually converging to create a really big noise. Steve and Zak, the rhythm section that we took on the recent Nields tour, appear onstage, and “Not Fade Away” mutates into “Eight Miles High”. Billboard scribe Bill Holland, DJ Alan Haber, Mike Clem (from Eddie from Ohio), and fiddler Willem (from Love Riot) are all onstage. Everyone cranks the Fender amps so that the tubes heat up like hot exhaust pipes, and the guitars go into blissfully cacophonous distortion. Like a storm, the jam crests and finally begins to lose force as it careens out over the cold waters of this musical North Atlantic, finally running out of steam over Greenland (to extend a metaphor way beyond it’s normal lifespan).
 
We all agree that we’ve done what we came to do. We got the vibe going, we gathered the clan for a ceremonial bash, and we traced our bloodline back to the patriarchs-- Holly, Louvin, Cash. The feeling is unanimous that we should do this again. The great thing is that the lineup, and thus the feel of the show, will be different every time. On the way home, we begin hatching plans for a holiday hootenanny this coming winter. In the meantime, we’ve got a seven-week tour starting in the morning.

July 14, 2000--Northern Virginia
The first part of the day is spent running errands--the bank, the post office, Whole Foods for provisions. We confirm the various house sitters and watchers who inhabit the place while we’re gone, and gather up all the stuff we need to pay bills and carry on normal business in a van. We also pack camping gear, sleeping bags, and a pink flamingo who will stand guard outside our tent. We finalize various mix tapes and CDs--Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke’s gospel stuff, the Everly Brothers, a pop compilation with the Fountains of Wayne, the Apples in Stereo, the Flaming Lips and others. We burn a guitar mix CD with Roy Buchanan, Johnny Smith, Django Reinhardt, Tony Rice. After a few tours, you know which stuff really holds up on the road. When you’re driving overnight from, say, Grand Junction, Colorado, to L.A., through hundreds of miles of desert, you need great music to make the mile markers go by. “Blood on the Tracks” is a good one for this, as is “Time Out of Mind”. Dylan is great anywhere, but his music really comes alive on a desert highway, late at night.
 
By mid-afternoon we’re ready to take off. To get to New England, we avoid the New York metro area by traveling up through Pennsylvania, this time in a driving rain. We finally pull in at a quirky little motel called Granny’s, in Frackville, PA. If you’re sticking pins in a map, it’s a little below Scranton, in the coal mining country. There’s a strange statue in front--it’s a granny consoling a little girl, who holds a headless doll. The strange part is that the granny and the little girl have identical faces, and they both look just like Tony Perkins, the star of the Hitchcock thriller, “Psycho”.
 
We’re too tired to consider the implications of this, so we simply pack it in.

July 15, 2000--Frackville PA.
After a restless sleep filled with dreams of axe-wielding grannies, we hit the road. The rain has intensified, and it pounds down harder as we cross the Hudson.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
A driving rain and a motel just like "Psycho"
Let the tour begin!

We drive directly past the Falcon Ridge festival site, and wave, unseen, to our rain soaked friends who are building the stage for next week’s fest. We don’t have time to stop. At six, we’re due in Stockbridge Mass., at the church immortalized by Arlo Guthrie in the song (and film) “Alice’s Restaurant”. This lovely former Anglican chapel was the home of Alice and her husband Ray back in the sixties, and was the first stop on what Arlo refers to a his “historical garbage trail”. Refer to the song for complete details.

 Arlo has established the Guthrie Center in this building. The Guthrie Center poses an unspoken challenge to all “star” entertainers, the ones who are financially secure. The challenge is: “Why haven’t you all done something like this?” In much the same way that Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and others have turned their attention and resources to the effort to eliminate land mines, Arlo has decided to give something substantial back to the community. The Guthrie Center sponsors various kinds of education related to spiritual growth and awareness of local and global issues. They support people inflicted with AIDS, and they make the church available for inter-denominational worship services. They also present concerts. That’s why we’re here.
 
The show lives up to all our expectations. The church is one of the most beautiful spaces we’ve played in, and the sound is fantastic. We’re talking live album quality. There’s something about the sonic vibe of a really old wood room that enhances vocals and acoustic guitars in a really beautiful way. Here’s what we suggest: if you live in the New York or Boston area, take a road trip here. See one of your favorite artists in this great setting and then stay over at a local B&B. You’ll also have a chance to become a member of the Guthrie Center and support their work. This place is what it’s all about, and we applaud Arlo as a musician who’s doing a lot more than looking after his own career--he’s looking after his community, as well.

We drive overnight to Syracuse.

July 16, 2000--Syracuse NY
We spend the morning catching up on things with Maura’s dad. He’s a top Henry David Thoreau scholar, and he’s just returned from a conference in Concord. He tells us about getting up at dawn to walk around Walden Pond, and we compare notes on our upcoming cross-country route. He’s hitchhiked all over the West, and he’s always got some good road stories. In the afternoon, we head downtown to visit Larry Hoyt’s radio show on WAER, and then play our show at the Syracuse Arts and Crafts Festival. It rains the whole time, but the audience gathers under a huge tarp, and we all forget about the weather. Our friend Dave Vermilya books the show. He and his wife Cheryl run a great place called the Town Shop in Camillus, NY. It’s a lot like the Guthrie Center, but is focused on teenagers. Dave and Cheryl give the kids a place to hang out, off the mean streets of post-industrial upstate NY, and they also turn them on to cool music. After a year of hanging at the Town Shop, these kids know all about Richard Thompson and Gram Parsons. More importantly, their eyes have been opened to a life beyond the closed down steel mills and unemployment lines of their hometown. If there are any would-be philanthropists reading this, contact us to find out how to support this great place.

We catch the film “The Perfect Storm”, and then turn in early. Tomorrow we head west.

July 17, 2000--Syracuse to Columbus, OH
Interstates all the way. The most notable thing is that it’s not raining. Before we leave town, we pick up a copy of Sebastian Junger’s book, “The Perfect Storm”. We’re now fascinated by all things nautical, meteorological, and oceanographic. Maura reads the book aloud as we travel.

July 18, 2000--Columbus to Terre Haute, IN
More chapters of the book. It’s got way more information than the film, and the storytelling is superb. We stop for lunch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the site of Antioch College. For the next few days, we will island-hop from one college town to the next as we make our way across the Midwest. Just as Bedouin nomads travel from oasis to oasis seeking fresh water, we seek coffee shops and used bookstores. At a sidewalk cafe, we are greeted by Vic, a DJ on WYSO, the local college station. Vic has a case of “Three Stooges” beer lashed to the front of his bike, so we assume that they will be having a pretty good time at the station during his shift. We push on to Terre Haute and pitch our tent at a campground. No sooner are we inside than the sky opens up. We finish the storm book while rain and thunder rage against our pitiable little tent.

July 19, 2000--Terre Haute, IN to Columbia, MO
We spend the morning drying out our camping gear, then we head out. We pull in fairly early at Columbia, the site of the University of Missouri, to attend to various laptop chores. Tomorrow we’ll explore the town.

JULY 20 - JULY 27, 2000: Lawrence KS to Eagle CO

July 20, 2000--Columbia to Lawrence KS
We check out of our cheapo motel and head downtown. First stop is a health food cafe called The Main Squeeze. On the Interstates, there is a very limited range of eating establishments. There is the Waffle House, found all over the South and a true symbol of everything that is weird and wonderful about America. But you can’t eat every meal there. Then there is Cracker Barrel, a politically questionable and somewhat surreal place populated by battery operated frogs that go “ribit” at unexpected moments, and by busloads of tourists heading for either Dollywood or Branson, Missouri. You can’t eat every meal there, either. The other choices are fast food enclaves too horrible to even contemplate. Seasoned road musicians buy a lot of their food at local grocery stores, and keep their eyes peeled for health food places.
 
After lunch we head over to a local gym and work out. We then walk leisurely around the downtown area and spend some time at a skateboard shop, asking about the music scene e.g. “are their any, y’know, cafes with music around here?” The cashier directs us to a place called the Music Cafe. While reading the posters in front of the place, we take note of the fact that Marshall Crenshaw is standing next to us, also reading the posters. We don’t approach him, because we have a strict taboo about bothering rock stars when they’re trying to lead the normal parts of their lives. The only exceptions are the one or two famous people that, through some kind of circumstances, we somehow have gotten to know. Of course, we don’t think of them as rock stars--they’re friends, which is better. Anyway, Marshall Crenshaw has strangely materialized, Zelig-like, in the background of various scenes from our marriage, including at a restaurant during our honeymoon, so we simply figure that our fates are somehow linked, and we note another Crenshaw sighting in the log. Someday, someway, maybe we’ll understand.

We continue west to the next college-town oasis, Lawrence Kansas.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
The midwest:
corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, Stuckeys
corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, Stuckeys!

July 21, 2000--Lawrence to Manhattan, KS
William S. Burroughs seems an incongruous figure here in the heart of America’s corn-fed breadbasket, but after a life of brilliant debauchery in New York, New Orleans, Morocco and Mexico, he settled here to spend his final years, no doubt relishing the incongruity of it all. Lawrence is a cool town with, of course, lots of coffee shops and bookstores. We have lunch at a great market called “The Merc”, and then we amble down the main drag, picking up a few travel books at a cozy place called the “Dusty Bookshelf”. Over coffee, we make the decision to forego an intriguing spot called the “Corn Maze” in favor of getting to Manhattan on time. We’re still intrigued, though. Seems an enterprising farmer has figured out that he can make more money by plowing his cornfield into a maze, and charging admission, than he can by harvesting the corn and selling it. Tourists from around the nation are lining up to get lost for a few hours in the cornfield, and the agro-entrepreneur is pocketing a nice piece of change. This is the kind of quirky tourist attraction that has made America great, and we resolve to visit it when we have more time.
 
The show tonight is at the Manhattan Arts Center, a supermarket converted into a great “black box” performing space. The production is good, and the audience is really nice. A local vintage kitsch store provides a green leopard-skin chair for stage ambience, and we promise to visit them in the morning.

July 22, 2000--Manhattan to Omaha, NE
We run by the shop, “Atomic Age”, in the morning. Lots of Fiesta Ware and so forth. Fun place to hang. Then we travel up to Omaha on Highway 77, a great two-lane blacktop that runs through the heart of the prairie, along the route of the Oregon Trail. It’s a lovely drive, and the time goes quickly. The gig in Omaha is at a club called the Music Box. Very nice place owned by a young computer tycoon.
 
We open the show, before a Tower of Power-ish funk band. A slight mismatch, perhaps, but we rock out a bit and it works out just fine. We finally win the audience over after briefly quoting “Stairway to Heaven”, “Communication Breakdown”, and “Whole Lotta Love”. Led Zeppelin qualifies as baby-boomer folk music, doesn’t it? Tomorrow we follow in the footsteps of the Mormons, the wagon trains, and the Pony Express, and head west toward the Rockies.

July 23, 2000--Omaha westward
Just as the pioneers did, we meet up with the Platte River at Grand Island, and stick close to its banks across the prairie. Roadside attractions are few, mostly of the “fake fort” or “Injun Trading Post” variety. We spend several hours engrossed in a discussion about songwriters, sparked by a magazine interview in which the interviewer accuses his subject of being “retro” because his songs have strong melodies. This is a very interesting topic to us, and it leads us to generate a list of really strong songwriters. It’s an interesting roster because it doesn’t reflect what we’re currently listening to (Apples in Stereo, Flaming Lips, etc.), but it identifies the monumental, timeless bodies of work that will outlive trends for a long time. Dylan leads the way, and we arrive at the notion that if you have “Blood on the Tracks”, “Infidels”, and “Biograph”, plus “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and compilations of Steve Earle and Richard Thompson, you’ve got a pretty good foundation built.
 
As the miles roll by, we slide in a mix tape custom designed for long-haul prairie cruising. Here’s the sequence:

Side A
Steve Earle--More Than I Can Do
Jolene--I Read What You Wrote Today
Son Volt--Windfall
Toni Price--Hey
Wilco--Casino Queen, Box of Letters
Bottle Rockets--Gravity Fails
Kim Richey--Those Words
Toni Price--Tumbleweed
Matthew Sweet--This Moment

Side B
The Byrds--Nashville West, Hickory Wind
   100 Years From Now, Easy Rider
Gram Parsons--Streets of Baltimore, Love Hurts
Flying Burrito Bros.--Wheels, Sin City

This tape gets us across Nebraska.

July 24, 2000--Estes Park, CO
We have a three-day break in the tour, so we head up into the high Rockies to do some hiking and wildlife photography. We set up shop in a cabin village called “Tiny Town”. This is, of course, reminiscent of the b-movie “Terror in Tiny Town”, in much the same way the Granny’s Motel was reminiscent of the a-movie, “Psycho”.   But part of the fun of being on the road is being slightly terrified of the place where you’re sleeping--it keeps the edge on. We hike up to a spot called Cub Lake, on top of a high ridge. The trailhead starts at eight thousand feet above sea level, and goes up another five hundred feet or so before we reach the lake. It’s a beautiful spot, and we relax on the rocks and have lunch by the water. We get good shots of a mule deer fawn, a peregrine falcon, numerous chipmunks and golden mantled squirrels, mallards, and beaver dams and lodges. No cougars or elk sighted, although they are common in this area. We top off the day with a dinner of fresh brook trout, and a roaring fire back at the cabin. Life is good at this altitude.

July 25, 2000--Boulder, CO
Before leaving Estes Park, we hike out to Alberta Falls, close to ten thousand feet above sea level. By now we are acclimated to the thin, low octane air, and we kind of dread going back down to the flatlands, where lots of weird things are undoubtedly going on. The nature photography has been great, but so far we have been denied the crown jewel of subjects--a bull elk, with a full rack of antlers -- the kind of photo that adorns the cover of Outdoor Life. The majestic beast beside a fallen giant of a tree, gazing imperiously at the camera like the monarch that he is...
 
Anyway, we go for one last spin on the high ridge road, America’s highest altitude highway. Down near the trailhead, we spot a large set of antlers protruding above some boulders in the glacial moraine. Sure enough, it’s a bull elk, resting in the shade. Two more bulls are reclining about a hundred yards to the north. They don’t seem to mind us at all, and we get some great shots. Heading further up the ridge road, just below the tree line where the tundra begins, we strike pay dirt--a huge bull, with enormous antlers, beside a fallen giant of a tree, gazing imperiously at us. This puts the icing on our trip to this part of the Rockies, and we head happily eastward toward Boulder.
 
Have you ever wondered if there was a subculture of hippies who became stock market/internet millionaires and established their own private enclave in the foothills of the Rockies? We haven’t either, but if you ever do wonder about that, we can tell you where that Starbuck-fueled Valhalla is--Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado. The first thing we notice upon entering Boulder is that everyone is tall, tan, and blonde. Except us, of course: we are short and pale, with dark, unkempt hair.  We are obviously immigrants from the East Coast. In the prevailing social hierarchy, this places us squarely in the untouchable class. Does this mean we don’t like Boulder? Of course not. We love it! Even being a bottom feeder here is ok. The coolest part of town is "the hill", the university district.  Here hippies and college students rub shoulders with, well, other hippies and college students.  We feel right at home here.  The best music venue is the way-cool old Fox Theatre.  Down the hill on the mall, we do note with a trace of envy the babies who travel with many of the nouveau-riche yuppies, in colorful nylon papooses. Yes, even they are taller, tanner, and blonder than we are.

July 26, 2000--Boulder to Eagle, CO
After some early morning thrift shopping, we head over to Airshow mastering lab to pick up the master of our next CD. Airshow has a studio near D.C., and our good friend Charlie Pilzer mastered the record (yes, they are still called records, whatever the format) there and Fed-xed it out to Boulder for us to audition. It sounds great, and we like everything about the mastering job. We have lunch outside with Ann and Dave Glasser, the owners (neither tall nor blonde, or tan), and a few other clients and staff people. A well-known Japanese avant-pop artist, Nanaco, is mastering today, and we have a wonderful conversation with her and her producer, Mark Bingham. It turns out that she wrote one of The Pizzicato Five’s hits, “Twiggy Twiggy Versus James Bond”, a song we really like. We all hit it off, pop fans that we are, and we exchange e-mail addresses and promise to keep in touch.
 
Then we hit the road, heading ever westward. This time we follow I-70 out of Denver. This is the highest altitude stretch of Interstate in the nation, and it feels like we’re on the roof of the world. Cruising around ten thousand feet for almost a hundred miles, we experience the odd combination of visual thrills (the mountains are spectacular), hair raising excitement at the steep curves, and a feeling, above the timber line, that humans don’t really belong here. Plants don’t grow up here, animals rarely venture this high, so why are we driving a Dodge minivan across this wilderness? To get to the next gig, of course. We pass old gold mines, and a herd of wild Bighorn sheep, clinging to a sheer rock face--more grist for the wildlife photo mill.
 
As the shadows grow long, and fourteen thousand-foot peaks throw long shadows, we pull in for a break in a truly strange place--Vail, Colorado. How do we describe Vail? It’s eerie, very much like the town in "The Prisoner". Kind of a pristine, whitewashed Disneyana plopped down in the middle of a beautiful, forbidding mountain kingdom. We love the mountains, but this transplanted Rodeo Drive creeps us out a little, so we push on west to Eagle, where the blue collar folks live.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Beautiful people, seven-figure incomes
no minorities - Vail.
 
Eagle is everything that Vail is not--funky, soulful, fun, and real. The people here are really friendly, which is a good thing, because our next gig is a free outdoor concert for the townspeople, tomorrow night.

July 27, 2000--Eagle, CO
We spend the day relaxing in this pleasant little mountain town, hanging out at the general store, at Aunt Betty’s used bookstore, and at a deli owned by a transplanted New Yorker. The concert is really fun, and it ends with about twenty kids on stage with us, all singing "Twist and Shout". After that everything dissolves into chaos--the perfect ending for a rock'n'roll show.

JULY 28 - AUGUST 1, 2000: Las Vegas NV to Los Angeles CA

July 28, 2000--Eagle to Las Vegas, NV
We rise at 5 a.m. and hit the road into the desert. The first landmark is Glenwood Canyon, one of those spots on the highway where you say, “How the heck did they build this, anyway?” The road winds through a narrow and picturesque canyon, so narrow that a bighorn ram nearly brushes the van with his horns. There is no civilization in the canyon, but at the western end there is a tiny town called “No Name”. Not to be outdone, the next few towns have similar quirky names. “Silt”, “Rifle”, and “Parachute” fly by in quick succession. After a stop in Grand Junction for coffee, we cross the border into Utah. Passing the turnoff for Moab, which we’ll visit later on in the tour, we enter into one of the most desolate and inaccessible wilderness areas in America.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Red rocks, deep shadows
beautiful secrets
Monogamous in Utah!
 
Green River, Utah, is an oasis, literally, in the desert.  It’s a small town surrounded by the only trees and green grass for hundreds of miles. It’s also a good place to top off your gas tank--there’s no civilization, not even a service station, for one hundred and ten miles. Since there are no exits, we stay with the same loose caravan of vehicles, “Grapes of Wrath” style, as we cross this remote area. Overlooking a spectacular canyon that rivals major national parks, but isn’t even named on our map, we chat with a couple from Bakersfield. In their 70's, they have been married only four years. Each one was recently widowed, and they reconnected after fifty years--they’d been high school sweethearts. Now they travel the U.S. in an RV.  Being from Bakersfield, they are big fans of Buck Owens, and they tell us stories about the music scene. We promise to visit Buck’s Crystal Palace someday.
 
As we head off into the desert, Maura and I talk about how incredibly lucky we are to do what we do. People work for forty years to get their retirement ticket stamped so that they can finally experience this kind of freedom. The fact that we can do it and pursue our musical vision, while making a modest living, is still a source of wonder to us, and something that we will never take for granted.

Nightfall brings us to the moderate, hardworking town of Las Vegas, Nevada. We snag a room at the Vagabond Inn, right in the heart of the Vegas Strip. This is in the newer part of town, the part that resembles a Midwestern shopping mall, except that everything is ten times normal size, and there are 200-foot Sphinxes and twelve-story likenesses of Wayne Newton looming over the boulevard. We are directly across from Treasure Island, where two full-size pirate ships do battle on an hourly basis, and the losing craft actually sinks. This happens in a man-made Caribbean Sea in front of the hotel. A block or so to the south, a large volcano erupts, sending a spume of flaming oil and steam a hundred feet into the air, every fifteen minutes. Good fun.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Sinking ships and erupting volcanoes
Is this real, or Vegas hype?
 
We have a late dinner at the Peppermill, one of our favorite cafes, and then stroll up the strip until two am or so. Time is completely irrelevant here. The street is as jammed with fun-seekers at two as it was at nine, and the action shows no signs of abating when we turn in, weary from our Mormon-like trek through the Utah desert, around three.
 
In the fifties, Las Vegas tourists used to flock to their Fremont Street hotel balconies to watch the mushroom clouds at the Nevada nuclear testing site, fifty miles to the northwest. A few miles south of the test range is Site R, where the remains of the crashed alien from Roswell, 1948, are, according to legend, kept under tight military secrecy. America is a weird place, and nowhere is it weirder than right here.
 
Tomorrow we will reach the Pacific Coast.

July 29, 2000--Las Vegas, NV to Los Angeles CA
We spend the day driving through the Mojave Desert, home to rattlesnakes, sand, and the world’s tallest thermometer. The WTT, as we will call it, sticks up about sixty feet in the air from the parking lot of a burger drive-in called “Bun Boy”. This is in Baker, California, smack in the middle of the Mojave. At noon today, the WTT is reading a comfortable one hundred and thirteen degrees, hot enough to keep a rattlesnake under the nearest rock.
 
Our show tonight is in Pasadena, just off of Colorado Boulevard, immortalized by Brian Wilson in “The Little Old Lady from...” The venue is a small art gallery, with really good acoustics. Roz and Howard Larman from KPFK radio come early, and we spend the evening with them, chatting over coffee and enjoying being in California. After the gig, we repair to our digs, the Safari Inn in Burbank. This is a fairly low-budget rock’n’roll motel near the Warner Brothers lot. We turn in and dream of Sphinxes, volcanoes, and mushroom clouds.

July 30, 2000--Los Angeles, CA
We are not among the people who hate L.A., just as we are not among those who hate New York. In fact, we love both places. A lot of people who have devoted their lives to music and the other arts congregate in these big villages, and we always fall in with kindred spirits when we hit town. Our headquarters in L.A. is Canter’s Deli, on Fairfax Avenue near Melrose, in the heart of Hollywood. This is old Hollywood, the classic stuff. This is the neighborhood where Phil Spector spent his teen years, and the classic studios where the Wrecking Crew worked were all within a mile of here. Sitting at a booth in the all-night deli, we can squint, and imagine Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine having coffee after working on “Good Vibrations” or “Wichita Lineman”. Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love probably drank Cokes at the soda fountain, and Mann and Weill, Goffin and King, and Boyce and Hart undoubtedly used these booths to polish lyrics over coffee and bagels. We love this place.
 
Our gig tonight is at another legendary spot, McCabes guitar shop. A few nights a week, they set out chairs and have a concert. Richard Thompson, John Hiatt, Jackson Browne and David Lindley have all played the room so many times they could be considered the house band. The vibe/mojo is strong, and the audience is great. Tonight is our first show with Equation, a great band from Devon, in the UK. We have a good time hanging out with them before showtime.
 
On the way back to Burbank, we stop off at Canters once again for a matzo-ball soup. They’re open all night, of course.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Kosher pickles and real pastrami -
A desert oasis this is!

July 31, 2000--Los Angeles, CA
Our gig tonight is at a place called “The Gig”, in West L.A. It’s part of a convention, of sorts, called the “International Pop Overthrow”, or IPO for short. Organized by the tireless David Bash, it brings together pop bands and fans from all over the globe. Music styles range from Rickenbacker janglers like ourselves to harder-edged cheap tricksters, with an eclectic mix of everything in between. It’s a bit like the early days of South by Southwest, when the major labels didn’t know about it yet and it was still cool. This is definitely a gathering of the clan, and the fashion statements are way hip, from Holly-ish nerdism to Carnaby-chic. Everybody is really into music, and guitar geeks and melodic moptops rub shoulders with crusading indie journalists. It’s really fun. Our favorite band of the night is “Frisbee” from Chicago, who are like a higher-energy Oasis, but way, way cooler.

August 1, 2000--Los Angeles, CA
Today we have lunch with our West Coast publisher, Lonnie Sill. Lonnie’s late dad was the legendary Lester Sill, one of the founders of the L.A. pop/rock scene. He taught Phil Spector the business, and he was involved in many projects with the “Brill Building” writers (a lot of their work was actually done here in L.A., three thousand miles from the Brill Building). Lester also worked closely with Don Kirshner on many projects, including the creation of The Monkees. Lonnie was a little boy at the time, and he was sort of a mascot for the prefab four. In fact, he had his own mini-directors chair on the set! Needless to say, he has lot of great stories about the glory days of the Wrecking Crew, the folk-rock scene, and other L.A. pop lore.
 
After lunch we head up the San Joaquin Valley to central California. Our destination for dinner is Pea Soup Anderson’s, an Alpine-style chalet conspicuously set down in the flat farmlands, and specializing in, you guessed it, pea soup. By now you know we love slightly off-kilter places like this.
 
AUGUST 2 - AUGUST 8, 2000: Monterey Bay CA to Eugene OR

August 2, 2000--Monterey Bay, CA
In the morning, we head across Pacheco Pass to the coast. It's dry as a bone on the eastern slope, and green and lush to the west, facing the Pacific. We stop for coffee in Gilroy, the garlic capital of the USA. You can smell the garlic in the air as you drive into town, but the coffeeshop owner tells us that his neighbors won't let him roast coffee during the day because the smell of the beans is too strong. This in a town that smells like a huge clove of garlic! Any way, The Romans knew about the beneficial effects of garlic, and their Italian descendants do, as well. We pass on picking up a garlic braid, though, because, over the next four weeks in the van, it might get to be a little much...

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Breathe deep the garlic smells of Gillroy.
Coffee roasters need not apply.

In Freedom, we visit KPIG, one of the great West Coast radio stations. They virtually invented the twang radio format that is currently in vogue, way back in the 70's, but they're not stuck in a retro groove. In fact, they are one of the most listened-to stations on the Internet.  We play "Life is Large" and "The Coo Coo" on the air, and the music director's dogs run into the studio and bark during "Coo Coo", adding a nice touch. After the show, we drive up a wooded canyon for a visit with Fat Music, an internet radio station run by Felton Pruitt, who has impeccable musical taste and a lovely studio with a spectacular view of the redwoods spilling back down the canyon.
 
The show tonight is in a really great venue. It could be called a mountain roadhouse--it's in the "Twin Peaks"-like town of Ben Lomond, in the redwood groves above Santa Cruz. It could also be called an Irish biker bar. Not a biker bar with Irish music, but a bar where Irish bikers hang out. Yes, there are Irish bikers in Northern California. Like a lot of Irish people, they are really laid back, and love music and having fun. In fact, in ten years, the club has never hired, or needed, a bouncer. It's a really good vibe room where the bikers mix with college kids and a few musically hip Silicon Valley yups. We have a great time here, and the promoter is really good to work with. We stay over in a cabin in a grove of hundred-foot redwoods, and we kinda hate to leave, but duty calls.

August 3, 2000--San Luis Obispo, CA
We head down the valley in the morning, past acres and acres of lettuce, broccoli, kale, carrots, onions, grapes, oranges, lemons and any other fruit or vegetable you care to think of. The produce is picked by migrant workers who ride out to the fields in old school buses, painted white. They wear hooded sweatshirts--nobody's working on a tan out here--and they work bent over in the relentless sun all day, men and women working side by side. As the days go by, we find ourselves thinking of these people whenever we eat fruit or vegetables--it's easy to forget that these things are picked by hand, by real people.
 
Real people are somewhat scarce in our destination, San Luis Obispo. There are plenty of partying revelers around, though. The town has kind of a year-round Mardi Gras atmosphere, and there is no discernable industry except general revelry, so if that's your thing, go there right away. We enjoy the constant tribal throbbing of Dead/Phishhead drummers in the streets, and tie-dyes are as common here as Armani suits on Wall Street.
 
We have a great time performing on KOTR, or K-otter as they call it. This great station segues from "Tomorrow Never Knows" to Steve Earle, to "Eight Miles High", to John Coltrane. Anyone familiar with our eclectic musical taste will recognize that this is our cup of tea. We make some really good friends here, kindred spirits, and the gig is musically really inspiring. The only snafu is that it accidentally got booked at a sports bar/brewery. Nothing against sports or beer, two great Anglo-Saxon traditions, but music usually occupies a distant third place in such watering holes, and tonight is true to form. To top it off, the owner stiffs us at the end of the night. This is something that hasn't happened in five hundred shows on the folk circuit, but it's a common practice at local beer-hall type joints. God knows we've both played plenty of them, and gotten stiffed before, but we're spoiled now because of the cool promoters we usually work with, and we forget to keep our guard up against the rip-off dudes. Anyway, he rips us off, and we head back to San Francisco, poorer but wiser. By the way, don't patronize the Slo Brewing company in San Luis Obispo. You may find yourself unwittingly abetting this guy in stiffing the very musicians you came to support. Instead, support Linnea's, across the street, and encourage them to bring in more touring troubadours. They're good folks.

August 4, 2000--San Francisco, CA
We love San Francisco. The good stuff about California mixed with the good stuff about Boston. What a cool place. The gig tonight is in a fun and funky neighborhood centered around Clement Street. It's an Irish neighborhood on the edge of Japan Town, a great San Francisco combination of ethnicities. The club, the Plough and Stars, is a gathering place for young people attracted to the area by lower prices, and the laid back atmosphere. They love music, and we feel like we've found an audience here that we instantly bond with. We jam on a lot of our songs for a long time, developing them in new ways, and the crowd gives back as much energy as we give them. We're very aware of the great heritage of music in this town--Janis Joplin, the Dead, Jefferson Airplane. Hendrix made his US breakthrough for this audience, and Clapton has said that the Fillmore West is where Cream finally found total acceptance for their jamming, jazz-influenced style. This awareness pushes us to a new level, and the evening is topped off when we see some of our hometown buds in the crowd.
 
We finish off the night at Mel's diner on Geary Boulevard.

August 5, 2000--San Francisco, CA
We spend the entire day on the Haight. Let's talk about this neighborhood. It's been a free-thinking, bohemian area since way back, and the beat poets were familiar with the area long before Tim Leary held the first be-in. It's fashionable now to disparage the district as a scuzzy, roach infested wasteland of burned-out hippies, but it's not really like that at all. It's a fascinating and very music-oriented neighborhood with a few tourist-oriented shops amid lots of great record stores (Amoeba is the best), vintage clothing shops that rock (especially Wasteland, which is reminiscent of Kensington Market in London), and really committed community projects like the Bill Graham Center. It's worth a visit for anyone who likes a funky, laid back area where music is the lingua franca (kinda like the East Village or Dublin's Temple Bar).  Of course, we buy some funky duds (Maura finds a groovy faux-leopard halter top, and I score a ringneck-tee from the Palomino, the home of L.A.'s country rock scene), and these will no doubt show up on stage before long.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
The summer of love ended long ago,
but The Haight still rocks, my friend.
 
Later on, we drive through the Presidio and across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County. We stop for pasta at the Cafe Trieste in Sausalito, and then settle in for the night at Mill Valley, in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais.

August 6, 2000--Mill Valley, CA
In the morning, we head over to the town square for coffee, and then we take off for the hills. Climbing over the switchbacks of Mt Tamalpais, we arrive at the trailhead into Muir Woods, a lovely grove of two-thousand year old, two hundred-foot California redwoods. Two thousand years--the Roman Empire and stuff. These trees were centuries old, well, centuries ago. We purchase a handful of seeds to plant in the woods behind our house in Virginia, so that, in two thousand years, tourists can visit the Kennedy Woods.
 
We head up highway 101 and turn east past San Quentin, former home of Merle Haggard, and then point the van toward Mount Shasta, three-hundred miles to the north. By nightfall, we're there, and we pitch our tent three thousand feet up the mountainside.

August 7, 2000--Eugene, OR
Today we're on the air at four pm on KRVM in Eugene, two hundred miles north of Shasta, so we don't have much time to mess around, but it's beautiful here under the volcano. We head north through Grant's Pass, and over Jumpoff Joe Creek. We stop briefly at the famous Oregon Vortex, but, on a tight tour budget, the seven-dollar admission is more vortex than we can afford, so we press on.
 
The station is great. One of the cool things about being on tour is that you can pull into a strange town, find the one hip radio station, and make instant friends there. I guess it's because we're all struggling, not just to make a living but, more importantly, to help bring real music to people--the kind that comes from the heart, not from a marketing plan. Now that we've seen Wal-Mart take over the economy of small-town America, we're aware of how fragile the chain of our musical culture is--a single generation raised only on commercial radio pablum could break that chain, and the vital life force of our music--Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bill Monroe--would be lost. If our grandchildren don't have Duke Ellington to enrich their lives, then we're to blame, because we're the stewards of that legacy. This feeling gives all of us in the underground music and radio scene a sense of mission and purpose, a sense strong enough to make us drive five hundred miles a day to spread the word, and we don't complain, cause it's really worth doing, and it's fun. Better to wake up in a tent at the foot of Mt. Shasta, and spend the day on a small community radio station, than to make bigger bucks doing something that doesn't enrich our lives, or the lives of the people we touch. That's why it's not about the money, or the driving, or the cheap hotels. It's about music, that's all. And that's enough.

August 8, 2000--Eugene, OR
The opening act tonight is a good band led by a fellow named Rex Morningstar. Backup was a guy named Jerry who played excellent guitar, and another chap who goes by the name of Farmer. Farmer plays Fender Rhodes piano in a very 70's lounge jazz style. We like his playing a lot, so we have him sit in with us on "Chelsea Embankment".  One of the tour patterns is that the pure pop fans in each town come out to every gig, usually sharing a table near the front. They egg us on, and encourage us in towns where we're unknown newcomers. We've made a lot of new friends this way, and tonight is no exception. We always exchange e-mail info with these dedicated music fans, and we sometimes customize the show a bit for them, inserting a few Gene Clark classics into the set list, since pop fans are abuzz about Gene right now,  with the recent release of "Full Circle" the two-disc tribute masterminded by our buddies Eric Sorenson and Bruce Brodeen. Tonight we do a three-fer: "Feel a Whole Lot Better", "Here Without You", and "Eight Miles High".

AUGUST 9 - AUGUST 14, 2000: Seattle WA to Twin Falls ID

August 9, 2000--Seattle, WA
It's our first trip to Seattle in five years, and we're delighted when we meet up with a bunch of folks who know our music. We get lots of requests before the show, and we fill them all, as well as tossing in "Big River", which we haven't played since IOTA, back in Virginia.  It's a really fun gig at a place called Connor Byrnes, in the funky/cool Ballard area, where a bunch of music clubs occupy old bayside barrooms, down where the tuna boats come in.

August 10, 2000--Seattle, WA
No show scheduled for today, because we'll be busy touring the newly opened Experience Music Project. If you've seen the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and been disappointed, as we were, you owe it to yourself to make a trip to Seattle for a visit to the EMP. It's great. We spend nine hours inside, barely scratching the surface of this fantastic museum/entertainment/education facility.
 
During the day, we see all kinds of unique things, including the white Strat that Hendrix played the “Star Spangled Banner" on at Woodstock, as well as Hank Williams' Gibson Jumbo, and Clapton's "Layla" Strat. But this is no Hard Rock cafe. They don't hawk souvenirs, although there is a cool gift shop. The main vibe of the place is musical inspiration, and it works. The exhibits on the life of Hendrix and the history of the guitar set a new standard, and rare videos of guitarists including Segovia, Roy Buchanan, BB King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Speedy West, Mary Osborne, Chet Atkins and many others provide an amazing musical mystery tour that really isn't duplicated anywhere else in the world.
 
One of the main goals of the EMP is to get young people interested in playing music, and they have developed all kinds of new technologies to facilitate this and make it genuinely fascinating. Any educator would be envious to see how teenagers line up here to dive into the groovy world of music.
 
Even for seasoned vets like ourselves, EMP is an education, and this place is, without a doubt, the primary resource center, and the richest archive, of pop music history. Music journalists should start looking for rentals nearby--this is the place to conduct research. Most of all, it's really fun, and the most fun of all is a thrill ride called "Funk Blast". It's a platform technology ride, where you sit in one place, but feel like you're being propelled through space and time warps like the ones depicted in "2001" or "Contact". In this solar system, however, the planets are occupied by James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic. Imagine a thirty foot high Bootsy Collins strumming on his star-shaped bass somewhere on the rings of Saturn, while Maceo and the other cats from James Browns funkiest band lay down an other worldly groove, and, I-Max style, you're not just watching it, you're there! Beats any roller coaster, fun house, or Florida high-tech hijinx hands down. You got to experience it, so get your tix for Seattle now! This is really worth it, and you know we're usually blasé about tourist attractions. After all, you don't see us plugging Universal City or Graumann's Chinese Theatre, do you? We usually steer clear of touristy stuff, but this is different. Totally different, and if you love music, EMP will blast you to a new level. Check it out.

August 11, 2000--Portland, OR
Portland is much smaller than Seattle, and is really fun in a more laid-back way. Everyone here seems to enjoy hanging out in small coffeehouses and music clubs, and they all frequent Music Millennium, one of the best independent record stores in the country. They really support their local bands here, a sure sign of a healthy music scene.

We start the day early, with a morning drive-time radio show on KINK. We go from there straight over to Borders for a free lunchtime show, and from there we head down to Gleneden Beach, two hours south, for our evening gig. This show is in a nicely appointed theatre, Eden Hall, situated right on the cliffs overlooking the Oregon coast. A nice gig, and we meet a woman named Cinda, whose husband works the Pacific tuna boat fleet. He's at sea right now--it takes twenty-eight days just to steam from Oregon to the fishing bank near Tahiti. That's right, Tahiti. And we thought we traveled a long way to our gigs! It's fascinating to learn more about this kind of life, and our conversation with Cinda, who worked the boats herself until she wore out her shoulders from tossing tuna onboard, simply increases the maritime fascination first sparked by our whale watching voyage, early on in the tour. That was the North Atlantic, this is the Pacific. What a long strange trip it's been...

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Logs along the Oregon coast:
one man's driftwood, another man's trash.

August 12, 2000--Portland, OR
Up at dawn today, as we journey back up to Portland for a big outdoor show at their summer street fair, the Bite of Portland. The band before us is Geezer Street, who play 20's style "Little Rascals" music on guitar, spoons, and mandolin with a flanger pedal. Following us is The Whole Bolivian Army, from Seattle. They do a cool cover of Kate Bush's "Runnin' Up That Hill".  The show goes really well, and afterward we walk around downtown.  Portland is probably the best city in the USA for strolling around aimlessly. There are all kinds of street performers, and the ever-present sound of West Coast drum jams. We grab some grub at a Greek place, and turn in early--we've got to be up at dawn again to play at the finish line of a mega bicycle run first thing in the morning.

 August 13, 2000--Portland, OR
We do the early morning show for ten thousand Spandex-clad bikers, and, surprisingly, it goes really well. A British bulldog named Chester sits in the front row, and he seems to genuinely appreciate our efforts.
 
Later on, we do a full-length show at a cool venue called the White Eagle, on the funkier East Side of town. The place has a real history. It's supposedly haunted, and we don't doubt it. It was built in 1905 as a saloon for Polish sailors, a place so violent that it was known as the "bucket of blood". The upstairs was a place where working ladies provided services for the sailors, and the basement was an opium den. Below the basement were tunnels leading to a network that laced beneath Portland. The tunnels were used by Chinese immigrants to enable them to live, literally, underground and outside of the reach of the oppressive, racist atmosphere of the old days. The tunnels were also used to shanghai drunken customers from the White Eagle --- able bodied dudes who passed out were dragged underground and woke up as crew members on Pacific merchant ships.
 
The place is pretty tame, nowadays, but it's a good venue for roots music. The gig is great.  Once again, we include our three-song tribute to Gene Clark, and we put Portland on our list of places where we'd like to spend more time.

August 14, 2000--Portland to Twin Falls, ID
By now we're used to rising at dawn, so we have no trouble hitting the road early. We head East, through the Columbia River gorge, past the Bonneville dam, and into the desert that is East Oregon. Crossing Deadman Pass, we drop down into the Snake River valley, and follow it into Idaho.
 
One of the great things about touring is that if you decide you'd like to eat an Idaho potato in Idaho, you simply do it the next time you pass through. This we do, in Boise, and we come away more than satisfied that this vegetable's reputation is well-deserved.

AUGUST 15 - AUGUST 21: Laramie, WY to Lyons CO

August 15, 2000--Laramie, WY
We do a little thrift shopping in Laramie, a town that still has the feel of the Old West. Maura finds a cool "Sam I Am" Dr. Seuss t-shirt from the "Green Eggs and Ham" era, and I score an AC/DC tour shirt from 1990. We head back out into the desert. Road signs read "dust storm area, no stopping", and "deer migration area". Turning east at Ogden, we pass through the forbidding canyons that the Mormons traversed in their last days on the trail. Near the Wyoming border, a mountain is on fire. The upper thousand feet of the crest is smoldering, and flames lick all around the edges as the fire moves down the slope. At this moment, over a million acres of the West is burning.

We stop for water near Ogden, at a place that specializes in deep-fried gizzards. We pass on these culinary delights and push on. Around nine pm, we pass through a dust storm. The twilight suddenly becomes total darkness as we drive straight into a cloud, much like flying into a cloud in a plane. For ten miles, we creep along, thinking, of course, about the Okies and singing songs by their poet, Woody Guthrie. It's funny how the tour started at the Guthrie Center, and now we find ourselves singing Woody Guthrie songs in a dust storm.

The air clears and darkness falls, and then, around eleven, we plunge into another cloud. This time it's smoke. The fire is somewhere over the horizon, but the low lying plume of woodsmoke has settled over the highway. The eerie part is that, in the dark, we don't see it coming. After another ten miles of creeping slowly, we emerge just in time to roll into a roaring thunderstorm--the first rain we've seen in weeks. Imagine making this trip in a covered wagon!

August 16, 2000--Florissant, CO
Interstate-25, which bisects the nation right down the middle, forms a man-made boundary that separates the East from the West. It's our own Great Wall, the divider between the old Euro-settlement and the newer, wilder frontier. The real wall, of course, is the Front Range of the Rockies. To the east, the migrating invaders from Europe had little trouble populating all the available land. All that was needed was a couple of centuries to spread out from the Atlantic seaboard, pushing the native population off of any desirable territory. On the West Coast, air travel has brought the same eastern culture--the coast, west of Interstate 5, is very much like the east, but with a lot better weather!

This leaves a big chunk of country, bounded by I-25 on the east and I-5 on the west, that is still a fairly wild frontier. Our gig tonight is in one outpost of that frontier. We reach Florissant by driving down I-25 out of Wyoming, past Boulder and Denver, to Colorado Springs. There we hang a right, heading due west. The Front Range of the Rockies forms a solid, forbidding wall, capped by Pikes Peak. But there are narrow canyon passes in the wall, and we head up one of them.

Highway 24 was known as the "Ute pass wagon trail" until the 1930's, and it hasn't changed much since then. For the first few miles, it's a busy road carrying visitors up to Manitou Springs and the Pikes Peak tourist road. After that, the traffic thins out, and the road curves sharply upward. Woodland Park is the last real town, and from there we plunge into a pristine Rocky Mountain wilderness. We're heading for a lonely crossroads where, in the 1890's, prospectors turned south toward Cripple Creek, the site of major gold and silver strikes. Gold and silver are still mined in this area, but the market price is low, and business is slow. Now, at this crossroads, fossils are mined.

The Florissant fossil beds were once the bottom of an ancient sea, now raised eight thousand feet above sea level by massive geologic forces. The banks of the old sea were lined with giant Sequoias, and their leaves, along with insects, birds, and butterflies, drifted into the water over eons. Now, these fragments of another era, thirty-eight million years ago, are readily found in layers of shale here at Florissant.

The crossroads has only a few buildings--a couple of antique shops and, incongruously, a deli. The most distinctive building is an old log cabin with a classic western sign reading "Thunderbird Inn". This is where our gig is tonight. It's a Wednesday night, and business is going to be slow. There are two or three Harleys parked out front, and a couple of pickups--no SUV's or minivans in this part of the world!

The owner, Russ, is a really good guy who supports live music. Some people might call him a biker, but that's like referring to us as "troubadours". We wouldn't call ourselves that, but it's OK if someone else does. Most so-called bikers are just people who want lots of freedom. "All he wanted, was to be free..." Some of them find their freedom in remote spots, like this part of the Rockies. Anyway, the gig is fun and very low pressure, so we throw in a few covers, including "Eight Miles High", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", and, for the first time this tour, "The Weight".

At soundcheck, our old friend Bill Gunzleman, aka "Gunz", walks in, two thousand miles from his home back east. It turns out that he's spending the summer just like us, driving around the West. Gunz is a really innovative and evocative artist, who displays his wares all over the country. This week, he's at a bike rally in Cripple Creek, and he's camped out at the fossil bed. We all agree to meet up in the morning for some fossil hunting.

Oh yeah, for the first time in several years, we play "Up on Cripple Creek", and Gram Parsons' "Wheels"  in honor of the bike rally.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Drunken bikers at the Thunderbird Inn
dig for fossils, like themselves.

August 17, 2000--Colorado Springs, CO
We rouse Gunz early and head into the fossil beds, where Nancy Anderson and her son, Cole show us the ropes. Maura comes up with couple of thirty-eight million-year-old bugs, kinda resembling New York City cockroaches. We find a place for them in the van, and head down the mountain to the next gig. It's booked at an Irish pub, ironically, since we've spent the last eight years convincing people that, although we're named Kennedy, we don't play Irish music. The audience and ourselves circle each other uneasily for a while, and the final score seems to be ESPN one, Kennedys 0. Oh well, tomorrow we begin a busy weekend.

August 18, 2000--Denver, CO
We head down to the funky warehouse part of town, called "LoDo" by the artist types who hang out there, and spend the day lazing around at a great local bookstore called "The Tattered Cover". Maura finishes "The Pilot's Wife", which she's been reading in bookstores across the country, and we play at a place called "The Soiled Dove" - another show with Equation. Between the tattered cover and the soiled dove, it's just fine being "stuck in LoDo again".

August 19, 2000--Lyons, CO
The whirlwind part of the weekend ensues as we head up to this tiny mountain town to meet up with the Nields, beloved members of our extended family. The Rocky Mountain Folks Festival is held here in a fairytale setting--a small box canyon with great sound and a truly magical vibe. We sit in with the full-band version of the Nields, and sing "Jeremy Newborn Street", "Keys to the Kingdom", and "Mr. Right Now", all from their recent album "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home Now". The Nields and the Kennedys always try to energize each other on stage, and we create a whole that is more than the sum of its hearts.

Later on in the evening, our old friend and mentor, Nanci Griffith, arrives from the Northwest.  She's exhausted from traveling all day, and dealing with some unexpected equipment and hotel snafus -- the kind of hassles that happen when you're moving a troupe of musicians and crew members around the country.  It's a tough job. We're ushered into her room backstage, and after catching up on things, we readily agree to sit in on a few tunes during her show-closing set.

By showtime, exhaustion and altitude adjustment--a big factor here--are hovering over Nanci like rebel angels just daring her to try and get through the night without a struggle, and, in fact, she does struggle with these twin demons as the show progresses. Her style of performing is exhausting, even at the best of times, because she demands perfection of herself, not only in her delivery, but in her desire to be completely "inside" of every lyric. This is the definition of soul, and it means that the artist is completely exposed, emotionally, on stage. This is the tightrope that she walks every night, and I've seen it threaten to pull her down when she takes chances that others would avoid by sticking to a safe "shtick". Nanci won't do shtick, and when she's wrestling with demons, it happens right there on stage. This isn't unprofessional. This is real. This is John Lennon, Dylan in '65, Billie Holiday. It's a refusal to be artificial, and that can be tough, in front of ten thousand people. Tonight, it's tough.

By the time we reach the stage, the air seems to be crackling around Nanci. She's throwing off lightning bolts, and that's making some people uncomfortable. Nanci is in no way comfortable herself, but that's not why she came here. Tonight she lays her feelings on the line--joy, sorrow, nostalgia--and she doesn't shrink from anger and open bewilderment at where her long and sometimes dark road will lead her next.

This breaks through the boundaries of a "safe" show, and becomes intensely personal. Ani Difranco's crowd would be with Nanci all the way tonight, but they're not here, and some of those in the audience came, perhaps, expecting a comforting, good vibes show--no soul baring, thank you--and this is more than they bargained for.  Suffice to say that no one emerged from that canyon totally unscathed.

Those of us who have known and loved Nanci for a long time know that she is much more complex than her albums may reveal, and her live show can be a wake-up call to the audience that this is a real woman who will give everything, but only on the condition that her listeners accept her as she is. The very demons that she wrestles with are the ones that make her a great artist, and a great artist can only be approached on her own terms.

It's an intense show, but ultimately a great one, because we know it will be a long time before we see another show that cuts as deep as this one. She doesn't take an encore, and no one who has really been listening expects one. This isn't show business, tonight. This is a woman revealing herself by laying bare her soul, and you don't demand an encore for that.

August 20, 2000--Lyons, CO
Today, it feels like a thunderstorm has past. The canyon is warm and sunny, and we exchange cheerful greetings with lots of old friends--Lucy Kaplansky and her husband Rick, Stacey Earle and her husband/ace guitarist Mark Stuart, plus Tom Rush, Guy Clark, and others too numerous...We run into Phil Kaufman, road manager extraordinaire, and one of the few people in this business who actually IS legendary, and he okays the notion that we might jump onstage and play a song while Emmylou Harris and her band are plugging in. Irish all-stars Solas also agree to let us do a warm-up tune, so we jump onstage for our third and fourth time this weekend.

In the evening, we finally get to be spectators, and Emmylou's show is totally inspiring. She is the Miles Davis of country. She has nothing to prove to anyone when it comes to traditional credentials--in fact, she brought trad country back to radio when it was lost in the haze of the 70's. Now that she has educated us all in "the good stuff", she's left everyone in the dust again by blasting the genre twenty years into the future. This is what Miles did in the jazz field, and it always takes a while for the audience and the industry to catch up. It takes a lot of courage, too, and Emmylou has it in spades. Plus, her voice, always great, keeps getting even better! She is totally committed to her music.

Another thing Emmylou has in common with Miles is that she always has a great band. Her current band is one of the best on the road, and they take country music back to its real roots, which are really mostly African. This is the untold story of country--examine Alan Lomax recordings of early African-American string bands to delve deeper.  Emmylou has the authority to really set this record straight, and she's doing it, all to her always-impeccable standard of musicianship and professionalism. In short, it's a great show.

AUGUST 21 - AUGUST 27: Cimarron, NM to Grand Junction, CO

August 21, 2000--Cimarron, NM
Today, we head south, over Raton pass, into New Mexico. Cimarron is a small town (900 humans, 1,700 elk) that has somehow stayed untouched since 1890, when the last gunfight went down in the saloon of the Mark hotel. The hotel is still in use, one of about ten buildings in town. No tourist trade here. The town is hemmed in by large ranches that have been laid out for a century, and have prevented modern townkillers like Wal-Mart and McDonalds from coming in. This frontier town has a rich flavor. At six am, the bullfrogs wake up the roosters, who in turn wake up the dogs, who rouse the horses. Everyone makes their own noise, and the cowboys join in as their pickup trucks roll down the single paved street. By seven, the whole town smells like coffee, and Maura and I are ready to roll over Cimarron Canyon, a ten-thousand foot pass, to our next engagement--a well-deserved vacation in Taos, just the other side of the Sangre de Christo mountains.

At the top of the pass is a high mountain meadow called Angel Fire. We named one of our albums after this place, and it still has its remote charm and clean Rocky Mountain air. We coast down into town, near the centuries-old Taos Indian Pueblo, and check into our digs--the Kachina Lodge, which features a pool, a hot tub, and a close proximity to Michael's Kitchen, a favorite Kennedy hangout. This is where we will chill out for the next two days.

August 22, 2000--Taos, NM
Total r&r. We stroll around town, enjoying the mix of cultures--the Hispanic majority, with the Anglo and Native minorities. The great thing about Taos is that it's a real town. If all the tourists left, the residents would go about their business the way they have for centuries. This is a good feeling--we have taken note of the artificial feel of some of the resort towns on this tour. The elders here--and Native Americans revere their elders--keep it all honest. Honest and real. It’s a good place to be.

August 23, 2000--Taos, NM
Today at the pool, we make friends with a great guy named Charles Collins. As we are later to find out, he is a gifted and visionary painter, and one of the top artists in this town of artists. We visit his gallery, and come away with a beautiful autographed print entitled "Looking to the Future". It's inspiring, and so is his personal vision, which is totally positive and empowering, and in no way ironic. This is really refreshing, and we're doubly psyched to find out that he is close buds with our recent role model, Arlo. It seems that the Guthries have a guiding hand in this tour, Woody from the great beyond, and Arlo from his "Blunder-Bus", somewhere out on this same trail across America.

August 24, 2000--Socorro, NM
Today we journey down the Rio Grande, following the old Spanish Camino Real. The headline in the local paper reads "Chile Crop Looking Better this Season", so we know we're gonna like this place.

The gig is at New Mexico Tech, and the first act is an open mic session with any freshman bold enough to step forward. Sometimes touching, sometimes hysterical, always engaging, we are thoroughly entertained. When we do our show, we find the students to be one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic audiences we have ever played for.

Some of them--Jamie, Chris, and the self-named Zen, Egypt and Omni, stay afterward to discuss the concepts in our lyrics. Their eagerness to share ideas is what music, education, and the liberal arts are all about. The coolest part is that these kids are all mega-whizzes at computer science and physics, as well. Zen entertains us by playing jazz piano, while the rest of us debate the ideas put forth in "Can't Kill Hope With a Gun". This is a truly satisfying concert, because we know we reached our listeners, and they responded by giving us the gift of their intellect and good humor. We can't wait to come back here.

August 25, 2000--Los Alamos, NM
That's right, that Los Alamos. This place is proof that sci-fi is real. Like the oldest Indian pueblos, it's situated on an impossibly remote mountain, way out of reach of any kind of civilization. But the world's most powerful computer is here, and it will be replaced in two years by one ten times more powerful. The atom bomb was invented here, and this lonely mountaintop is its home. We play outdoors, a free concert for the townspeople, and a few hundred yards away, across a deep but narrow ravine, is the large, top-secret complex where the supercomputers generate doomsday scenarios. Everyone in their right mind fervently hopes that the knowledge generated here will never be put to use, including the PhDs from around the world who bring their families out to enjoy the music tonight.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Checking out the Red Rock Canyons,
What kind of missle flies overhead?.

The biggest applause of the night came when we announced that Maura's eldest brother, Joe Boudreau, is a top nuclear physicist, and a member of the Fermi Lab team that discovered the top quark, the smallest sub-atomic particle ever identified.  This draws such an enthusiastic response that we are forced to concede that, in this town of nuclear physicists, Joe is, in absentia, the real star of the show.

August 26, 2000--Grand Junction, CO
A fascinating trip north today, through the Zuni, Navajo, and Jicarilla Apache homelands. We stop at a Spanish outdoor flea market that sells t-shirts that display a souped-up "low rider" car, with Our Lady of Guadalupe above, giving her blessing. Below the auto, it says "Pray for us". This is a great idea for a t-shirt, and we buy one. Later in the day, we cruise through the red rock canyons of Utah to the village of Moab, the mountain biking capital of the universe. We grab lunch at a good place called the Slick Rock Cafe, and head on out to Grand Junction for the last show of the tour.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Mountain bikes and Geiger counters:
popular Christmas gifts in Moab

On the way, we are caught once again in a dust storm, once again followed by a wicked thunderstorm, with high winds sending tumbleweeds tumbling across the highway. We're in the middle of nowhere, so we keep going, and eventually outrun the storm. The gig, with our friends Equation, from the U.K., is really fun, with a genuinely receptive audience. They hoot and holler in response to the music, and we give back by playing one of the rockingest shows of the tour, a fitting close to two months of genuine adventure, good friends, and lots of music.

Dashboard Buddha Sez:
Eyes peeled for antelope and elk
Suddenly - charged by a tumbleweed!.

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